When life gives you lemons, don't turn those lemons into a statue of your English teacher. As fun as it sounds, and as great of a waste of time it really is, it's not the best idea in the world. It's also really hard to do and tends to make people give you strange looks. On the other hand, you might get a pretty good grade on your art project for creativity.

I should start from the beginning. I didn't want to do this project in the first place. Who in their right mind assigns a project where you draw an item type out of a hat and then forces you to make something out of said items? That would be my beyond strange art teacher.

I was the unlucky kid who drew the item "groceries," which don't make for a very good art medium by the way. I realized I could have just made a ginger bread house or something simple like that but silly little me, a twelve year old kid who has to take summer art classes, though that would be far too easy. And so would have been making a cake and decorating it.

I had a week to make something out of groceries and bring it in to the art teacher or my mother, who thought this was a brilliant idea, would throw a fit about me not trying, which wasn't true. I was trying very hard. I wasn't kicked out of the class after all. So, rather than search the internet for something that any other twelve year old would have made, I went to my number one source for strange and impossible ideas, the Pines twins.

Dipper and Mabel Pines were two years older than me and visiting from Piedmont, California like they had been for the two summers prior to this one. Mabel was generally a good person to bounce ideas off of when I wasn't sure something would work out the way I wanted it to. Dipper was a fair source of innovative ideas himself, they were just more dangerous than this art project required.

"Why not paint with vegetable juice?" Mabel had asked, knitting a new sweater for the summer. It was a fair idea but called for a lot more juice than I would have access to.

"Or make a fruit tray? Oh oh, what about celery people?"

I admit, I did like the idea of celery people and that would have been fair to do for this project. I was going to do it, I really was, until I heard someone talking about lemons. Lemons had rinds and, apparently, could make invisible maps. That would be something the teacher didn't expect from me or anyone else and could be done before the week was out. It would have been, too, if it wasn't for the map getting destroyed on a little adventure to Scuttlebutt Island.

I was out of ideas until Thursday morning when I saw my teacher at the store. She had always been a sort of striking figure with shiny blonde hair and a strict but kind smile. I remember thinking that she would be perfect for a statue. And then it hit me that I could do that. I could make a statue of my English teacher.

So I took a bunch of lemons and glued and taped them together in the outline of her and filled in details with a pack of Sharpie markers I found lying on the coffee table. It didn't look horrible, just very lemony. I took it in to my art teacher, who gave it a B, but they had the brilliant idea to show it to my English teacher, who was apparently her aunt.

Since then, I haven't been able to get over the slight humiliation of my English teacher consistently doting on me outside of class. This would be okay if it wasn't a small town where everyone knows everything the moment it happens.

So take my advice, do not make a lemon statue of your English teacher. Or any teacher. It does not end well.