Well. Last week, I thought I was going to come home and continue my day’s “winter is coming and work is blah” mope in front of the television. Instead, I came home to pick up the mail and howl mirthfully at the contents of the package therein. Peter arrived to find me rolling on the bed with my legs waving in the air like some sort of upended bug, gasping,”I will beat you with wheat until you are naked!”*

Fifi had sent me a collection of our high school cartoons, birthed mainly in algebra class and inspired largely by our mildly-stuttering and thickly-bespectacled teacher, Mr. S. In retrospect, Mr. S. must have been a clever teacher to make us recite, “Mmmmmm, slope!” Even today, I can remember that in the line-forming equation y=mx+b, m represents the slope of the line. Naturally, Fifi and I found it spasmodically delightful to see him standing in front of us, rubbing his stomach in appreciation of the delicious slope at hand. Especially when he wore one of his shirts that looked like graph paper or a tic-tac-toe grid.

Another algebraic principle that caught our attention was the idea that subtracting a negative resulted in a positive. We promptly determined that our insignificant bustlines suffered from such negativity and drew scenarios in which beating—or subtracting—them would create a lovely positive swelling. Because that isn’t weird at all! Quite funny, in fact.

Here we have an adventure in which Fifi and I take advantage of the checkerboard pattern on Mr. S’ shirt, and he kindly obliges by passing out.

*no idea, but it was a common punchline