Yoda Would Not Approve

My Freshman year of high school, 1999-2000, was a year of great experimentation for school districts in my area. You probably thought about experimentation with homosexuality or illegal narcotics when you first read the part where i said, "great experimentation," didn't you? I did. And i wrote it knowing full well that that's not what i meant. I'm slightly inebriated right now so if this blog doesn't quite work out, you have my sympathies and so forth. But i promise it's a really good story. I mean, as long as you think pedophile jokes are funny, it's a good story. Gosh i think i'm farther in the bag than i thought. God bless you, automatic spell check. This blog would be a lost cause already if not for those bright red squiggles under incorrect words. I'll probably be a little less verbose than usual on this one.

I may just re-author this blog at a more sober time. We'll see if you/i have the attention span to read/write this twice.

Now that the qualifiers are out of the way, on to the story.

In my freshman year of high school, the district was working in conjunction with a couple other school districts on an experiment which would bring students from multiple schools into classes together, thus eliminating the need for every school to hire a teacher for classes they knew would be somewhat small. The most obvious choices for this new experiment were foreign language classes. I had signed up for French.

This newfangled technology was dubbed the JEDI System, which was an acronym for Jefferson something or another. Jefferson is the name of the city where the system was based (not my school). How it worked was basically this: we sat in a classroom with a camera pointed at us. There were four televisions in the front of the room, suspended from the ceiling directly above the teacher's workspace so the class could see them. Another camera and another four TVs hung above the first row of student seats, pointing at the teacher's desk. Displayed on these four TVs were the teacher, the class, and two other classes from around the state. This way, a teacher in any one location could teach the other two simultaneously. French was not taught out of our school, so no teacher was present in the room during class. We had the German teacher.

The thing was, the cameras were of such a low resolution that the video may as well have been processed by the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Since this class happened first hour, i would generally sit right in the front row with my head down on the desk and sleep. If the teacher called on me to answer a question, one of my classmates would poke me and give me the correct answer. I would then press the Talk button on the microphone that sat on my desk, recite the answer i was just given, and then promptly go back to sleep.

Another completely inadequate aspect of the system was the way we turned in most of our homework. There was what was called a document camera, basically a camera mounted to point at a flat surface, which transmitted the image onto one of the televisions for the teacher to see. Kind of like a primitive scanner, if you will. This, too, was hideously low-res, and at least one girl in my class took serious advantage of it. After she'd done the homework the first week of class, she never did another assignment. She'd show the same assignment on the document camera every single day. The teacher never caught on.

Tests were either faxed or mailed, depending on the circumstances. And since, due to the poor cameras, we could basically get away with anything short of having our books open during a test without being noticed, we'd have piles of notes or stuff written on our hands during them. However, in fact, after a while we figured out that the fax machine itself obscured enough of my work area, right in the front of the room, that i could have my textbook open as long as i wasn't terribly conspicuous with the page turning. This is probably why my classmates covered my ass while i was sleeping most of the time.

It's all a horrible way to learn, i know, and in some ways i regret it, since i took two years of French and i can say about three sentences. The one i'm the best at is "I'm a dumb white guy," which i can actually say in seven languages. It seems so useful! If i'm ever trapped in a non-English speaking country, at least i can offer up a weak excuse for my poor social skills and strong language barriers.

So anyway, due to a discrepancy between when Jefferson's class periods and our class periods ran in physical time, the system cut out every day ten minutes before out class actually ended. The screens would all go blue and we'd be completely unmonitored. At this time, the girls would leave, where they'd go i don't know because it's not like our high school had any place interesting to be between classes, and the guys would sit around and shoot the shit, or else translate pick-up lines into French. Aaron and Brandon had translated quite an arsenal of them by the end of the year, not the least of which was "Nice shoes, wanna fuck?" (Bonne schuettes, something something, i'm not really sure but i think that's about what it sounded like. There was a girl in one of the other schools that had been to France and helped us out with swear words one day when the teacher left the room for a couple minutes). I would always leave my desk and seat myself at the teacher's station and log onto the internet.

One day, after the system went down and the girls had left, Kyle stands up and starts meandering around the room, ever so slowly and deliberately. He stops at Justin's desk.

"Justin."

"What up?"

"Why do you like..." he paused momentarily for effect. "Little boys?"

Justin stared at him for a moment, unsure what to say. "I don't know."

Without another sound, Kyle moved on to the next desk, with all the grace of a ninja who has cornered his prey. "Aaron."

"Yeah?"

"Why do you like...little boys?" he asked in the exact same monotone.

"I don't know, Kyle. I just do."

Kyle made the same slow, graceful motion to the next desk. I had been carefully observing him out of the corner of my eye, careful not to look like i was paying too much attention. I knew he was going to end up at me. I wasn't really sure what his master plan was.

"Brandon."

"Kyle."

"Why do you like...little boys?"

"I'm not really sure, Kyle."

I was the only one left. I'm going to finish this story with my own bizarre, unworldly response, and let you use your imagination for the hilarity and confusion and chaos that ensued thereafter. Rest assured, it was indeed hilarity, and confusion, maybe not chaos, but hilarity and confusion for sure. There was no pause between his question and my answer, it was delivered as though i'd been waiting my whole life to answer the question. It was my destiny.

I sure hope it's not really my destiny because it would be depressing to know that i'd fulfilled my life's purpose eleven years ago and everything's rolled downhill from there. Plus to know that i was put on this Earth simply to be the punchline to a pedophile joke. I digress. That's Captain Morgan speaking, don't listen to him.

"Trevor."

"Yes?"

"Why do you like...little boys?"

"Because my dick looks really big in their little hands."