January 13, 2019:
I was in the gifted program, so they matched me with a lawyer. Let's explore how this happened.
The purpose of the gifted program was to separate the kids who were destined for college and therefore white-collar professions from the mass of blue-collar students who either dropped out or received vocational training. Thus the match. They placed me with a white-collar professional, an attorney, rather than with the rougher blue-collar dudes who would have been better fits for me culturally.
They also, I think, would have been better for me in general. It's my sense that those dudes joined the program because they wanted to be helpful to the kids. My attorney bud wanted to be helpful to himself. Participation in the program was a checkbox he ticked on his ascension to judgeship and sinecure. Its was CV fodder and it had nothing to do with me personally, nor with the subsequent Little Brother they paired him with after he and I quarreled.
Not that anyone, working class or otherwise, would have been actually good for me. The entire program was a patronizing fraud. Based around the sexist, condescending notion that young boys "need" adult men in their lives, or else — what? They turn to crime? Grow up gay? Horrors!
I didn't need an abstract "adult male" in my life. I needed competent teachers of whatever gender. Adults who took genuine interest in my emerging identity and personality, who'd put effort and insight into sussing how to nurture those aspects of myself which made me uniquely me.
Good fucking luck.