The thing about orange-peeling, is that after the initial tear, the remaining peel must be kept in one piece. When finished, you can't be holding two or more sections of peel. I don't boast (often), but I have an unbroken peel run of over 25 years. Navel Oranges, Tangerines, Clementines, Mandarin -- all intact for over two decades.
I unfollow social media accounts with brazenly misspelled words or lazy grammar habits, because there are some hills worth dying on. One hundred years from now, as humankind has devolved to grunts and hieroglyphics again, I will smugly continue to judge them from my cryopreservation pod.
I’ve had the same best friend since I was four years old, and we have the same first name. He’s now a successful attorney and still goes by Matthew, while I was more of a 'Matt' early on, and am now bragging about a 25-year orange-peeling record. He's also one of the worst spellers I've ever known.
If you're counting -- the spelling thing, the name thing, and the orange peel thing are now three facts about me.
By now, Western New Yorkers are probably wondering where they've seen my name before. Does the Olean Times Herald, 1992, ring any bells? Families across the Enchanted Mountains followed my staggering run through the Portville Central School District and Western New York Regional rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. My dream came to an end at the New York State competition, but that was enough to catapult this studious twelve-year-old to the bottom of the social ladder. In fact, to publicly laud my accomplishment, my middle school canceled recess and required my 150 classmates (who would have rather been playing kickball) to gather in the auditorium for an impromptu celebration. I was called to the stage and presented with a shrink-wrapped, hard-cover Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. To this day, the lamest flex I've ever had was carrying that 12 lb. dictionary to my subsequent classes because it wouldn't fit in my locker.
Thirty years later, the once blue and red cover heavily worn, that book still sits on a shelf in my bedroom. Ever so often, as I drift off to sleep, my eyes fall on the barely visible spine in the darkness, and I'm haunted by that uncomfortable day in 1992, and the question -- why did they give the winner of the spelling bee a dictionary?