![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gmonkey42And I didn't have dinner last night because I fell asleep early after doing bad, naughty things with myself. Uhh. I think maybe I'll just have lunch early.
I saw this meme in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
luciusmalfoy's LJ. So I'll do it too. Because I am a huge luciusmalfoy wannabe.
My Life in High School Meme (I'll include Junior High too, since in America, high school is only four years)
The timing of some of these events might be a little off but this is as best as I can remember.
1992/93 - I meet some cool new people with whom I'll remain friends throughout high school and then hardly see any of them again. For the first time, there are advanced classes and I love that. Budding elitist that I am. The lockers are too small and we aren't supposed to keep stuff in them overnight in case of vandalism. I carry all my books with me everywhere and develop a mild case of scoliosis, which goes away later, after I get a better backpack. My friends and I eat lunch on some steps every day; it's our spot and to this day, those I haven't lost touch with remember it fondly.
It's odd making the transition from elementary school lunch recess to junior high lunchtime; I'm often torn between sitting around like I'm cool and playing tag or something. As a sort of compromise between the two, we sometimes borrow a basketball from the PE room and play.
The case of acne I was beginning to develop in 6th grade gets steadily worse, reaching a maximum in about 9th or 10th grade. Pressured by my mum, I begin trying a long series of products that are supposed to cure acne but have no discernable effect.
1993/94 - I find out that school can really suck. The advanced English and history classes are combined into one two-hour class from Hell, taught by a couple of dipwads who begin the school year by standing too close to each other and the male one says "we're married" (beat) "but not to each other." They spend the rest of the year irritating us with their lame-ass assignments (including writing a rap song about the book A Lantern in Her Hand - oh, how I wish I were making that up) and disturbing us with their wildly inappropriate touchy-feeliness towards each other.
For the first (and last) time, I become so apathetic that I fail to make the honor roll. This comes back to bite me in the ass at the end of the year, when a snotty parent of a friend says to my mum "isn't it nice that they got stars on their diplomas for being on the honor roll every semester," and my mum hadn't known about that because mine had no star.
Also, we have our first school dance this year and everyone's really awkward and hardly anyone dances.
For the end-of-eighth-grade trip, we go to Great America. I ride The Edge and it is scary as hell and totally sucks ass. The log ride is better.
The summer between junior high and high school, I start watching MTV and get really into grunge and Beavis and Butthead. And my brother and I drink gallons of Barq's Rootbeer for the cool Barqtoos.
1994/95 - Freshman year at Cal High. Things are looking up because the teachers here are better and the students are marginally less immature.
I quit Tae Kwon Do with a brown belt after struggling for months with worsening knee problems. That sucks but I wind up being too busy to do TKD anyway.
I have a crush on the history teacher who later turns out to be a total asshole. Also, he doesn't teach us much that we can actually use. We do a bunch of projects including (again, not making this up) playing the original Civilization PC game in groups and writing a history book of what happens to our civilization. One of my team-mates somehow deletes our saved-game file and I have to make up a story about the mysterious, Anasazi-like disappearance of our little society. We also make a video about the Renaissance and ours kicks ass. Because I am a control freak and am responsible for roughly 80 percent of it.
We also have an awesome English teacher and, though I continue to have a bad attitude about the subject that won't really go away until partway through university, I love the class and work hard at it. One of our projects for English (this class, unlike history, has both projects and plenty of real work) is to do a video or skit or some kind of presentation about a Greek myth. Agnes - who's been my friend since elementary school and lives in Kansas City now but we still keep in touch - and I get the Trojan War. We have a blast. When I saw her last, I asked if she'd seen Troy and if it made her think of our project. She had and it did.
1995/96 - I learn to drive a stick-shift but sophomores can't get parking permits so my mum continues to drive me to school.
I get the first in a series of awful math teachers. She actively hates each one of us individually, except for a few male students who are her pets. My performance in math begins to slip, never to recover fully, all because I had sucky math teachers in high school.
I continue taking Spanish (forgot to mention that earlier - I also took French in junior high but I dropped it). There's no advanced Spanish so we have instead "La Mesa," a table that seats four where the people who got the top four scores on the last exam get to sit. We have special privilages like getting to eat during class but we also have extra homework and every day, one of us has to go up and ask, in Spanish, what that extra assignment is. Unfortunately, by sophomore year, teenage depression is kicking in and my grades are already beginning to slip but I get to sit at La Mesa on and off.
