Senior Year

Dear J-

One of the reactions that gratified me in that first week of Leadership Academy last year was when I made the confession to the class — people I’d known for maybe three days — that I’d been taking pictures and posting them to the web via flickr. My excuses were many but boiled down to (ultimately) that I missed my family and this was the best way I knew how to keep in touch, given that my relatively cheap phone provided no coverage out in the boonies where we were. The response was swift and immediate: they copied down the websitie address and hastened to share it with the rest of their families so that they could see what they were doing on their week away from home. Unexpected, but gratifying.

I told them that whatever photos they didn’t want to see I could take down, but no one raised huge objections. It’s something I’ve been wrestling with a bit lately as we’re headed towards reunion times: first theVet hits her ten year veterinary school reunion in a few weeks, then I’m going to be twenty years out of high school next year, and then theVet hits her twenty year HS reunion the year after that. Man, twenty years out of high school sounds like an impossibly long time, inconceivable in 1992 — here’s a date to keep that’s out further than you’ve been alive. So quite separately from any official preparations I’ve been digitizing some of my old diary/journal entries from twenty years ago. The plan is to have that senior year online by publishing one a day until graduation or soon after — right now I’m thinking beginning of September 1991 through the end of March 1992.

I’m in the unique position of having kept that journal and its equisitely embarrassing entries senior year in high school (this is rich: one of the ones I worked on last night questioned that if I became famous inside of ten years, would I still make time to go to the reunion? Oh, the arrogance of a sixteen-year-old, convinced that fame is what’s most important). The question in my mind is whether to use names or initials. At the moment I’m sticking with the convention that my sixteen-year-old self has given, first names only and I think that’s probably fine. Without a frame of reference strangers aren’t going to be able to connect the dots while my graduating class will almost definitely be able to pick out who and what. Now what I need is to do something about the hormone-charged ogling that really makes me come across as something more crazed than I let on …

Mike

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High School Lesson Plan

Dear J-

Now that the new nursery is complete and the PE is out of the way we’re slowly easing back into television. A couple of weeks ago I was able to sit through a live episode of CSI not because of any special skill but because Calcifer would scream his head off if I sat down. theVet, with no such alarm, drifted off to sleep peacefullly and quickly, much as I would a week later gvien a similar situation. In pushing bedtime back half an hour I’m usually able to catch shows starting at 8:15 or so which means that I can now watch a good chunk of Glee. I know that the popular sentiment has been that this season hasn’t been as good as the last one — too much reliance on guest stars being the most common knock, not enough plot about scrappy underdogs — but truth be told, last night’s rerun was as good as one I’ve seen.

The episode’s title, “Never Been Kissed,” reflects the status of two characters, Kurt (the only openly gay student in school) and Coach Beiste (the new football coach). Although the plot twists can be seen a mile away (geez, what could be that bully’s problem) the execution is nonetheless masterful and the actors pull off convincing performances. This season (at least from what I’ve seen) has seen less of the rivalry between Schuester and Sylvester, and while that’s not necessarily positive (affording Jane Lynch less scene-chewing opportunities) I will say that Chris Colfer (Kurt) stole every scene he was in last night. Bullying runs like an undercurrent to every episode (they are the Glee Club, after all, and subject to the same socially stigmatized lives as any other niche pursuit) but last night provided a valuable lesson too: have courage to be the change and face up to it squarely, silence unfortunately implies victim assent.

Of all the classes in high school — six classes per trimester, three trimesters a year, three years = fifty-four different classes — the one I remember perhaps best is Advanced Placement Language Arts, to the point where if we graduated together and you weren’t in the class, J-, I don’t think nI would have remembered we were even in the same graduating group. I like to think that all my favorite people were in it but the truth is that of all the classes that one stretched me the furthest and asked me to grow the most. It comes back to the notion that Mrs. Nyman advanced about our comfort zones: you could stay in a comfortable rut for the rest of your life and even tolerate some transitory discomfort along the way in order to seek out a way to stay in your comfortable bubble, but it’s stepping outside that gives you the most oppportunity for growth.

Mike

P.S. Did I mention that I used to pick the rattiest-looking copies of assigned books initially to ensure that my indifferent handling wouldn’t result in a fine, but later when I knew I could keep them instead — Mrs. McDermott would write them off as total losses — I did it so I’d have copies of Pride and Prejudice and The Stranger?

