Marvin Post Part 1

Lindsay has been asking me to contribute to this blog for a long time now and I keep putting it off. This seems like an appropriate time since she is out of town and I am here with just my imagination and Fran the Cat.  I know most of the readers are female so these couple posts will be kind of a departure from the regular Rainbow Bright, Barbie discussions but bear with me. I might manage to fit in an American Girl reference.

As you know, I work at the same school as Lindsay except that I work with a couple of the elementary classes. 4th and 5th grade. I don’t have many interesting stories about 5th grade though, they are kind of getting into the stage where they think girls are cute. I just don’t go in for that kind of thing so I mostly let them be. The 4th graders on the other hand hate girls! I find this attitude more to my liking. The class is made up of 11 students and 9 of them are boys. If I had been in this class I would have been right at home. I like them because they are very real and disgusting and sweaty. One of them speaks only in “explosion” which is to say that everything he talks about ends up exploding. They love guns, getting sweaty, and pretending to blow each other up.

 

They are really sweet and childlike at the same time though which is mostly why I like them.

Anyway, about a month ago I was on a coffee kick. The coffee here is very, very strong and it is only drunk in small doses by the natives. I am American though and the only size for beverages I know of or want to know of is Large. So. I drink this super strong coffee by the mug full. At least 2 per morning, sometimes 9. One morning after hitting the mug especially hard, I decided to help the students individually with their Math class work. I began to explain the finer points of long division to The Exploder when he turned to me and said “Your breath smells.” He delivered the statement with all the emotion of the evening news but he was right. I have a pretty good idea of what he was going through though because I was once a 4th grader too. I remember leaning farther and farther away from my teacher but ultimately being unable to escape the inescapable fog being laid down over me like a blanket. Holding your breath doesn’t seem to work because teachers need feedback and if you don’t say anything, they keep talking and you end up gasping in a lung full of nuclear waste.  There really isn’t anything like it though and I do actually try to be conscientious about where I breathe my noxious fumes.

I momentarily considered drawing attention to the fact that The Exploder’s breath doesn’t exactly smell like strawberries either. I decided against it though because I know that would be like comparing apples to rotten apples or whippersnappers to nuclear bombs.