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high school
2005-10-26 - 12:21 p.m. Here's what's going on: Things have seemed good -- N's been cheery and talkative and getting her homework done. But there have been worries about a few friends. One, S., appears to be failing, seems to hate school, and appears to be wandering around downtown unsupervised late at night. Honestly, I think S is a good kid. Her parents are a bit wacky, but I think she's fond of them. I bet they pack her off to boarding school or something and in 10 years everything is fine. There's another friend, O., who greatly troubles me and B., who is E's mother. She's sort of a classic trust fund kid. There's money, but it's unclear where it comes from. There are some seriously wacky parents, and there's a kind of wholehearted admiration for people like Hunter S. Thompson. I guess that's not so odd, really. I think he's an asshole, but in my youth I probably did not. Anyway -- there's a sort of a yearning for a footloose life of adventure, without much of an anchor to hold her down. There's a sort of desire to appear older than she is. Actually, I don't worry too much about the influence of O. N. really is a pretty sensible child. However, she will go along with things I'd prefer she didn't, and proximity to O. is sure to increase the occurance of these things. And E. worships her, I think. E's parents and I predict that in 10 years O. will be a publicist, on her way to unhappy marriages to wealthy men. It's interesting, because earlier this morning I wrote this to E's mother: "Last night N. told me that I. [another girl] is perfect -- nice, friendly, gets good grades, does lots of sports. So now, of course, I am worried that N. thinks she ISN'T perfect. What am I supposed to do with that? "Ugh. "There's this kind of yucky confluence of "what colleges want" plus her needing to figure out what she wants plus what, of course, we want. It can't be that colleges will only take people who play sports -- there must be room somewhere for bright but shy people who actually do have leadership skills (look how she's organizing this degrassi thing at your house!) just not on some huge scale and who are thoughtful and take good photographs! "Hmmm." But actually, upon further reflection, she may be contemplating her place in the universe of LUPS. We had a long talk last night about where M. should go to school. Freshman year at LUPS, she realized, she had three good classes and three terrible classes. Anyway -- she may be contemplating a move into the "good kid" category. This may in fact be wishful thinking on my part, but she is working hard. And of course there is more than one way to be perfect, and you don't have to play sports. She's a smart kid, and of course we'll find some place, and a good place, for her to go to college. It's hard at LUPS, because I think it's completely uncool to admit that you are a good kid. You can take 5 AP classes and work really hard and get good grades (and you do have to work hard to get good grades), but you have to do so while also being a bad kid in other ways. Ahh, high school.
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