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in which there is talk of sisters, high school, general mischief, and bad behaviour
I talked to my middle sister today, and she is disappointed that Ivan skipped New Orleans, because she wanted to take pictures of damage. This makes her a much bigger asshole than me, which makes me feel better.
I was also a little worried about my mom (her emails are funny, but in that way that people on the verge of a nervous breakdown are funny), so I emailed my other little sister, the one who still lives at home and is in her last year of high school. Incidentally, she tells me they just took the class picture for the yearbook, the one of them standing on the hill by the football field in the shape of 05. They made the numbers look all square, like a calculator, she complains to me. But I all could think was, God! Class of 05?! Can you fucking imagine?! I am SO OLD. I still remember standing in the top part of the 7 in 97 like it was, well. Not yesterday, but. You know. Less than 8 years ago. (Also, I think I am having my quarter-life crisis.)
Also, my sister tells me that she is spending all her free time -- when she is not playing soccer --making plaster cast masks of her face. She has about 5 so far and she is planning to hold one in her third grad photo, which will be taken next week. No one held anything but flowers in their third grad photos back in the olden days when I was in high school, but apparently it is all the rage now. Most of her friends are holding soccer balls. She says last year this one girl held a teddy bear, which even she thought was kind of weird.
How's mom, she seems kind of stressed, I ask my sister. She *shrugs* and says she doesn't know, it's probably to do with school. How are classes, I ask my sister. She writes:
we've got a project in media which is fun, but economics is torture! i dunno if it just took him this long, or if i did something specific, but today in class mr. Twofirstnames* made the connection between me and you. Have you ruined my reputation??
So, I call my sister up and tell her that yes, yes I did ruin her reputation.
What I did was, I skipped Mr. Twofirstnames's class and got caught and got reported and got detention and complained to the principal that the reason I had skipped class was that we weren't doing anything in class since Mr. Twofirstnames had apparently finished everything he had to teach us for the year -- it was Moral Ed. so he made up his own curriculum -- and was making us come to class and sit at our desks and do nothing. As I told the principal, this was clearly bullshit and I when I was caught skipping class I was doing homework, which would have been impossible in Mr. Twofirstnames's class, since it was utter pandemonium and I got to permission to go to the library instead of to his class for the rest of the year. But since I knew all the library staff because I had done my community service in the library, I mostly just went to the yearbook room and slept on Heather's beanbag chair instead. And thus Mr. Twofirstnames and I became nemeses and would stare each other down and have arguments whenever we passed each other in the hallway because he was pissed at me for complaining to the principal about what a shit teacher he was and I was pissed at him because he was The Man, Trying To Keep Me Down, claiming I should follow the rules just because he made them and he was an authority figure, even if the rules were bullshit, and I recognized this as the work of the conformist society trying to mold me into a non-thinking zombie. Anyway, I was mad (but also secretly thrilled) that I had to go to detention for two whole lunch hours; Mr. Twofirstnames was mad that I got out of going to his class for the rest of the year, and we had some Words. And to this day I am still absolutely convinced that I was in the right and that he is a huge asshole.
I told my sister all of this and she laughed and laughed and then said I could have warned her, which was a good point, since it would really suck if he held a grudge, but I said just to make sure to stay on his good side and she would probably be fine but she said it was already too late for that since she had called him on his bullshit assumption that clothes are necessary for survival in western society -- she could, as she pointed out to the class, happily go live on a nudist farm and get along perfectly fine -- on the first day of class. Which was surely when his brain starting ticking along, making the connection to his former smart, sassy student with the same last name. It was only 4 classes later, however, when he sidled up to her while taking attendance and asked quietly if she was related to someone named Laura. Cousin, possibly? "Sister," said my sister.
"Oh," said he, and walked away. I would love to know what his memory is of me.
The sad part about this whole story is that I was a huge nerd in high school and that was the only time I ever skipped a class, in my entire 5 years there (also the only time I ever had detention). My middle little sister, on the other hand, the one who is now in New Orleans studying neuropsychology and will probably become a doctor, was much smarter than me in high school and used to skip whole days of school all the time to do drugs in Optimist Park. The one time she got caught was when she skipped the day before she was supposed to mediate the debate portion of the Intellectual Olympics and Mrs. King called home to make sure she was alright and would be coming in the next day and our parents were like, "Wh-huh? Isn't she at school?"
When she came home from "school" the parents were waiting for her and really angry, but they didn't punish her, probably because they didn't know how (they weren't really big on discipline), but they said, threateningly, that they hoped the school punished her but good.
So, when she got to school the next day she was a little scared when Mrs. King came up to her, but all Mrs. King said was, "I hope I didn't get you in trouble with your parents!"
Then she went home and lied to our parents that she had been given detention and they felt satisfied that the matter was being dealt with and left her alone and that was that. So, the easy solution is clearly lying. I was never very good at figuring out the easy solution.
Oh, high school. How I do not miss you at all.
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