in middle school, ryland decides to create a reputational "safety cushion" for himself, because he has been bullied by his peers from the past two years — even his brother's protection not being enough to stop them for poking him about his interests — and he doesn't want it to haunt him all the way to high school
and the one idea he comes up with is to do parkour. because it's cool, and he's seen colt do some of it before, always creating excitement on the playground, and if his brother can do it, then of course he can too
except he can't, not really. he may be athletic, but he lacks confidence when he has to flip, and he stumbles where he needs a firm grip. colt has to watch as he almost breaks his arm trying to jump over a fence before he thinks "to hell with it" and just. pretends to be ryland in front of his classmates, doing it himself
and it works, so the next step is to simulate ryland's injury — the one that would prevent him from practicing parkour in the future — so that no one can ambush him with a request to do it, preserving his reputation; and they do it, and they're successful
so ryland isn't surprised — at least not as much as their parents — when the very next year colt announces that he's going to be a stuntman
To make people think he isn’t as smart as his rivals is to hide perhaps his greatest strength... for me, the greatest trick that Lewis Hamilton ever pulled, was convincing the world that he wasn’t smart.
what did your sports final consist of? on which subject was your hardest final so far?
The way it works is that, throughout the year, we’re evaluated on three different sports, and the total of those three grades makes up our sports final, and the last one was in climbing. My physical capabilities are more or less equivalent of a seriously overweight house cat missing two legs, so my expectation for sports grades have never been particularly high in my life ever, but since it was actually quite important this time around I was a bit more anxious than usual. Though we were graded on…I guess you’d call it wall climbing, one of the rare activities I’m not 100% useless in lmao.
Technically speaking, Sports was my first final this year, the real shit that’s gonna drown my soul and rip my limbs off will begin in June (Literature in French, German and English, History, Geography, Philosophy). But, overall, last years finals also count into the same grade as this years finals, so if we’re counting those, the hardest thing was probably my French oral.
I hate orals, always have, always will. Not only do I have to bring up a ton of important information in the span of a minutes, everything needs to be presented with coherency, consistency, logic, well formulated and argumented. None of this is all that problematic in theory, but during the oral you have extremely limited time, and you need to present everything to an actual human being sitting in front of you, not just a sheet of paper. And it just stresses me the fuck out. I’m generally awful when it comes to holding conversations with even tidbits of non-idle talk; if you want to talk to me about anything with actual substance there’s a 99% chance I won’t be able to answer any questions on the topic, or present any of my actual opinions, thoughts or knowledge on the matter, as everything seems to conveniently disappear from my mind when in any sort of direct discussion/confrontation. I love it. Really its…totally not hindering me at all.
It gets better though. I had to do the oral in French, and, despite having lived there for 8 years (7 at the time), I can’t say I’m overly fond of or expressive in the language. It’s just not my thing, but I’m counted and graded among the other natural French speakers in my French class, and I’m okay with that. Still not a fan of anything oral though, especially not in French. So during the exam, I’m pretty stressed out, I’m stuttering a bit, I’m worried bc I couldn’t find just enough things about my text to talk about during the first part of the presentation. We then move to the 2nd part, which is basically teh interrogator asking questions about said text and the stuff surrounding it etc. I’m not doing overly well (in part bc I really should’ve studied more lmao), and I guess it could be heard in my voice, bc my interrogator asked me if I were French, or how long I had been living in France, bc I apparently had a very thick German accent and it didn’t sound great at all. Now, the thing is, over the years in which I learned French from scrap, I quickly got pretty good at it, and got complimented on my fluidity and lack of accent often, which was nice, bc I was a kid in a new country with very little self esteem or confidence, so being told you’re doing the thing you need to be good at really good is helpful. But that’s what I’ve been told by everyone really, including friends and teachers. So then in the middle of an exam focused on a literary analysis, the interrogator comments out of the blue on my “pretty heavy” German accent, and that really finished me off lol. If my mental capacity was already wanky and a tad unstable during the presentation beforehand, this caused the whole thing to crumble lol. Idk. It might seem like I’m overreacting, but being told that in the middle of my at that point most important exam so far from an official, government approved interrogator, when it goes so heavily against my previous experiences, was pretty damn heavy on me, and, needless to say, the rest of the oral wasn’t all that great lol.
my boss also said that she sees me as the type of person who needs to be shown something 2-3 times but once I got it I never forget it which... true...
