So I was cleaning out a lot of my shit, still packing for whenever I move, and I found a pamphlet that brought me back to junior high. I'm fairly smart, but I'm not nearly as smart as people think I am. If I was, I would have majored in business instead of English and philosophy, two things guaranteed to get me nowhere in the world. I don't know. Maybe it's the glasses.
But people have always thought I was a lot smarter than I am, and this goes back to childhood. To the surprise field trip. A group of super smart kids got chosen to go on a field trip to learn about nuclear power and engineering and a whole lot of other science things that smart kids are totally into. Somehow, I ended up being one of those kids. And no one told me.
I remember being in the auditorium for some function or other, and some teachers pulled me out and asked me why I wasn't with the other kids on the bus. I had no idea what they were talking about. I did, however, know that going on a field trip was a lot better than this stupid auditorium shit. So I went with them.
Yeah, I learned a lot. I'm always paying attention to these kinds of things. I saw how important math is to building bridges and not just because each bridge built has to calculate a set amount of worker deaths that are acceptable. Yes, that's a thing. I got to fiddle around with a Giger Counter. I learned about how we're all radioactive, just not with the kind that kills us. (Well, unless you live near Chernobyl.) I learned how holographs work. It was pretty fun. Then we got back on the bus and went back to class and back to the usual boring shit kids are forced to sit through.
To this very day I have no idea how this happened. I'm still certain there was a mix up with paperwork, and my name wound up on the clipboard and some genius kid had to sit through another principal announcement about something that would have zero impact on our lives. I don't remember getting my mom to sign a permission slip, and I certainly didn't remember handing it in. An excuse to get out of school? That would have stuck in my head.
To be fair, I didn't often give mom the stuff my teachers said to give to her. If it was all that important, they would have mailed it to her like they did with report cards. Although I did find a paper recently warning our parents that there was a stranger lurking around the school grounds who had tried to abduct one of us. Whoops. Maybe there were a few important things I should have passed on.
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