1996/97 - Worst. Year. Ever. A bit overwhelmed taking Advanced Placement chem, bio and history, regular physics (honors physics doesn't fit into my schedule), honors trig and honors English. I had honors Spanish instead of physics to begin with but I didn't like the teacher so I dropped that. I did well in bio, history and physics but my performance overall had slipped. We had the same English teacher as we'd had for honors freshman English. Once, after I'd blown off a minor essay assignment, the teacher asked me to come into his office and he just said "what the hell's going on?" At the time, I said, truthfully, that I couldn't get As in everything and I had to make science and math classes my priority. And he accepted that but I could tell he was disappointed. It just struck me that most teachers wouldn't care, or they'd just be mad but this one knew I could do better (hypothetically, if I hadn't been so emotionally messed up that year) and that made such an impression on me.
The AP chem teacher wanted to retire several years ago but they'd never been able to find a replacement so he's stuck around and he clearly hates it. I do badly and end up not taking the AP exam because I'm unprepared for it. He thinks I'm a dumbass, though he's proven wrong six years later when I get my degree in biochemistry. Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to tell him. Yet.
The trig teacher is even worse. He has a sign on his office door that says "Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions" except 'don't' is crossed out. When we all do horribly on an exam, he blames us for not asking enough questions.
Also, I go semi-goth this year. Bear in mind, Hot Topic was still fairly new and edgy at this point. I cut my hair shorter than it'd ever been (though not as short as it is now) and later dye a chunk at the front blue.
This was the year some kids started a gay-straight alliance at my school and I joined. Though at the time I identified myself as one of the straights. Heh. We get a lot of flak from one particular vice principal, which would continue the following year.
I do frenzied dippy community service activities to put on my college applications. At some point, I take the PSAT, which will eventually lead to a National Merit Scholarship. For a surprisingly small amount of money, actually. 'But it's the prestiiiige,' one keeps telling oneself.
Also, I get the highest possible score on the AP biology exam (a 5, on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 and 2 being fails). I still remember, one of the essay questions was about designing an experiment about sea slug behavior and I included a diagram with little smiling sea slugs. I also got a 4 in AP U.S. history.
I miss the last four weeks or so of the school year because my ulcer (which went undiagnosed for years) is getting worse and I have to take antibiotics that make me sick. Also, the doctor is nice and writes a letter for me so I don't have to go to school. The trig teacher makes me come in over the summer to take the final. I get a C.
1997/98 - I apply to UC Davis. Nowhere else. I know I want to go there and that I'll get in. I get a few dumbass classmates saying "Davis? You're smart; why would you go to Davis" because they just know that it has a lot of cows and not that it's got an excellent biology department. I cut back on the class schedule a little, partly because there aren't many classes that I haven't already taken. We get the same teacher for AP economics as we had for freshman history and I clash with him over his insistence on not letting us make up exams missed due to VALID absences till the end of the quarter and therefore putting Fs and "in danger of failing" on our progress reports because we don't have a grade for that exam yet.
The gay-straight alliance is still going strong, now with more members and me and the only really openly gay male student I knew as co-presidents. At the beginning of the year, after our first membership drive, I try to call last year's president to tell her the club's still alive. Her mom answers the phone and says she's already gone away to college. I explain I'm the new co-president and I'm just calling to let her know we got a lot of people sign up to come to the first meeting. Because I know she and the other founder, both of whom graduated, were worried that there would be no club after they left. I think her mom understood, though I could tell she was suspicious, getting a call about the gay-straight alliance, but I got the impression she had no interest in passing along the message.
I take AP Art and end up failing the exam because I made the mistake of doing a "general" portfolio instead of "drawing." I choose this because I want to try sculpture, never having really done it before. I fault the teacher, who'd known me since freshman year, for not advising me to skip the experimental stuff for the portfolio and submit what I'm good at.
I also work on the campus newspaper and have a blast. The yearbook class (newspaper and yearbook count as classes) is next door to us and we hate them because they have pizza parties every Friday while we're rushing to meet deadlines, plus they take everyone's money and produce crappy yearbooks with people's pictures missing and names misspelled. Seriously.
