Thumbs Up 4/21/10

I had a flashback during today's run, to something that may have been a formative moment in my adolescence. Actually, it happened when I was in seventh grade, which meant that I was still several years, and lowered voice octaves, away from puberty.

Specifically, it happened in Shop Class, which was optionally mandatory- the other offering being Home Ec. Ec is short for ectoplasm, which is "a viscous substance claimed by spiritualists to emanate from the body of a medium and then produce life forms." That definition was both disgusting, and perfectly descriptive of me at the age of thirteen. Since I did not want to be singled out every day as ectoplasmic, I chose Shop Class.

There, I would stand out only for my inability to make anything resembling anything we were supposed to make. I couldn't even form my sheet of green, molten plastic into the candy dish/ashtray it was supposed to become, and that was during the mid-70s, when a straw encased in a chunk of asphalt sold for $1 million at an auction in London. Therefore, I was in way over my head when we had to mine iron ore, smelt it, and upon cooling, form it into toolboxes for our fathers. I panicked at the thought of losing multiple appendages in the process, and so, handed in my father's own toolbox as my own creation. Yes, I should have removed his tools in advance, not claimed them as extra credit projects done "with the time I had left over." Maybe then, I would not have been on the verge of failing Shop Class, going into the final exam.

And, maybe Mr. Silber- I'm using his real name, because I'm sure he's suffering from dementia caused by inhaling too much sawdust, and doesn't have the faculties to sue me- wouldn't have made the cruel remark that led me to hate my opposable appendages for the rest of my life. While explaining the rules for the final- yes, a written final in Shop, he caught me fantasizing about my once certain F, turning into a D, and said in front of my mustachioed classmates, "Potts, get your thumbs out of your ass!"

My thumbs separated me from the lesser primates-who were all turning around and laughing at me- why would I abuse them in that base, if possibly exciting, manner? And, since he had in an earlier class, during the disastrous "bird-house meets arc welder incident," described me as "all thumbs," he must have intended to imply that my nether regions were awash in them. I was confused, disgusted, and filled with self-loathing. I was forever after opposed to my thumbs.

Which proved to be my ruination on the final. I refused to hold my no.2 pencil between unmentionable digit and forefinger, using instead the middle two fingers, with the outsiders as a sort of movable platform. It took me the entire hour to finish the first question, which was "What is the corollary of 'Righty Tighty?'"
Even that answer he marked wrong, as it looked to him like "Lift a Lunacy."

So, I failed Shop, which actually did no harm to my chances for advancement to eighth grade, as all thirteen-year-olds were automatically promoted, out of fear that they were a dangerous subspecies that needed to be moved out of the education system as soon as possible. In those days, the really hard cases were given Ph.Ds, just so they wouldn't spend all their time blowing up toilets and hiding in the girls' locker room.

But it did cause enormous psychological damage. I was caught just a few months later slicing my own thumbs in the bathtub. Later, I went into a stage in which I refused to acknowledge them at all, telling everyone that I "only have eight fingers. I'm just watching those other two things for a friend in Switzerland."

So, hey, all you Industrial Ed., teachers out there(Ed being short for "edentulous," meaning "toothless."), take more care in addressing your charges. We live in a more litigious society today than that of 1975. If you make the kind of comment to one of your little simians, like that Mr.Silber made to me, you might just be looking at a multi-million dollar lawsuit for alienation of thumb affection. But, more importantly, you might be distorting the thumb self-image of a very vulnerable little lemur, like I was.

Please, stop the suffering before it starts. And I will stop this blathering blog.

Thanks for reading.