To write about kids that are in middle school, I have a vast store house of memories from middle school. And every once in awhile I’ll run into people, you know, that I knew back then and I’ll say, “Do you remember that time when such and such happened?” And they’re like, “Boy, I don’t remember that.” But I do. And not always in a happy. These aren’t always happy memories but I do remember all this stuff.
And in my head I can play back that entire school; walking down the hallways, going to the cafeteria, sitting on the little round sets that we had at the lunch tables. I remember all of that and it’s very clear to me and there were a lot of painful moments there and I can replay those and every once in awhile there are maybe one or two little victories and I can replay those.
And sometimes when I write about them I have to change things a little bit. Sometimes I’m like; well today if a kid was in this experience they would go look it up on Google or something. You know, when I was a kid, if somebody said, there’s this song called the Twist, I would have to go home and ask my parents, “Have you ever heard of the Twist?” And my mother would say, “Well, we had this record.” And a little 45 record and you put it on and it goes around — and that’s how I would have found out about the Twist.
Well, obviously today a kid would type in Twist on Google and Chubby Checker would pop up and they’d be hearing the song in 30 seconds. So I have to change things but it’s still all the same stuff. And, you know, I have this chapter about a kid that gets this embarrassing stain on his pants, it’s just water, but it’s in a place where people think it’s something more than water.
And Yoda tells him to make all of his pants wet so it’s not just in that embarrassing place anymore. So his whole pants are wet. Well, I heard about this kids recently who had read my book and well, he was an amusement park, he was on a roller coaster, the roller coaster was really scary, something happened in his pants, he peed in his pants, because it was scary. I can understand that, it was scary. He peed in his pants. So now he’s at the roller — he’s at the amusement park, he doesn’t have a change of clothes. Is he going to walk around with this stain on his pants? That’d be embarrassing. And he remembered Yoda’s advice.
He remembered that Origami says, Origami Yoda says, “All of pants you must wet.” So he told his uncle that he was with, “Let’s go on the Log Flume ride.” So they went on the ride, they got soaking wet, all of his pants were wet, nobody thought he had a pee stain, everybody thought, “Oh, that guys been on the Log Flume or whatever it was.”
So it’s still the same stuff, you’re still embarrassed about your pants, you’re still embarrassed about girls or boys, you’re still getting yelled at by teachers for stuff that’s not your stuff. It’s all just the same stuff it’s just different amount of gadgets and different slang terms. And sometimes higher stakes nowadays. If, you do something embarrassing somebody might have filmed it. You know. But it’s still all the same stuff.
