May

If you think about it, a box full of Alpha-Bits is just a bowl full of swearwords waiting to happen.

So I really like this girl in my homeroom, Chelsea Hamilton. She’s the editor of the school newspaper, and really cool, and she looks sort of like Emma Stone, if Emma Stone were in the eighth grade. And I’ve been trying and trying to talk to her, but she doesn’t even notice me. Like, literally, doesn’t notice me. This morning, I said hi to her, and she said, “Oh, hi! Are you new? Did you just transfer to this school?” And I said, “No. We’ve gone to school together for the past seven years.” And she said, “Ha-ha, very funny, I think I’d remember that. So, where did you transfer from?” And I said, “Ohio.” It just seemed less embarrassing for both of us.

This morning in homeroom, the captain of our wrestling team, Scott Scanlon, showed up with glasses—he said that he got them over the weekend. “My parents think I’ve never done so good in school ’cause I can’t see the blackboard, so they sent me to an optimist to get my eyes checked, and now I can see more goodly.” (I think that sentence may help to explain why I think Scott’s eyesight isn’t the reason he does poorly in school.)

Today in the lunchroom, I overheard Chelsea talking to her friends about Scott, and how much she liked his new glasses, because they make him look so smart and cute. Which gave me an idea: if they can make Scott look smart, I bet glasses would make me look like a genius!

Now I just need to figure out how to get myself some glasses. Ugh, I wish my eyesight were worse. Scott’s so lucky to have crappy eyes.

So last night, I started trying to make my parents get me glasses. I told them I thought my eyesight was bad, and my mom said, “Well, what are you having trouble seeing?” And I said, “Everything.” And my dad said, “It can’t be everything. Are you nearsighted or farsighted? Are you having trouble seeing stuff that’s close to you, like your textbooks? Or far away, like the TV?” And I said, “Which is the one where I can watch TV, but can’t read my schoolbooks?” And he said, “That’s farsighted.” And I said, “That’s what I am.” My parents looked a little suspicious, but they made me an appointment with the eye doctor anyway.

Went to the eye doctor today. He made me read the eye chart, and I was going pretty fast through it before I remembered that, if I wanted glasses, I had to pretend not to be able to read some of it. So I just stopped reading and said, “I can’t see any of the rest of it.” And he said, “Wait—you can’t read anything else?” And I said, “Nope.” And he said, “You were halfway through one of the lines. How could you read the first three letters, but not the next four?” And I said, “Lucky guess?”

Anyway, he started trying different lenses for each of my eyes, and each time, he’d say, “Better, worse, same?” And I was answering at random until he said, “A minute ago, you said that lens was better, and now you say it’s worse.” Which seemed uncool of him, to pull a trick question like that. But from then on out, I said every single lens was better than the one before it, until he finally said, “Well, these are the strongest lenses we have.” And I said, “Awesome!” I bet Chelsea Hamilton will be really impressed when I tell her my prescription’s way stronger than Scott’s.

We picked up my new glasses today!

When I got home, I put them on, but I’m not sure how I look in them, because I can’t see myself in the mirror when I’m wearing them. I showed them to Sophie, though, and she said, “Whoa! Cool!” And I said, “They look good?” And she said, “They make your eyes look so huge! You’re like an anime character!” Which is probably good, right?

I wore my glasses to school for the first time today. I walked right up to Chelsea and said, “Hey, Chelsea! Notice anything different about me?” And she said, “I notice that you’re late for class, but if you hurry, I won’t write you up for it.” And then I took my glasses off and discovered that the blurry thing I thought was Chelsea was actually Mrs. Plimpton, our vice principal. (And by the way: these are some pretty impressive glasses if they can make Mrs. Plimpton look like anything but Mrs. Plimpton.) As the morning went on, I also mistook our school janitor, a trash can, and a motivational poster of a kitten hanging from a branch for Chelsea.

Finally, at lunch, Chuck pointed me in Chelsea’s direction, and I walked over to say hi to her. And I was halfway there when I walked right into a sixth grader’s tray full of sloppy joes. Man, they call those things “sloppy” for a reason—they kind of go everywhere.

Later in the day, my friend Kevin ran up to Chuck and me in the hallway and said, “Hey, did you hear? Some new kid from Ohio totally embarrassed himself in the cafeteria today! Hey—what happened to your shirt?”

Chelsea Hamilton and Scott Scanlon are officially dating now. Chuck tried to comfort me by saying, “Look, you did everything you could. But maybe it’s not the glasses that Chelsea likes. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s got a huge neck and sort of looks like a professional wrestler. So you know . . . you never had a chance.” I hate it when Chuck tries to comfort me.

To make things worse, I needed to figure out a way to explain to my parents that I won’t be wearing my glasses anymore. So tonight at dinner, I announced that I didn’t need my glasses anymore: “My vision’s suddenly fine again! It’s a miracle!” And my parents looked at me for a long moment, and then my dad said, “So what was her name?” And I said, “Chelsea.” And he said, “Did it work?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “Well, tell you what: it’s a shame to let a nice, expensive pair of glasses like that go to waste. So how about you get a little more wear out of them—say, any time you want to watch TV for the next three weeks or so?”

So, if you’ll excuse me, I should get going. A new Big Bang Theory is on, and I can’t wait to hear it.

My school had a fire drill today. At two p.m., the fire-alarm bells sounded, and we all got into lines and walked single file out of the school. I’ve always thought the problem with fire drills is that they’re nothing like a real fire—nothing’s actually on fire, and nobody’s choking on smoke or getting lost or anything. I think that to really test how ready the school is for a fire, they should blindfold everyone and put super-loud music on over the intercom and assign some students to just smack people at random as they try and fumble their way to the exit. It’d be better preparation, and also a lot more fun.

