EduSummerCation

So, summer 2012 will forever be known as the summer where, at the ripe old age of 21, I finally learned how to dive.

And the great thing about learning to dive in front of kids is that they'll be excited to watch you, and even more excited to mock you when you fail.

I was going off the diving board today and on one of the jumps, I jumped off the end of the board and was up in the air, and I got into sort of a horizontal tuck and then I froze. I completely forgot what to do. So I landed in a sort of crouched belly flop and I just remember this stinky, mustard, yellow-green color flashing before my eyes and the first thing I see when I get above the water is a little girl in the program saying, "Andy, I just want you to know. That was the worst jump I've ever seen."

Two Things:

One: When people get really angry, they see red. I think when you do something really stupid and embarrassing, you see stanky-dank green. I saw a mother duck once, sitting on her nest. And as I was watching she got up, covered her nest with some grasses and what-not, then jumped into some water and immediately ejected this stream of foul, putrid, yellow-ish bodily waste. That is the color of shameful incompetence. Duck excrement.

Two: Being a kid is hard. Like, if I was the age of a kid in the program, and I had done that and heard someone tell me that was the worst jump they'd ever seen. That would've broken me. I would've had to put my towel over my head and try to drown the pain in french fries from the snack bar. You don't have enough experience or confidence at that age to protect you from comments and humiliation like that. You haven't graduated high school. You have to be driven everywhere. You've never tried to purchase condoms from a Wal-Mart on Christmas day at midnight. You haven't done anything.

The night I wandered into a Wal-Mart on midnight on Christmas to try to buy condoms, was the night I became impervious to anything anyone under the age of thirteen could say to me. You enter into this whole new world and you suddenly have this power and realization that you could blow their little minds at any second. It'd be like showing them the shape of infinity. Some sort of spiraling fractal that twists into itself forever and forever.

I'm impervious to mockery from people severely younger than me! Huzzah!