Perspective, Fatsos & Other Stuff

At the end of the semester, my room always turns into a maze of piles––piles of stuff to grade, piles of yearbook pages to proof, piles of yearbook pages to complete, piles of newspaper contest entries to clip, piles of stuff I should be doing, stuff I need to do, stuff I don’t want to do…

Stuff. Lots of stuff.

Things were so hectic, I almost missed some of this chatter…

It’s all in the perspective…

I walked into the midst of a rather heated argument about the girls basketball team during newspaper. One of the sports editors was being less than charitable in his assessment of the team.

“You have a losing record,” he harrumphed.

“We don’t ever lose games,” said the other editor, who played on the varsity girls’ basketball team.

“We just run out of time,” she explained.

Hmmmm, I found that assessment rather interesting and wondered if perhaps I might be able to apply that little gem to certain areas of my life.

Things like my new fitness challenge. It would go something like this… “I’m not really fat. I just need to grow taller.”

Or let’s ramp that baby up a notch and apply it to deadlines. I’ll just tell my yearbook rep, “Oh, pah-leese, we didn’t miss that deadline. We just ran out of numbers on the calendar.”

Or maybe, just maybe, I could tell my principal, “Grades? Oh, I have grades. I just didn’t record them.”

Yeah, let’s see how those work for me.

Just call me Teom…

My editor-in-chief (who I must say is always fab-u-lous) was showing off her new necklace.

“See, I’m the ‘Stend’ and my mom is the ‘Befrie,’” she explained, pointing to her section of the sterling silver heart-shaped necklace that when put together says, “Best Friends.” She had purchased the necklace as a Christmas present for her mom.

“That’s really nice,” I said, “but I’ll never have one of those because, at any point in time, at least one of my children is angry with me about something.”

I told her if my kids ever purchased me a necklace, they would be the “Iham” and I would be the “Teom.”

It took less than a second before another staffer quipped, “Hey, we might need to buy a case of those. We could make some money.”

A few others nodded in agreement.

I wasn’t sure if I should have been disheartened that other moms share the same lot in life as I currently do, or if I should be cheered by the entrepreneurial spirit of the staff.

Fatty Fatty Two-by-Four

One of my photography classes (yes, the one that thought I lived in a necklace) was critiquing photographs. One photograph showed two sumo wrestlers.

“To capture the action,” I explained, “the photographer used a fast shutter speed.”

“Did you say a fat shutter speed?” one student quipped.

“He probably used a wide angle lens, too,” another piped in.

“Yeah and a wide aperture, too,” another added. “You know, to blur the background.”

Hey, all you Bloom lovers out there, who’s worried now about kids applying basic knowledge to real life situations?  We’re rockin’ that application/analysis/evaluation stuff here.

Stuff.

There you have it… We’re back to that stuff again.