Law of Gravity

At the heart of much speculative fiction (and fiction in general) is a question. What if? On Tuesdays I like to throw one out there and see what you make of it. Do with it as you please. If a for-instance is not specified, feel free to interpret that instance as you wish. And if you find this becomes a novel-length answer, I'd appreciate a thank you in the acknowledgements.  😉 What if the missing character, the one everyone believes is dead because they've been missing for months, turns out to actually be alive? 

And just like that, it's finally done... It's been that kind of week, really. The subbing gig abruptly ended on Thursday. (Yes, I knew it was coming to a close, but it still snuck up on me and surprised me.) And when I no longer had lesson planning to do every night, I suddenly had time again to work on the windmill bag. It's been a few weeks since I talked about the windmill bag . It was almost finished the last time, and it totally would have been finished if school hadn't started and I hadn't gotten sucked into that vacant English class . Because all I had to finish were the straps. And I had started the straps that week. (School started on Thursday.) When I picked them up again, I used the wrong size hook. If I were to show a close up of the straps, you would notice that they suddenly shrink about halfway through. But considering how many mistakes I've made with this thing , I decided to embrace one more and keep going. So, there it is. The windmill bag is f...

The topic for the day was writing a summary, so for the seventh graders' warm up, they were to write a summary of their favorite movie. You'd think this would be easy, but several didn't have a favorite movie or didn't like movies, or some such. But once I took away the onus of it having to be their very favorite,  most found something to write about. I asked for volunteers to read out their summaries without telling us what movie. And for the most part we knew what the movie was just from the summary. There was Toy Story, X-Men, Spongebob Squarepants, The Lion King, and several other movies that weren't at all surprising. I may have mentioned a time or two that sixth periods tend to be different. They can be wild. But I've got a good group, and I'm not allowing wild, so this group is just kind of strange. There are a couple girls who act way more mature (and seem to have a good head on their shoulders) than I generally get in a seventh grade class. I gave t...

Back in my retail days (at the evil toy store), I worked for a time in the cage where they lock up all the video games. (They got rid of the cage in the latter days of my employment with them.) It was a small booth where we constantly were filling the shelves only to have the games (and other electronic stuff) sell. We'd get trucks in. We'd place the newly arrived merchandise on the shelves. People would purchase things, and we would hand them out to them. It was a decent system most of the time. But, it was retail, so from time to time, we would get new items in that didn't have room on the shelves. Or we would get shipments and it would be so busy we didn't have time to put them away. At those times, the floor of this very narrow booth would fill so one could barely walk back and forth to get stuff. When I'd arrive some evening (I was in college at the time) to find the booth piled with boxes, I would play a game called Find the Floor. The object was to get every ...

I'm still in that middle school English class I started off the year in. There's a reason I don't do these sorts of assignments all that often. They are hard slog. I have three periods of seventh graders. They've been lovely. A little squirrelly, sure, but for the most part they've been fine. The eighth graders, however... This day was going a bit better than some others, but the group at the back thought something was hilarious. "They're laughing at you," a girl informed me. Because, of course they were.

At the heart of much speculative fiction (and fiction in general) is a question. What if? On Tuesdays I like to throw one out there and see what you make of it. Do with it as you please. If a for-instance is not specified, feel free to interpret that instance as you wish. And if you find this becomes a novel-length answer, I'd appreciate a thank you in the acknowledgements.  😉 The random thoughts I have while driving... What if we greeted each other in song? That is, what if when we met someone (like on the street), and instead of saying, "Hello, how are you?", we sang  something instead?