at least the kid's okay.

Amidst everything else, the Increasingly Mislabeled Boy (he's been bigger than me for several years now) is flourishing. He had some understandable difficulty focusing on his Government class: he's interested in law school, but there are obvious questions about how relevant the rule of law will be in a decade.

We get to witness him through the eyes of the program staff, who have loved him since Day 1, because he's a deeply caring and wonderful person, and he's also hilarious. His comic timing, when he was...maybe 7 or 8?

One evening the three of us were in a car waiting for some friends, and we started a poorly-defined game that involved throwing a purple Nerf ball at each other.

J starts saying "Quack" over and over, waiting for the audience (us) to notice.

"What are you doing?"

With as much glee as I've ever seen on a child: "Oh, I'm just ducking!".

He is probably the world's foremost expert on an emerging genre known as Bad Fan-Fiction. This is fanfic written in some form of terrible prose, as the name suggests, but with multiple layers of parody and social commentary woven throughout. Among other patterns, it expands the Unreliable Narrator to include the Unreliable Author, who might be throwing their beliefs on the page, or mock said beliefs by pretending to believe them. There are many, many master's theses to be had down this road: it's marinated in and encompasses every meta-referential fourth-wall break in Western literature. Dante's Virgil is an unabashed author insert. Don Quixote moves through a merciless dual reality, his mind having been destroyed by too much chivalric literature. Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla, Pirandello's Six Characters In Search of an Author, Waiting For Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Being There, Forrest Gump, The Truman Show, on and on and on.

His infectious enthusiasm for this thing, which nobody's ever heard of, is absolutely off the charts.

He had a stereotypically somber German anesthesiologist for his tonsillectomy—somber and focused is a great feature in an anesthesiologist—who we met while he was mostly already asleep. We did our waiting thing, and when they wheeled him in, she had this wondering grin on her face, and said "He was telling me about this 'bad fanfiction'...?". 

We're at that stage where the grown kid spends most of the year away from home, and we get minimal visibility into his interactions and relationships. We still can't get over the fact that he was "chatting" with college fair people.

Or any people.

Ever.

I want to see it so bad.