I was online today purchasing some sort of Age-Defying, Youth Enhancing, Wrinkling Asskicking moisturizer. I am 26 years old and am just starting to see the beginnings of lines on my face that are eventually going to mature into wrinkles.

Full-on panic-mode… ENGAGE.

It’s been a decade since I bought my first car – a blue 1972 Dodge Dart that I spent $500 for at an auction. Five hundred dollars worth of freedom. It feels like ages ago, but it was only ten years.

I pulled straight A’s throughout my entire grade school career. However, sometime around 7th grade,  friends and boys and hanging out suddenly became more important, and things went downhill. This trend continued into highschool, when I purchased said car.

I failed Physics the year I bought it. I didn’t fail because I couldn’t do the work. I failed because I couldn’t show up. I spent more time in parks and diners and just driving around than I did in class.

So I had to go to summer school. My summer science teacher, as it turned out, was the very same who had failed me in his Physics class. I’d interacted very little with him during the year, since I usually wasn’t even out of bed by the time his class began. He was a late-twenty-something, sloppy-haired, beardy man who looked like he’d crawled out of a 70’s era skateboarding video. He was having a fairly well-known affair with a married English teacher. In my infinite 16-year-old wisdom, I hated him. I hated him because I thought he was a pompous, English-teacher-shagging, has-been scenester who had had the audacity to fail me. I mean come on – I’m friggin’ awesome. You don’t fail me.

So I shuffled through summer school, showing up sometimes, but sometimes not. I appeared ostentatiously for class one morning and found my seat, and was about to busy myself with something conspicuously unrelated to class when another student inquired as to our teacher’s favorite band.

“Fugazi.”

Fugazi?! Near and dear to my heart, Fugazi was then and still is in my top five favorite bands of all time.

Music snob that I was, I decided to test him.

“What about Rites of Spring or Embrace?”

Rites of Spring was the precursor to Fugazi, containing several of the same members and produced by Ian MacKaye, who would go on to be Fugazi’s singer. Embrace was Ian MacKaye’s band before he hooked up from the gents from Rites of Spring to form Fugazi. Savvy?

He’d never heard of them. Oooh FAIL. Never hesitant to show off my music collection, I offered to let him borrow the albums and he gladly accepted. The next week he brought them back to me and put them on my desk, saying, “Thank you” and nothing more. Thank you? They certainly warranted more than that, so after class I decided to pick his brain about what he had though of the albums. He didn’t care much for either of them, but he appreciated them, so we talked about the rawness of both bands and how they evolved and merged into what would eventually become one of the most legendary post-punk hardcore bands ever. We moved on to other shared favorites and talked at great length over the next week about everything and everyone from Jello Biafra to Rancid. We were joking about something vaguely Henry Rollins related when he paused.

“Please don’t make me fail you again.”

We had managed to mostly avoid any discussion of my academics until this point. I was content to talk to him about music. I didn’t really want to hear his opinion of my schoolwork. However, there was no condescension in the request – it was sincere. He liked me and he didn’t want to have to be my enemy.

I had decided he wasn’t so bad, either, and that I should at least do him the courtesy of a modest effort in his class.

“I won’t.

And we carried on chatting about bands, until summerschool ended, and I pranced off with a passing grade. I don’t even remember his name.

I learned a lot about perception from the exchange. He wasn’t the lowlife I thought he was. He was a lot like me, really. He didn’t really want to be a grown up – he would have rather been going to the same shows and festivals that my friends and I were driving out to every weekend. But he had a job and he had to be a professional, even if that meant failing slackers like me, even if he didn’t really want to.

It’s something I try to remember in my interactions with people. That my perceptions of others and their perceptions of me are likely very flawed. And that sometimes my perception of myself is equally as flawed.

And that maybe my laugh lines which are soon to be wrinkles will not be what people see when they think of me, or when they remember me years from now.

Maybe they’ll just remember that I was always late and loved Fugazi.