Our First Day of High School
Me at age 12. Look at how much I adored school. (Click to look closer at the love.)Why would I say this was our first day of High School, you ask? You came to the right person! I mean me. Anyways, you see, I never went to High School. Not one day. I left school early and went to work in design and did tutoring and blah, blah, blah. Throw in a few swear words with the blahs and that about sums up my personal relationship with formalized education. Oil and water don’t mix. But school and I were more like gasoline and soap chips, which mix just fine… to create napalm. So yeah.
That’s why dropping my son off to his first day of High School was more than your average parental surreal. It was completely unreal.
I’m not really someone any parent should talk to about education. Sure, I’ll bob my head and and smile at all the right parts, but really, I’m a subversive non-conformist who would rather have walked the psychotically mandatory two circuits around a block before entering any building with Nicola Tesla than sit in any class. Yep. He had to do that. And you know what? Ball lighting is what!!! Ball f##king lighting! I’d have skipped anything and walked a block or two for that.
In a way I’ve sired little saboteurs; thinkers. They ask questions and disagree and challenge things they’re being taught. KaBOOM! Their grades are good, and I don’t even care about grades. It’s really hard to look some of their frantic teachers in the eyes. They all work so hard. But then there are those that smile at me after they look at my sons, and I smile back wider.
But now I’m here with my son, Cody. Fourteen years old. Dropping him off to begin experiences I don’t even have on my own hard drive. Stuff I only saw in John Hughes films.
All I could think of to say before he closed the car door was…
Cody looks ready to tackle the world. Tackle it and use it as pillow to nap on.He completed my statement himself. His own words. I smiled so big and laughed proudly. In that one exchange, we both knew I’d done a good job and possibly conceived a pretty rad message t-shirt together on top of it all.
Afterwards, when I asked him how the day went, he got all eloquent and long-winded like teenagers do, and said, “Good.”
After some coaxing (like getting Pandas to breakdance on each other in captivity), I got out of him that it really did go well. Aaaaaaaaand that he got stabbed with a pencil by a mentally-challenged kid. … Right?!? Same reaction from me, too! WTF gravy drizzled on a 12oz Holy S##t steak! But he went on to say it was nothing/an accident/just playing and I swelled again with pride that Cody was chillin’ with a handicapped kid. I had done well. About the things that matter. Somehow.
He showed me the mark under his skin where he’d been jabbed and said he hoped it would go away. I held up both my hands and told him not to hold his breath. I’m an artist and a klutz; single dot graphite tattoos are a given.
So that was our first day of High School. If you look back at the top of this post you’ll see my son walking into the bright light of an epic new beginning. If you look at where he’s looking, it might be fairer to say that the aim of his head is directed at the girls and friends he might know… what can I say, possibly more important than Trigonometry in terms of his life. We’ll see. It’s his life.
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Instructional Diagrams
Have a look at what my lack of education has resulted in.
Get an A in Facebook
Easiest test ever. Just like us and read comic books in class.
Ann says: 
Laurie 
Lacey S 
Mother Duck 
John 
