A collection of short stories reminiscing on my memories from elementary school in the late 2000s.

Introduction

Some people say their time in high school was the best. Others may say college was the greatest time of their life.

However, for me, I would have to go all the way back to elementary school.

That choice may seem bizarre to some people. After all, I was just a little kid at the time. I didn’t have my own money or even free will. What’s so good about that?

The past 12 years have been a constant state of decline in the quality of my life. It accelerated greatly when I started high school and ticked up during the first year of college, but then the downtrend continued again soon after.

This tumultuous time has been riddled with depression, mistrust, and other negative emotions. And of course, there’s that whole world-upending event that happened.

“””Unprecedented times.”””

While conditions have been improving for me recently, when I think about when I was most consistently happy with my life, I would have to say it was during my grade school days.

And here is why I think so.

Why Elementary School?

There are a lot of reasons why grade school was the happiest time in my life. I was too young to understand the world and its harsh reality. But ignorance was bliss.

I also actually had friends back then. Many friends, in fact. And despite some differences, we always saw eye to eye with each other.

Of course, it definitely bolstered my confidence that I was absolutely acing my schoolwork at the time. I was just smashing those multiplication tables and Scantron worksheets.

2 times 2 is 4. Nailed it again.

This isn’t to say that I never encountered adversity at times. Some drama and tragic events happened. But for the most part, I would say I was pretty carefree compared to the years following.

I think I would like to take a trip back down memory lane. To document all of the good times I had down on paper. To immortalize those memories in the digital realm so that they may never be forgotten.

A Trip Down Memory Lane (2005–2011)

I Actually Had Friends

While I was a boy (well, I still am), a majority of my friends in elementary school were girls. Cooties were just a thing that I had never caught wind of. Even then, I didn’t really care.

These were some of the friends I had. I’m obviously going to change the names for anonymity's sake.

“N” — A blonde girl with glasses. She would accidentally spit in my face when speaking. Like literally every other sentence. Then she’d laugh and apologize.

“T” — A Russian girl who taught me how to make silly putty out of eraser shavings. Or rather, what we called silly putty.

“D” — A tall Filipino girl who knew martial arts. Once, we actually ran into each other on the same car, on the same train, at the same time and day at Disneyland. It really was a small world after all.

“J” — A shorter Asian girl with glasses and a bit of a nasal voice (at least I think that’s what it’s called). Gave off a pretty smart vibe.

“A” — J’s psycho little sister who always laughed manically while chasing me around the yard. It was all in good fun.

It’s a little difficult to put these profile descriptions into writing, but I did the best I could.

The Volcano

We had a volcano inside our school.

Okay, it wasn’t an actual volcano. It was a traffic cone in the back of the yard. It was placed on some dirt next to one of many large, planted trees.

My friends and I would always dump dirt in it and kick around the bottom. A bunch of airborne dust would shoot out of the top.

Hence, a volcano.

Eventually, after a couple of months, one of the custodians took it back to use someplace else. But it was fun while it lasted.

Killer Robot Bees

There were a lot of bees buzzing around the place. Maybe that’s why I still get freaked out by buzzing insects, even at 22 years old. Even common house flies I’m just like…

Nope. Someone else kill it, please. Save me. HELP.

One of the ideas floating around between us classmates was that you could never outrun bees. The faster you ran, the faster it would fly to keep up with you. 700 miles per hour? Still not fast enough.

However, if you stood completely still and didn’t move a muscle, the bees couldn’t see you. And they would leave you alone.

I tried it once. I heard the telltale buzzing of black and yellow. And I froze immediately in my tracks.

It came into view and started flying around my head. All I had to do was keep completely still and… it was flying right in my face.

I’m out.

I took off and ran all around the yard until I didn’t hear it buzzing anymore. So much for that strategy.

That wasn’t the only time I tried the strategy. Another time, I was in the play structure area. There were some monkey bars with stool-like things below them. And here came another one of those fuzzy…

Bzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Once again, I stopped and waited for the bee to lose interest and leave me alone. It hovered around in front of me but didn’t retreat.

