(no subject)
Things I do when I'm given assignments with no guidelines:
http://unix.temple.edu/~jsj/fmafinal.mov
“Death to you!”
He always gets it wrong. My cousin always steals my sayings, but his reenactments leave something to be desired. In this case, he said the words in the correct order and with good emphasis…but he forgot to throw the penny.
My parents went on vacation without me, and so I’ve been living with my aunt and uncle for three months now. In those three months it’s become perfectly clear to me that my cousin is mentally incapacitated. Throwing the penny at the end of a catch phrase like that is like placing the period at the end of a sentence.
I liked living with my aunt and uncle, but there were too many rules to follow by. I couldn’t play baseball in the house, not even if I called it something else. I couldn’t climb out of my window using a knotted-sheet rope, and I couldn’t even break things without getting in trouble…so eventually I turned to my cousin Thomas for entertainment.
On Saturday mornings we would race down the steps to watch cartoons; this was ritual. I’d always beat him to the better couch and the remote. Partially because he’s so slow and feeble and partially because I’m so awesome.
On one particular Friday, Thomas’s mother was doing her laundry, but left a clothes basket at the landing atop the stairs. Upon waking and meeting for our weekly ritual the next morning, Thomas and I found the basket. We emptied it out and strapped a bra to his head to help cut the wind resistance, he got in, and then I pushed him down the stairs.
About halfway down the steps, the basket dipped into a large incline (I believe that the designers of the stairs made them uneven. My plan was foolproof, I practically had blueprints and funding from the Smithsonian), tipping it and letting Thomas spill out. He hit several awkward poses on the way down and finally came to a rest at the foot of the steps. I raced down to him and ran into the living room to watch cartoons.
About thirty minutes later he walked into the room.
“Ow.”
“Ow what?” I asked without looking up.
“It hurts.”
I can’t believe he’s telling me that it hurts. That’s such a childish thing to say. How am I supposed to know what hurts? Can’t he see that I’m not looking? Does he expect me to ask him what hurts?
“Shut up.”
“Farf.”
“You’re still saying that?”
A few months ago Thomas had uttered a far less pleasant verb to my aunt, which resulted in his mouth being washed out with soap. I had never seen such a thing done. I had only heard the rumors, but now I was to bear witness to the actual event.
My aunt put Thomas’s head face up in the sink. She forced open his mouth and ran water into it, while dispensing liquid soap for the dishwasher over his tongue. She then took a brillo pad and a bar of soap and painstakingly rinsed out the contents of everything between and behind his lips. Since then any foul language has been masterfully disguised as gibberish.
I wish I had had a camera.
“You’re such a wuss,” I said upon his lack of a reply.
“You’re a bean head.”
A bean head? That’s the best he could come up with?
“You are s--“ I stopped mid-sentence as I looked over at him. He was holding a hand up to his right eye, where a few fine lines of drying blood were finding their way across his cheek.
“What did you do?!” I inquired subtlety.
“Me?! ME!!? I farfing schloper dunfit arrrlet conti rugga basketball wagon herder garrr!” He seemed hungry. There was no other explanation, and we hadn’t yet eaten. I would make pancakes and everything would set itself straight.
“You hungry?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll make us some breakfast.”
The pancake making turned out to be harder than I once thought. How can a package say that the product is ‘instant’ if it doesn’t slide out when you open the flaps and tip the box? I pushed the powder under the stove and into the sink.
Later, sitting across from each other in the kitchen while enjoying a masterfully crafted breakfast of cereal, I started taking care of his eye in the most professional way possible.
“Stop staring.”
“We need to fix your eye.”
“No.”
By this time, it had stopped bleeding. I leaned over the table and poked at it with my spoon to make sure nothing was broken. The cut opened again and turned pink from the sugar coated milk left there from my spoon.
“Ow.”
“Stop whining.”
I started eating my cereal again and thought about what I needed to do. I could hide him until it healed…which would be six, maybe ten hours at the most. If I dressed the chair up in his clothes and put a hat on it, the difference would be imperceptible. But what if my aunt talked to him? I should practice throwing my voice.
