I vaguely recall during ninth grade that after the first semester of earth science I was promoted to the honors version of earth science for the second semester for some reason not so clear, maybe because my grades were good. A month or two into the second semester I received a report card on which Mr. Freund, our earth science teacher in ninth grade, had written a cryptic comment, something about how he perhaps regretted promoting me to honors science because he was now observing me being somewhat quiet, not talking to people around me very much, which he interpreted as me having become too proud and arrogant as a result. Perhaps he had not noticed that I always was quiet and didn't talk very much to people around me in the earlier class either. My personal reaction to this very personal comment is sort of ambivalence and mixed feelings because why is all responsibility for friendliness dumped on my shoulders while everyone around me is coolly ignoring me, so proudly and arrogantly self-absorbed are they in their own adolescent preoccupations? I may have said something to that effect but it is sort of hard for me to discuss this minor point when any comment I might make to whoever will almost certainly be flipped into some strange configuration, as I had already learned somehow. So that is a two-way street. Anyway, it was nice of Mr. Freund to promote me to honors science. That at least made me feel good about my academic abilities. But as for my personal relationships in high school, it really was more complicated than Mr. Freund alone could possibly understand.
I vaguely recall that in downtown San Salvador there is a very large store called "Freund's" where we sometimes shopped. One tends to assume that our Mr. Freund was not the one minding the store or he would not have needed to be teaching science at the high school. Also, I was never a shop girl so it was really not his place to fire me. We could say something similar about the Siman's department store. I was not planning to say about anything else about that but some people apparently have nothing else to talk about so uneventful and boring are their sad lives.
