The Finish Line

Day 61 of walking

This Saturday is academic decathlon, which means Catholic school children all across the state of California currently hate life. On Sunday they will love decathlon and proclaim it the best experience ever. It’s a lot like pregnancy and child birth, only in this case it lasts 6 months and the prize at the end is a picnic full of junk food and maybe a medal.

Mikey lost all motivation to study this final week. He’s tired, he’ll never memorize everything, he hates the plant life cycle and Phoebus Levene and flash cards. I told him he’s made it this far, so he can’t drop to a crawl 10 feet from the finish line. It’s sprint time, so stop whining and start running. (You know, encouraging stuff.) Then we blasted the Rocky (Main Theme) song at full blast on repeat because we are, above all things, geeks. An hour later he had his headphones on and was humming the theme to Rocky so loudly as he pounded the keys on Quizlet that I thought the walls were going to crumble down around us in an inspiring and heroic fashion.