by Tim Carvell
PLANET
TAD
TIM CARVELL
Illustrated by Doug Holgate
Dedication
For my mom and dad
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
Back Ad
About the Publisher
January
Hello, world!
My name is Tad. I am twelve years old and a seventh grader at Lakeville Middle School. This is my school:
This is our mascot:
We’re the Lakeville Middle School Pirates. I guess because of the “LAKEville.” Although, come to think of it, you find pirates in the ocean, not in lakes. Our mascot’s, like, some kind of a lame lake pirate.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that our mascot sucks.
Anyway, this is my new blog, which I am starting today, on the new computer I got for Christmas. (It’s actually my dad’s old computer—he got a new computer and let me have his old one. Not that I’m complaining. There are some things you can’t use and then give someone else—like underwear or toothbrushes—but I don’t think computers are one of them.)
I’ve decided to start a blog because I have a lot of important thoughts to share with the world, and also to try and get Natalie Portman to go out with me.
I’m just kidding about that last part. Although if you are Natalie Portman, and you’re reading this—like, if you Googled yourself or something—hi.
I live in Lakeville with my parents and my little sister, Sophie. She’s seven years old. She’s OK, even though she’s not as good at sneaking up on me as she thinks she is. For instance, right now, I can tell she’s STANDING RIGHT BEHIND ME READING OVER MY SHOULDER. HI, SOPHIE!
(Just heard her trip over something as she ran out of my room. Awesome.)
Starting this blog is one of my five New Year’s resolutions. The other four are:
1. finish seventh grade
2. figure out how to do a kickflip on my skateboard
3. get girls to notice me
4. finally start shaving
So: One down, four to go!
Ugh. I can’t concentrate. Sophie’s in her room, practicing for her oboe recital Friday night. She’s been playing the same five-minute song over and over for an hour, and it’s not even a good song.
Actually, on second thought, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a good oboe song.
My best friend, Chuck, came over tonight to hang out. He saw that I got a new computer, and asked me what games I have. We poked around on it, but because it’s my dad’s computer, it doesn’t really have any games on it. Still, it’s got Photoshop, so we spent a little while playing around with that. For instance, this is what Sophie would look like if she had the head of a dinosaur:
I call her Sophie Rex. I think it’s an improvement.
Bad news: Sophie found a printout of Sophie Rex and showed it to my parents. They say that I’m not allowed to Photoshop pictures of Sophie anymore.
Of course, they didn’t say anything about Photoshopping pictures of THEM:
They looked really beautiful on their wedding day.
I wonder if spiders have their own version of Spider-Man where a spider gets bitten by a radioactive human and winds up being able to read and balance his checkbook.
Tonight, my parents made me go to Sophie’s oboe recital. On our way in, I picked up a program and saw that Sophie would be playing “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. I looked at my parents and whispered, “Did you know that’s the song she’s been practicing for the last month?” My dad said, “Nope!” and my mom said, “Never would’ve guessed it in a million years.” And then they made me promise to tell Sophie that she’d done a great job.
Afterward, we went out to dinner, and my dad ordered the spaghetti and meatballs, and I ordered the same thing. The waitress said, “All right. You’ll have the pasketti and meatballs.” And I said, “No. Spaghetti.” And she said, “You’re thirteen and under, right?” And I said, “I’m twelve.” And she said, “Well, if you’re thirteen and under, you can order from the children’s menu, where it’s spelled ‘pasketti.’” And then she whispered, “Look: If you say ‘pasketti,’ it’s three dollars cheaper.” And I said, “I’m not going to mispronounce ‘spaghetti’ on purpose.” And my dad said, “Come on, Tad.” And I said, “I’m ordering the spaghetti and meatballs for you. If it’s worth three dollars to you to have to say ‘pasketti and meatballs,’ you can order it for me.” And my dad thought about it for a second, and then he said, “We’ll have two orders of spaghetti and meatballs, please.”
I’ve been doing the Sudoku puzzle in our newspaper for a year now, and I just found out that Sudoku is a Japanese word. Which made me feel stupid, because for all this time, I’ve thought the puzzles were called Sudoku because they were made by a woman named Sue Doku. I even imagined what she looks like: She’s sixty and lives alone with a whole lot of cats, and she spends her days filling in grids of numbers, then erasing almost all of them.
When Chuck came to school today, he asked me, “So, you notice anything different?” I looked at him for a while, and the only thing I noticed was that he was a little more dandruffy than usual, but that didn’t seem like the right thing to say. And then he said, “I shaved!” Which makes it official: I am the last guy in the seventh grade to shave. Well, second-to-last. There’s Dan Cramer, but he skipped two grades and is, like, ten, so he doesn’t count.
I don’t know why it’s taking me so long—there are girls in my class with more hair on their faces than me. (Not that I envy them that, either. But still.)