“…my day was fine…”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing…my day was fine…”
My day was fine my day was fine? That’s the best I could come up with? This isn’t going to work. What if she asks me something personal?
“Thom,” which I pronounced as Thom, “what would you say your favorite color is?”
“What? Why?”
“Just shut up and tell me.”
“No.”
I wield my spoon in a terrifying opposition.
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“Fine.”
It was obvious at this point that I would have to take a chance by assuming that my aunt knew as little about her son as I did.
“…green…”
“What?”
“Shut u--,” I barely had half of my retort out of my mind when I had what was quite possibly the most brilliant idea ever, “--p.”
Hanging on the wall in back of Thomas was what could best be described as a one-third scale family portrait. This was perfect. I would teach him something even better than the time I taught him how to clean a spill by using the cat to wipe it up.
“I don’t want to shut up. Stop telling me to shut up. I’m going to keep talking. You can’t make me shut up. I’ll just keep talking. I won’t shut up…”
He did this every now and then. He didn’t recognize my obvious superiority.
“…keep talking because you can’t make me shut up. I won’t. No I won’t. No no no.”
He looked rather ridiculous saying all of this while trying to eat cereal and hold his hand over his eye. It was still bleeding from the spoon incident. I told him so.
“You’re bleeding and you look stupid. Stop that.”
“…shut up. No, I won’t stop. I’m not stopping, I’m going to keep doing it…”
I took the picture down from the wall and got scissors and glue from the drawer by the stove.
“Sit still.”
“…you sit, we sit, we all sit for you sit, we sit…”
He wasn’t being very obedient.
I took the picture from the frame and cut out a portion of the one-third Thomas’s cheek. I smeared glue over the back and slapped it onto the real Thomas’s face.
“…won’t sit still, no…OW! Why did you do that?!” His whining was causing the picture to droop off of his cheek.
“You need to stay still for the glue to dry.” I pushed the picture back up to his cheek to cover the cut and held it until Thomas stopped moving.
“But I…”
“Stop talking.”
This wasn’t working. The idea worked, and the cheeks blended together by my artistic genius, but he was moving too much. My mind scrolled back over the contents of the drawer.
“Don’t your parents have tape?”
“Just dad. It’s duck tape.”
Duct tape? Could I have used such a thing? No. It’s completely unethical.
“Where does he keep it?”
“Toolbox.”
I left for the garage, where I had last seen my uncle’s toolbox. When I came back, Thomas was watching television.
“Okay, I found it.”
“So?”
“What do you mean ‘so’? You’re so stupid.”
“Don’t call me stupid.”
“Then don’t be stupid.”
I tore off a piece of duct tape and perfectly aligned the edges so the picture stuck without anything showing underneath. Just as I was finishing adding a couple of freckles to it with a marker, I heard noise from upstairs.
“I think mom’s awake.”
“Hold still, I need to make these freckles even.”
He squirmed and one smudged. It was barely noticeable. I’m an artist.
I heard someone walking down the steps and ran into the other room to hang the picture back on the wall. The hole I cut out in the picture was barely even noticeable; I had managed to fill it in with the marker. I did a great job.
I realized as I heard a foot hit the base of the steps that I had forgotten to sprinkle cat food around the laundry basket so that it looked like the cat had dropped it down the stairs during the night. Then I remembered what else I had forgotten.
“Ah! Scissors!” I said to myself.
It was too late now. I could never get back to the drawer in time to not be caught with the scissors, or the glue for that matter. I picked them up and ran into the other room and sat next to Thomas.
“Morning.” It was Thomas’s mom.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning,” replied Thomas. Morning? If he keeps acting like this, he’ll get us caught.
I pushed the two pieces of evidence between the seat cushions and tried to concentrate on the television.
“Did you two eat…or should I say actually get any of this food in your mouth?”
She was referring to the mess we had made. Very clever. I laughed, probably a little too loudly. Thomas wasn’t laughing. I elbowed him.
“Ow.”
“What was that, honey?”
“Oh, he just said yes. Yes, we ate. We had food, thank you. Ha ha…”
“Why is the duct tape out?”
