The high school meme thing

[bunrab]

angevin2 says everyone's doing this, so here's mine:
What year was it?
um, my last year of high school was 70-71, it was my junior year.

What were your three favorite bands/musicians?
Simon & Garfunkle, Peter Paul & Mary, Leonard Cohen

What was your favorite outfit?
Pretty much what I'm still wearing now: jeans, button-up shirt, boots.

What was up with your hair?
It was always either too long or too short.

Who were your best friends?
Um, I only had a few friends at all. Rick, I guess - the Mad Merry Midget; electronix repairs done cheap. We're still in touch - in fact, he lives directly across the street from my old elementary school.

What did you do after school?
Orchestra rehearsals, underground radio station, the crowd in Rick's car drinking cheap wine. (It was a '60 Chevy; it could seat about 8 people in comfort!!!)

Did you take the bus?
When it rained, yes; the rest of the time, bicycle.

Who did you have a crush on?
Crush? I had undiagnosed major depression. I'm pretty sure I never noticed anybody; if I did, I don't remember it.

Did you fight with your parents?
Let's see: drop out of high school, run away to Boston, change name... yeah, I would say I fought with my parents. I went on occasional hunger strikes, once spent 24 hours sitting curled up under the kitchen table refusing to move, spit on my stepmother... I was nasty.

Who did you have a CELEBRITY crush on?
Nobody? I didn't go to movies, had no idea of who any of those celebrities were; I guess the closest I came to a crush was wanting the singing voice of ANY of the folksingers I liked - didn't care who, if only I could sing like a folksinger... a good singing voice of any sort was what I wanted from them.

Did you smoke cigarettes?
No. Ick. Did not even hang out in the same room with people who smoked cigarettes. Other substances now...

Did you lug all of your books around in your backpack all day because you were too nervous to find your locker?
High school was different back then. It was peak baby boom years. We pretty much HAD to store stuff in our lockers - there'd have been no room in the halls at all if everyone had those backpacks people carry around today.

Did you have a 'clique'?
I suppose the underground radio station electronix geeks crowd counted as a clique - the people who were doing the equivalent of a magnet program, though we didn't call it that then, in electronics and the sciences. I wasn't doing the electronics stuff, had no interest in TV repair, but I was doing the math and science thing, and very early computer courses - I expected to go to college as a math major and learn to use the giant computers. So, there was a small crowd of us allowed to touch the PDP-8e. And I edited the electronics program newsletter and drew cartoons for it. I guess that was a clique - certainly no one else in the whole school ever had the faintest idea what we were talking about or doing.

Did you have "The Max" like Zach, Kelly, and Slater?
Someone explained that this was apparently a restaurant. I never had that kind of money, and neither did most of the people I knew - we couldn't have afforded to hang out at a restaurant every day!! For many of us, even the school cafeteria was a stretch on our budget and we usually brought our own lunches. My after-school hangout budget ran to about two candy bars a week plus 50 cents chipped in toward the cheap wine aforementioned.

Admit it, were you popular?
Outside of my immediate classes, if there were more than 6 people in the school who knew my name, other than my teachers and the other people in the violin section of the orchestra, I'd be mightily surprised. I was not only not popular, I was damn near invisible.

Who did you want to be just like?
Anybody else whatsoever would have been an improvement over being me.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
Anything but what I was and anywhere but where I was. Concert violinist would have been nice but I already knew that was unobtainable; writing the great american novel would have been nice, but I suspected I'd kill myself long before I finished a novel; immediate goal was to get a college degree in math and then figure out some way to use it.

Where did you think you'd be at the age you are now?
Dead.

Comments

[momily.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, Kelly!

Sounds like we had a lot in common in high school, too. I was always the odd one out, my friends were the ones who nobody else could stand/understand, did the drug thing, was basically completely miserable.

I've never gone back to a single high school reunion, don't plan to, EVER. I hope they all curl up and die. Oh wait, that's not very Christian. I hope they all get seriously dry skin and cedar fever.

Isn't it nice to be 50 and contented?

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

I have never gone back to a reunion either!! After 9/11, someone from our class was emailing everyone about who had died, "surely you remember X, and Y who was president of the This Club or That..." nope, not a one of 'em. I mean, I was sorry to hear they died, but they were people who ignored me and vice versa.

I love your moderated wishes for those people; may I borrow the wording for my wishes for my old classmates?

I wouldn't go back to being a teenager again for a billion dollars.