I had forgotten how weird I was in high school, and subsequently how weird high school boys are in general until living in the same building as 80 of them. High school girls are kind of a mess emotionally, but high school boys are just plain strange . For example, one of my students has decided that he is only going to speak to me in Spanish – what? The problem with this game though is that I don’t speak Spanish… and neither does he. We haven’t gotten very far past “Hola Senor!”

Another crew pretends to speak heaviy accented, FOB-ish English, even though they speak perfect English. I’m often greeted with a “Mr. Bowman, how you are?” I wish I knew Arabic well enough to pretend have an Amercan accent.

Living in the dorm is by far reveals the strangest things though. Whenever I walk out of my apartment, the dorm either reeks of Axe body spray or smells like rotting garbage. There’s really not much in between. The Axe smell is mostly in the morning (though rumor is that they spray it when they smoke cigarettes too), and as it starts to dissipate, it starts to smell like someone left a diaper in the heater, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that were somehow true based on the state of the bathrooms. Beyond the daily feast of odors, I have found kids shocking each other with an electric flyswatter, I have found 10 kids in the same room blasting a song that repeats “I’m in Miami, bitch” over and over while the lightbulb in the room changed colors, and I have seen more homoerotic behavior than I would at gay night club in Miami (where the aforementioned song might have actually been playing).

Moral of the story is that high school dudes are weird, and you just have to step up your weird-game to relate. Needless to say, that’s something I’m decent at, so I have made some weird little buddies.