Day Twenty-seven - Figurehead

I've not had an easy life - not overly hard, mind you, but definitely not easy by any stretch of the imagination. And for that, I blame entirely no one, not a soul, not some vague concept, not a single circumstance : every single choice I made, I made so willingly. No one ever put a gun to my head and made me make bad decision after bad decision. 

And if I could pinpoint the moment in which things started to fall apart for me, I'd safely say it was fifth grade. What I mean by this is that fifth grade was such a massive paradigm shift for me, in pretty much every single facet, that I quickly realized that I really, really didn't like going to school. And I also disliked a great part of the curriculum we were being taught  nothing against the subjects thereof in and of themselves, but because I either couldn't grasp any of what I was being taught, or because I found it so useless for my life, then and in the future, that I just could not connect to what I should be learning. I also really, really, really, disliked studying. Even more egregious, I abhorred the notion of homework. For me, it was like an extension of what I was already hating, and having it be replicated at home. Now, obviously, in my previous school years I had to homework - of course I did. But that was the simple stuff. Things not only became more complex, they became almost unbearably dull. It became such a chore that my second term really didn't go that well, and I had to put in the effort on my final term in order to pass. 

It also didn't help that a) this was my fourth school in five years and b) this particular school, which thankully doesn't exist anymore, was right by one of the then dodgiest places in the city. Rife with drug trafficking, gun crime, and altogether with very nasty people. I went to this school for my fifth and part of my sixth grade - about half of it, at which point my parents decided to get me out of that hell hole and put me in another school, the very same where I had gone for my third grade.

This school year was rife with firsts for me : this was the year where I first saw a porn magazine; some random kid had brought it to school and was surreptitiously showing it around to other kids. I remember little of it, other that the girl being dressed as a nurse, and I found everything that was happening there to be so, so confusing. Little did I know...

That year I guess I also saw part of a girl's bits for the first time. Believe or not, I had two classmates who were a bit older that the rest of us kids, they'd been held back a few times, and apparently they'd been together before... and on one occasion, she was lying spreadeagled on the floor, and this kid who'd been her boyfriend pulled up her skirt and I briefly caught a glimpse of that part of her. Again, I found it to be weird as hell. Truly, how little did I know.