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Adventures in the Land of High-Schoolness
Jan. 8th, 2001 10:35 pmYeah, so I went to go visit at my high school today. It was rather interesting. After 3:30 I got to hang out with the techie type people. It's been so long since I've been in the backstage area of a theater. It was so nice. Now, if only I could hang out with Advocate people. *sigh* But the Advocate office won't ever be quite the same as it was when I was there, back in Old Academy. (Old Academy being everything before I left, unlike Old Reed, which is everything before sophomore year.) And in Old Academy, 10-12 had assigned seating. And Senior Projects weren't required. I was one of the last lucky few (sixteen of us) who could spend the last four weeks of senior year taking classes on campus and being big slackers instead of spending a month on some project.
I didn't see as many people as I had hoped, so I plan to go back tomorrow, earlier this time. I had gone at two in the afternoon today, when there was an hour and a half left of school. But if I go tomorrow at about ten, I can go talk to Pam, Richard, visit Mr. Gray's English class, and visit GSA at lunch. At GSA I'll probably talk about how not involved in QA I am, because it's quite a different creature from GSA. But then, Reed is quite a different creature from Academy. At Reed, there's no need for a full-scale war against homophobia. (Does homophobia even exist at Reed? If it does, it certainly doesn't exist to a problematic extent.) Ooh, and in Mr. Gray's English class, I can talk about Heart of Darkness again! A rather depressing book, that, especially when you read it right after Maus and simultaneously with We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and then watching Apocalypse Now. I'll have to mention that Movie Board showed that last semester. Oh, and all of this reading came at about the time of Manoa's death. (Hey, look, I can call it by name now. Progress!) So, about then, everything was death and depression. Very icky. I'm still messed up from that. Oh, and the anniversary of Manoa's death will be the weekend after the first week of classes at Reed. Hmm, maybe I'll get drunk that weekend. At least at the beginning. Then that Sunday I think a little celebration is in order. A celebration of life. Nothing morbid. No need to piss and moan about how short life is and how much it sucks that people die. People die, so what? Sometimes very suddenly, out of the blue, very innocently, hit by a man running from the police and running a red light at 80 m.p.h. and then rolling into a ditch. And sometimes you hear about it gathered together with your entire graduating class in the theater, everybody waiting in awful silence, a silence magnified by someone who knows and is sobbing uncontrollably and you've never seen this person cry before, and magnified by an underclassman running from the auditorium screaming because in the auditorium the news filtered through each row before any official announcement was made, and someone who hears the screaming cries out for someone to say something, and once the news is delivered, a collective gasp echoes in the theater. And afterwards, you go, numb, to collect your things from where you left them in Applied Geometry class, in Mr. Hause's classroom. You put away your drafting board, your triangles, your drafting pencil, eraser, technical pens; drift through the Senior Commons, go for a walk out on the mesa, assuring yourself that you're alive. You go to the Advocate office, where no one else is, to notify friends at college by e-mail. You go to see if anyone has actually gone to class. No. The only reason anyone is sticking around at all is to get lunch, which is provided for all. You go back to the Advocate office to find a response already. It punctures the numbness. You go play music, Bach's cello suites, paying no attention to tempo, or rhythm even. Then you go and join classmates in the commons, thinking, "Happy 28th," remembering Darin's balloons and cake for Haley and noting the irony. It seems there is no more comfort in the world.
Tomorrow when I'm at Academy again, I shall have to go visit Manoa's memorial, which we built as a class, out on the mesa, instead of having an English final.
I didn't see as many people as I had hoped, so I plan to go back tomorrow, earlier this time. I had gone at two in the afternoon today, when there was an hour and a half left of school. But if I go tomorrow at about ten, I can go talk to Pam, Richard, visit Mr. Gray's English class, and visit GSA at lunch. At GSA I'll probably talk about how not involved in QA I am, because it's quite a different creature from GSA. But then, Reed is quite a different creature from Academy. At Reed, there's no need for a full-scale war against homophobia. (Does homophobia even exist at Reed? If it does, it certainly doesn't exist to a problematic extent.) Ooh, and in Mr. Gray's English class, I can talk about Heart of Darkness again! A rather depressing book, that, especially when you read it right after Maus and simultaneously with We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and then watching Apocalypse Now. I'll have to mention that Movie Board showed that last semester. Oh, and all of this reading came at about the time of Manoa's death. (Hey, look, I can call it by name now. Progress!) So, about then, everything was death and depression. Very icky. I'm still messed up from that. Oh, and the anniversary of Manoa's death will be the weekend after the first week of classes at Reed. Hmm, maybe I'll get drunk that weekend. At least at the beginning. Then that Sunday I think a little celebration is in order. A celebration of life. Nothing morbid. No need to piss and moan about how short life is and how much it sucks that people die. People die, so what? Sometimes very suddenly, out of the blue, very innocently, hit by a man running from the police and running a red light at 80 m.p.h. and then rolling into a ditch. And sometimes you hear about it gathered together with your entire graduating class in the theater, everybody waiting in awful silence, a silence magnified by someone who knows and is sobbing uncontrollably and you've never seen this person cry before, and magnified by an underclassman running from the auditorium screaming because in the auditorium the news filtered through each row before any official announcement was made, and someone who hears the screaming cries out for someone to say something, and once the news is delivered, a collective gasp echoes in the theater. And afterwards, you go, numb, to collect your things from where you left them in Applied Geometry class, in Mr. Hause's classroom. You put away your drafting board, your triangles, your drafting pencil, eraser, technical pens; drift through the Senior Commons, go for a walk out on the mesa, assuring yourself that you're alive. You go to the Advocate office, where no one else is, to notify friends at college by e-mail. You go to see if anyone has actually gone to class. No. The only reason anyone is sticking around at all is to get lunch, which is provided for all. You go back to the Advocate office to find a response already. It punctures the numbness. You go play music, Bach's cello suites, paying no attention to tempo, or rhythm even. Then you go and join classmates in the commons, thinking, "Happy 28th," remembering Darin's balloons and cake for Haley and noting the irony. It seems there is no more comfort in the world.
Tomorrow when I'm at Academy again, I shall have to go visit Manoa's memorial, which we built as a class, out on the mesa, instead of having an English final.
