1984.Orwellian dystopia?
Or, the last Van Halen album with David Lee Roth?
The NSA still hasn't gone full Big Brother on us, but I can tell you right now that the dude in this picture certainly wasn't Hot for Teacher.
In fact, he didn't like her at all.
The feeling was mutual, of course, he wasn't the outgoing type and she was still mourning her love beads and Jefferson Airplane, who were too busy building cities out of rock and roll to care much about white rabbits.
She was old and creepy by 1984, so I can only hope to assume she's pretty dead now, but I can say that she had a terrible name for a third grade teacher, which I won't reveal just incase she is still alive and lucid enough to Google herself from time to time.
Calvin's third grade teacher is much cooler.
At first I thought she was a bit nuts, but after being a parent volunteer every other week, I now see why she has to radiate the kind of energy she radiates. We all want to blame the parents, we all kinda want to blame the teachers, but let's face it, third graders are unresponsive freak show animals. All of them.
I used to worry that mine was too nuts, too shy, too weird to socialize with the rest of them, but other than the fact that I can't get him to eat enough food or put his shoes on, he really is as remarkable as I could possibly want him to be.
The other kids, wow, really not so much.
The reason I thought about this picture is because I got to drop off Calvin to school this morning and was trying to remember if my parents dropped me off still at this point or if I walked to school. We lived right around the corner, so it's not like there was much of a journey to talk about, but I don't remember getting in the car even when it was raining.
I'm sure we did, but it's important later in life to lie a little bit about how hard you had it.
And then, as I watched him make that turn from the sidewalk to the play ground, I wondered if the eight year old me would have gotten along with the eight year old him.
I had Star Wars.
He's got YouTube.
I was into guns and swords.
Calvin's into swords and guns.
We're both athletic, but not athletes.
Yeah, we totally would have ruled the neighborhood.
I guess.
I don't know. As the lists start rolling around my head, it stops being an intellectual exercise and more of a liars jump down the rabbit hole.
It's safe to assume that if all eight year olds are unresponsive freak show animals, then most likely, so was the kid in the picture, despite the gleaming smile.
But, I guess in the context of entertainment for the sheer sake of entertainment, it's perfectly okay to bend the truth a bit. To romanticize the intellectual superiority of your eight year old self in order to project the pride you have in your eight year old son.
And hey, if you're gonna tell stories,
might as well JUMP!
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