A Grade Three Reaction

Waking up early is crap. The Nokia alarm goes off at 7:00 a.m. and I experience what I like to call my Grade Three Reaction©. That could be interpreted in any number of ways, so allow me to explain. The Grade Three Reaction© originated in...um...grade three. Elementary grade three was a milestone year and particularly memorable for three awful reasons. From least awful to most awful:

3. The folks broke down and bought me a Nintendo GameBoy (God bless them). It was a monochromatic beast, eating batteries and shitting entertainment. I don’t even want to guess how many hours I sunk into Tetris and Super Mario Land, so I’m going to go with a metric lot. Another kid in my class (Gerard Scott, the little bastard) “accidently” took my GameBoy home after school one day, and I ended up with his. I didn’t notice until I got home. When I turned the unit around to pop in some Balloon Fight I noticed the back of the case was all scratched and dented and actually leaking battery acid. The front screen was also scratched and chipped. The conniving little shit swapped my pristine item for his busted-ass hunk of trash. I could never get him to bring in my original, and when he finally did it was in even worse shape than his old system. He ruined my favourite toy. It broke my heart.

It was approximately this bad.

2. I found out Santa Claus wasn’t real. There was only one jolly fat guy who brought the presents and he slept next to Mom. It broke my heart.

And, without further adieu, the actual genesis of the Grade Three Reaction©:

1. My teacher, Sister Mona. It sounds anticlimactic but she was the most wretched, unloving, unsympathetic nun who ever taught. She repeatedly berated children and made them cry. She once told a child to stop running in the playground, and being a kid from a different class, with a human teacher, he thought he had a good grasp on what was and was not acceptable behaviour and what he could and could not get away with. He was wrong and ended up finding out the face-first-in-the-gravel-via-malicious-nun way. She was genuinely awful. She made me think of a new retarded excuse not to go to school every day. Every single day. If I didn’t have a critical stomach condition I was suffering from a vicious head cold. Mom didn’t believe my bullshit. At the time as far as I was concerned, she was an unfit mother. Nuns broke my spirit.

To summarize, the Grade Three Reaction© is a sinking feeling I get in my stomach. It’s comparable to waking up every morning and dreading going to grade three, a condition I’m sure none of you had. Basically it’s a sinking feeling of unease and distress. It’s awful.

Where was I........? Oh right. Today I was to talk to Jimmy’s creative writing class. The topic was Newfoundland: An Overview. The 7:00 a.m. alarm buzzed and I immediately felt that sinking feeling. Public speaking has always been a fear of mine, a debilitating fear. Speaking to a group of young students shouldn’t evoke this reaction, but for some reason it did. It turned out to be completely unnecessary though because the talk went great. I got up, did my thing, and answered questions such as:

“Do you find Filipino women attractive?”

And

“Are you looking to get married?”

...

I like to think I’ve made a difference today.

Overall it was a good talk. The students seemed to enjoy the bits they understood and I was much more comfortable that I thought possible. The Grade Three Reaction© was, as never before, actually baseless! Hmmm, maybe this means I was all wrong about Santa after all!

Gerard Scott’s still a douchebag though.