I’m ready to move.  READY.  I’ve lived in my apartment nearly seven years and in San Francisco for ten.  It is time to move the fuck on.

I look around my apartment and see things I’m tired of seeing.  I look around San Francisco and see things I’ve been seeing for ten years.  I like what I see for the most part, and it will be great to visit a city I know so well, but I’m ready to say I’m from San Francisco rather than I live in San Francisco.

I’m not “from” San Francisco, but that’s what I’ll say when people ask once I’ve moved.  It’s certainly easier to say I’m from San Francisco than that I’m from all over California, that I’ve lived in northern California, southern California, thankfully not central California.

I have senioritis.  You know that feeling, when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and you want to get there already.  I want to move already.  Change will be very welcome in my life.  This year started off kind of shitty and has gotten better and better and better.  I feel like if I stay here things will only stagnate, and I want them to continue to get better.

The last time I had senioritis so badly I was a senior – in high school.  At the end of my sophomore year my guidance counselor sat down with my father and me and told me there was a chance I could graduate early if I wanted to do so.  Did I!

I had heard about people at my high school graduating a semester early, which is what I hoped for.  However, because my high school had very few requirements for graduation, including only three years of English, and because I had begun taking high school-level classes in junior high, I was told I could graduate a full year before my classmates.

Fuck yeah!  I would have to jump through a few hoops, but I could do it.  I had to get special permission to sign up for classes that were normally only open to seniors.  My guidance counselor took care of that.  And because there were only so many class periods in a day, I had to put in time to get additional units at the continuation high school in my district.

On Wednesday nights my father drove me to the continuation high school.  For those not in the know, a “continuation” high school is for the pregnant girls, the behavior problems, and those with learning disabilities.  It’s a last step before dropping out for most of the students who go.  On Wednesday nights the local continuation high school had supervised study that allowed students to catch up on classwork.

I was to earn a few units on the Wednesday nights, and take a full course of classes during school days, and I could graduate a year early.  I could do that.  The first few Wednesday evenings, the supervising teacher had me read stories and answer comprehension questions.  She always seemed surprised when I finished, and usually let me go before the study period was over because I had completed all my work.

The work was mindless and silly, but I wanted to do whatever it took to graduate early.  After a few Wednesdays of attendance, the supervising teacher didn’t have any work left for me to do; I had done everything that was normally given to students who needed extra units.  The teacher asked me to act as a tutor and help any of the other students who needed it.  Whatever it took, I did.  Finally, the teacher made it clear that I was wasting my time, and set me free, with more units than I had requested or needed for the early graduation.  Thankyouverymuch.

With that cushion of units at my disposal I proceeded to purposefully fail a math class that I didn’t need to graduate and that was more work than I was willing to put in.  The last semester of high school I did the bare minimum of work.

I moved out of my parents’ (father and step-mother) house during my last semester of high school, in March of 1990, when I was 16.  Some time during that final semester my parents got a call indicating I was “in danger of not graduating.”  I heard through DJ that my parents got the call, as I had no interest in talking to them during that time.

I didn’t give a shit that I was in danger of not graduating, because even if I didn’t graduate then, a year early, I could take summer school, or attend another semester, and I still would have graduated early.  The teachers looked at me with a wise pity, like they had seen it all before – the formerly good student who was just done.

I still don’t know what my final grades were, but I did graduate from high school a year early.  Literally the day after I graduated I moved from the small suburban Sacramento town to the San Gabriel Valley in southern California.  DJ helped me with that.

I can’t say this bout of senioritis is as difficult at the one when I was 16 since I now have a bit more maturity.  Just a bit.

I swear.  True story.

Tags: Chicago, idiot, SF love, walking contradiction

Categories: True Story.

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