Fair.

original

I dressed like an adult this morning--hair in a bun, classy earrings, Anthropologie suit jacket, long black pants, kitten heels--and put on an official badge and ribbon to judge the elementary school chemistry division of the Central Utah Science and Engineering Technology Fair. The projects were adorable, especially when the posters were written by the kids themselves (and not by overbearing parents). I mean, the "Further Experiments" section of the "CSI Chromatography" project I favored to win [side note: when would a crime scene investigation ever require chromatography?] read, "Next we want to do this [chromatography, mind you] to DNA OR BLOOD."

The most interesting part of the day was interviewing the students. I was responsible for sixteen individual interviews over the course of two hours and couldn't help but smile through every one. Some kids were painfully shy, some rigidly overprepared, and others totally off the wall. My favorite personality of the day belonged to a small boy whose project completely didn't work out. The fact that he had no results to show me didn't make him self-conscious at all, and in an open and conversational tone he explained all the mistakes he'd made, how he'd documented them in quaky pencil handwriting on one (stained) sheet of notebook paper, and how he finally had to stop experimenting because his mom said it was getting too dangerous. I walked away envious of his natural friendliness and total lack of guile.

Another girl was incredibly tense and had every one of her speaking pieces rigidly memorized. All I wanted to do was put my hands on her shoulders and tell her it was okay, that I was nice, to just calm down, that it was just a science fair and this was just an interview and this was just third grade. I wanted to tell her to value herself and her project enough to come off with confidence--to be if not overtly friendly at least sincere--and then I realized I was talking to myself.