Tomorrow is our pep rally. Now, before you start picturing anything, note that I work at a boarding school, and as students often tell me, pep rallies at public school are, "SO much cooler!" I have no personal basis for comparison.
Essentially what we do is give the kids the day off of dress code, and each grade has a color to dress in. The grade I teach (well, the one I teach mainly; I teach one other, but only one class) dresses in green, but I am an advisor for a different grade and therefore dress in orange. This causes much friction and I am generally outcast as a traitor for the classroom portion of the day.
We have a shortened day and then we all go to the gym. There is lots (TONS!) of yelling; in fact, there is a part where we see which grade can yell the loudest. Pure bliss, let me tell you.
Then there are competitions. There are cool ones like creating human pyramids, or seeing how many kids from each grade can fit in one of our minibuses. There is even a competition to see which grade has a representative who can draw the best portrait of a faculty kid. I love that one, truly, because it's just the cutest thing in the world.
But then there are the eating competitions, and this is where I get all squirmy. Chubby bunny I can handle, even though I spend most of it trying frantically to remember my Heimlich skills in the event of a choking disaster. Even the pie eating competition isn't awful, because they're small pies, and frankly, I have yet to meet a high schooler who wouldn't rival a professional competitive eater.
But the soda chugging competition is a whole different game. A disgustingly different game.
The rule is simple. Each kid (one from each grade) has to chug a liter of Pepsi. Fine, whatever, you might say. A liter isn't
that much.
It's carbonated, people.
And I kid you not, every year, EVERY YEAR, we make it no more than two minutes past the end of the competition before somebody pukes. And the kids think it's hilarious, even the kid who pukes, and no one else seems to mind, except for me. Because there I am huddled in some remote corner of the gym, peeping through my fingers as my hands cover my face, grimacing and fighting my gag reflex, living my worst nightmare. Well, a version of it, anyway.
Nothing scares me more than vomit.
There, I said it, and I'm a freak. Sure, there are tons of way scarier things in the world, but apparently, for me, none of those things holds a candle to vomit. You know that noise in those the-world-is-ending, a-hideous-monster-is-attacking-us, I-just-discovered-my-grandfather-is-a-serial-killer movies? The one that plays when a fireball/monster/serial killing grandfather pops out of the shadows? This is the sound I hear in my head when anyone even mentions the
possibility of throwing up. I mean that literally. I actually hear that exact sound, and then I run away as far as possible, and I avoid that person for about three days.
I usually like to blame this all on my mother,* the one behind the "ipecac episode." Apparently, when I was two, my parents hosted a Christmas party, and just before it started, my mother found me sitting next to an overturned trash can which had previously contained poisonous berries that were no longer anywhere to be found. I don't remember any of this, of course, but needless to say, my mother never made it to the Christmas party, because she spent the entire evening upstairs, inducing her child to vomit. And then she found the berries in the trash can where they had been left. This is what they mean when they talk about the subconscious, right?
All of this is to say that I am contemplating not going to the pep rally tomorrow, because I would like to be able to control at least a few things in my life, and while I cannot guarantee I won't have to deal with a similar situation at some point this year (panic! PANIC!!!), I can guarantee that I don't have to deal with it tomorrow in the gym. So there we go. I feel empowered. I am in charge of my own destiny.
*Don't worry, Mom - no hard feelings. It's just a really good anecdote.
This is a picture of Matilda after she got a little too curious about the bath water and fell in. Unfortunately for me, I was in the other room and didn't see any of it, although I did hear it (lots of scratching, a giant splash, and rustling/ripping of the shower curtain) but the aftermath was funny enough that I think I killed more than a few brain cells from oxygen deprivation as I laughed. This picture was taken a good ten minutes after she actually fell in, because it took that long to coax her out of hiding under the bed. The down side was that everything in our room (the carpet, the curtains, the bed) was soaked, but the up side was that it all (including the cat) was delightfully perfumed by the scent of lemon verbena bubble bath.
Here is Quincy, with a great deal of trepidation, checking out the scene of the crime. Like our mint green-tiled walls? Wait until you see the watermelon paint that goes with them...no, I'm not kidding.
