Bunny Ears January 12, 2005 ~ 9:35 pm
Posted by Julie in : Daily Grind , comments closed
The back of (ahem) someone’s head after he cut his own hair. The tail makes me laugh.
The cell phone can actually be turned on now! The buttons don’t all work yet, but they worked well enough for me to send the picture of mom’s cat out, so that’s saved. I put it back in the furnace room to dry out a little more. Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’, I guess.
My monitor at work clocked out at about 3:00 this afternoon, right as I was putting the finishing touches on a blog entry. I called ITS for a replacement, but their guy still hadn’t come at 5:00, so I shut the computer off and Blogger ate that post. I’ve recreated it as well as I can remember. Here’s the re-write, inspired by Lois’s tale of cheating in 3rd grade math.
I was 2 when I started nursery school. I guess I was precocious and my baby-sitter wanted something to keep me entertained. I turned 3 at then end of September, but I was still a year younger than the other kids. My mother thinks that explains this story, but I prefer to think of it as an early indication of deviant behavior.
One day the nursery school teachers decided that they had tied too many toddler shoes and that we were going to be independent tykes and tie our own from there on out. We were seated at long tables with cardboard shoe outlines that had laces through them. The teachers demonstrated shoe tying (the one loop around method rather than the bunny ears one, as I recall), and then expected us to tie the shoe outlines before us.
I tried hard, but no matter what I did my fingers could not make those laces into a bow. I looked to my left. Kid over there had tied his shoe. I looked to my right. Kid there had tied her shoe. In fact, as I looked up and down the table, everyone had tied their shoe. Except me. I looked down at the mess of laces and weird knots that my fumbling attempts had made. I looked back up and saw a teacher coming down the table, examining everyone’s handiwork. “Good job!” she said to one kid. “Excellent!” to another. I looked back at my shoe. No way it was going to get a “good job”. She would take one look at it and say “Why can’t you do this? Everyone else can.” I was stupid. Totally stressed, I panicked. What could I do? I couldn’t tie that shoe no matter how hard I tried, and she was getting closer.
In desperation, I nudged the girl next to me. “Hey, can you tie this?” I whispered. She did, easily, and set it back in front of me. The teacher finally reached me, looked at my shoe, and pronounced it “Great!” with a smile. My first experience with panic, stress, and cheating, all at the age of 3. Maybe I was precocious.
I guess it explains why I still tie my shoes with the bunny-ear method at age 27, doesn’t it?
