Journal

day before first quarter
june 26, 2001 ~ 10:19 p.m.

I’ve been driving around my grandmother’s car, which is living at our house until we can figure out a way to get it to my aunt’s house in Philly, and it’s kind of nerve-wracking. For one thing, I’m so used to my parents’ car that I continually forget that I’m in a different one. Every time I get in, I reach up to grab the seatbelt to strap myself in and I’m reminded that the seatbelt is on the other side. I’ve also turned on the windshield wipers many times when I meant to change the gear.

But the other thing is that her stuff is still all over the car, and every time I happen to see her hand cart or her book on thyroids sitting in the back, I’m reminded that she’s dead.

I went on a run tonight, and it felt like I hadn’t done that in ages. Which of course I hadn’t, I haven’t run since the race I did in May. That was more than a month ago, which is really amazing. It felt good to get out there again. I did a mile around the track, watching the darkening evening sky, the crescent moon sinking towards the horizon, and the lightning bugs dancing the middle of the field.

When I was up there a memory struck me, and it felt as if it was so recent, even though I know it wasn’t. Two years ago, when I was in eleventh grade, I started talking to my parents about unschooling, explaining why I hated school, why I needed to do something else, and how I could do it, and showing them chapters from the Teenage Liberation Handbook. After a few weeks of discussion, they finally sat me down and told me that I had to go to school my senior year because there was too little time left and I needed a diploma to get into college.

I left the house in tears and on the spur of the moment decided to walk up to the park. When I got there I wandered over to the orange and blue playground, climbed up one of the towers and sat there in the dark, brooding over what they had said and wondering what the fuck I was going to do. I guess I was hoping to reach some epiphany that would clear my head or figure out a way to convince them, but of course I didn’t.

And as it turned out, after weeks of trying to set something up at my school, and an entire summer of worry about the next school year, my parents agreed to enroll me in the Learning Community, which would let me design my own classes and everything, just like regular unschooling, but would give me a diploma and a transcript as well. It’s so ironic that after all that trouble everything worked out fine, and that if I had known about the Learning Community all along, my parents probably would have agreed from the start.

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