In which I am subtle

I run the weird little gay kids club at my school, right? Which is great. I love my weird little gay kids club. It’s my favorite part of my job. Only, and I don’t know if you know this, I live in Indiana, and Indiana’s … kinda more backwards than a lot of other places, and racing towards the past as fast as we possibly can? So it’s been decided that the advertising for our first meeting can’t say things like “gay.” Or “LGBTQ.”

Which would be a problem, if you weren’t me. Witness my Gem Club posters, or at least the top half of each of them, since the bottom half has things like QR codes to sign up for the club and my real name:

This next one is a little questionable because pop culture is so fractured and it sort of depends on these kids knowing who these people are. The bottom of the poster has Lil Nas X and Freddie Mercury on it; I know damn well they don’t know who Freddie Mercury is but I don’t care and also any of them who do know who Freddie Mercury is should damn well be in my club.

This one is the snarky one:

Not one of them says gay! I follow rules.

LGBTQ+ Club Scavenger Hunt

So my club of weird, wonderful little queer kids decided they wanted to do a scavenger hunt. We put the list of items together today. They have a week:

  1. A pop-it
  2. Any object with a rainbow theme
  3. A piece of handmade jewelry
  4. An actual real world paper map not printed by a printer
  5. A map of a fantasy world
  6. Something with fire (nothing illegal please)
  7. An unbroken egg
  8. One Croc
  9. One chancla (bonus points if it’s the same color as the Croc)
  10. A hat with a bird on it
  11. An action figure
  12. A unicorn (three-dimensional, not a picture)
  13. A school hallway pass, signed by a teacher, with “APPLESAUCE” written as the student’s name.  I must be able to read the teacher’s name and you can not explain why you need this.
  14. A [name of our school] article of clothing.  Your ID does not count.
  15. The wrapper for a Jolly Rancher
  16. An unsharpened pencil of at least two colors.
  17. A receipt from CVS, Walgreen’s or 7-11.
  18. A recipe for baklava.
  19. A toilet paper tube.  No toilet paper may be attached.
  20. An unused but unwrapped Band-Aid.
  21. A button with two holes in it.
  22. A bobby pin
  23. A safety pin
  24. A clothespin
  25. A piece of paper with a clear fingerprint on it.
  26. A Nevada quarter
  27. A piece of paper foreign currency
  28. The name of one of Mr. Siler’s favorite books.  This will be ten books and to keep things fair Mr. Siler will share a list of the books with another teacher.
  29. A phone video of you dancing and singing the alphabet.
  30. A milk sticker.  The milk does not have to be dairy based.
  31. A paper wall calendar from 2023.
  32. A container for a large fries from McDonald’s.  
  33. A piece of turquoise.
  34. A pink Lego.  You may not steal Mr. Siler’s Legos.
  35. A yellow Zip Tie.
  36. A tie clip.
  37. A cassette tape.
  38. A DVD.
  39. A piece of hair from a teacher.  The hair must be in an envelope and the teacher must sign it.  You cannot explain why you need the hair.  You may lie.
  40. A piece of soap in any color other than white.
  41. A picture of two stuffed animals in a place stuffed animals are typically not found.  They must look like they are upset with each other.
  42. A Halloween wig.  It cannot be a wig a normal person would wear on a normal day.
  43. A picture of your parents/guardians/responsible adults when they were young.
  44. A positive affirmation from [either of the social workers].  This can be written on paper or emailed.
  45. A toy car.  
  46. A picture of yourself in preschool (3-5 years old)
  47. A horoscope clipped from a newspaper or printed from the internet
  48. A Marvel comic book.
  49. The Secret Item from [the principal].  I have not decided what this is yet so give me some time.
  50. A video of any teacher rapping.  You cannot tell them why you need the video.
  51. BONUS: Any item so strange that no one else recognizes it.

I will report back on how this goes. They were super excited about putting the list together; we’ll see how many of them actually bring a bagful of stuff next week.

In which today just goes away

Totally had plans to do all sorts of stuff tonight but it all got derailed by having to spend over two hours trying to put together a five minute video for class tomorrow, a project that should have taken no more than fifteen minutes but kept running into truly stupid tech-related delays. And now it’s 9:30 and I haven’t done shit since I got home and all I want to do is go to bed.

One plus side of today, though: got asked, by a pair of the kids, to sponsor a LGBTQ club at school. THAT was unexpected and interesting. I agreed, of course.