More AP exams at the end of the year: a 3 in calculus and a 5 in English Lit. (When I write essays for exams, they tend to be better organized and with fewer page-long sentences). For the English exam, the main question was about a work of literature that's shocking. I argued that a modern audience wouldn't find any book shocking any more. I wrote about Slaughterhouse 5 and how the content isn't shocking but the structure of the plot is so unusual. I heard people sometimes write about Harry Potter for their AP English exams. I don't think that's foolish at all if one can write a good essay.
In AP English class, which, like my previous English classes had a few projects and plenty of essays, I make a comic book version of Jane Eyre. I get a rare (for that teacher) A+ and he keeps it to show students the following year. This is my first serious comic book, though I earlier did a well-written though poorly drawn (on lined notebook paper) James Bond comic. This is also the year I begin The X-Files Kids.
After graduation, I have a massive headache and miss the Senior Overnighter (sober-graduation thing), which my friends tell me was a whole lot of fun. And thus ends my high school career on a bitter note. I keep telling myself university will be millions of times better.
ETA:Oh! I can't believe I forgot to include this: I launch an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to change the graduation gowns to all black, after I learn at the end of junior year that the graduation gowns are black for boys and white for girls. I spend maybe half the following school year getting the administration to pay attention and finally having a school-wide survey. The majority of every group - both girls and boys in each of the four class-years - wants to keep the girls wearing the virginal white. Some people even get quite angry that I suggested the change and it's probably just as well that not a lot of people knew me. The administrator who wound up handling a lot of this was the same one who kept ordering the custodians to take down our signs for the gay-straight alliance meetings. After one meeting with him, I had to go to the bathroom and puke. I wasn't nervous about talking to him or anything; in fact, I just coincidentally had a stomach bug. But it was still fun to tell my friends, who knew what he was like, about it and say "yeah, he just has that effect on people." But, I gurdgingly admit, he gave me a chance and was willing to change the gown policy if the students wanted it.
But I had my senior portrait taken with a black gown. Ha. Though I had to wear the white one at graduation.
This was fun. I should do one for university too.
I saw this meme in
luciusmalfoy's LJ. So I'll do it too. Because I am a huge luciusmalfoy wannabe.My Life in High School Meme (I'll include Junior High too, since in America, high school is only four years)
The timing of some of these events might be a little off but this is as best as I can remember.
1992/93 - I meet some cool new people with whom I'll remain friends throughout high school and then hardly see any of them again. For the first time, there are advanced classes and I love that. Budding elitist that I am. The lockers are too small and we aren't supposed to keep stuff in them overnight in case of vandalism. I carry all my books with me everywhere and develop a mild case of scoliosis, which goes away later, after I get a better backpack. My friends and I eat lunch on some steps every day; it's our spot and to this day, those I haven't lost touch with remember it fondly.
It's odd making the transition from elementary school lunch recess to junior high lunchtime; I'm often torn between sitting around like I'm cool and playing tag or something. As a sort of compromise between the two, we sometimes borrow a basketball from the PE room and play.
The case of acne I was beginning to develop in 6th grade gets steadily worse, reaching a maximum in about 9th or 10th grade. Pressured by my mum, I begin trying a long series of products that are supposed to cure acne but have no discernable effect.
1993/94 - I find out that school can really suck. The advanced English and history classes are combined into one two-hour class from Hell, taught by a couple of dipwads who begin the school year by standing too close to each other and the male one says "we're married" (beat) "but not to each other." They spend the rest of the year irritating us with their lame-ass assignments (including writing a rap song about the book A Lantern in Her Hand - oh, how I wish I were making that up) and disturbing us with their wildly inappropriate touchy-feeliness towards each other.
For the first (and last) time, I become so apathetic that I fail to make the honor roll. This comes back to bite me in the ass at the end of the year, when a snotty parent of a friend says to my mum "isn't it nice that they got stars on their diplomas for being on the honor roll every semester," and my mum hadn't known about that because mine had no star.
Also, we have our first school dance this year and everyone's really awkward and hardly anyone dances.