I had forgotten the duct tape. Where was it? It didn’t matter now, it was over. She knew everything. She was going to fingerprint the tape and put together the entire thing. She would know how much we used and then deduce what it was used for, leading her to the only reasonable conclusion--
“We had cereal.”
I looked over at Thomas and he shrugged. Amazing. Completely amazing.
“Oh, that’s nice.”
We had made it. We were in the clear.
Then the unthinkable happened. Thomas’s kidneys sounded their exhaustion from being stretched like balloons.
“I’ve gotta go pee.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do! I’ve gotta pee! MOM! I HAVE TO PEE!”
“Then go pee, honey.”
“Okay!”
Thomas ran out of the room towards the other side of the house. Seconds later I heard a door close. A few seconds after that I heard a flush and Thomas came back. The cut up picture was drooping from his cheek again.
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean? In the bathroom? I peed.”
“No,” I pointed at his cheek.
“Oh, I washed my face.”
“Why?”
He shrugged and sat down.
“OW!”
He stood up to reveal a pair of scissors protruding from his pants. I offered words of encouragement.
“That’s funny.”
“It’s not funny.”
“Honey, are you okay?”
“He’s fine!”
“I am not!”
I glared at him. How could he be so selfish?
My aunt came into the room and gasped.
“Thomas! What happened?!”
I started hoping that she was asking about what was going on in the cartoon we were half-watching. But just in case she wasn’t, I had a plan.
“It was the cat.”
I am so amazingly great.
“The cat put scissors in the couch?”
“Er…well…yes?”
“And what’s that sticking to your face?”
She reached over and pulled the disfigured picture from Thomas’s cheek. The duct tape on the back tore the cut open again as it stuck to his skin. Thomas’s eyelid made a popping sound as it slapped back against his eyeball.
For a while she was silent.
My mind would most likely not be able to comprehend the trouble that Thomas was about to get in. He probably deserved whatever the punishment would be, though.
She turned around and went back upstairs. I heard the door close. Thomas and I turned around and went back to watching television.
“Did she just go back to bed?
“Shut up, stupid.”
http://unix.temple.edu/~jsj/fmafinal.mov
“Death to you!”
He always gets it wrong. My cousin always steals my sayings, but his reenactments leave something to be desired. In this case, he said the words in the correct order and with good emphasis…but he forgot to throw the penny.
My parents went on vacation without me, and so I’ve been living with my aunt and uncle for three months now. In those three months it’s become perfectly clear to me that my cousin is mentally incapacitated. Throwing the penny at the end of a catch phrase like that is like placing the period at the end of a sentence.
I liked living with my aunt and uncle, but there were too many rules to follow by. I couldn’t play baseball in the house, not even if I called it something else. I couldn’t climb out of my window using a knotted-sheet rope, and I couldn’t even break things without getting in trouble…so eventually I turned to my cousin Thomas for entertainment.
On Saturday mornings we would race down the steps to watch cartoons; this was ritual. I’d always beat him to the better couch and the remote. Partially because he’s so slow and feeble and partially because I’m so awesome.
On one particular Friday, Thomas’s mother was doing her laundry, but left a clothes basket at the landing atop the stairs. Upon waking and meeting for our weekly ritual the next morning, Thomas and I found the basket. We emptied it out and strapped a bra to his head to help cut the wind resistance, he got in, and then I pushed him down the stairs.
About halfway down the steps, the basket dipped into a large incline (I believe that the designers of the stairs made them uneven. My plan was foolproof, I practically had blueprints and funding from the Smithsonian), tipping it and letting Thomas spill out. He hit several awkward poses on the way down and finally came to a rest at the foot of the steps. I raced down to him and ran into the living room to watch cartoons.
About thirty minutes later he walked into the room.
“Ow.”
“Ow what?” I asked without looking up.
“It hurts.”
I can’t believe he’s telling me that it hurts. That’s such a childish thing to say. How am I supposed to know what hurts? Can’t he see that I’m not looking? Does he expect me to ask him what hurts?
“Shut up.”
“Farf.”
“You’re still saying that?”
