My Pet Moths

Dear nonexistent readers,

Due to the impending doom and sneaky approach of midterms, it seems as though the days have inexplicably shrunk.

Apologies to all who have been here long enough to have read this post before, but I will be reposting an old post.

 

When I said that my only pets were plants, I lied. Unintentionally, of course. I also had some pet moths.

Way back a long time ago, in kindergarten to be specific, everyone in my class received a board game. I mean, technically it was a board game, but it was printed on regular printing paper, which, as the name implies, is used for printing upon. Usually. Printing paper has a plethora of other uses too, which I’m sure you can use your own imagination to figure out.

So anyway, returning to the point at hand, my lovely kindergarten teacher gave us all a board game and Mexican Jumping Beans. I was entranced by the beans. My five-year-old mind could not process the magic of legumes that moved on their own. Usually, legumes require people to move them.

We were not told that Mexican Jumping Beans are not, in fact, beans, but rather they are moth larvae.

So I brought four or five moth larvae home, convinced that they were magical beans.

For a few minutes, days, or weeks, I can’t remember, we all played this lovely board game with my magical beans. It was brilliant.

Then, one morning, I wake up, as most people do on most mornings, and I decided to play my lovely board game. I was very surprised to find that the little plastic box where I kept my magic beans were full of moths.

 

Sleep Stories Part 1: Kindergarten

Sleep is that wonderful time between being awake where everything is bliss and there is no homework or taxes to worry about.

But it’s so hard to sleep for enough time, what with the hectic schedule that comes with being awake and often spills into the nighttime hours. I usually have to get up at 6 a.m., which is before the sun rises and therefore inhumane.

People keep telling me to take a nap when I start nodding off in the middle of conversations or trip over my imagination and fall, but I refuse to sleep during the daytime when there is a sun in the sky, telling me that there is work to be done (however inefficiently).

I remember back in kindergarten when there was rest-time. Ahh, rest-time. Such horrible memories.

There is a large difference between rest-time and naptime. When you have naptime, you are supposed to sleep. When you have rest-time, you are supposed to lie on the hard floor quietly, doing nothing, saying nothing, and staring at nothing. But you are not supposed to fall asleep. Never fall asleep! It was absurd.

But this nothingness was only supposed to last a few months into the school year. Once we learned to read, we were expected to read during rest-time. I, on the other hand, couldn’t really read well until first grade, so I continued to spend the time doing nothing with a book in front of my face.

But before the class, as a whole, could read, we were to bask in our nothingness, but nothingness is quite boring, especially for a fidgety five-year-old. So what is a fidgety five-year-old to do other than fall asleep?

So I fell asleep. And my lovely kindergarten teacher didn’t wake me up (Shoutout to you, Ms. K, the best kindergarten teacher in existence). But the class could not wait for me, a tired and fidgety five-year-old, to get the sleep she needed. They had things to learn! So while I was asleep, the rest of the class read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and made construction paper palm trees. They were glorious.

Growing Up: Some Random Thoughts

Growing up is hard, as many people often notice. For example, after one is grown, there is less fun, more work, and less free time. When most people become old, they reminisce their younger days when their joints didn’t hurt and they had time for fun and they didn’t know swear words.

But when most people are young, they cannot wait to become old. When they are old, they can have jobs, they can change the world, they can be tall. They wait in anticipation for the days when they are the firefighters rescuing cats, the police fighting bad guys and saving the cities, or the famous singers whose names everyone recognizes.

I was the oddball of the group. I wanted to stay young forever and I dreaded growing up. (I did want to be taller, though. But not too tall. I was terrified of how the banisters on stairwells would then be shorter.)

But one cannot help but grow up as it is in one’s DNA. However, even if you were to stay in a kindergartener’s body forever, you would still grow in experience. (Would it be acceptable to relate one’s age to the number of swear words they know?)

A negative side effect of growing up, besides banisters being shorter, is the loss of magic. I love fantasy books now, but I didn’t when I was younger. Maybe this love of fantasy is like a vitamin supplement to make up for the lack of magic in the real world.

When one is young, one believes in a whole variety of magical beings and one puts absolute faith in their existence. Such magical beings could include (but are not limited to) leprechauns, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, other fairies, cats, gnomes, elves, Santa’s elves, Keebler elves, etc.

The uncertain existence of these magical beings brought a sense of excitement to otherwise mundane kindergarten life. I say uncertain for two reasons A) you never see them, even though you know they exist and B) the doubters out there always said you are wrong, even though you know deep down that it was they that were wrong.

When I lost my first tooth and I put it underneath my pillow, ecstatic for the soon-to-arrive tooth fairy’s arrival, the tooth fairy forgot my house. Predictably, I was quite upset that morning. I couldn’t believe that the tooth fairy had forgotten me.

My parental units sat me, the five-year-old without front teeth, down and told me that the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and leprechauns and other fairies and Keebler elves were all lies. They were stories and they were fake. This shattered my little heart. I don’t remember my reaction, but it was probably along the lines of screaming and/or crying.

But, of course, I wasn’t crying because I had discovered that Earth was populated solely by human beings (among plants, animals, and microscopic life, of course) instead of being inhabited by mythical all-powerful beings as well. I was crying because my parents had lied to me.