Blog #2: Little (Big) Lie

I don't remember ever lying to my parents before high school. I mean, I'm sure I did, but it was never about big stuff, or about stuff that was statistically significant to my memory, apparently. But I lied to my teachers a lot in middle school, because I was used to being given free reign over my education from elementary school (they were really good about challenging "gifted" students, a category I fell into for a good portion of my childhood) and middle school was throwing off my groove.

And that's why I found myself, still flinchy about swear words at 13, handing Mr. Baker a forged note to get me out of SNT. He glanced at it, glanced up at me, and I literally felt my hands shaking and my upper lip beginning to perspire. As he studied the curves of the fake signature my forearm twitched, as if it wanted to snatch the note back and apologize and never do anything so stupid again. I wasn't used to rebellion. This was too much. I had to-

"Ok. Go on." He nodded at me but kept the note and went back to grading papers.

I-I got away with it? AWESOME! As I walked away from the classroom, I mentally gave a passionate middle finger to the SNT class growing smaller and smaller behind me.

SNT was "Student Needs Time", or basically study hall in which you were graded on your apparent effort. Doing homework (or, really, writing anything for 45 minutes, even if it was just the word "fuck" over and over again because no teacher ever actually checked) got you an A for the day, reading a book got you a B, and on and on down the line. I never had stuff to do during SNT because I often finished homework during class, and I always had a book to read because I was such a fast worker and needed something to do with the approx. two hours of waiting around I did per day for the rest of the class to finish up. SNT was not my friend, and I was not giving up my 4.0 for a glorified study hall class.

Next bit of context: At the time, I was in a class called "Production Tech." I honestly have no idea what the actual purpose of that class was, since I spent most of it in the computer lab, blogging on my new website. I think we were supposed to be filming and editing the morning video announcements, which weren't as daily as they were meant to be, as I remember. A kid named Keenan, who was friends with some new friends of mine, was in charge of editing said not-so-daily daily videos, in a cramped little black room with archaic analog editing machines. Sometimes, when editing didn't get finished during production tech, which it often didn't because of how long it took with the editing machines from the 1700s, Keenan and whoever else was involved in that day's episode could get a note excusing them from SNT to finish up.

Further (and final) context: Production tech was "taught" by a rather detatched teacher named Ms. Greb, who never monitored the editing room, during class, SNT, or otherwise. In fact, I don't remember a single occasion when she set foot in the room at all. She wasn't detached enough to sign any note we wanted her to, though, but luckily her signature, which we had several copies of, was easy to forge.

So for the rest of the year, unless I actually had homework to do, I'd forge myself a note and hang out in the editing room, reading.

There wasn't much sensory detail in that, but it's the earliest lie I can remember. Looking back, that was the nerdiest bit of rebellion ever. I forged notes from my teacher not to smoke, or get high, or whatever else kids forge notes for, but to read in peace without my SNT grade suffering. Pathetic. I don't think I have to analyze that any further because this anecdote pretty much speaks for itself. I AM A NERD.