What I learned in school

Back in the day, when I was still in school, we were occasionally told to build things. This happened mostly in Physics class. Apparently it had something to do with seeing the practical side of what we had learned in class. Not that we ever even made a connection between the cool stuff we built and the boring stuff we read in the books. We just thought building things was fun.

I remember one time when we had to make a rocketship out of a regular plastic soda bottle. We were a group of three girls and, with a simple equation, I can explain what happened:

It was so pink and glittery and girly and it made me sick. I have never been much of a girly girl, and I had to do something to show I was a part of the group, too. Something that would scream LAUREN!!!, because all it would scream before was WE ARE PINK LOVING LITTLE GIRLY GIRLS!!! Something definitely had to be done about our rocketship.


And then, a light shone upon me and I had an idea.


I grabbed some rope and a doll that, coincidently, looked an awful lot like my Physics teacher. I'm not sure what my friends were thinking at the moment, but they didn't dare say a word.


I'm not really sure why, but the teacher wasn't too thrilled.

And then there was the day we had to make some sort of battery operated motor thingamajig that was supposed to look like this:


Yeah, I know. Doesn't seem too complicated. Well, IT WAS FOR US.

We were told to gather in groups of three and given one month to get it done. Can you guess what happened?


That's right. We procrastinated like no procrastinator has ever procrastinated before.

The project was due on a Monday. On Sunday, one of us remembered and we met up at Bob's house to try to put together something that would hopefully not look too last minute. I really don't know who we were kidding, but we tried.

We only had one problem: we needed a special kind of copper cable thing or something and, after going around the entire city on foot in the rain, we noticed the stores didn't open on Sundays. However, we found a store that sold some kind of power transformer box thing and the lady said it had the copper cable inside, if we could open it. It would do. We bought the power transformer box thing and took it back to Bob's house.

Opening it wasn't as easy as you might think and somehow led to this:

Okay, so maybe that's a bit of a dramatic representation of what really happened. But Bob did attack the power transformer box thing repeatedly with a hammer. He did manage to open it and retrieve the copper cable inside, but it wasn't the special copper cable we needed and, therefore, did not work for our battery operated motor thingamajig.

I can't really remember what else happened that day project-wise. I do remember, though, that Bob's mom made us sandwiches and that the three of us spent the rest of the evening playing the guitar and singing. Oh, and Bob used the not-so-special copper cable to improvise a new guitar strap. It looked pretty cool.

I wonder how much we scored on that project.