Gamer Girls

 We’re going Erin Plays here today.  I’m going to tell some stories about stuff that I DIDN’T do.

Watching The Head Returns got me thinking.  Here’s my review:

https://gamergrrlsofficial.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-head-returns-2020-cinemassacre.html

The “movie” is really childish and as I commented in the review, I wouldn’t even turn that thing in as a school project.

Then I got to thinking.  I never did any videos as a school project.  I only had one assigned to me but I managed to dodge it.

It was for 7th grade music class.  We had a new teacher.  She got her precious children involved in doing commercials and she considered herself somehow in the entertainment industry.  She was just a fat, loud, pushy redneck from Texas.

So she said that we need to do a music video.  We could do it in groups of up to three.  Oh fuck.  Group work: friend to lazy teachers and foe to reserved kids.  

I got in a group with my friend and his friend.  We went to my friend’s friend house theoretically to brainstorm for ideas but then we just played Nintendo and made fun of his Star Wars pop up book.  My friend suggested that there was a pop up Princess Leia who made this guy sexually excited.

We didn’t meet up again because it was a total waste of time.  I don’t know if it was only me who didn’t want to do this fucking video or nobody wanted to do it.  I suspect that it was just me and then they just went along with it because they didn’t want to cause problems by telling me that I have to put some effort into this shit.

But yeah, I didn’t want to fucking do it.  People are self-conscious, especially at that age.  I don’t want to make a fucking music video.  Make a total ass of myself for the entire class to see.  Why should I have to do that?  

The video was optional, by the way.  You could have just gone in front of the class and sung a song.  But for whatever reason, we all knew that we had to do a video.  If you don’t make a video, it’s like you’re saying that you’re a poor person who doesn’t have a video camera.  This was way before camera phones and digital cameras.  

But I didn’t have a camcorder.  Neither did my friend.  The only person who had a camcorder was the third guy in the group.  And we ended up severing ties with him after that first disastrous meeting.  

So now it was just me and my friend.  The due date for this assignment is getting close.  We had some sort of meeting, I can’t remember if it was at school or one of our homes, but I came up with the idea of doing a stop-motion animation using GI Joe figures.  And then I guess that we would sing over it.  It was just because I didn’t want to fucking appear on camera.  So I came up with that idea and my friend went along with it, again, I think just because he didn’t want to cause problem by saying, “Hey, that’s a really stupid idea.”

Nothing ever left the theoretical stage.  We never wrote a song.  We never sourced a camera.  All we had was this stop motion animation idea.

So it’s time to show our music videos.  We don’t have it.  Okay, we just lost a letter grade and have to turn it in next week.

In the meantime, the third guy in our group finished his project solo and it was embarrassing, as all of these probably were, but whatever.  It was him in his pool singing.

Next week rolls around, we still don’t have it.  We just lost another letter grade.

Next week, same thing.  

Next week, same thing.

So now we failed but the good news is that we don’t have to do the assignment.

I only remember two performances.  One was our former partner’s and one was from a girl in our class.  She was a new girl and she was really unpopular.  There were like three cliques of girls: the hot chicks, the average girls, and the homely girls.  The homely girls briefly let this girl into their clique but then even they weren’t having it.  She was bringing them too much heat.

Our class was overwhelmingly white and this girl was Mexican.  I think that this was a factor.  She was an awkward looking girl, she was very quiet, and she had an odd nickname that she liked to use based on her Mexican heritage.  Even the teachers called her it.  It was because her actual name was hard to pronounce so she used this easier name.

She was picked on relentlessly by some of the guys.  Not by me.  I didn’t do that to her or to anyone.  I never had a single negative thing to say about her.  But she was the recipient of a lot of abuse.  I think that she was only in our school for that one year.  Presumably, she had similar problems at her previous school and she probably had them at her next school.

So she had to turn something in for this project.  She would claim to be sick every time this class came around.  So she’d be in the nurse’s office during class.  She did this two or three times in a row.  She obviously didn’t want to do the project either.

But then one day, she decided to do it.  Maybe the teacher contacted her parents or maybe she was worried about getting an “F” in music class.  

So she comes to the front of the class and she reads like a poem.  She wasn’t singing in any way.  She was just looking down, obviously very nervous, and quietly reading this poem.  It rhymed.  It was about a guy she knew who was misunderstood.  It was presumably fictitious.  I even remember some of the lyrics.

Then people made fun of her for that poem/song for, I don’t know, a week?  Two weeks?  Something.

Anyway, I got a 0% for music class for that quarter or whatever.  I remember the homeroom teacher saying, “I don’t know how some of you got zeros for music.”  It’s because the teacher was a vindictive bitch.  The music video wasn’t the only assignment we had for that quarter and I did the other work.  But she gave us zeros because we didn’t do that stupid music video.

I remember freaking out over that zero.  Nothing happened.  It’s seventh grade music class.  Who gives a shit?  It had absolutely no effect on my life.  

I think that that was the only time when I had an assignment requiring any video footage.  It’s a bad assignment to give to children.  It just exacerbates social and self-esteem problems.  But she was a lousy teacher.  She was wholly unqualified.  Didn’t have any teaching degree.  Possibly didn’t have any degree at all.  Her fat ass was gone by the next year.