And then…

Bzzzz-ZIIIP

It zipped at warp speed right at me. And struck me smack dab in the middle of my forehead…

…And then it fell right to the ground and stopped moving.

What even happened?

Confused as heck, I checked in with my teacher. She confirmed that I hadn’t been stung.

Maybe I had a forehead of steel. Some sort of superpower.

Nerd

One activity I did for fun was to continuously add the same numbers over and over. Yeah, I did math for fun.

What a nerd.

So, what exactly sparked this? Well, I was curious as to what values I could get if I continuously doubled numbers starting from “1” on a calculator.

However, the calculator ran out of room for digits pretty quickly. So I had to keep going by hand. I was playing 2048 on paper before it even existed.

1 + 1 = 2

2 + 2 = 4

4 + 4 = 8

And so on, so forth, for all of eternity. I think I got to around 30 digits. The paper was getting so crowded with calculations that I eventually ran out of space and had to flip to the backside.

I don’t even know if the numbers were right. I probably made a slip-up somewhere and added the wrong digits. Or skipped over some numbers entirely. But they were probably close enough.

Many recesses went by with me doing nothing else but scribbling on that paper. And it was worth every second of it.

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768, 65536… I can’t be bothered to mentally do the rest.

Silly Putty

As I mentioned before, my friend “T” had taught me how to make silly putty. Since we all had erasers and used them quite often, we were often left with plenty of eraser shavings.

She told me I could take those shavings, roll them up into a ball, and keep squishing it and squishing it until it became putty.

*squish squish squish squish*

I tried it, and it worked. The putty looked gray and dirty, probably from the graphite it had picked up from our pencil mistakes. But it was definitely a squishy substance.

And so every time I made a mistake, I took those shavings and rolled them up. I didn’t get much out of it each time, but over time that little ball would build up.

Eventually, it was about a centimeter in diameter.

Unfortunately, one of the monitors wasn’t too impressed with how distracted I was by this. You know, there’s always that one lady in every school that always thinks the students are up to no good.

There was one for me in grade school, middle school, and high school. Just constant questioning over obvious things. Denying your feelings when you’re hurt and all that.

I’m holding a camera and a tripod here. What do you think I’m doing outside of class? Spying for a foreign government? Am I going to get expelled for treason? Huh?

(Sorry, I got a little heated.)

Back to the story. My school’s version of that lady saw what I was doing and ordered me to get rid of it.

Throw that away!

So there went all my progress. But it was only a temporary setback. With time, I would rebuild my putty empire.

“T”, “N”, and I (as in, me) did that for years. We would often give what we made in class to each other. But I would never get beyond a centimeter in diameter before it got lost in my backpack or someplace else.

I guess it would keep falling out without me realizing it.

Many, many years later, I was taking a shower and having shower thoughts. I was rubbing all the crud off of my skin. It was coming off in those little rolls.

And that’s when I noticed something peculiar.

This crud looked awfully similar to the putty we made back then.

It felt the same too.

So maybe that putty wasn’t only made of eraser shavings… and that meant…

This whole time, we had been mixing our own dead skin cells, oil, and dirt together.

And giving it to each other.

(If that is not a sign of friendship, then I don’t know what is.)

Goodie Two-Shoes

I’m going to sound like a conceited dork saying this, but I was always looking to do good deeds when I was younger.

I had read about and seen all the stories about how humans were polluting the Earth and that there was garbage everywhere.

And I felt compelled to take action.

There was this little claw thingamajig I had that closely resembled a real trash picker-upper. It was just like the one the janitor used. And so I brought it to school and began picking up trash for fun.

Every few days, I would spend my recess just going around the yard and picking up trash. Sometimes with the claw, but other smaller pieces needed to be picked up by hand.

I would bring it to a pile I had formed in one of those outdoor hallways along the outside of the school building.

Some of my friends like “N” and “T” would ask what I was doing and occasionally join in the cleanup.

(They’re mentioned a lot, us three were always together.)

A few other students were also curious as to what we were doing.

By the end of each recess, I would have this pretty remarkable pile of garbage sitting in the hallway. It was surprising how much litter there was around the place.

