Mrs. P, stop keeping me awake at night!

I have a fairly reliable long-term memory. In fact, one of my earliest memories is from when I was in diapers (and no, I'm not talking about that crazy time with the football team, the goat, and the box of Depends). It is brief, but I can conjure an image of myself in our living room with big white furniture, donning red footie pajamas and a fresh set of Huggies.

My excellent long-term memory is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, when a debate arises about something that happened years ago, I deftly settle the score and get the record straight by recalling the incident with detailed accuracy. This pisses my mother off on a regular basis. She will bring up a story from my childhood, and even though I love her, she has no right to retell certain events so that she comes out of it looking like the paradigm of superb child-raising - so I call her out. One day a year or so ago, she was telling a friend how understanding and open she was when it came to my sister and I going to college. "I always told them, no they didn't have to go to college for all four years, but they had to give it at least one year to see if it was meant for them. They had to at least give it a chance."

When I overheard my mother say this, I interrupted, as rude as it might have been. "No you didn't!" I cried. "You never gave us that choice - we were going to graduate from college, and that was final in your book."

"Oh no, I distinctly told you and your sister that you only had to go for one year -"

"Na-uhhhhh!" And this is where I broke into a tiresome diatribe concerning all the minute aspects of every conversation she'd ever had with me about college.

Aside from the inane minutia about the past I like to throw up in people's faces, there are other negative symptoms incurred by my elephantitus brain. The injustices suffered at the hands of my ego-maniacal elementary school teachers constantly haunt me, ghosts from the past that probably most people forget, but I replay in my mind when it has nothing to do but think. So I am starting a recurring column where I expound a crime committed against me by one of my teachers. This, I think, will serve as a bit of therapy for me (though the readers might find it hard to relate to...oh well, one of the perks of writing a blog is that you can be as self-indulgent and boring as you want!) Conversely, feel free to use to comment section to bitch about that waddle-necked bitch you had in primary school who always found a way to make your life miserable.

The Perp: Mrs. P, my second-grade teacher

The Crime: Being a screechy bitch-vulture who taught bad penmanship

My second-grade classmates and I were learning cursive, and the letter of the day was T. As customary for primary school, we were working on wide-ruled, triple-lined paper, where the middle line bifurcates the space between the top and bottom lines with a level dash. This effectively makes the writing area vertically symmetrical.

As we all know, lower-case cursive t's are not only shorter than their upper-case counterparts, but the two lines that make-up the character are perpendicular like a cross, not a plus sign. Because Mrs. P was a bizzaro penmanship nazi, she insisted that we write our lower-case cursive t's so that they touched the top line, AND she wanted the middle line of the t to meet the middle dashed line (are you people following this? Even I'm starting to get cross-eyed from this description). Essentially, she demanded that we make them look like the retarded bastard cousin of what a real lower-case cursive t should look like.

We knew she was wrong. We ignorant second-graders knew this woman was giving into the demands of our wide-ruled baby paper, and we weren't having it. Several of us approached her desk. "But that's not what it looks like," we told her. "Look at what it looks like in our primer books." (Of course we didn't say "primer books," we were seven for chrissakes, but bear with me here)

"No!" she squawked. "Your writing has to match the paper! Do it the way I say!" (What gets me the most, with every complaint I have about my elementary school teachers, is that they felt totally entitled to scream, yell, bark, snarl and gnash at us kids, even when we approached them with subdued temperament. And yes, THAT is how it always went down - the calm children-Davids against the crazy frothing teacher-Goliaths. Remember, my long-term memory is magical and all-knowing, so OF COURSE these stories are being described to you with unfailing accuracy)

Despite the massive evidence we had against her theory - didn't she realize it was just lines on paper, not to mention a format of writing paper that we would never use again after the second grade? - we complied with her batshit penmanship demands. To this day, I lie awake at night wishing I'd known just the right words to say to lay the smack down on Mrs. P for this indiscretion. Though I eventually learned how to write a cursive t properly, I'll always feel the pain from the injustice I and my classmates were dealt that fateful day in second grade.