I remember there is a time where, um, we got into camp late in, I think, in coastal Oregon or maybe southern Washington. We had drove — driven up from California that day. And, uh, we were hungry, we were starving. So, it was dark out. We set up camp. While I got camp ready, um, my girlfriend began, you know, making a fire so we could — I wanted hot dogs, you know, something quick and tasty and so um yada yada yada, we, we do that, and we sit down to eat hot dogs at the picnic table, and my girlfriend puts her elbow down on the picnic table. And it's dark, uh, but immediately she feels a sharp pain. Something has bitten her. And we don't know what it was, but she doesn't handle pain well. So it was, uh, pretty traumatic, um you know. I can't remember if there was tears, but maybe. And the best thing I could think to do was to have her go to the car where there's light, and I was gonna go get her some ice to put on it because it was swelling up. Um so, that's what we did. She went to the driver's seat, I went to the passenger seat. And, um, I reached in the back and got her ice, and I sat with her to comfort her. And after, like, a minute, she looked over at me and she was like, "Oh my God." She's like, "Don't move." I was like, "What's up?" And she's like, "There's a giant spider over your head." And, um, I, I noted that there was indeed a spider over my head. And so then we got out of the car, and kind of panicked. The dome light was on so we could see the spider. The spider got a little spooked, and it climbed along the ceiling toward the back of our car, which is where all of our belongings were spread about. We had been on the road for weeks at that point, and it was just a mess back there. And so then we had to figure out what do we do about the giant spider in the back of our car. Um, and it was kind of high stakes because if we opened the door and we tried to knock the spider out of the car, but…

Anyway, this walking stick had stamps all the way down it of different animal footprints native to Michigan with them labeled. So, I took this thing everywhere with me, that summer. And we went camping at some point, and I'm walking to the bathroom, and I saw this huge paw print in a little sandy area by a tree. I’m looking at my walking stick, and I’m looking at the paw print, and it looks to me like a cougar because it was huge, first of all, but it also didn’t have nails, and — or like nail prints, I guess. Big cats have retractable nails, so you don’t always see them when you’re looking at their print. So, I rushed back to the campsite, and I tell everyone that will listen that I saw this amazing thing, and nobody believed me, and they told me either that cougars don’t live in Michigan or they’re really rare or something. So, I just — I actually didn’t really care that much, I kind of moved on. I think I probably felt a small bit of injustice, but nothing giant. And fast forward later into the week, my mom had been cooking us breakfast all week, and bacon was part of that menu, and she would throw the bacon grease out behind the campsite. So, on one of the last nights, the adults were sitting around the campfire, the kids, including myself, had already gone to bed. And allegedly, I heard this in the morning: they saw — or they must’ve heard something first, and then they looked up and saw the glint of eyes and were able to make out in the, I don’t know, campfire light, that it was a big cat. So, I think they just kept really still until it moved on. But the next morning, my mom told me about it and said they were pretty sure it was attracted to the bacon grease smell or the bacon grease. So, that was very vindicating. I feel like when you're a kid and you — I mean, I did have an active imagination, so again, I didn't fault anybody for not believing me. But when you're a kid, it's rare that when you are actually right, people find out.

This really made me feel disrespected, and this is about me. Maybe not their behavior might not have been about me, but this made me feel hurt. Somebody came up to me and more or less lied directly to my face about having been there the week before. Just, right, like, straight up, bold-faced lie — bald faced lie? I don't remember — like, it wasn't that they gave me some excuse, right? That I think would have been at least respectable, and, you know, as respectful at least to my observational skills and what have you to know that they were not in class to notice that who wasn't in class and who was, and also I wouldn't maybe have known directly that they were like, alright, fine. You know, that sucks. But this student just came up to me and told me directly that they were there. Now, I knew that they weren't there because only five of my students had shown up the week before and she was definitely not one of them. And quite frankly, I was like, so shocked by the fact that she had so boldly lied to me, after I had mentioned that I only had five students showed up. I don't know if she missed that, if she walked in late or something that day because I had a lot of students walk in late too in that section. It's interesting, that section is like, both my most participatory but also seems to be the most flippant about attendance and I don't really get that. But whatever. And it just, yeah, like I don't like lies. I don't like being lied to. And again, it's one thing to like — it was just — like it would have been one thing had she lied, like, even actually, like, lied intelligently to me.  There's just something about that that also just makes me feel like, "Oh, you think I'm, like, stupid, or you think that I'm like, gullible." You know, that's kind of what that, what that signals to me. Or kind of more importantly, you think like, I don't matter as a human being, like you, you are treating me basically just like as an instrument to your grade. Like, you, you don't, like, see me as a subject.