Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, a more-or-less permanent fixture at Wendell Wilkie High School.

Hey, Mr. C.,

OK, so I get it that you’re not interested in signing a permission form so I can donate my brain to science. I didn’t think you would do it but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

Anyway, that means I’m going to have to go back to school (again) in about a month, and the whole Wilkie High experience will happen to me one more time. Oh well. I guess they’d miss me if I was gone – I’ve been there so long I pretty much have seniority over all the teachers and administrators anyway, and they ask me how stuff ought to be done.

Imagine that – THEM asking ME for advice!

One year in early August Principal Peepers was just starting at Wilkie and he got visited by a delegation of parents saying he should change the lunchroom routine around to “the way it used to be” about 5 years earlier.

They had all heard it was better back then but nobody could recall exactly what was different about it.

The teachers weren’t much help. The youngest ones hadn’t been at the school that long and the old timers had gone through so many different lunch management schemes everything was just a blur to them.

So they asked me, figuring that I had such a famous history of breaking lunchtime rules I must be an expert on every single regulation throughout all of time.

“And your brain is young,” Principal P. told me, “so you can call up the details at will.”

But what he didn’t know is that I’d been pretty much sleep deprived my whole time at Wilkie – at first because I was a late-night-TV junkie, and then from staying up super-late to use the computer on the sly because my folks wouldn’t let me on the internet unless one of them was in the room to monitor my “activity”. So I didn’t remember either. But what was worse – I didn’t know I didn’t remember.

There’s this new research that explains it – they say being sleep deprived really opens up your mind to retaining false memories. So like your mind is really open to suggestion and you take something totally fictitious and buy into it like it’s real. My dad says Sara Palin has this same problem, so I know I’m in good company. Famous company anyway, which I think is pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, here are the rules I told them we’d had for lunch five years before. They questioned me pretty hard about it, but I stuck to my guns.

1. The lunchroom lights must be kept super low.
2. Everyone comes to lunch in costume.
3. Extra points for extra appendages.
4. Talking is allowed in as many languages as possible.
5. Food and drink should be served smoking.
6. There’s live music, but the band only plays one tune.

Anyway, nobody in the administration stepped up to “champion” my version of the rules and they wound up going with something pretty standard about keeping your voices down and your fingers off of other people’s plates.

Later on I realized that the “rules” I remembered were not from Wilkie High – that was a false memory I picked up from the Star Wars cantina scene.

Oops! My bad, but we almost had an awesome cafeteria that year!

Your pal,
Bubby

When have you been convinced a false memory was true?