I biked past this sign the other day and was filled with dread and injustice:
What a nightmare that would be. Luckily, I don’t have to go to school anymore. And more important, no real school could ever start on July 9. But wait! It’s late August! It really IS almost time for school! And now I’m reading that in Los Angeles school started on AUGUST 14TH SOMEHOW.
Probably the reason I saw these in the grocery store today:
If these are an actual back to school thing, I can’t take it. I really hope that no kid has received one of these from his parents because they noticed that he was especially down about school starting again.
I don’t think there’s any way to solve this terrible problem except to go back to the days when Alexander the Great had Aristotle as a tutor. It might also be solved by the system I vaguely yearned for in second grade, in which your parents went to school with you. At least on some days, they would come and sit on bleachers and observe you in class from afar. In between classes or at lunch you could go talk to them. I think I got this idea from the way my swimming lessons at the Y worked. Swimming lessons: the second terrible thing of life back then.
Some things were fun about going back to school, though. “Think of what I can do with all these colors of Sharpie!” And the night before had a weird greatness because you could pre-revel in the things you knew you were going to accomplish. “This is it. Third grade is the year that my sweet love will confide her dear, sweet love for me.” I hope that computers will be strong enough someday to run an accurate simulation of what the fuck would have happened if you and your eight year old crush HAD liked each other AND revealed it AND started dating.
But the underlying nature of the universe may not permit such a thing.