Today, the eighth grade took a trip to Liberty Falls Village. It’s an educational theme park where people reenact what it was like to live in the 1780s, so everyone there is wearing an old-timey costume and doing old-timey stuff like churning butter or repairing carriage wheels or making candles. And you can ask them questions, and they have to answer in character as colonial people, which is less fun than it sounds, because once you’ve asked, “What’re you doing?” and they say, “Churning butter,” you kind of run out of things to talk about. After a little while, I started saying, “Hello! I am a visitor from the future! Look at my wristwatch—how do the digits on it keep changing? It’s sorcery! Does it scare you?” until one guy in a blacksmith shop leaned over and said, “Dude, c’mon. This job sucks enough as it is.”

And that’s when I realized: this guy was only a couple of years older than me. He was probably a college student doing this for a summer job, and in a couple of years, I’ll probably have a summer job that sucks just as much as his does. This wasn’t just a field trip to our past. This was a trip to my future.

When you say it out loud, the word mailman becomes redundant.

A lot of my friends at school have joined a fantasy baseball league. Which sounds awesome—like, baseball games between dragons and sea serpents and wizards.

But it’s not. It’s about imagining baseball games between actual baseball players, using the statistics from their most recent games. So a lot of my friends’ lunch-table conversation now is about comparing baseball statistics. It’s basically like a really long, ongoing story problem in math class.

So this is almost the end of middle school—next week is final exams, and then I’m done!

We had an assembly this morning where Dr. Evans announced that, because this is the seventy-fifth anniversary of our school, our class will bury a time capsule in front of the school on Friday, to be opened in twenty-five years, so that kids in the future will know what life was like for us. “They did the same thing on the twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversaries,” she said. “So if anyone has anything they’d like to put in it, bring it to the ceremony tomorrow.” Then she asked if anyone had any questions. I raised my hand and asked if we’d be digging up the time capsule that kids buried twenty-five years ago, and Dr. Evans kind of mumbled, “Actually, we don’t know where it is. The people running the school back then forgot to write down where they put it. Are there any other questions?” And I raised my hand again and said, “Weren’t you the one running the school twenty-five years ago?” And then she muttered something and dismissed the assembly.

Kevin, Chuck, and I spent all of lunchtime talking about what we’d put into the time capsule. Kevin suggested maybe we could put some pencils and erasers in there, but Chuck said he was pretty sure that pencils and erasers would still be around in twenty-five years. I finally decided that I’d bring in one of my comic books, because it’ll probably be worth a lot of money in twenty-five years, and all I need to do is show up when they dig it up and I can claim it.

Toothpaste is a weird word, because it sounds like you should use it to glue your teeth in. We should call denture adhesive toothpaste, and call toothpaste something else, like mouthscrub.

Tonight at dinner, my mom asked Sophie how school was today, and Sophie said it was great: “We played tag on the playground, and I won.” And I said, “How do you win at tag?” And she said, “It’s easy: when you’re tagged, you don’t chase anyone. You just sit down, and you wait. Sooner or later, the people who are playing the game will get tired of waiting for you to chase them, and they’ll decide someone else is It.” And my mom said, “So how does that mean you won?” And Sophie said, “Because you’ve bent them to your will. That means you’re better than them.”

I need to remember to be nice to Sophie, because I’m pretty sure that one day, I’m going to be working for her.

This morning we buried the time capsule at school. A bunch of people brought stuff to put in it—I put my comic book in it, and Chuck brought some of his old video-game cartridges that he doesn’t use anymore, and Kevin brought a few erasers, and Doug Spivak brought a paper bag full of his old Pokemon cards, “so kids in the future will understand what we did for fun.” Which was actually a pretty smart idea for Doug Spivak.

Anyway, they sealed it all up this morning and buried it. At lunch, I saw Doug Spivak sitting there, staring at an empty brown bag and a pile of Pokemon cards. I said, “I thought you put those in the time capsule.” And he said, “So did I. I think I accidentally buried my lunch.” And then he shrugged and said, “I hope kids still like tuna fish in twenty-five years.”

If this blog is still around in a quarter century, and any kids are reading it . . . sorry.

I wish I had a fraternal twin, and that our last name was Identical, so we could be Identical twins who look nothing alike.

So in history class today, we all had to pick a historical event to write a paper on. I chose the Alien and Sedition Acts, because they had alien in the name, but it turns out, they don’t involve aliens at all. After school, I went to the library to check out some books for research, and the librarian said I wasn’t allowed to, because I have an overdue Percy Jackson book from last November. It’s really aggravating.

Well, I had to tear apart my bedroom last night, but I found my missing library book and brought it back to the library. The librarian said that I owed $49.70 in late fees on the book—“thirty-five cents a day for one hundred forty-two days.” I said, “The book isn’t even worth forty-nine seventy! The price on the back is just eight dollars.” And she just shrugged and said, “Rules are rules.” So I put the book back in my bag and said, “I lost the book. I’ll pay to replace it.”

And she said, “You didn’t lose it. It’s in your bag.”

And I said, “Nope. It’s lost.”

And she stared at me for a long time.

And I stared back at her.

And finally, she sighed and said, “OK. That’ll be eight dollars.”

So I paid the fine. Then I said, “You know, if the library is missing a Percy Jackson book, I could sell you a replacement one.” And she said, “Don’t push your luck.”