From Tuesday night to Wednesday afternoon was the worst I’ve felt in a long time. The weird thing about progress is when you backslide a little you can feel like such a failure and seemingly the world is at its end. I’m mostly okay now thanks to the presence of a few friends, but man, life really sucks sometimes.
I missed my Psych final. I thought it was at 12 noon but as it turns out it was at 8 am. This was the second time that I missed a final. So I hunted down the professor and she said if I could take the final right then I’d be allowed to take it. Well, I had pencil in hand so she led me off to a little room with a video camera (she assured me it was off) and then she let me take my test. All that crap I complained about Psych 101 is a load. Jennifer Morris is a pretty cool teacher.
Wednesday was a fairly good night at work. I helped this on family that was a little painful to watch. The son seemed painfully shy and the father was extremely domineering and had no idea how to handle newly teenage teenagers.
He came in asking to see “what the kids are wearing these days.” It’s amazing at how with that one statement I had completely assessed the situation. This poor acnefied kid is starting a new school. He didn’t have any friends (or very few of them) at his old school and his parents are trying to help the situation by buying him some hip designer duds.
I wanted to say clothes weren’t going to make this kid fit in. Teenagers are drawn to confidence. Heck, everyone is. Jocks are confident. Cheerleaders are confident. That is why they are popular. With every cutting remark that the dad made, the kid just hung his head lower. No pair of $80 jeans is going to fix that.
When the kid tried on a pair of jeans the dad would ask.
“Do you like those.”
“Yeah, I guess.” (which is teenage-speak for heck, yeah)
“What kind of an answer is ‘yeah, I guess’? Do you like them or not?”
Hello, I’m your salesperson, you’re making me uncomfortable. They were there for a long time and it was constantly like this.
“I like these.”
“No, not those.”
Good luck at high school, kid. You’ll need it. If you survive, there’s always college.