It Chooses You - Miranda July [11]
Miranda:
Do your parents have ideas of what you should do now that you’ve graduated? Do you have a plan?
Andrew:
Go to college, get a good education, get a career started.
Miranda:
Where are you going to go?
Andrew:
Long Beach. I already registered. I have the booklets and stuff.
Miranda:
And what do you want to study?
Andrew:
I want to get into engineering with airplanes and stuff, work with the engine or something like that. I don’t know. Something using my hands, like a mechanic.
Miranda:
And, besides a job, besides school and then a job, what things do you picture in your future?
Andrew:
Picture?
Miranda:
What do you imagine?
Andrew:
Like in the future?
Miranda:
Yeah, anything.
He looked at the ceiling, summoning a vision as if I had asked him to actually see his own future.
Andrew:
I probably imagine myself, I guess, being in the forest and stuff like that – in the mountains, something like that, around wildlife.
Miranda:
So maybe not here.
Andrew:
No, not here.
Something moved in Andrew’s terrarium; I thought it was a turtle but then I looked again.
Miranda:
Whoa.
Andrew:
Yeah. That’s my pet spider.
Miranda:
Is it a tarantula?
Andrew:
Yeah. He doesn’t bite. It’s all right.
Miranda:
Okay. Good to know there’s a tarantula behind me. Okay, what’s been the happiest time of your life so far?
Andrew:
The happiest time? I would have to say it was the graduation party my mom and my father had for me.
Miranda:
I bet they were really proud.
Andrew:
Yeah. They’re proud. One of my goals was getting out of high school.
Miranda:
Was it hard?
Andrew:
Well, to me it wasn’t really that hard. I was in Special Ed, so the teachers don’t try to take out effort from you. It’s easy.
Miranda:
Was it too easy?
Andrew:
Too easy. It could’ve been harder. They don’t try to teach you, because they think you won’t be able to pick up the information they’re giving you.
Miranda:
Do you know why you’re in Special Ed?
Andrew:
No. I’ve been in it since 2000.
Miranda:
So… since you were eight.
Andrew:
Yeah. They just gave me my paperwork, and on the paper it says it’s because I’m slow in remembering.
Miranda:
Is that true?
Andrew:
It says supposedly when I’m in class I’m daydreaming. I guess the teacher must think that because I don’t really talk to people in my classes, because I don’t know them. I just sit there and do my work and I don’t talk to nobody. I guess the teacher must think I daydream because I’m not interacting with other people.
Miranda:
What do you wish you’d learned more about?
Andrew:
Probably science. In my science class we weren’t able to do experiments. If you give some of the Special Ed kids a knife or something, they’ll play around, and I guess they didn’t really trust all of us so they’d rather not give us materials to be able to do experiments and stuff. I kind of got mad at that part. We weren’t able to do experiments where the other kids would do projects and stuff. We never had the chance to do that.
Andrew:
Probably science. In my science class we weren’t able to do experiments. If you give some of the Special Ed kids a knife or something, they’ll play around, and I guess they didn’t really trust all of us so they’d rather not give us materials to be able to do experiments and stuff. I kind of got mad at that part. We weren’t able to do experiments where the other kids would do projects and stuff. We never had the chance to do that.
Miranda:
And you would’ve been so good at biology and –
Andrew:
All that stuff. It’s crazy.
Miranda:
It’s making me mad.
Andrew:
It made me mad.
Miranda:
Not many people your age build a whole pond and keep everything alive. I wonder how much your college will look at those papers or if you can get kind of a fresh start.
Andrew:
They’re going to look at them. My counselor, she told me to turn