Words

Last weekend I learned to differentiate between tactile and tactful. In short, tactile is referring to sense of touch or good with the hands while tactful is about being considerate and discreet.

To make it easier for me to remember, I use thumbtacks. If you give a box of thumbtacks to a tacktile person, he or she could make an art out of them. However, if you are not tactful with that same person, you might get some thumbtacks stuck on your b-u-t-t… That is the easiest way for me to remember…

Memories

Thumbtacks bring back memories during my junior high years. My friends and I were in a class where our brains were more dominant than our muscles. We had a huge problem during the lunch break at the school cafeteria as the other boys from the other classes somehow had their muscles developed much faster than their brains.

We were taught to queue for our food and they were taught the same but somehow, due to some unexplained events, those teaching about being civilized such as, taking turns by queuing up, failed to stick in their head. I guess brains and muscles have different ways of learning stuffs…

As a results, those students would dash to the food counter like bulls on a stampede. Before we knew it, we were pushed to the sides and everywhere else except anywhere near the food…

Brainstorming

This went on for months and we decided to have a brainstorming session. Furthermore, that’s the only part of our body that was stronger than those bulls. Finally, inspired by the MadMax movie and porcupines, we had devised a defence mechanism that would not prevent us from being pushed around but instead, would painfully punish those who came in contact with us. Sadistic but somewhat necessary as muscles would definitely respond to that…

Defence Mode On

It was really simple. We bought lots of thumbtacks. Then we just pushed the thumbtacks from inside our shirts and pants so that the protruding pins would prick those unsuspecting bulls. Placing them strategically around our body, those tacks could not really be seen unless someone would really come close.

The outcome was a big success. We heard lots of “Argghhh!” “Ouchhh”, “Adoii” … And since then, although we were still being pushed around, we had the satisfaction of knowing that we had successfully delivered lots of pain to them…

Well, their brains were capable of processing the painful sensations but expectedly. was unable to figure out how to avoid such pain in the future…

Victory

After some time, the school authority realized that there was a problem and shortly after that, prefects were assigned to manage the food queues and we were told to take off our thumbtacks… Yeah, we were caught…

Anyway, what did we do with the thumbtacks since we had lots of them?

To be continued…

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Updated on Feb 7, 2010: This entry will not be continued…