In English today, Mr. Parker had us spend the whole class diagramming sentences at the blackboard. Diagramming sentences is like a combination of the worst parts of doing math with the worst parts of doing English. It’s a total waste of time, because you can either speak English or you can’t, and if you can’t, there’s no point in drawing lines all over your sentences. Doug Spivak thinks that gooder means the same thing as better, and no amount of diagramming sentences will fix that.
I asked Dad at dinner whether there’s any job where you have to diagram sentences, and he said, “Teaching middle-school kids English.”
Today, Mr. Parker had us diagram sentences again. I told him that I didn’t want to have to keep doing this, because the only job where you have to diagram sentences is middle-school teacher, and I plan on doing something better than that. He didn’t say anything. He just got very quiet and gave us all a pop quiz on diagramming sentences. I got a D.
Last night, Sophie was watching Lady and the Tramp, and I watched a little of it with her. It got to the scene where the Tramp takes Lady to the restaurant, and the owner brings them the plate of spaghetti and meatballs, and sings and plays a song on the accordion for them, and I started to wonder: What’s the chef’s story? How do you wind up running a restaurant that serves pasta to dogs? Is that his whole business? Or does he only do it as a sideline? Do the dogs pay him somehow? How does he stay in business? Is he mentally ill? And what about the other kitchen workers? Are they just humoring him? The dog stuff is nice—what with the nose-pushing of the meatball and everything—but it seems to me like there’s a far more interesting movie going on right behind them.
So we’ve been assigned Watership Down in Mr. Parker’s English class. We’ve been reading it for a few weeks now, and during today’s class
, Doug Spivak raised his hand and said, “Hey, wait a minute: This is about rabbits, isn’t it?”
I don’t know why this is even surprising. Doug’s repeated seventh grade twice, and is the guy who, until he was ten, thought the International House of Pancakes restaurants were actually all made out of pancakes. He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact, he’s more like a spoon or something, sharpness-wise.
My dad’s taking fish oil to lower his cholesterol. Whenever I see the bottle, it cracks me up, because I like to imagine it’s supposed to be squirted into squeaky fish.
Today in health class, Mrs. Lewis told us that we needed to learn about what it would be like to be a parent. So she paired us off and gave every pair an egg to take care of, like it’s a baby and we’re its parents. One of us has to keep it with us at all times until Friday, and if it breaks, we get an F for the project. I got paired with Laurie Watson, the co-captain of the field hockey team. It could’ve been worse—Chuck got paired up with Sam Turner, the defensive tackle for our football team. When Chuck and Sam asked why, Mrs. Lewis said, “Families come in all different configurations. Plus, we have more boys than girls in this class.”
After we got our egg, Laurie asked me what we should name the baby. She said she was thinking of maybe naming it Katherine, “but we’ll call her Kate or Katie for short.” I just stared at her and said, “Laurie, it’s an egg.” And she said, “Oh, okay. Fine. Be like that. But I’m calling it Katherine.” And then she ignored me for the rest of class. I feel like our egg baby is going to have a lot of trouble at home.
Meanwhile, Chuck was fighting with Sam over their egg. Chuck wanted to name it Chuck Jr., while Sam wanted to name it Sam Jr. If they’d asked me, I would’ve suggested compromising and calling their baby Suck.
It’s probably a good thing they didn’t ask me.
Man. Only a day into parenting this egg, and Laurie and I have already had our first big fight. I took the egg home last night, because Laurie had field hockey practice, and I realized pretty quickly that it was going to be hard to keep the egg from breaking. So I had what I thought was a pretty good idea: I boiled it.
I was kind of proud of myself, but when I gave it back to Laurie before homeroom, she said, “Something doesn’t feel right about Katie.” So I told her what I’d done, and she said “You boiled our baby?” so loud that everyone in the hallway turned and stared. I pointed out that at least I didn’t poach or scramble our baby, but that didn’t seem to make things any better.
Later, Laurie came up to me at lunch and said that she was thinking of asking Mrs. Lewis to let her have sole custody of the egg, with me only allowed supervised visits, but then she realized that really wouldn’t be much of a punishment for me, and besides, she needed me to look after the egg during her violin lessons.
Is Jabba a common name throughout the Star Wars universe? And does each planet have only one of them? Because it seems odd to me that you’d need to go by “Jabba the Hutt.” It makes me wonder if he had one too many phone calls that went like this:
“Hey, it’s me, Jabba.”
“Jabba the Ewok?”
“No, the other one.”
“Jabba the Gungan?”
“No.”
“Jabba the Dagoban?”
“No. C’mon, man. It’s me, Jabba! Jabba the Hutt!”
“Oh! Jabba the Hutt! Why didn’t you say so?”
During health class today, Mrs. Lewis announced that, so far, four out of the twelve couples in our class have broken their egg babies. Then she said that any couple who kept their egg intact would get a bonus A for the semester, and Sam got so excited, he accidentally high-fived Chuck with his egg-holding hand, and Sam Jr. went everywhere. Chuck didn’t seem too upset about it, though. He said that he and Sam had been fighting a lot about how to take care of the egg, and he was kind of glad to have that over with.
