less than a week before the 2002 school year was scheduled to start, an advanced placement biology teacher quit. she was only one of two. at the time, california suffered from an apocalyptic teacher shortage, so the administerial scambling to avoid the ire of berkeley's affluent and motivated parents was legendary.

enter: robo-delp.

particularly obvious untruths frequently catch listeners flat-footed. the utterer can't possibly be lying, because such a lie would be trivially discoverable; so, i guess...their outlandish claim must be true? when your listeners are professionally credulous, you can build a lucrative career out of this type of lie. when they're high schoolers, you can generate some funny stories.

the highest authority in any organization isn't the person with the fanciest title. it's not the person officially "in charge". the highest authority is the person with the keys. at a high school, that's a custodian. if the school is big and old enough, maybe it's one particular custodian who's been around long enough to collect keys to weird, forgotten spaces.

that custodian might be schmoozable.

i've seen one and a half lacrosse games in my life. one of them was a women's lacrosse game i watched while touring the stevens institute of technology. i was curious about what women's lacrosse was "supposed" to look like, a confusion borne from my experience at that other half of a game: a debacle of mean-spiritedness that illuminated some things about high schooler morality but very little about lacrosse. it was a dumb argument that metastasized into spectacle, a strange outgrowth of berkeley high schoolers' general inability to adequately answer the question: why not?

one theme of all these stories is that berkeley high's educational model was largely "fuck around and find out." as a comfortably middle-class white kid, i typically "found out" about power relationships by being on the right side of them - by learning that the person putatively in charge of you was not, and that there was a whole universe of agency that i could learn to exercise.

most of the school's black kids had a very, very different experience.