The Bug Collection

I feel compelled to write about my Junior High experiences today. I'll share one story, and then go back to refusing to acknowledge the entire period.

In 9th grade for Biology, all of the students had to make a bug collection. It was a huge deal (we had to turn in around 50 insects), and we were supposed to work on it for the entire year. As one might predict, most of us didn't begin work until the week before this was due; in our defense, we had more important things to be doing, like hyperventilating over the opposite sex. Anyway, this major panic ran through the class, as people began to realize there was no freaking way they could finish this assignment on time. Some enterprising 14 year old then discovered there was a shop in town that actually sold insects for collections like this. Within a day, everyone in the entire class knew about it. The teacher warned us that if you bought your bugs, you'd fail. Almost everyone purchased them anyway. As a result, everybody possessed these immaculate collections when it came time to turn them in. Everybody but me, that is.

For some unknown reason, I had actually been working on my bug collection that entire year; trust me, it's not like I planned ahead. Instead, my mom knew about the project. Once a week, she'd yell at me until I took a coffee can and a flashlight out into the backyard, where I'd stumble around in the dark, wading through mounds of dog crap, looking for insects. By the end of the year, my collection wasn't impressive (I had less than half of the bugs, and most of them were duplicates). Nevertheless, I had so much frustration invested into it, I was determined to finish the damn thing. So, the week before the collection was due, I kicked it into overdrive, spending hours and hours all over my neighborhood. For a week, I lived like a homeless guy, spending all of my time by sewers and dumpsters. Unlike a homeless guy, I wasn't peeing into jars and huffing glue out there; I was engaging in SCIENCE!

By the end of the project, I just didn't care anymore. Short of insects, I started putting spiders and pieces of lint in there. Also, since I had spent all of my time searching for bugs, I didn't have much time to prepare the collection. We were supposed to make these elaborate displays for the bugs, but I instead opted for a plastic box and a sheet of styrofoam. In addition to that, we had to use these special insect pins to pin the insects to the display, but since I did all of this at the last minute, I had to use regular straight pins from my mom's sewing rooms. Those straight pins were much, much bigger than the pins we had been told to use. As a result, whenever I tried to pin a bug, it feel to pieces. Whatever, I just wanted to finish.

When I finally got it to class and I compared it to my classmates', I began to make preparations for repeating the 9th grade. Their collections were perfect. They had these fancy finished boards with velvet inlays. Inside of them, all of their bugs were pinned and labeled perfectly. In contrast, mine was full of random bug pieces and made up names. I was tempted to say that I had a fancy collection when I left for school that day, but I'd been accosted by a group of Satan-worshipping, entymology haters who insisted on trading my awesome collection for their completely retarded one. Instead, I took the man's way out, weeping uncontrollably and peeing in the corner of the room.

We got our grades back shortly thereafter. All around me, my classmates joined in an uproar. Apparently, they had done very, very poorly on the assignment. "Sweet Jesus," I thought, "if they didn't get good grades for their crap, I'm going to be sentenced to the gulag for mine." Instead, I got something like a 125% on my assignment. Was this a mean-spirited practical joke? Had the teacher been drinking again? Were my teachers ordered to be nice to me because I had cancer? I wanted answers. After class, I asked her why I did so much better than everyone else in class. She began to laugh, and said, "There is no way you bought something like that." In retrospect, that's probably not a compliment.