Okay.
So this happened to me a long time ago. I was like… 6? 7? I was in first grade.
Anyway.
So, one day, I’m sitting in class, learning the alphabet. Or how to write in cursive. Something like that. But as I’m sitting there at my little desk, I realize that my feet are really uncomfortable. It was my socks, man. Everything about them seemed specifically designed to make me suffer. They were tight. They were scratchy, like wool and stiff cotton had a lovechild and slipped it on my tiny fucking feet. And they were crew cut, so it was a pretty wide, high-impact zone of child suffering.
So I’m trying to pay attention, trying to remember that triangles have three sides and all that, but I just can’t… concentrate. My socks. My socks, man. They’re killing me.
So I decide to take action. Without taking my eyes off of the teacher even once, I bring my feet up one at a time, take off my shoes, and yank those cotton torture tubes off. Liberation came with a rush of relief. I quickly stuffed my feet back in my Hush Puppies and shoved my balled-up socks in my desk.
I might have told my mom that I hated the socks and asked her to buy new ones. But she must not have, because my socks just keep on bothering me in class. But that’s okay. Because now I know the solution to my problem. I came up with it all on my own. Fucking child prodigy, right here. It’s easy. Pretend to pay attention to the lecture about addition and subtraction, take off my shoes, rip off my socks, jam the socks in the desk.
So, one day, my teacher announces to the class that she’s going to do a desk inspection. And immediately I know my time has come. I have been sneaking my socks off of my feet and into my desk for literally WEEKS. And I’m like 6 years old, so I could never be bothered to try and smuggle the socks into my backpack to bring home. Writing this now, I don’t think my mom ever noticed that socks were going missing at an alarmingly steady rate. I must have had a lot of fucking socks.
Anyway, my teacher must have been a sadist who enjoyed watching kids squirm in their humiliation, because if she checked a desk and it was messy, she would dump its contents right out on the floor. The child would have to clean up their desk as their classmates laughed at their misfortune.
So I’m shitting my pants (figurately speaking… I was a potty-trained six-year-old) with fear here. The teacher’s on to me. Stick a fork in me, because my goose is fucking cooked. I’m shuffling things around in my desk, trying to clean things up. Messy papers and broken pencils and socks. Socks, man. Too many goddamned socks. My teacher is going to see them. She’s going to see them and she’s going to tip over my desk and I will have to move to fucking Florida to escape my shame.
The teacher gets over to my desk and peeks inside. “Oh! Looks like Jenny’s desk is going over!” she says.
There have only been a few moments in my life where I was so stressed and terrified that time seemed to slow… D\down. This was one of those moments.
The teacher tips my desk over. My mess starts to slide out. The papers. The pencils. The socks.
I stuff my arms into the desk to try and stop the outpouring of filth, and I swear to god, Anon, I screamed, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
My puny child arms are not strong enough to keep the shit in my desk from spilling out. It lands in a pile at my feet.
The room is silent. A piece of chalk rolls out of my desk and plinks against the floor.
“Is that a sock?”
(No. It’s a metric fuck-ton of socks.)
My classmates start giggling and whispering to each other about what a fucking weirdo I am. My teacher looks horrified. Like I had a bunch of dead frogs in my desk instead of socks.
And she loses it.
She really tears into me about how unacceptable this is and how she’s going to call my parents. At this point, I’m bawling my eyes out, the way I bawled my eyes out when I read the ending of Flowers for Algernon for the first time. Everyone is laughing at me. I was always a strange kid. I didn’t have that many friends. But this incident definitely wasn’t doing me any favors for making new ones.
I don’t really remember what happens after that, to be honest. I know the teacher uses the phone in our classroom to call someone while I’m sobbing on my hands and knees on the floor, surrounded by notebook paper and socks. Another teacher sticks her head in and seems equally scandalized.
I don’t get in trouble with my parents when I go home. I think they were just… confused? Like… Jenny??? Why did you do that????
I don’t get what was so hard for everyone to understand. My socks were just really fucking uncomfortable.
