Diamonds and Drugs

Ok so heres a rather funny childhood story that i thought i'd share just cuz i didnt know what else to post. It happened in grade 3 or something...maybe grade 4....whichever it was the important part is that i was still a young buck, very young, and easily manipulated by things i had taken in from my surrounding...including, it seems, girls, and jewlery commercials on TV.

So we'll say it was grade 3, you know, that age where you can understand things and think for yourself and make your own decisions, but you still needed guidance...lots of guidance. So, like pretty much every elementary school, we were learning that drugs and alcohol were bad. But in order to keep a grade 3 kid interested you need to do fun things, like posters! oh how i loved to draw posters. i was good...real good....for a young buck that is. What, apparently, i wasnt good at, was listening to instructions. So theres my teacher, Miss. Star Caldwell, giving all of us little tikes instructions on how the theme for our posters is "Dont do drugs", but if we stick to that theme we can draw whatever our little hearts desire. and there i am, off in my own little world, probably daydreaming about Holly Baird or Trina Bradshaw (the two loves of my life back in elementary school...except this was seriouse...i was in love, several times, with each of them, sometimes at the same time)....maybe thats what led to my idea for my poster...but i, and no one else, will ever be sure. So i completely missed the instructions and my teacher started handing out poster paper. This of course got me excited. "oooo golly! we get to draw again today??? YES!"

But by this time in my life i knew that we dont just draw for fun, nope, theres always a reason why the teachers hand out that big poster paper, and theres always certain things you need to draw on it. So i start asking my fellow classmates (probably Holly and Trina first)

"so....babe....those are wonderful wax crayons you have there...what are we supposed to draw?" (oh yes...i was smooth).

Now it seems that everyone in my class didnt know me as well as they should have by now, because they thought i meant "what are we supposed to draw on the topic of Drugs and Alcohol?" so they just replied

"oh anything you want Mark."

Now i was confused! we never got to draw anything we wanted, that was back in the good 'ol days of kindergarten...this is grade 3, this is seriouse business. so i go ask the teacher

"so...ummmm...what do i draw?" who once again underestimated my ignorance and replied
"oh anything you want mark, its up to you."

now i was extatic! anything?!? really anything??? finally this poster had my complete and utter attention. There were 30 kids around me creating works of art but i didnt seem to notice that all of them had the same theme. i was in my own little word. i got to draw whatever i wanted! now before i go on to say what i drew you have to understand that i had just learned to draw diamonds and i was very impressed with my skills in that specific area of art. so this was going to be a grand picture indeed. oh ya, and all our posters were going in for a poster contest and they were going to be hung up on the wall at the high school!!! wow, the high school! this had to be a good poster, old people were going to be walking by it everyday.

i think we got a full hour to do it, maybe more. all i know is that for that hour i didnt look up once from my page - not once to notice that everyone around me, all the other kids in my class, just happened to want to draw about drugs...something we hardly knew about at that age. had i looked up something might of clicked upstairs...but i only noticed my mistake at the very end of class, while we were all handing in our posters...and it was then that i felt a little girly and quite foolish. for after one hour of artwork, i see everybodies posters with ciggarettes, bottles of beer, and drugs, with captions that said:

DONT DO DRUGS
DRUGS ARE BAD
DRUGS ARE WRONG
DRUGS ARNT COOL
DONT DO DRUGS
DONT DO DRUGS

and then....there was mine. having gotten the awesome inspiration from a "Janina's Jewlers" commercial on TV, and being able to draw diamonds like it was my job, i had three beautiful blu diamonds on the centre of the page, surrounded by the breathtaking phrase:

A DIAMOND IS FOREVER!

i dont think i won that poster competition. but in my defence, if my poster had been shipped out to a diamonds poster competition...i woulda won hands down!