or, the importance of knowing the difference between confidence and arrogance
Just as I was not always this infuriatingly handsome, nor this immaculate a gentleman, so too was I not always this polished an editor and writer.
When I try, which is exceedingly rare these days, I’m the greatest this generation has ever read, the self-styled Millennial F. Scott Fitzgerald.
1. My body of work on Medium speaks for itself.
2. Brown Grass hasn’t even dropped yet, and has 18,350+ pre-order email signups.
3. It isn’t bragging if it’s true.
These numbered facts, while worth mention, are all more or less besides the point.
My first essay was assigned during the second month of sixth grade. I missed the first month due to my parents’ ingenious idea to suddenly transfer me from my beloved magnet program, The Academy for the Intellectually Gifted at the Mamie Faye School (PS 122Q), to the godforsaken herpes sore that was my zoned junior high school, IS 230Q, because its pilot class coincided with the start of my junior high school journey and it was located literally across the street from our apartment building.
My beloved darling angel mother’s favorite hobby quickly became watching me go to and from school from our home’s fourth floor window, since it faced the middle school monstrosity’s building facade. Fun fact: it used to be an abandoned psych ward. I kid you not. Feel free to look it up.
During the span of this first month, I dearly missed all 30 or so of my fourth and fifth grade classmates, quickly lost most of whatever prodigious genius I once possessed, and learned the metric system all over again, because that’s what Gotham’s Board (now Department) of Education expects from and insults its sixth graders’ capabilities with. Somehow, I found myself taking Italian instead of the familiar Spanish I studied for the previous two years. I found myself grossly disgusted by not only my male peers, but all the girls too. How was I supposed to get through junior high without a single crush?! It was hell. The only saving grace was the lunch. I can’t, in good conscience, do either of two things: reward failure; and, more importantly, insult good food. The first day, I gorged on cherry tomatoes and mozzarella balls. It was also heaven, in this minor, singular way.
Somehow, my daily and nightly pleading with my parents to reverse their admissions apocalypse found its way into meeting their empathy, and eventually I was back at the Academy. The day I returned, I was the most popular human being to have ever walked the face of God’s green earth. It was like my very own ticker tape parade. Instead of kissing adoring supporters’ babies, I got a kiss on the cheek from a new classmate I didn’t even know I had. Turns out there weren’t 30 of us anymore. 64, but who’s counting? That day was the origin of the constant chorus of my life, a haunting refrain I’ll clue you in on now: Farooq, Farooq, Farooq is on fire. How I burnt and blazed. It wouldn’t last. It never does.
Now mind you, I had gone through a massive dumb down, like when Homer Simpson asked Moe the bartender to reinsert the crayon into his brain. Naturally, this didn’t occur to me, so when I learned my new, meaning old, meaning novel, meaning original, sixth grade magnet English class was reading Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), I thought nothing of it. I didn’t bother to catch up, and kept hearing the word essay, without bated breath or sweaty brow.
Okay, enough foreplay and prologue.
I wrote my first essay in the form of a first person stand-up comedy routine. My essay, though lost to the annals of corrupted Windows 2000 Compaq hard drives, contained the clause: “without further ado, how about that Huckleberry Finn?”
It included several smiley faces, back when emoji were known as emoticons.
That’s not even the worst part.
Now, you won’t believe me, most likely.
So I need to preface this with a solemn oath:
I swear to God, on the memory of my deceased dearly departed friends and family, my mother’s name, and everything I hold near and dear:
This essay was written and printed in… COMIC SANS.
Mrs. Dinstein graded it a “C”.
When I received my hard copy, it was covered in red ink. It looked like a crime scene.
It included the note: “see me”.
She asked me if it was a joke.
To save face, and hide my horror, I lied and said it was inspired by my interpretation of what Tom Sawyer would have done in the year 2000. She thought it was genius, and told me to write a serious essay. I decided to undo the dumb down, and proceeded to study all of what Microsoft Encarta — the OG Wikipedia — had to offer regarding Mark Twain, Bildungsroman, and several other topics and themes I read and sutured together to resemble some semblance of literary critique. I got an A.
By the time I graduated from The Academy, I had a 98.3% eighth grade GPA, and had earned a seat at Stuyvesant High School, one of 710 amongst a test pool of ~30,000. Dumb down diverted.
The best part: six years after this essay, I scored a perfect 800 on my SAT verbal, and scored a perfect essay on the new SAT writing section.
I told you.
I’m the greatest this generation has ever read.
See you at the Barnes & Noble meet and greet.
August 2017. 4 years strong.
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