1989 Again

Dear J-

Rain falls in gentle waves, washing sinner and saint alike in equal measure..  For some reason the single year I spent in band (freshman year, 9th grade) sticks out in my mind as being the longest or at least most memorable year of high school; it certainly demanded the most out of my extracurricular life (debate would carve out a few more slices, but nothing like the Friday night trips to away games in the fall).  Indeed, the rain that Saturday at Joe Albi for a band competition would have otherwise been spent indoors looking morosely out at the grey overhanging everything, were it not for band.

One thing research suggests is that adolescents have pretty well-developed satisfaction/pleasure centers in their brains, but the part responsible for consequences and reasoning isn’t quite all there until your early twenties; anyone who’s spent half an hour on a bus filled with high schoolers would be able to tell you that.  Being a classical nerd (let’s see — band, debate, math team, knowledge/quiz bowl; I’m only missing chess) had its compensations, after all — if I’d stuck with my original plan of soccer only, I wouldn’t be the well-rounded individual present and accounted for today.

It’s the rain that makes me flash back, though; we had plastic ponchos but we were all soaked through by the time we got to the final part of the competition.  I can’t remember how we placed, or what we played — all that remains is a soggy blur of hollering applause and random vignettes seen through streaky glass:  wiping the feathers in our hats (and called it macaroni) with my white gloves and watching the dye come off, literally, in my hands; the squelch of wet turf underfoot; the warm, dry bus ride back punctuated by staccato raindrops on windshield and roaring puddles under tire.  Where does your mind take you these rare southern California rainy days, J-?  I’m always in 1989 again at the slightest provocation.

Mike

Watching You

Dear J-

I’ve said before that we watch a lot of reality shows on television; as part of my regression into a truculent teenager, I located a copy of the book that kept me entertained through innumerable Saturday piano lessons (Anthology of Children’s Literature) thanks to the internet, and promptly delved in to some of my favorite fairy tales.  There is a thread of the unlikely hero running through reality shows; where else would ordinary folks get the chance to participate in their own Lord of the Flies (Survivor) or Around the World in 80 Days (Amazing Race)?

They speak to simpler motives in our lives; justice is edited to be swift and ruthlessly poetic (folks getting the villain edit will get some satisfying comeuppance — you can reliably count on that), just like wicked stepsisters or foolish older brothers.  Likewise, winners blossom like some ugly duckling, showing some hidden quality by the end of the show making you sigh with glee and ambition — if they can, surely I can too, right?  Best of all, it’s packaged in some easy-to-digest one hour chunk with an episodic resolution moving us closer to a goal of an ultimate winner.

Do you remember Mrs. Nyman from high school, J-?  We deconstructed archetypes of the Western in one of the assigned essays, virtuous heroes and chaste heroines and I, who didn’t grow up on Saturday afternoon Westerns (Have Gun, Will Travel was our signal that the cartoons were over) asked if I could use Star Trek instead:  crew drifting into lonely planets, week after week, cleaning up the messes, and leaving the population gratefully saved, riding a horse named Enterprise.  Everywhere you watch, it’s the same plot, wrapped up in a twist or quirk, but the same values show through with a little polish.

Mike

Band Geek

Dear J-

This time of year — we’re now three weeks in to having football nearly ’round the clock on weekends — reminds me of how I got started watching football in the first place.  You have to remember that I come from a family of non-sports watchers; my dad would pointedly turn the channel away from virtually every event save the Olympics, and the only exposure I got to sports was when cousins would come for their infrequent visits and insist on watching their favorite teams compete — so I grew up following the St. Louis Cardinals, mostly.  Football was right out — too violent, too arcane.

All that changed in high school; suddenly, with college looming on the horizon, we had to start gearing up for those things that colleges love:  grades, interviews, and extracurricular activities.  Grades wouldn’t be too much of an issue — I had you, J-, as a spur to goad me on, and as it turned out, I started to run out of classes to take senior year.  I definitely had to practice my interview skills, as it cost me at least one scholarship (and later, another one while in college, although I would have had to Michigan and work for Ford at the conclusion of that one — maybe it was dodging a bullet, really).  But extracurriculars?  When I was in elementary school I managed to injure myself in every single PE sport we attempted; I couldn’t punt, I couldn’t throw, I hadn’t been gifted with a single athletic bone in my body, though I secretly harbored dreams of being a place kicker — I wore holes in my right shoe kicking pine cones on the way to school.  Yet ours was a school where the starting kicker had a set of goal posts in his back yard and once kicked a 63-yard field goal just to see if he could.