A few months ago Thomas had uttered a far less pleasant verb to my aunt, which resulted in his mouth being washed out with soap. I had never seen such a thing done. I had only heard the rumors, but now I was to bear witness to the actual event.
My aunt put Thomas’s head face up in the sink. She forced open his mouth and ran water into it, while dispensing liquid soap for the dishwasher over his tongue. She then took a brillo pad and a bar of soap and painstakingly rinsed out the contents of everything between and behind his lips. Since then any foul language has been masterfully disguised as gibberish.
I wish I had had a camera.
“You’re such a wuss,” I said upon his lack of a reply.
“You’re a bean head.”
A bean head? That’s the best he could come up with?
“You are s--“ I stopped mid-sentence as I looked over at him. He was holding a hand up to his right eye, where a few fine lines of drying blood were finding their way across his cheek.
“What did you do?!” I inquired subtlety.
“Me?! ME!!? I farfing schloper dunfit arrrlet conti rugga basketball wagon herder garrr!” He seemed hungry. There was no other explanation, and we hadn’t yet eaten. I would make pancakes and everything would set itself straight.
“You hungry?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll make us some breakfast.”
The pancake making turned out to be harder than I once thought. How can a package say that the product is ‘instant’ if it doesn’t slide out when you open the flaps and tip the box? I pushed the powder under the stove and into the sink.
Later, sitting across from each other in the kitchen while enjoying a masterfully crafted breakfast of cereal, I started taking care of his eye in the most professional way possible.
“Stop staring.”
“We need to fix your eye.”
“No.”
By this time, it had stopped bleeding. I leaned over the table and poked at it with my spoon to make sure nothing was broken. The cut opened again and turned pink from the sugar coated milk left there from my spoon.
“Ow.”
“Stop whining.”
I started eating my cereal again and thought about what I needed to do. I could hide him until it healed…which would be six, maybe ten hours at the most. If I dressed the chair up in his clothes and put a hat on it, the difference would be imperceptible. But what if my aunt talked to him? I should practice throwing my voice.
“…my day was fine…”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing…my day was fine…”
My day was fine my day was fine? That’s the best I could come up with? This isn’t going to work. What if she asks me something personal?
“Thom,” which I pronounced as Thom, “what would you say your favorite color is?”
“What? Why?”
“Just shut up and tell me.”
“No.”
I wield my spoon in a terrifying opposition.
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“Fine.”
It was obvious at this point that I would have to take a chance by assuming that my aunt knew as little about her son as I did.
“…green…”
“What?”
“Shut u--,” I barely had half of my retort out of my mind when I had what was quite possibly the most brilliant idea ever, “--p.”
Hanging on the wall in back of Thomas was what could best be described as a one-third scale family portrait. This was perfect. I would teach him something even better than the time I taught him how to clean a spill by using the cat to wipe it up.
“I don’t want to shut up. Stop telling me to shut up. I’m going to keep talking. You can’t make me shut up. I’ll just keep talking. I won’t shut up…”
He did this every now and then. He didn’t recognize my obvious superiority.
“…keep talking because you can’t make me shut up. I won’t. No I won’t. No no no.”
He looked rather ridiculous saying all of this while trying to eat cereal and hold his hand over his eye. It was still bleeding from the spoon incident. I told him so.
“You’re bleeding and you look stupid. Stop that.”
“…shut up. No, I won’t stop. I’m not stopping, I’m going to keep doing it…”
I took the picture down from the wall and got scissors and glue from the drawer by the stove.
“Sit still.”
“…you sit, we sit, we all sit for you sit, we sit…”
He wasn’t being very obedient.
I took the picture from the frame and cut out a portion of the one-third Thomas’s cheek. I smeared glue over the back and slapped it onto the real Thomas’s face.
“…won’t sit still, no…OW! Why did you do that?!” His whining was causing the picture to droop off of his cheek.
“You need to stay still for the glue to dry.” I pushed the picture back up to his cheek to cover the cut and held it until Thomas stopped moving.
“But I…”
“Stop talking.”
This wasn’t working. The idea worked, and the cheeks blended together by my artistic genius, but he was moving too much. My mind scrolled back over the contents of the drawer.