For the end-of-eighth-grade trip, we go to Great America. I ride The Edge and it is scary as hell and totally sucks ass. The log ride is better.
The summer between junior high and high school, I start watching MTV and get really into grunge and Beavis and Butthead. And my brother and I drink gallons of Barq's Rootbeer for the cool Barqtoos.
1994/95 - Freshman year at Cal High. Things are looking up because the teachers here are better and the students are marginally less immature.
I quit Tae Kwon Do with a brown belt after struggling for months with worsening knee problems. That sucks but I wind up being too busy to do TKD anyway.
I have a crush on the history teacher who later turns out to be a total asshole. Also, he doesn't teach us much that we can actually use. We do a bunch of projects including (again, not making this up) playing the original Civilization PC game in groups and writing a history book of what happens to our civilization. One of my team-mates somehow deletes our saved-game file and I have to make up a story about the mysterious, Anasazi-like disappearance of our little society. We also make a video about the Renaissance and ours kicks ass. Because I am a control freak and am responsible for roughly 80 percent of it.
We also have an awesome English teacher and, though I continue to have a bad attitude about the subject that won't really go away until partway through university, I love the class and work hard at it. One of our projects for English (this class, unlike history, has both projects and plenty of real work) is to do a video or skit or some kind of presentation about a Greek myth. Agnes - who's been my friend since elementary school and lives in Kansas City now but we still keep in touch - and I get the Trojan War. We have a blast. When I saw her last, I asked if she'd seen Troy and if it made her think of our project. She had and it did.
1995/96 - I learn to drive a stick-shift but sophomores can't get parking permits so my mum continues to drive me to school.
I get the first in a series of awful math teachers. She actively hates each one of us individually, except for a few male students who are her pets. My performance in math begins to slip, never to recover fully, all because I had sucky math teachers in high school.
I continue taking Spanish (forgot to mention that earlier - I also took French in junior high but I dropped it). There's no advanced Spanish so we have instead "La Mesa," a table that seats four where the people who got the top four scores on the last exam get to sit. We have special privilages like getting to eat during class but we also have extra homework and every day, one of us has to go up and ask, in Spanish, what that extra assignment is. Unfortunately, by sophomore year, teenage depression is kicking in and my grades are already beginning to slip but I get to sit at La Mesa on and off.
1996/97 - Worst. Year. Ever. A bit overwhelmed taking Advanced Placement chem, bio and history, regular physics (honors physics doesn't fit into my schedule), honors trig and honors English. I had honors Spanish instead of physics to begin with but I didn't like the teacher so I dropped that. I did well in bio, history and physics but my performance overall had slipped. We had the same English teacher as we'd had for honors freshman English. Once, after I'd blown off a minor essay assignment, the teacher asked me to come into his office and he just said "what the hell's going on?" At the time, I said, truthfully, that I couldn't get As in everything and I had to make science and math classes my priority. And he accepted that but I could tell he was disappointed. It just struck me that most teachers wouldn't care, or they'd just be mad but this one knew I could do better (hypothetically, if I hadn't been so emotionally messed up that year) and that made such an impression on me.
The AP chem teacher wanted to retire several years ago but they'd never been able to find a replacement so he's stuck around and he clearly hates it. I do badly and end up not taking the AP exam because I'm unprepared for it. He thinks I'm a dumbass, though he's proven wrong six years later when I get my degree in biochemistry. Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to tell him. Yet.
The trig teacher is even worse. He has a sign on his office door that says "Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions" except 'don't' is crossed out. When we all do horribly on an exam, he blames us for not asking enough questions.
Also, I go semi-goth this year. Bear in mind, Hot Topic was still fairly new and edgy at this point. I cut my hair shorter than it'd ever been (though not as short as it is now) and later dye a chunk at the front blue.
This was the year some kids started a gay-straight alliance at my school and I joined. Though at the time I identified myself as one of the straights. Heh. We get a lot of flak from one particular vice principal, which would continue the following year.
I do frenzied dippy community service activities to put on my college applications. At some point, I take the PSAT, which will eventually lead to a National Merit Scholarship. For a surprisingly small amount of money, actually. 'But it's the prestiiiige,' one keeps telling oneself.
