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Friday 06 February 2015 | 0 Comments
fun in threes, sometimes fours
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I have a little jar of olive oil mixed with grapefruit seed extract that I keep in a plastic bag in the bottom of a desk draw at school. It was from a long time ago, for an irritating spot of skin on my hand that I didn't want to go see a specialist about. The wise Internet suggested this as a homeopathic remedy.
Today, a young man caught a glimpse of that little bottle when I was pulling something from my desk draw. Or at least I guess he did -- the alternative is that he was rummaging through the drawer when I wasn't looking, something I don't want to imagine he did. At any rate, he went to Ms. W, the eighth-grade administrator and my immediate supervisor, with a concern shortly after that.
"I think Mr. Scott has a little jar of urine in his desk drawer."
Ms. W told me shortly afterwards that it was very hard to keep a straight face with that concerned young man. "I can assure you, Terrence, that that was not what it was, and that there is a logical explanation for what you think you saw."
Oh, but the fun I could have with that misconception tomorrow in class...
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an inventor. Who doesn’t, I guess. I mixed this and that, sometimes with permission, sometimes surreptitiously. At one point, I even determined that I could certainly make my own alcohol, so set some potato peelings to ferment, and not knowing really about the distillation process, created what could only be called later a foul mess.
Today, L was less ambitious. She wanted, appropriately enough for her interests and gifts, to create paint. She mixed various food colorings together, taking careful notes about proportions.
In the end, they all wound up in the sink, I believe. She couldn’t figure out a way to thicken the mixture into a paint that didn’t involve some idea like mixing yogurt into it. We’re more than happy to let her play, let her experiment, let her explore, but everything has a certain limit.
Few things remind me of how glad I am to be an adult as well as chaperoning a middle school dance.