The janitor would come by and thank us for our work. Then, he would scoop all of it up into his trash can on wheels.

All in a day’s work.

The Paper Trail

I had a lot of random activities I did. One of those things was to make an enormously long strip of paper.

Kind of like a kite tail, except there’s no kite.

What I did was take a piece of paper, and fold it in half. Crease, flip it over, and fold along the same line, creasing again. Then I would rip across the seam to get two clean halves of paper.

I did that again to make four strips, and once more to make eight. Then I folded each strip back and forth until it became kind of like a paper spring.

Finally, I took all of the folded strips and taped them together to make a very long zigzagging strip of paper.

I repeatedly did that with multiple pieces of paper.

Many times, until the strip had become quite significantly long. When the whole thing was folded up, it was one square inch in area and more than 3 inches thick.

When it would get windy, I would take it out and try to catch the wind. It wasn’t the most aerodynamic piece of paper, so for the most part, it couldn’t hold its own weight.

But sometimes, it caught the wind just in the right way, and it would remain suspended for tens of seconds. When the strip was released little by little, it would look like I had a 20-foot-long paper whip flying in the air.

And that was only around half of the full length of the paper.

Watch me whip… watch me… whip again…

Watch Me

Elementary school was a time before I had a smartphone. Or even any phone, for that matter. So I instead wore a watch to keep track of time. It was digital and glowed blue when you hit the light button.

I don’t know why, but one day I decided to be goofy and wear a second watch on the same arm as the first. A lot of my classmates thought it was funny.

This one was a green digital watch.

Little did they know, I had more where that came from. Bam. Three watches on one arm. Unlike the other two, I believe this watch was analog. It also didn’t even have numbers. Not even any unique colors. Just a boring black strap.

I’m not done yet. Not even close.

I was going to show everyone just how ludicrous I could be. And so three became four. Four whole watches are attached to my left arm. I can’t even remember what this one looked like, all I know is that I had a fourth one.

After the fourth one, I decided I was done with my fun and…

SIKE.

Five watches. Five whole watches on my left arm. I was the controller of the cosmos, the master of all possibilities. I had ascended this universe’s mortal rules and become a being transcending time and space itself.

But no more than five.

I didn’t have any more watches. Or arm space, for that matter.

I knew all those cheap watches would come in handy someday.

Intermission

I was really only expecting to document a couple of stories before I ran out of memories. It felt like my mind had gotten cloudier and cloudier in the past few years. I thought I was forgetting my past.

Thankfully, in March 2023, I’ve seen dramatic changes in how I’ve been feeling. I’ve said that before, but it really does feel like I’m alive and not disassociated from my own body.

It’s the first time I’ve felt this way since these elementary school days.

As I’m writing more and more, it seems like those neuron links are getting dusted off and firing hard. I’m remembering so many good times and other cool things I did now.

Anyway, just wanted to convey how good I was feeling writing about this. In the most cheesy way possible. Don’t mind me.

“felt cute, might delete later”

I’ll get back to the short stories now. There are just a few more.

Visit From The Governor Of Cauliflower

It was a typical school day.

Aside from the fact that Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, came to visit the school and was standing in our very yard.

Actually, according to online research, he was just mayor at the time. But for some reason, I remember him being governor. Around 10 years before he actually became governor in 2019.

I’m really confused.

Anyways, that aside, there was a bunch of my classmates swarming him and asking for autographs. The teachers all tried to restore order and get everyone to form a line.

Eventually, they did, and I got in the queue. Everyone was asking him to sign their hand or arm.

Finally, it was my turn, and I asked him to sign a paper airplane I had made. It was The Moth, a fairly simple and high-performance plane.

He smiled at me and said…

“Finally, someone’s got a piece of paper.”

Or something like that. I don’t really remember. Close enough.

But yeah, I opted for paper because that way, the signature would be permanent. Plus, I just thought getting my skin signed was a bit strange.

He scribbled some fancy cursive onto the plane and returned it to me. And I thanked him for doing so.

It was pretty cool.