Also, I get the highest possible score on the AP biology exam (a 5, on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 and 2 being fails). I still remember, one of the essay questions was about designing an experiment about sea slug behavior and I included a diagram with little smiling sea slugs. I also got a 4 in AP U.S. history.
I miss the last four weeks or so of the school year because my ulcer (which went undiagnosed for years) is getting worse and I have to take antibiotics that make me sick. Also, the doctor is nice and writes a letter for me so I don't have to go to school. The trig teacher makes me come in over the summer to take the final. I get a C.
1997/98 - I apply to UC Davis. Nowhere else. I know I want to go there and that I'll get in. I get a few dumbass classmates saying "Davis? You're smart; why would you go to Davis" because they just know that it has a lot of cows and not that it's got an excellent biology department. I cut back on the class schedule a little, partly because there aren't many classes that I haven't already taken. We get the same teacher for AP economics as we had for freshman history and I clash with him over his insistence on not letting us make up exams missed due to VALID absences till the end of the quarter and therefore putting Fs and "in danger of failing" on our progress reports because we don't have a grade for that exam yet.
The gay-straight alliance is still going strong, now with more members and me and the only really openly gay male student I knew as co-presidents. At the beginning of the year, after our first membership drive, I try to call last year's president to tell her the club's still alive. Her mom answers the phone and says she's already gone away to college. I explain I'm the new co-president and I'm just calling to let her know we got a lot of people sign up to come to the first meeting. Because I know she and the other founder, both of whom graduated, were worried that there would be no club after they left. I think her mom understood, though I could tell she was suspicious, getting a call about the gay-straight alliance, but I got the impression she had no interest in passing along the message.
I take AP Art and end up failing the exam because I made the mistake of doing a "general" portfolio instead of "drawing." I choose this because I want to try sculpture, never having really done it before. I fault the teacher, who'd known me since freshman year, for not advising me to skip the experimental stuff for the portfolio and submit what I'm good at.
I also work on the campus newspaper and have a blast. The yearbook class (newspaper and yearbook count as classes) is next door to us and we hate them because they have pizza parties every Friday while we're rushing to meet deadlines, plus they take everyone's money and produce crappy yearbooks with people's pictures missing and names misspelled. Seriously.
More AP exams at the end of the year: a 3 in calculus and a 5 in English Lit. (When I write essays for exams, they tend to be better organized and with fewer page-long sentences). For the English exam, the main question was about a work of literature that's shocking. I argued that a modern audience wouldn't find any book shocking any more. I wrote about Slaughterhouse 5 and how the content isn't shocking but the structure of the plot is so unusual. I heard people sometimes write about Harry Potter for their AP English exams. I don't think that's foolish at all if one can write a good essay.
In AP English class, which, like my previous English classes had a few projects and plenty of essays, I make a comic book version of Jane Eyre. I get a rare (for that teacher) A+ and he keeps it to show students the following year. This is my first serious comic book, though I earlier did a well-written though poorly drawn (on lined notebook paper) James Bond comic. This is also the year I begin The X-Files Kids.
After graduation, I have a massive headache and miss the Senior Overnighter (sober-graduation thing), which my friends tell me was a whole lot of fun. And thus ends my high school career on a bitter note. I keep telling myself university will be millions of times better.
ETA:Oh! I can't believe I forgot to include this: I launch an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to change the graduation gowns to all black, after I learn at the end of junior year that the graduation gowns are black for boys and white for girls. I spend maybe half the following school year getting the administration to pay attention and finally having a school-wide survey. The majority of every group - both girls and boys in each of the four class-years - wants to keep the girls wearing the virginal white. Some people even get quite angry that I suggested the change and it's probably just as well that not a lot of people knew me. The administrator who wound up handling a lot of this was the same one who kept ordering the custodians to take down our signs for the gay-straight alliance meetings. After one meeting with him, I had to go to the bathroom and puke. I wasn't nervous about talking to him or anything; in fact, I just coincidentally had a stomach bug. But it was still fun to tell my friends, who knew what he was like, about it and say "yeah, he just has that effect on people." But, I gurdgingly admit, he gave me a chance and was willing to change the gown policy if the students wanted it.
But I had my senior portrait taken with a black gown. Ha. Though I had to wear the white one at graduation.
This was fun. I should do one for university too.