So this happened to me a long time ago. I was like… 6? 7? I was in first grade.
Anyway.
So, one day, I’m sitting in class, learning the alphabet. Or how to write in cursive. Something like that. But as I’m sitting there at my little desk, I realize that my feet are really uncomfortable. It was my socks, man. Everything about them seemed specifically designed to make me suffer. They were tight. They were scratchy, like wool and stiff cotton had a lovechild and slipped it on my tiny fucking feet. And they were crew cut, so it was a pretty wide, high-impact zone of child suffering.
So I’m trying to pay attention, trying to remember that triangles have three sides and all that, but I just can’t… concentrate. My socks. My socks, man. They’re killing me.
So I decide to take action. Without taking my eyes off of the teacher even once, I bring my feet up one at a time, take off my shoes, and yank those cotton torture tubes off. Liberation came with a rush of relief. I quickly stuffed my feet back in my Hush Puppies and shoved my balled-up socks in my desk.
I might have told my mom that I hated the socks and asked her to buy new ones. But she must not have, because my socks just keep on bothering me in class. But that’s okay. Because now I know the solution to my problem. I came up with it all on my own. Fucking child prodigy, right here. It’s easy. Pretend to pay attention to the lecture about addition and subtraction, take off my shoes, rip off my socks, jam the socks in the desk.
So, one day, my teacher announces to the class that she’s going to do a desk inspection. And immediately I know my time has come. I have been sneaking my socks off of my feet and into my desk for literally WEEKS. And I’m like 6 years old, so I could never be bothered to try and smuggle the socks into my backpack to bring home. Writing this now, I don’t think my mom ever noticed that socks were going missing at an alarmingly steady rate. I must have had a lot of fucking socks.
Anyway, my teacher must have been a sadist who enjoyed watching kids squirm in their humiliation, because if she checked a desk and it was messy, she would dump its contents right out on the floor. The child would have to clean up their desk as their classmates laughed at their misfortune.
So I’m shitting my pants (figurately speaking… I was a potty-trained six-year-old) with fear here. The teacher’s on to me. Stick a fork in me, because my goose is fucking cooked. I’m shuffling things around in my desk, trying to clean things up. Messy papers and broken pencils and socks. Socks, man. Too many goddamned socks. My teacher is going to see them. She’s going to see them and she’s going to tip over my desk and I will have to move to fucking Florida to escape my shame.
The teacher gets over to my desk and peeks inside. “Oh! Looks like Jenny’s desk is going over!” she says.
There have only been a few moments in my life where I was so stressed and terrified that time seemed to slow… D\down. This was one of those moments.
The teacher tips my desk over. My mess starts to slide out. The papers. The pencils. The socks.
I stuff my arms into the desk to try and stop the outpouring of filth, and I swear to god, Anon, I screamed, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
My puny child arms are not strong enough to keep the shit in my desk from spilling out. It lands in a pile at my feet.
The room is silent. A piece of chalk rolls out of my desk and plinks against the floor.
“Is that a sock?”
(No. It’s a metric fuck-ton of socks.)
My classmates start giggling and whispering to each other about what a fucking weirdo I am. My teacher looks horrified. Like I had a bunch of dead frogs in my desk instead of socks.
And she loses it.
She really tears into me about how unacceptable this is and how she’s going to call my parents. At this point, I’m bawling my eyes out, the way I bawled my eyes out when I read the ending of Flowers for Algernon for the first time. Everyone is laughing at me. I was always a strange kid. I didn’t have that many friends. But this incident definitely wasn’t doing me any favors for making new ones.
I don’t really remember what happens after that, to be honest. I know the teacher uses the phone in our classroom to call someone while I’m sobbing on my hands and knees on the floor, surrounded by notebook paper and socks. Another teacher sticks her head in and seems equally scandalized.
I don’t get in trouble with my parents when I go home. I think they were just… confused? Like… Jenny??? Why did you do that????
I don’t get what was so hard for everyone to understand. My socks were just really fucking uncomfortable.
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