However, a few years later, it literally just disappeared into thin air. It was sitting on top of my drawer before one day I noticed it was just gone.

My parents said they hadn’t thrown anything away. I looked everywhere around the place. But there was no trace of that plane.

It had been spirited away or something.

So yeah, that was a bummer. That was almost 10 years ago.

(But hey, if he wants to send me another plane signature…)

“haha lol, just kidding… unless?”

Kickball Hero

One of the sports we played the most at school was kickball. Such a simple sport. All you needed was a ball and legs. And I had two.

Two legs, that is.

I remember that faded red bouncy ball we used all the time.

Many of our recesses were spent playing kickball.

I was a relative weakling compared to the big guys. I never sent a ball over the fence and into the neighboring resident’s backyard, but I was still pretty decent.

One time, we were having a tournament with a variation on normal kickball. Basically, there were some cones set up behind where the person kicking was.

After the kicker sent the ball flying, they would have to run around the cones set up on the bases. The catchers would try to return the ball to the catcher, and then the catcher would try and knock down the cones before the runner could return to kick it away again.

I was the next person up.

I took my place in front of the faux bowling pins and got ready to defend them from falling. Despite the fact that I was weak, I had a strategy that allowed me to keep up with the rest.

Right before the ball reached me, I would jump.

While I was in midair, I would be able to kick without worrying about the ground. No chance of getting hurt or losing power to friction.

All of the catchers moved in closer, and then came the pitch. The ball approached, bouncing ever so slightly. And when it got within range, I jumped and sent it flying over everyone’s heads.

I took off running as fast as I could. First base down, then second base. Third base and then right to home.

That’s one point for J.Y.

I waited a full twenty seconds before they were able to get the ball back to the catcher. That was when my P.E. teacher, who I’ll call “Ms. M”, came up to me and clarified something...

“You only need to go around the first cone.”

Oh… I had no idea. I had totally overachieved on that run. In any case, that made things a whole lot easier.

Here came the pitch again.

This time, the catchers had moved out further. They weren’t underestimating me anymore.

A bounce and another bounce, and bam.

Another good kick. I ran to the cone on first base and looped back around to home with time to spare.

The cycle continued. Pitch, bounce, bam. Pitch, bounce, bam. I had already lost track of how many points I had scored. All I knew is that I was acing it right now.

These cones weren’t coming down any time soon.

Eventually, I messed up the timing of my jump and ended up kicking the ball more forward than up and out. And so I was at an immediate disadvantage.

I was also getting pretty tired from sprinting around so many times.

But I kept on running for that cone.

When I looped around to get back to home plate, I saw that the ball was already in midair and on its way to the pitcher again. I thought it was too late to get there in time.

But it wasn’t over yet. I kicked it into overdrive as the ball started rolling.

It headed closer and closer to its target. It looked like I wasn’t going to make it. And so, I did something pretty wild.

I did a baseball slide right into home base.

The timing was so perfect, even I was impressed. By making myself go horizontal, I had gained just enough distance to reach the ball.

And inches away from the cones, I was able to deflect the ball to the side with my extended right foot.

My life probably peaked at this moment.

Even the teachers were stunned by that move. I knew I probably wasn’t going to make it back this time. But I picked myself up and tried anyway. I made it to first base once again and looped around.

Since I hadn’t kicked the ball so much as I had nudged it away, the catchers were able to get to it pretty quickly.

I got a little more than halfway through the return trip between first base and home plate before the cones came tumbling down.

Game over.

After we were dismissed, I went to the monkey bars and talked with “T” for a bit. I asked her how many pitches I had gotten through, and she said at least seven.

I felt the absolute coolest in that moment.

That’s All For Now

I think that’s a good note to end this article on. There might be more memories I’m forgetting, but I covered most of the good ones I think. And now, they can live for eternity in the form of digital media.

If I do remember anything else, I can always make an addition to this article. Or even a sequel if there’s enough I forgot to warrant one.

I guess I’ll see what my mind can recall.

I hope you enjoyed reading these excerpts from my life. Even if for just a brief moment, I thoroughly enjoyed being able to relive all these memories.