With the experience of junior high chorus fresh in my mind (“Look, if you’re going to sing loudly AND off-key …”), I thus signed up for band freshman year.  At last, my years of piano lessons would pay off for … uh, marching band?  Of all the instruments to pick up, or rather, not — short of a lawn tractor, there’s no way you’re getting the piano out and mobile during a halftime show.  Thus I ended up in the “pit” whaling away on the glockenspiel, along with the other folks with immobile instruments (generally, percussion folks).  But oh how I envied those out on the field — sure, we all had the same uniforms, but I wasn’t out there making patterns visible only to folks in the stands (it’s harder than it looks — I sometimes wonder how the creators of the Nazca lines achieved their precision).  And, of course, we played every home football game and that year, as our team went deep into the playoffs, reaching the state championship, we traveled to exotic Moscow (Idaho, for the Kibbie Dome) and Seattle (the Kingdome, already exhibiting signs of tattiness).

Long trips, mixed company (really, how often do cheerleaders get to travel with their teams, and aren’t there usually far more team members than cheerleaders, anyway), teenage hormones, and large numbers conspired to make more than a few private situations on the bus rides.  Let this be a lesson:  there are benefits to being mocked for being in the band.  Those American Pie movies aren’t far off the mark, ironically.

Mike

Debatable Glory

Dear J-

We caught a fragment of movie yesterday — Rocket Science — which managed to catapult me back twenty years to that first taste of high school debate; we spent half the time in awe of those kids who could seemingly talk as though their jaws were hinged twice, so they could flap quickly yet somewhat distinctly, and, in the very next breath, shift alliances to the other side of a topic.  The idea being that you never know — luck of the draw — which side you’re going to have to argue, so having to defend both gives you a finer understanding of the issue.

The problem being that, as high school students arguing in front of often disinterested judges (judges are drawn from three pools of people:  bus drivers, coaches — who usually are the best judges, as they want to teach the debaters to be better, but often form the very smallest pool, and cynical ex-debaters back from college on holiday — who want to prove whose is biggest), you fall back on one trick:  volume.  The thought being that by sheer number of points, you can overwhelm your opposition into submission if they fail to answer even a single one of your points.  Thus there’s a small industry in summer debate camps, where you share evidence (pro and con) and create “disadvantages” that can be tied to any number of constructive cases, showing how if you go with plan X, you introduce the end of the world.

Thus the dance goes between making your constructive case as splinter-y as possible, so that nothing sticks, and making your disadvantage as sticky as can be, so you can throw it up against anything.  Plus there’s the fact that you end up debating the same kids several times over the year, so eventually, if your case fails to evolve, disadvantages seem to stick that much better.  One year we were going to explore space through micro-satellites, which because of the miniaturization of technology, would end in a nanobot-controlled future with all of humanity dead.  See, everything brings about the end of the world.  Want to feed gramma?  That’ll cost you … to fund that program, you’re going to take away from the defense budget, and then the communists win (c’mon, it was still the Cold War).

It was great, and it gave me a stutter, I think.  We walked around in pretentious self-importance and I still miss the feeling of raw verbal combat at times.

Mike

High School (Aren’t We Joe Cool Yet?)

I’m not convinced I got the most out of high school. But at least I got out.

*****

To be honest, things didn’t change much in high school. The hair of the student body didn’t pose the fire hazard that it used to, but we stayed in the groups that we’d split into as junior high people. I don’t condemn it because it just happens and seems as natural as plate tectonics: huge masses rushing towards each other and one would inevitably grind the other down, but not without rumbling and trembling. It’s not always a wasteland, though; sometimes you find genuinely honest and wonderful people, like some of my neighboring locker-owners. We all had to deal with the peculiar quirks of the school, such as how it was designed for southern California weather (and hence was a series of disconnected buildings) while experiencing a snow-belt reality. I still like almost all of the people who graduated with me, but it was difficult to reach across the group borders afterwards; I have yet to contact probably 90% of my graduating class with something stronger than a rumor.

Crushes (man, how unexciting am I)

This is my favorite post in the series, and actually had names embedded in the HTML comments. J-, you’re on here too, and I don’t think you ever really left, to be honest.

*****

I moved to a different elementary school fairly early on and achieved some of my most visible academic achievements there (“Student is a joy to have in class,” comment code #12, I think). I remember thinking that my second grade teacher was dazzlingly beautiful and pitied the kids in the other second grade for having such a drab teacher. A few years later I had a series of crushes, and I didn’t really know what was going on until about the third or fourth one — before, I just found that I couldn’t look that person in the face before having to turn away, dazzled by glory and beauty and wisdom and the great headiness of keeping an open secret. I decided that the world and I could get along, the way things were going. I wouldn’t feel that way again until my third year of college.