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Who am I?

I could give you boring details such as I have two brothers and a sister, and I have a mom that is the best mom in the world. But that does not tell a story. I am a storyteller. I hope to be a good one someday.

Here is a story from my childhood:
When I was a senior in high school I was suspended for not just drinking at school, but sharing with the entire senior class on a half day. We finished the keg at lunch.

Of course, I was caught, and when sitting in the Vice principal’s office waiting for my mom to pick me up, waiting for my punishment to be handed down to me, I learned I had 163 unexcused absences (It might have been in the 180’s), it was close to the end of the year and there was a class I had yet to attend. I figured since I was a senior and only needed one class to graduate and had signed up for eight, it was no big deal. I was wrong. The class was study hall and it was just before lunch. A long lunch is too enticing for a senior to pass up to attend study hall, so every day for 163 days I enjoyed a long lunch.

“You have to go to study hall, or you can aide for your math teacher,” the vice principal told me even though my math teacher already had two aides and the policy was that no teacher could have more than two.  Since I didn’t have any leverage in my drunken state to argue, I agreed.

What the vice principal didn’t know at the time was kind of relationship I had with my math teacher. Mr. D was my AP Calc and AP Stats teacher that year. We had gone mountain biking together. There was an incident with a rattle snake but that is another story. We often played chess.

My vice Principle handed me a three-day suspension and thought about what I did. Now, being much older, and not drunk, I know he was handing me a giant favor because I could have been in real trouble with the law.

In school on my first day as an aide, my math teacher took me aside before class. He said, “Cory, there is a time and a place for everything. It’s called college.” I half-smiled in response because I knew he was disappointed in me. Then he asked me to run to Taco Bell to grab him some lunch.

In my AP Stats class, I learned from Ashley who sat next to me that my teacher had shown my drunken attempt at taking a statistics test to the class. “How the fuck did you get the highest score in the class?” she asked. She probably didn’t say the F-word, she was a nice girl.

Part of my punishment for drinking at school was I had to attend drinking classes for a month. With a parent. My poor mother. At least, it was only once a week for four weeks.

My mom is 115 pounds of sweetness. A single mom with four kids. Some weekends we cleaned houses to earn a little extra money to make ends meet. The five of us would split up and clean a disgusting house as fast as possible, so we could go home and have our weekend. She taught me the value of hard work. I thought about those things sitting in those classes. She just stared at me without saying anything.

From that experience, I learned my mom will love me no matter what I do, or how many mistakes I make. I know I am a better person now than I was then, but I have a long way to go.

Now you know a little about me.