By Hillary Travis
Special to powhatantoday.com

Who doesn’t love the class clown?  You can always count on them to interrupt class at just the right moment, solely to put a smile on your face.  Everybody gets to have their moment, whether intentional or purely by accident, where they can laugh at themselves and hear that all- too-familiar echo of others laughing with them… at them. 

While I don’t consider myself to be the “class clown,” I am definitely not immune to the wave of embarrassment that comes crashing down whenever you least expect it.  In fact, I’m quite prone to such shenanigans, and, whether I’m just goofing off or am completely caught off-guard by a laughable incident, it never hurts to have a red-faced moment.  Admit it, we’ve all made fools of ourselves at one point or another, right?

It all started in kindergarten, and steadily rolled downhill from there.  Of course, I had to have one of those famous moments where I threw my hand in the air to catch the teacher’s attention, then called out “Mom!” rather than the teacher’s name.  Unfortunately my kindergarten teacher was not my mom, and, as you may have guessed, even five-year-olds get a good laugh out of petty mistakes. 

As far as I can remember, first and second grade slid by rather uneventfully.  Third grade was another relatively dull year, but there was one highlight I remember quite well at a presentation of “The Nutcracker,” to which all third-grade classes were taken on a field trip.  It was Christmastime, so everything was decorated all festively, and being the mid-90s, those stupid singing Christmas trees were all the rage. 

Remember those?  Like those singing fish people hung on their walls, the singing trees would come to life when someone got too close to them, and transform from a normal-looking tree to a singing and dancing monstrosity (complete with eyes and a mouth, and creepy little eyelashes).  Well, as I was walking next to my friend Joe, I decided it was a brilliant idea to push him into one of the Christmas tree displays as we passed it.  Toppling over and taking down a particularly green one, he barely had time to mutter a word before it came to life and started jamming out to its own Christmas musical concoction.  Needless to say, my friend Joe leapt several feet in the air and shrieked like a little girl, making the entire scene about 950 times more hilarious than I had intended.

I’ll go ahead and skip over the rest of elementary school, and even middle school, because as far as I know, my shenanigans were kept at a bare minimum.  Perhaps I should feel unfulfilled that I never barfed on some poor innocent kid sitting next to me, fell down the stairs (but I have fallen up them, and been trampled by a bunch of careless teenagers), or ripped the seat of my pants while bending over (though I did slip and fall in the mud one time, and got to walk around school for the rest of the day with a giant muddy brown stain on my butt, as amusing as that surely was), but hey, nobody’s perfect! 

High school, of course, is where all the individuality kicks in and personality oozes out of every zit-worthy pore on the teenage body.  And naturally, I like to spice things up and keep the world interesting (or perhaps I am just a complete klutz… I’m not sure which). 

To kick things off, I must inform you that geography is not my greatest subject.  For example, I laughed during the “Miss Universe” pageant because “Miss Georgia” was walking across the stage, and (as I foolishly stated) “Georgia isn’t a country!”

Well, okay, sorry… apparently it is.  But anyways…

I made a new enemy in ninth grade, in the form of one of those giant maps that teachers unroll and refer to every so often in front of the class.  On this particular day, the teacher was calling students up to point out specific countries.  When I was called forward, I was asked to point to Russia. 

Easy enough, right? 

Well three minutes later, as I’m searching through all of the tiny little islands in the Pacific Ocean trying to find one labeled “Russia,” the teacher had to call forward another student to help me find it.  And as you can probably imagine, I felt like the world’s biggest moron as I stared at the giant blob that read “Russia” in big, bolded letters.  Losing track of Russia is like forgetting where your nose is.  With that said, I can assure you I will never forget the location of Russia again.

In tenth grade, my greatest shenanigan involved a clock and a pair of batteries.  But this wasn’t just any old clock — it was one of those clocks with the birds that chirp every hour, on the hour.  My English teacher strategically kept the batteries that controlled the chirping removed from the clock, so that it only functioned to tell the time.  One day, I decided to throw a pair of batteries in it while my teacher wasn’t looking, and sure enough, as soon as the minute hand hit the 12, the clock began screeching and chirping out the hour (appropriately enough, we had been reading To Kill a Mockingbird).  My teacher, of course, didn’t find it as funny as I did, but the perplexed look on her face made the moment priceless.  Pure genius.

