Your Mouth Has Stamina

(Growing up, I am as far from athletic as one can be, not that I care much. I also am completely unable to know when to stop talking. One day in seventh grade, a classmate has been bugging me the whole day, and continues while we are at recess. I ask him to stop it. This guy isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and is quite aggressive.)

Classmate: “What, you wanna fight? I’m sure I can beat you!”

Me: “Well, of course you can! You have at least six kilos and ten centimetres on me. I’m not sure you should be proud about beating me.”

Classmate: “What?”

Me: “You’re far stronger than me. Being proud about beating me up would be as if I bragged about getting a better grade in a seventh-grade maths test than a first-grader.”

(This is where I should have stopped talking, but instead…)

Me: “…or said first-grader bragging about getting a better grade in a first-grade maths test than you.”

(This is the moment I realised I’d f***** up. I began to move away from him, knowing that when he understood what I said, he would be furious. After a couple of seconds, he realised what I meant and tried to hit me, and I began to run away from him. Thankfully he never caught up with me and got tired before I did. I learnt two things that day. The most important was to keep my mouth shut. The second was that although I couldn’t run very fast, I had nice stamina and could run a little longer than most of my classmates.)