Fake Tattoos, Conversations & Wet Willies

Traveling with teens to the state journalism convention can make you do a lot of things you wouldn’t normally do—things like buying matching fake tattoos, a Fraggle Rock puppet or a dozen Chinese yo-yos. 

It can also make you run around the University of Texas campus with a rubber chicken. (OK, OK, OK so maybe I would have done that one on my own.)

Traveling with teens can also make bizarre, random  conversations sound normal—conversations about dying everyone’s hair a shocking pink to match the mean girl standing in the hotel lobby, about whether handguns come in the color pink or if street people have to have backpacks or if the panhandler on Guadalupe in Austin would give you back your three cents in change after he requested 97 cents.

Yep, traveling with teens can force you to listen to conversations that seem to make perfect sense at the time in a warped, twilight zone kind of way.

I’m not exactly sure how this particular conversation started, but the end of it went something like this…

“I’m so great they named Carson City after me,” Carson said.

“I’m so great they named Travis County after me,” Travis said.

“Well, they named Hannah Montana after me,” Hannah said.

“Oh, yeah, they were like ‘Super Star’ and I was like, ‘nuh uh,” Travis said.
  
For just a nano second, it sort of all made sense. Sort of. I started to tell them that both North and South Carolina were named after me, but after the Super Star and nuh uh thing, I decided to keep my mouth shut.

Other conversations this weekend were rather enlightening. The next time someone tries to get you to donate money for a cause, you can always offer Travis’ response: “No thanks,” Travis told the Greenpeace guy, “I’m not feeling like a hero today.”

Another conversation brighten the day for the guys at Amy’s Ice Cream in Austin. After one staffer tried a sample of the Mexican vanilla ice cream, another staffer asked her, “Is it spicy?” 


Of course, some bantering just doesn’t bode well for the drive back home. While driving down Interstate 35 in the white school suburban, the two boys in the back started making car acceleration noises.

“Are you 5, Travis?” Hannah asked.

“What?” Travis responded in disbelief. 

“You’re acting like a little kid,” she said.

“Hey Hannah, weren’t you the one that put a wet willy in my ear a few hours ago?” he asked.

Traveling with teens: definitely not for the faint of heart.

Teens, Trips & the Rubber Chicken

Ah, it’s the week before Spring Break. Normally, this would be the time that we throw the final pages of our 304-page yearbook together to meet our final deadline and lock in our ship date.

Instead, I will be traveling with nine newspaper kids–let’s count them one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine–to New York City to attend the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s spring convention and collect our school’s first ever national award for its newspaper.

Pretty exciting stuff.

Pretty scary stuff.

Teenagers and trips.

Just the mere thought can make a teacher call the pension office and ask how much it will cost to buy additional years in order to qualify for retirement by tomorrow. When you say “teenagers and trips,” you might as well include the word “terror.” Just like Dorothy wandering through the forest in the Wizard of Oz chanting, “Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my,” substitute an old, fat, bitter teacher blubbering, “teenagers, trips and terror, oh my.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, some of my best memories have involved trips with my students. However, trips are where everything can suddenly spin out of control, things can and will go wrong, and when the dust settles, there you are, the last person standing, and all fingers are pointing at you—and not in a good way either.

You might as well walk out of a bathroom with toilet paper stuck to your shoe. Whatever happens, you will get the blame even though you had about as much ability to intervene as you do at stopping Mount St. Helens from spewing again.

Horror stories across the nation abound. I’ve known teachers who tape the outside of doors to see who busts curfew (Isn’t that sort of like closing the barn doors after all the cows/horses/whatever have run off?). I’m not sure how that all helps.

Veteran teachers check into hotels with specific orders to the hotel staff: “Turn off the phones. Turn off the adult movie channels. Don’t provide room service.” Still, disaster strikes.

We lecture our students. I tell mine: “No sex, drugs, and only a little bit of rock‘n’ roll is permissible. No talking to strangers. No going anywhere with strangers, and just remember, don’t do anything you wouldn’t want God or your Mama to see. That’s the test. If you wouldn’t want God or your Mama to see it, don’t do it.”

Despite the chill down my spine, I think I’m almost ready for the thrill of this trip.

We’ve already decided to bring the rubber chicken. (He’s never been before.) We also decided to photograph our rubber chicken like the elementary kids do with their flat Stanleys.

So you’re probably wondering about those yearbook pages, my page proofs, the new batches of photography projects to grade, and all that important paper work exponentially reproducing on my desk.

Well, as they say in New York, “furgetaboutit.”

I’m leaving the work and taking the chicken. You'll find us on top of the Empire State Building.

You know, I think this little excursion is going to be fun after all.