Well, today was the final day for the egg-baby experiment, and I’m really happy, because I was sick of taking care of my stupid egg. In class, when it came time for us to give our eggs back to Mrs. Lewis, Laurie and I were one of only three couples who’d kept their eggs intact all week long, and she said she was very proud of us. Then she leaned on her desk a little, and our egg rolled off and fell on the floor. That’s when Mrs. Lewis realized ours had been boiled. She told us she was very, very disappointed in us, and hoped that we didn’t have a baby for many, many years. I told her that made two of us.
Chuck and I were debating: If a fast-food mascot were making your food, which one would you go with—Ronald McDonald, the Burger King, Wendy, or the Arby’s hat? We both agreed that we wouldn’t choose the hat, but after that, it got harder. I said I’d go with the King, but Chuck pointed out that a king probably has people preparing food for him, so he’d be unfamiliar with proper cooking techniques and wouldn’t know how to cook your food to the proper internal temperature. (Chuck had food poisoning once, and ever since, he’s been terrified of it. I once saw him ask a lunch lady to reheat his pudding cup to kill any bacteria.) Chuck said he’d go with Wendy, but I said that she was even less likely to know anything about preventing food poisoning. Plus, I know how gross my little sister, Sophie, is, and I wouldn’t trust anything she prepared. So that left Ronald McDonald, and we both agreed that if we had to choose between a burger made by a clown and nothing, we’d pick nothing.
I was hanging out at Chuck’s place last night, and his older sister, Tracy, had rented Twilight: New Moon, so we watched it with her. I have to give it credit: I never knew a movie about a vampire fighting a werewolf could be so boring.
Sophie came home from school today all excited because she got cast in the school play as Gretel in Hansel and Gretel. She was super super happy, because she’d beaten out Sara Cambert, her big rival. Sophie kept talking about how crushed Sara was. Sara’s been in a local furniture commercial and was sure that she was going to be picked for the role, but instead, she’s going to have to play a bush, “and not even one of the good bushes.” Finally, my mom said, “Well, it’s going to be a lot of work. You’ll have to learn your lines.” And Sophie said, “What lines?” My mom explained that if you’re in a play, you have to know what to say and do, so Sophie would have to practice her lines every night instead of watching TV, and my dad said it would be a good lesson in the value of hard work. Then Sophie got super quiet and just kept muttering about how Sara Cambert had “won this round.”
After dinner tonight, my sister said that she’d asked her teacher about learning her lines, and “Mrs. McKenna told me that I should practice them with someone. She said it’d be easy for me to remember my lines if I just spent an hour or two every night with my parents going through the script. It’ll be a good lesson in the value of hard work, right?” My dad looked at my mom, and my mom looked at my dad, and then they both looked at me. And my mom said, “Tad, you know how you’ve been asking for a new skateboard?” And that is how I wound up helping Sophie learn her lines for her play.
Argh. I’ve been going through the Hansel and Gretel script every night with Sophie, and it’s really no fun. The whole play’s written in rhyme, so all of her lines rhyme with the one that came right before, and she still can’t remember them. I’ll read Hansel’s part and say something like, “Look at that house! It’s so fine and so dandy!” and then I’ll look at her and she’ll just be like, “I don’t know.” And so I’ll give her part of her line: “It looks delicious, like it’s made out of …?” And she’ll still be like, “What? I don’t know. Bricks?”
I hate helping Sophie—it’s a big waste of time.
And the worst part is, I’m now thinking in rhyme.
Just three more days till I get my reward.
This is too much work for a stupid skateboard.
Well, Sophie’s getting a little better at learning her lines. Tonight, for the first time, I said Hansel’s line, “Now’s your chance, Gretel, start doing some shovin’!” and she said, “Something something something, something something
oven?” It’s a start.
Sophie’s big show is tomorrow, and I’m glad I’m finally done helping her. I think she’ll actually do OK—it took a while, but she learned all her lines, more or less. I’m just happy I never have to think about the story of Hansel and Gretel ever again. It’s a weird story. Like, why would anyone want to eat a candy house? Wouldn’t it be kind of dirty and sticky?
Just got back from Sophie’s big play. It was a little … weird. We got there, and Mrs. McKenna was all panicked, and told my parents the show might not happen because Jerry Moynihan, who played Hansel, was out sick with the stomach flu. And then Sophie said, “My brother, Tad, knows all the lines! He learned them all when he was helping me!” And Mrs. McKenna said, “Oh, that’s wonderful! If Tad can play Hansel, the show can go on!” And Mrs. McKenna and Sophie and my parents and all the other kids were looking at me, and just before I could say, “No way,” my mom leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Lord of the Rings trilogy DVD boxed set.” And I said, “Extended versions?” And she said, “Sure.”
So at the age of twelve, I just starred in an elementary-school production of Hansel and Gretel. It was fun right up until the moment I noticed Bill Gilbert in the audience—he’s in my class, and I guess his younger brother’s in Sophie’s class. I think I’d better get ready to be called Hansel at school for the next month or so.