Please… Understand My Messed Up Life - Tales from Greenwood Middle School by Mark De Young

Author:Mark De Young [Young, Mark De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
Published: 2018-08-07T19:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The Hurricane and Heehaw

Dear diary,

Have you ever shot a soccer goal to win the championship for the other team by slamming the ball against your own team member’s nose? Have you ever broken your jaw because you were so absorbed in taking an action shot with your digital camera that you weren’t paying attention and got hit in the face with a bat? Have you ever baked a prize-worthy cake, only to receive second-degree burns and drop it right before the judges arrived because you forgot to use oven mitts? Have you ever been ready to give a speech at the fifth grade promotion ceremony, only to knock over the microphone into the punch bowl, push the principal off the stage, and cause the whole celebration to be canceled? No? Then why does all of the bad luck seem to happen to me? Back in Ohio, I was known as ‘Jenny the Jinx’, ‘Jaw-breaking Jenny’, ‘Hurricane Jenny’, or simply ‘Oh, no!’—well, that is what they would always say when I would decide to try and join one of their clubs.

I swear I was the poster child for the school nurse during my elementary years. All of my accidents should have been photographed and filed as picture references in ‘how to deal with injuries’. There was the one school year when I broke both my arms when I leaned back and fell down the ladder side of the slide. I also knocked a hornets’ nest in a tree with a ball and ended up with 12 stings on my face. To top it all off, I busted out my two front teeth and dented the janitor’s car with my forehead when I tripped over the curb in the parking lot. If I remember correctly, that was the last straw for the school janitor, Mr. Thompkins, and he left the school permanently, muttering something about being sick and tired of having to clean up blood every other week and snapping his mop handle over his knee.

On the last day of my fifth grade school year, I swear that I even heard a celebration from the nurse’s office as I left after dropping off a bouquet of flowers to thank her for her work in keeping me and the rest of the people at school in one piece.

Besides being constantly injured, I have never been successful in any competition. Sure my trophy and ribbon shelf is full of awards, but they are all lame ones for honorable mention. In other words, thank you for trying, but you sucked it up and couldn’t win. The only reason that I keep these around is to remind me about what not to try next. I even stuck some of my injury pictures next to the trophies to convince me not to attempt them again. When you see yourself in a leg cast up to your hip after trying to skateboard down a half-pipe, it makes you think twice about strapping on a helmet and yelling ‘Cowabunga!’ The trophy for that adventure said, ‘To the bravest competitor’.

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