I was sooooo close.
Today is Georgia's birthday.
She's thirteen.
She's in seventh grade, locked in the vacancy that is private school (and that part I all too clearly remember) and she's failing.
She's got this week off school.
Next week, she gets to retake all the midterms that she failed. If she doesn't pass 'em, she gets to do seventh grade all over again, the same homework that she despises, the same teachers that hate her, but without any of her friends.
This doesn't seem very real to her, not as real as the sheer drudgery of doing homework that has no interest, no pertinance, and more importantly no visible reward.
So she came to the office and we locked her in our lab and she did her spanish homework, her french homework, her geography, her geometry, and I tested her on the religion stuff.
We had a contest, whoever got more questions right owed everybody else an ice cream.
So I owe her an ice cream, and I'm also learned what an epistle is. Y'see, in our hebie school they didn't teach us about all that fancy apostle/epistle stuff since frankly, it's all bullshit. (like the old testament is any truer than the new? You believe what you choose to believe)
In any case, we've both memorized the entire lineage of Terach/Abraham/Isaac/Jacob/etc...
And we did some reading work, we memorized a bit more of that poem, we played a little bit of arkanoid on my machine.
We're going to see a movie with David and Tia in an hour.
Sooooo close.
But she's refusing to read the last seven pages of her french book.
"I hate reading" she said.
"No, YOU don't understand, there's no way I'm doing my homework" she yelled as she stared me down, and right now she's sitting behind me at Peter's desk, playing with my tarot cards and jeopardizing her future.
(no wait, now she's stormed out and is wandering the halls of my office building. fuck.)
And I wish I could remember what it was that made any sense to me back then when I was too busy planting cherry bombs in the toilets to do any of my homework either.
I wish I could remember what was truth, then.
I wish I could remember it like I'd promised myself that I was going to.
~