I have long
been interested in art. Since I was fresh-baked tater tot in the late 80s, I've loved drawing. In the mid 90s, when I started elementary school, I was already pretty aware of the fact that, at least according to most adults I knew, I was a pretty good artist. It soon became clear, as I consistently turned in high-quality work, that I was more advanced in art than many of my classmates. This, and a strangely obsessive sense of right and wrong, lead to a maniacal, yet mostly secret, competitive streak in me that exists to this day.
In my third grade class, there was a girl, who for the sake of this post we'll call Peepee, that everyone thought was a
more perfect version of me. She was pretty much the human embodiment of the uncanny valley. She moved unlike anyone else, and emoted like Data from Star Trek, although with a much shorter fuse. She was prone to snapping at people, rolling her eyes, and acting like everything she was assigned put her out
so so much. She was the other girl in my grade with long hair, though hers was course and permanently crimped, while mine was fine and wispy at the ends. She did ballet at the same studio I attended. She was very good with spelling tests. She was involved in competitive tennis. She was also decent at art.
We could have been friends, if not for the fact that her dad shaved her arms and legs every night, and she was very, very mean to me. In my head, she would be my rival until the day I died, and I would need to show her up every step of the way. She was constantly treated better by our teacher, mostly because she was as quiet as a ghost trying to sneak down stairs and I was horrendously loud. She was allowed to use brand names like Xerox and Kleenex on her spelling lists, but I wasn't allowed to use the names of characters from our Weekly Reader, though we actually had to do assignments about them regularly. (Peanut and Jocko. Peanut is even a REAL WORD and I wasn't allowed to use it.)
In the spring, we were allowed to use ceramic clay for the very first time. Each kid was doled out a lump of it, informed that if we breathed a single particle of the dust in that we would immediately get cancer and die within hours, and were told to get to work. I immediately hatched an incredible idea that would get me very far. I was going to make a space monster. It started with a coil that made a circle about two inches wide. Then, the rest of the clay would be a gloppy base to hold up the totally awesome spiral. I then dug out clay to be a terrifying mouth for my space beast. I was so excited. Clay was amazing. Ceramics was amazing. I was using really mature materials and using them to the best of my abilities. I was stoked.
Until I noticed that little snotass Peepee was copying me. She copied me exactly, aside from our coils going in opposite directions, so that the end of her coil faced upwards, while mine was hidden skillfully by the base. I was beyond pissed, but there was nothing I could do about it but carve my name really blatantly on the bottom so that they would never get mixed up. We finished sculpting our pieces, and they went into the kiln to be fired. When they came out, they'd transformed from soft, grey blobs into hard, white objects that would shatter if you so much as winked at them. I went to grab my space monster out of the box the projects were being kept in, and she was nowhere to be found. Oog-Oog, as I'd named her, was missing. I looked over to find Peepee smearing MY SCULPTURE with baby pastel colors! She'd stolen my piece, because it was sculpted better than her jankity-ass failed attempt at a snail, and she was RUINING it.
I was outraged. The teacher came over and Peepee admitted that she had taken my sculpture, which clearly had my name carved into the bottom, because she liked it better than the one she'd made, and was hoping I wouldn't notice. She quickly pushed it at me and said "Here, you can have your stupid monster. I don't even want it." Unfortunately, the damage was done. The teacher told me that no matter what glaze I put on Oog-Oog, the pastels Peepee had brushed on would push through. That, and we only had 20 minutes left to paint them before they had to be collected to be put back in the kiln. Oog-Oog would have to go in with some of the paint Peepee had used on her.
While my sculpture may have been permanently damaged, Peepee's credibility had been ruined in the eyes of the class and our teachers. From that point on, they had little patience for Peepee's attitude, reluctance to participate in classroom activities, and entitled, icy nastiness. Not even bringing her accordion from home, teaching the other girls how to french-braid, and making a "glacier" in a tupperwear container could repair the damage she'd done to her own reputation by stealing and ruining my art project. I had trumped my rival by letting her own bad behavior speak for itself. Oog-Oog was a testament to my virtue; a trophy for my victory over the dishonest, rotten Peepee and her ugly dumpy baby-diaper-looking snail. Oog-Oog stayed on my dresser for years, until she was tucked away in a box in the cellar. She floated around our living room for a while, and I'm sure we still have her somewhere, although I'm not exactly sure where she might be. She was a fearsome looking thing, and might have been banished to the garbage by my parents.
The best I can offer at this time is a drawing of what the thing actually looked like. It wasn't any real prize, in the long run, but for a third grader who'd never so much as slapped real clay before, Oog-Oog was a masterpiece. LONG LIVE OOG-OOG. LONG LIVE ME.
