Year 9s with blood on their hands and that hymn where you sing whatever you want to sing.

"Youuuuu well haf blud ohn yurrrrr haaaaaands!" screamed the crazy Scottish broad to a dance studio filled with 100 8th graders.

Why on earth was a woman with mad hair, a beaded hippie bag and a Scottish accent so strong that I was concerned it might be contagious telling a bunch of 13 year olds that their actions were dangerous enough to kill somebody and put blood on their (in some cases pre-) pubescent hands? Had they been peddling drugs to one another? Had they been holding Fight Club meetings during recess? Had they been playing Frogger with the traffic on the nearby high street?

No. They'd been doing Jesus arms on the stairs.

Let's rewind a bit.

Headmasters: (Not so) Child-friendly Daleks?

If there is a creature stranger than a headmaster, I'd sure like to meet it. Maybe it's just the schools I went to, but they always seem to be men obsessed with the concepts of honor, dignity and achievement. And I understand that as a head of a school that maybe abstract nouns are exactly the sort of thing you should be obsessed with, but the problem is that headmasters always like to use themselves as an example...a fact which teenagers inevitably exploit the shit out of.


Today I'm not even going to get into my elementary school headmasters in any detail. I simply don't have time to analyze the ex-military man who paddled children or the stiff man who sounded so much like those newfangled talking handheld dictionary computers of the early 90's that we used to type in words, press "SAY" and scare our teacher into thinking he had stealthily popped in for an inspection. No, I won't talk about these two men, although I'd briefly like to ask what the hell the Board of Trustees was thinking when they decided to hire someone who is about as expressive as a dalek that daleks find boring to run a school for children 11 and under.

This is why I'm fat, PART 2: Middle School Soccer

By the time I graduated to middle school my confidence in the usefulness of PE and its coaches had all but disappeared, but for some reason I still gave team sports a chance. Maybe I thought that at a different school the coaches would be different, but unfortunately PE coaches worldwide have to pass a standardized insanity test, and those who are sane enough to be capable of putting together a complete sentence are disqualified from the job.

Oh well. In any case, my first year at my new school I made the soccer team. I say "made" as if there were tryouts and the possibility of getting cut from the team, which is what I'd like to think. This was a decade ago though, so I no longer remember--but I have a hard time believing there could have possibly been cuts, because the girl who totally freaked out that one time a gnat flew into her eye managed to make the team. ...

This is why I'm fat, PART 1: Elementary School PE

The best part about middle school was the fact that the seniors had to park their cars on the football field because of the construction. I wish I could negate that statement with something about how the best part was how accomplished I felt being in the middle school play (I actually felt deeply, deeply embarrassed over how stupid it was; I played the role of someone's conscience) or how the best part was Science Fair (The teacher actually told me he was "embarrassed" over how idiotic my experiment was), but in reality the aspect of middle school that at the end of the day made me feel the warmest and fuzziest inside was the fact that I was able to hide from the PE coaches while running laps.

I look back now and wonder how my life would be different if I had just given in to the barely intelligible demands that I run faster and longer which were delivered through a bullhorn held by a woman who looked like a Brazilian Arnold Schwarzenegger driving a golf cart. I would be much less of a lardass, that's for sure. Or maybe I wouldn't. When I think of all the diving behind Volvos, ducking underneath Jeeps and William Shatner shoulder rolling to the other side of BMWs that my friends and I did, we worked up quite a sweat. And I'm not entirely sure that it was less work than just doing the laps in the first place.

But before I go any further about how I ended up sucking at PE in middle and upper school, let's take a trip back to elementary school...

Ah, to be 13 again

It's kind of reassuring to me that, even across the pond, gravity still pulls us downward, the sky is still above us, and 13 year old boys are still complete perverts. I am greatly comforted by the fact that the 13 year old boy's unique composition has the same kind of obvious international presence as McDonald's. Except instead of ubiquitous Big Macs it's this ubiquitous struggle of feeling extremely frightened and confused (like the male version of "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret") while also trying to project total confidence (“Although I only figured out what my penis was for just yesterday, I have now decided that I am Casanova/the God of Sex/Gene Simmons.”).

Call me strange, but this is what I find so wonderful about 13 year olds—the girls have sprinted ahead in the puberty race by this point and from an outsider perspective seem to have quite suddenly woken up one morning with a bad case of the boobs, and the guys have to pretend that they’ve caught up. No, the guys have to pretend that they were never behind, and so they resort to wildly inventing stories and experiences that they can boast about to their similarly pre-pubescent guy friends (within earshot of the girls, who by this point are so far advanced in their development that some have actually started menopause), but the wonderful thing about a lot of these boasts is that they don’t ring true to the ears of someone with actual experience or to the ears of anyone in possession of female anatomy. But, most of the time, this doesn’t apply to 13 year old boys—I mean, there can’t possibly be too many of them with female anatomy. ...