thoughts on me as a 7th grader
I started to do one of those "what were you doing X number of years ago" surveys, and it led in an interesting direction. To find out what I was doing 10 years ago, I pulled out my journal from the time, and decided to type up the entries from right around this time ten years ago. Here are some highlights.
There's an entry from Sunday, December 6th, 1998. Here it is, verbatim, with the heading I wrote included:
Weekend- 18 words
Well, I had a :( weekend. I thought about M. a lot. I also got in trouble. G'night. -Kati :(
[I'm omitting M.'s real name b/c I still know her. She was a friend of mine who I was upset with at the time.]
There's a more interesting story a week later- December 13th, 1998:
The girl who was hit by a car
A girl was hit leaving Fulton [my school], Thursday. Hit, I mean by a car. I saw her taken off in a stretcher covered by a white sheet. It was very scary. My friend Erica Hamilton saw it too and thought she had died. I was with Amanda Glithero at Drama Club then. My mom drove Amanda home, and before we left the school, my mom talked to Dr. Strange (the vice-principal) about some girls she saw running across the intersection diagonally. He said, "Right. A girl was just hit on the other corner. She was skipping class and was trying to get back in time for the bus home." [My junior high was on a busy intersection across from a shopping center and restaurants where kids would go to skip school.] Later, I heard that she was a new girl to our school, she was Mexican, and she was teased in her art class, so she skipped it. Other people said she wasn't skipping on purpose, she was confused about the bells and didn't speak English. Anyway, she lost! her middle finger and broke 2 ribs, her leg and arm. My friend Brittany Hanners saw her get hit. And as we were leaving, Amanda, my mom, Kelly, and I saw the woman who hit her crying very hard. It must have been terrible for her.
*****
The weird thing about that is I'd TOTALLY forgotten this ever happened. I wonder when I stopped thinking about it- maybe a few weeks after it happened. I have a really good memory, but I can hardly even call up these memories. Normally I can picture incidents (I have a visual/photographic memory and can "see" my memories), but I really can't here. I guess there wasn't much for me to actually see when this happened. I can't remember the stretcher, but I can vaguely recall the crying woman. I think a man had his arm around her. I can imagine what the stretcher looked like and where it would have been, but I can't actually remember seeing it.
It's a pretty dramatic thing to forget, isn't it? I think I know why I forgot, though. 7th grade was really crazy. It probably is for most kids. I was dealing with being really unpopular and losing most of my friends from 6th grade, when I'd been reasonably well-liked and had close friends in school. I was teased at school. I was in awe of the older kids. I was over-involved in clubs and had too much homework. I was fascinated by the different types of kids at school- the sluts, the "preps" (remember that term? hahaha), the thugs, etc. Pretty typical for that age. And my mom was recovering from brain cancer and surgery, while my whole family was in turmoil.
And I kept seeing bad things all the time. First of all, I was keenly interested in current events and world affairs at the time, and the news would really get to me sometimes. I was upset about the war in Kosovo and freaked out by human rights abuses in the Middle East. There were a lot of school shootings, which made me think of my own school as a potential war zone (I'd come up with escape plans and hiding spots for most of my classrooms), and at the end of the school year, Columbine happened. There was a bomb threat at my school. And my school was pretty violent and depressing all year. Kids got in fights- bloody ones- all the time. My mom remembers Cody and I walking past kids getting arrested in front of the school and not even blinking. People were just always getting hauled off in ambulances and cop cars- I figured at least once a week- so it got really routine. A girl at school was in a car that was hit by a high school boy on a motorcycle going 80 MPH on 10th Street. The boy died and the girl was brain-damaged. I didn't know them, but it freaked me out. Another girl got hit by a car another time (I do remember that.) And there were probably other things I don't remember now.
Anyway, I thought all that was normal. And it's pretty common, that's true. Many schools are like that, and a lot of kids see things like that. In some ways I look back and think, "Yeah, that's life. Some pretty bad things happen. That's the way it is." And another part thinks, "Wow, that is really messed up that I was dealing with and seeing all that at the age of 12."
Kati