“Don’t your parents have tape?”
“Just dad. It’s duck tape.”
Duct tape? Could I have used such a thing? No. It’s completely unethical.
“Where does he keep it?”
“Toolbox.”
I left for the garage, where I had last seen my uncle’s toolbox. When I came back, Thomas was watching television.
“Okay, I found it.”
“So?”
“What do you mean ‘so’? You’re so stupid.”
“Don’t call me stupid.”
“Then don’t be stupid.”
I tore off a piece of duct tape and perfectly aligned the edges so the picture stuck without anything showing underneath. Just as I was finishing adding a couple of freckles to it with a marker, I heard noise from upstairs.
“I think mom’s awake.”
“Hold still, I need to make these freckles even.”
He squirmed and one smudged. It was barely noticeable. I’m an artist.
I heard someone walking down the steps and ran into the other room to hang the picture back on the wall. The hole I cut out in the picture was barely even noticeable; I had managed to fill it in with the marker. I did a great job.
I realized as I heard a foot hit the base of the steps that I had forgotten to sprinkle cat food around the laundry basket so that it looked like the cat had dropped it down the stairs during the night. Then I remembered what else I had forgotten.
“Ah! Scissors!” I said to myself.
It was too late now. I could never get back to the drawer in time to not be caught with the scissors, or the glue for that matter. I picked them up and ran into the other room and sat next to Thomas.
“Morning.” It was Thomas’s mom.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning,” replied Thomas. Morning? If he keeps acting like this, he’ll get us caught.
I pushed the two pieces of evidence between the seat cushions and tried to concentrate on the television.
“Did you two eat…or should I say actually get any of this food in your mouth?”
She was referring to the mess we had made. Very clever. I laughed, probably a little too loudly. Thomas wasn’t laughing. I elbowed him.
“Ow.”
“What was that, honey?”
“Oh, he just said yes. Yes, we ate. We had food, thank you. Ha ha…”
“Why is the duct tape out?”
I had forgotten the duct tape. Where was it? It didn’t matter now, it was over. She knew everything. She was going to fingerprint the tape and put together the entire thing. She would know how much we used and then deduce what it was used for, leading her to the only reasonable conclusion--
“We had cereal.”
I looked over at Thomas and he shrugged. Amazing. Completely amazing.
“Oh, that’s nice.”
We had made it. We were in the clear.
Then the unthinkable happened. Thomas’s kidneys sounded their exhaustion from being stretched like balloons.
“I’ve gotta go pee.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do! I’ve gotta pee! MOM! I HAVE TO PEE!”
“Then go pee, honey.”
“Okay!”
Thomas ran out of the room towards the other side of the house. Seconds later I heard a door close. A few seconds after that I heard a flush and Thomas came back. The cut up picture was drooping from his cheek again.
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean? In the bathroom? I peed.”
“No,” I pointed at his cheek.
“Oh, I washed my face.”
“Why?”
He shrugged and sat down.
“OW!”
He stood up to reveal a pair of scissors protruding from his pants. I offered words of encouragement.
“That’s funny.”
“It’s not funny.”
“Honey, are you okay?”
“He’s fine!”
“I am not!”
I glared at him. How could he be so selfish?
My aunt came into the room and gasped.
“Thomas! What happened?!”
I started hoping that she was asking about what was going on in the cartoon we were half-watching. But just in case she wasn’t, I had a plan.
“It was the cat.”
I am so amazingly great.
“The cat put scissors in the couch?”
“Er…well…yes?”
“And what’s that sticking to your face?”
She reached over and pulled the disfigured picture from Thomas’s cheek. The duct tape on the back tore the cut open again as it stuck to his skin. Thomas’s eyelid made a popping sound as it slapped back against his eyeball.
For a while she was silent.
My mind would most likely not be able to comprehend the trouble that Thomas was about to get in. He probably deserved whatever the punishment would be, though.
She turned around and went back upstairs. I heard the door close. Thomas and I turned around and went back to watching television.
“Did she just go back to bed?
“Shut up, stupid.”