Weird sh*t from grade school
Childhood is fn weird af
Today, write about something impactful that happened to you in grade school. By impactful, I’m talking about a really remarkable teacher who gave you the perfect gesture or words at the perfect moment, or, the bully who said a thing that still sticks with you, or a wild/hilarious/terrible story you still remember about a classmate that you still think about from time to time.
I landed on this prompt today because I saw a person at the grocery store who was wearing a blue windbreaker jacket that reminded me a kid who went to my elementary school who once threw a rock at me while I was roller skating and told me I was stupid and ugly but did so in the laughably stupidest way: “Amy Guth-pah-doop eats Fruit-pah-Loops! You’re so ugly you’ll probably have to marry a horse! You’re so stupid you’ll have to rob a bank!”
Okay, first of all, Jeff, Fruit Loops were delicious, and I’ve never even ridden a horse much less married one and you’ve got it backwards about bank robbery because one can’t very well just fail into being a criminal mastermind for a living, so let’s workshop that insult material there, my dude.
But, more to the point, remembering this goofy kid prompted me to also remember I roller skated away from him with my purple sparkly wheeled skates and that made me remember how I skated all over that neighborhood and got good enough to fly around the fast and spin around corners quickly. There were winter olympics that year and I was inspired by and tried to mimic the speed skaters and learned how to skate fast in a crouch-down-and-move-only-one-arm kind of way and thought that was the most badass thing in the world. And that made me write a long piece about things that helped me develop resilience when I was a girl.
Let’s write.
