david and i are really smart people who both got C's in art.

i got it because seniors in the period after kept pouring paint over my work, so i had to repaint something every day based on what I could cover. the art teacher (also the woodshop teacher who chewed tobacco and had a stump of a left ring finger), appeared too bored to take my unusual predicament into consideration when handing out grades. later, in parent-teacher conferences, my biology teacher, this manic-depressive woman with a bowl of bangs looked over my report card and yelled, "how the hell did you get a C in art? no one gets a C in art. How the hell did you get a C in art?" i was mortified at the time and my parents were embarrassed, but in hindsight, her reaction did help me put that situation into perspective. my mom keeps that fucked up painting in her office-- it's a bridge on a stormy night with red warning lights because i had to find a way to incorporate the red paint they'd poured on it the week before it was due. i always wonder if that experience just completely demotivated me to try hard at school.

david went to a similar school where people in general were idiots. in terms of art class, he wasn't interested in copying someone else's style, but wanted to create things that would be original. he got yelled at by his teacher that everything's been done before and there's no such thing as original art. for the final, he knew everyone was supposed to do something classical but he wanted to draw robots. so he turned in robots. "i'm like 15 or 16 and we're supposed to draw something that we'd learned, but i wanted to draw robots, like i'm 9 years old. i was well into robots."

fuck art class.