Day Thirty-six - When doves cry

And now it's time to move on to the seventh grade - and man, what a year that was, and I don't say this in the best way possible. At all.

So, as was often the case, a new school, a new set of people for me to get to know, but mainly ignore and stay out of their way, and all this happened at the height of Batmania! This, of course, refers to Tim Burton's '89 Batman movie - and as a kid I always adored Batman, though as an adult not so much. But going into that school year I'd be just getting a brand new Batman t-shirt with the logo, I'd won it in a contest and I wore it all the time. No, I do mean all the time - so much so that that year my nickname was Batman. In my school noone knew my name, but everyone knew who I was. What a weird experience that was.

So evertything about school I'd started to dislike and even loathe on my fifth grade, just got way worse. It was the moment I realized I wanted to be everywhere else but in school. And that translated into me failing that year - my first time, though not the last - and I failed because I started cutting classes. I just couldn't bear spending so many hours inside the classroom, it just wasn't for me. So I'd either lounge around the school in some corner, or spend time in the library - a great hall filled with dusty books, I loved it. Sometimes, I'd go to a shopping centre not very far from the school and if I could spare the money, I'd play a little bit in the arcades. Some memorable games I playes for the first time were Konami's 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Tutles : The Arcade Game' and 'The Simpsons : The Arcade Game'. Though not this year, I'd soon be playing one of the most influential games of my life quite soon in another nearby arcade - Street  Fighter II. More on that in the future.

Eventually what happened was that in the first term of that school year I'd skipped so many classes that I flunked out of school altogether. My parents made a last ditch desperate effort to see if things could be somehow reversed, and I was given a reprieve under the proviso that I wouldn't be able to skip another class or else I'd be flunked out for good this time. And guess what? I didn't even last past the early stages of my second term. The day I was given notice that I was being kicked out of school, I was picked up by my father at my granparent's, and on our way home to that small village we lived in, and where I'd spend pretty much the rest of the time, he was fuming, all the time teeling me what kind of thrashing I would be getting when we got home. It thankfully never arrived - though to this day I can't understand why it didn't; nothing ever stopped him from being violent towards us before.