Still not impressed?  Don’t worry, I still had more shenanigans up my sleeve. 

Junior year is one big blur of SATs and endless schoolwork to me.  Speaking of which, I hated taking the SAT (which I took at Monacan High School, and refused to take more than once).  I apparently have some sort of SAT curse, because as I was sharpening pencils the night before (under the assumption, for some unknown reason, that I wouldn’t be allowed to use mechanical pencils), my hand slipped and I poked a nice graphite-filled hole in the center of my palm.  The next day, as I’m waiting in line holding my SAT information sheet, I’m (quite animatedly, apparently) telling someone the story of how I ended up with the wound, when the next thing I know, my SAT papers fly up and poke me in the eye.  Thinking the storm had blown over, I proceeded to the test-taking room.  During one of the breaks, I slid out and headed to the restroom, where the line stretched halfway down the hallway and naturally, I had to be last.  When I made it back to the testing room, the test had already been resumed without me.  Great fun.

Airplanes are another fun adventure.  While traveling to and from Colorado for a competition, I learned just how strange some people are.  I’ve always loved getting the window seat on planes, but now I realize why some people prefer the aisle.  On one particular plane, I was trapped against the window by a woman who was (quite literally) cutting the cheese.  Yes, that’s right —she had packed a block of cheese and a plastic knife for the flight, and spent the whole flight slicing the cheese into smaller pieces and eating it.  As much as I love cheese, my tolerance level only goes but so high.  It’s even lower for children… kids know just how to push my buttons and drive me crazy.  One kid sitting behind me seemed to have a strange fascination with vomit (which I may have mentioned is one of my biggest fears), and decided to spend the entire flight pretending to puke in his air sickness bag (after which he would shout out “Look!  Look at my barf!!!”). 

On the final flight home (for which I had smuggled a Big Mac and was ready for anything), I got stuck next to a guy who kept showing me pictures of architecture.  And by architecture, I mean forts he had build from cubes of Spam.  Delicious.  Between slide shows of potted meat plantations, he would poke the people in front of us in the backs of their heads, after which I would have to silently point towards my neighbor to assure them I wasn’t the culprit.  Airplanes are so fun.  I think people who are afraid to get on airplanes aren’t really scared to fly or crash or any of that… they’re just afraid of who they might have to sit next to for several hours.

Returning back to school, I must say that my senior year has proven to be the most interesting and eventful of all my years in grade school, and it’s not even over yet.  Just the other day, for example, I successfully flipped the letters around on my calculus teacher’s “Words of Wisdom” board while she was checking everyone’s homework off, so that it now read “Worms of Wisdod.” If I ever write a science fiction novel in my lifetime, I promise you it will be named after this —The Worms of Wisdod, by Hillary Travis.  Sounds appealing, does it not? 

I also convinced my AP lab partner to light a tiny piece of paper on fire in the Bunsen burner, but we failed to think about the fact that burning paper smells.  Of course, my most embarrassing chemistry moment has to be back in 11th grade, when I dropped a glass tube that had just been in the flame, which melted a hole clear through my shirt and burned my chest.  It didn’t really hurt, but I have a wonderful square-shaped scar to prove it.

All in all, it seems I have an endless batch of embarrassing stories and shenanigans to share (though I guarantee they’re much better if you were there).  After a while, you kind of lose count of all the times you’ve had a good laugh at yourself, and it goes without saying that this isn’t even half of all the crazy and embarrassing things I’ve done throughout my life. 

As they say, “Laughter is the best medicine.” I must agree, especially considering you don’t need a prescription for it, you can’t overdose on it, and there are very few side-effects of it.  So I’m going to keep on embarrassing myself, sharing a laugh, and making the best of life and whatever happens in it. 

An apple a day might keep the doctor away, but laughter tastes so much better.