My History In Education, Part 2

7th Grade
I moved back in with my mom and newborn sister in La Jolla, and attended Muirlands Middle School, where coincidentally, my sister now goes. I hated school a whole bunch, and was pretty miserable most of the time. Some of my teachers were ok, but I mostly hated them. We had seven periods, and I somehow ended up with Dr. Hom for three of them, Social Studies (my least favorite subject), Music Appreciation, and Advisory. I don't even remember anymore why I hated her as much as I did, I think maybe I was just sick of her. She used to show West Side Story and The King & I in class all the time, and because I had three of her classes, I quickly grew to despise those movies, which is unfortunate because West Side Story is probably pretty good. I had one of those remote control watches, and I would sometimes change the channel in class or turn the volume down, and I was eventually caught because some asshole made me let him borrow it, and he got caught with it, but said it was my watch, and I'm the one who got in trouble. I was put on in-school suspension and the watch was confiscated, with a promise I would get it back at the end of the year, but then when I asked for it back, they had lost it. I also got in trouble, again, for swearing, when Dr. Hom somehow found a notebook with a bunch of stories and artwork a friend and I had been working on. We had to see the guidance counselor, who told me my writing was actually pretty good, I just needed to clean it up a little, a piece of advice I clearly paid a lot of attention to later in life. I wasn't an especially athletic kid, and so I was really bad at P.E. But every day, P.E. would start with everyone having to run two laps under a certain amount of time, and if you didn't complete the laps in that amount of time, you would get an F for the day, and you had to sit off to the side and not play any of the sports. My friend Lisa and I eventually said fuck it, and for like the entire second half of the year, we would always walk one lap and not make it back in time, and so we got to hang out for the whole period instead of having to play sports we fucking hated. And I don't know if the school had some kind of weird policy about grading in P.E. or what, because even though I had gotten months worth of daily Fs, when my report card came, I had an A. My favorite band was Green Day, and my second favorite was The Offspring, who were my first concert. My best friend Adam and I were handed backstage passes by some guy running past us, looking frantic, and we didn't get to meet the band, but we got to stand onstage right next to the speakers, and when they walked off, Dexter Holland smiled at me, which beat the time Ultimate Warrior slapped my hand as the greatest moment of my entire life. I also liked White Zombie and "Weird Al" Yankovic. My favorite movie was Fast Times at Ridgemont High.