When I was in first grade, one of the many routines was the My Weekend paragraph. Every Monday morning, each of us got out our notebooks and wrote a few painstakingly printed sentences about what we'd done over the weekend. As I recall, after the first couple weeks of the project, my entries were almost completely fabricated. My weekends were all the same, and terrifically boring to write down, and besides, I had a runaway imagination and a penchant for lying. That notebook showed some pretty kickass weekends: I didn't just go to the zoo, I got to ride on the elephant. My family spent the weekend on a boat, with SHARKS!

At some point in the spring term, my teacher noticed a particularly lurid paragraph about the trip to Germany, complete with castles and medieval knights, that my family had taken over the weekend, and somehow it dawned upon her that this might not be God's own truth. She took me aside and asked me, with sincere pain in her eyes, if I was fibbing.

I mumbled something shamefaced. What I was thinking was more like, of course I am, you stupid cow. I'm six years old, if I didn't make shit up I wouldn't have anything to write about. I remember being slightly shocked that it had taken her that long to catch on; I hadn't exactly been going for realism in my stories, and I thought it was fairly obvious that they weren't, strictly speaking, true. That was when it dawned on me that (a) I was smarter than my teachers, and (b) I would have to spend the rest of my school career hiding this fact from them.

Well, ok, that last sentence is a bit bullshit. What I realize now is that I should have made it my absolute goal to hide my intelligence from the teachers and from my fellow students. But back then, I thought I was winning when I pointed out the ignorance and errors of those around me. In retrospect, I was kind of a little shit.

N.B.: This post contains a fair amount of what they call tooting one's own horn. Tough shit--it's my website and I'll be arrogant if I want to.