There were four schools in our district total: two elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. So I had been in school with about a third of my graduating class since kindergarten. I've been thinking about my high school career (since the reunion thing) and how I came away with a sum total of one friend, and even she I haven't talked to in years.
What happened?
It's an astonishing failure on my part, isn't it? It wasn't that I had no friends at that stage in my life - my best friends are people who I've known since I was born. Our parents were also friends, and we knew each other through church; we just didn't go to the same school. Still, how was it possible that I spent that much time around kids in my class and yet connected with them so little?
College went much better and the places I've lived since then, as well. I've put more effort into meeting people; it's become more important to me. And there was the introduction of alcohol into my life and social circles. (If I had partied at all in high school, I feel like things would have looked a lot different.)
The other thing, on top of that, was that being an aspiring Christian girl, trying to do things right, had me only consuming Christian, church-approved media. Plus, we only got two and a half channels of TV at my house. (I want to be a television writer, now, and I've had to do a lot of catch up on my pop culture, my influences really starting probably senior year in college.)
Mitch showed me this the other day... I've started to get on something of a Jack Black kick.
Tenacious D came out with this album in 2001 - when I was a freshman in high school! (Also, Mr. Show is amazing amazing amazing.) I love this so much, and I needed it so badly as a little freshman. Something weird and funny that I could connect with other people about. I instead was spending my time being a committed but mediocre athlete, focusing on "right-living", and, you know, school. I guess I got an education.
Recently, somebody in my writing class was doing a spec episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt where she was just learning to masturbate and realizing that she could have masturbated her way through her 15 years in the bunker if only she had just known about it. The angst! The regret! That's how I feel about my relationship to pop culture, comedy in particular, in high school.
I'm not going to my ten-year high school reunion. It's mostly because Mitch and I can only do so much traveling, and we'd rather go visit our friends in Chicago, but. But I have been tempted to just go see what re-meeting those people would be like, see if I can do some last-minute reclamation of relationships I failed at making for twelve years.
I suspect that going back would make me feel like my high school self, that it would be too much. That earth is salted, man.
No. I don't know. It's just this large block of my life where I think, the fuck was I doing? Subject to altered memory, of course, and hindsight bias. But anyway.
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