graduation: the near disaster
So yeah, friday was graduation and all, my siblings are in from california and texas, shoved into our exceptionally cute but tiny 2 bedroom house (air matresses. gotta luv em)
first things first: finish off highschool credits, then paying fines so that i could finally get the tickets (and be elligible to walk. that would have been VERY bad). basically, this involved lunch w/ lara, driving, manicure (i just discovered i adore being pampered.... combine this w/ the free massages at my office and im set for life), free coldstones ice cream (leigh i adore you!), bank,driving, emailing 2 papers to myself thanks to my dead printer, forging a few signatures, driving, printing off emailed papers, lying about forged signatures (god im smooth), and then practice right afterwards. so basically, i finished my high school credits at 5:30 thursday.
thursdays ALSO the day the school finally realized, after TWO YEARS, that id passed CIM. they never entered my records from riverdale into their school system, so all last year while trying to do college aps i had no records of my sophomore year in high school. didn't look so hot. So they call my mom to say 'oh... btw your daughter passed CIM, and she needs to come to the school and pick up her chords'. so that was amoungst the numerous hours of driving on thursday w/ lara (this was before officially completing high school)
OK! NOW for the day of graduation!!!!
all started out w/ realizing i didn't have shoes to wear for it. so my sister, the shopping addict, decides we should go to nordstrome rack. for about 2 hours. let me put it this way: id found cheap, cute shoes and had even looked for, and failed to find jeans, all in about 15 minutes. then rest was kinda just standing around for me. after a good and long hour and a half, we get a call from my brother saying 'uhhh... yeah im in portland now, wanna come pick me up?' and the answer being 'hmmm we'll be there in a bit. we're buying shoes'
i think we finally managed to pick him up half an hour later.
went out for sushi, mad chaos involving my mom and her helping out w/ the grad party, racing back to the house so they could pick up my stereo for it (which i dont think i got back ever), and then i was left trying to find a last minute ride to the graduation ceremony
here's where the fun starts!!!
So we had to be at the U.portland around 6, no later than 6:15, and if we got there after 7 we basically couldn't be in the ceremony (theyd seat you in the very back or something). we mapquest the place, find a semi-direct route there, and take off 20 minutes later than we'd initially wanted to (bad omen. very very bad omen). this is after my sister spent 30 minutes trying to primp me up in numerous outfits before finally saying 'well.. what you were wearing originally would be fine'. GRR!!! so not cool!
so we take germantown, an extremely curvy, somewhat dangerous one-lane backroad to get to the middle of no where in downtown portlad, which coincidentally is where we needed to go. so we're going, we're driving, we're managing to stay on the road until we nearly crash into the cars infront of us, which are all stopped as far as we can see. notably, the farthest ahead you can see at any point on that road is maybe 7 cars, but still. everyone was stopped. so we're thinking 'ok, we still have half an hour'. 10 minutes later, we've moved about 10 cars lengths and keep randomly screaming at the cars infront of us in frustration. by the time we got to the bridge, we were starting to get hoarse
after we cross the bridge, our directions stop making sense and we gradually become more and more confused. So our natural reaction is to find someone else driving there we know and just follow them
Unfortunately, this lead to us trying to follow someone that was one car behind us. who was trying to follow us at the same time. (YES I REALIZE THAT THIS MAKES NO SENSE!!!) by this time carol and i were both making panic calls on cellphone saying 'where the hell are we?!' and text messages other people saying "just so you can laugh at me, im fucking lost and going to miss my own graduation"
So after getting incredibly frustrated, we pull into a burgerville, where dan, the guy we'd been trying to follow despite him being behind us, decides to lead this time cause he 'knew where to go'(bullshit). so hes driving, we pass the correct street w/o turning onto it, he keeps goign endlessly, takes a huge U turn and by then im like "we have 20 minutes til the ceremony starts and hes busy making U-turns!!!" so, extremely frustrated, paniced, stressed, etc, we just stop following him, we're both on our cells trying to figure out where we are still and whether or not we're going the right direction. by this time im calling people who graduated last year trying to ask for help and theyre giving up and are about to mapquest it for us, but no one even knew the address for the place.
SOMEHOW we make it (thank you alice...), we park a fairly long distance away cause everything packing place is taken and we're freakishly late, we grab our crap and start sprinting in high heels clutching onto our graduation gowns. AAAAAANNNND JUST to make matters worse, my tassle falls off during all this. so it was a very last minute scramble w/ the vice principal ripping through extra graduation gowns and caps trying to find tassles for me and ester (who had apparently also lost hers... least im not the only one)
then to top things off, carol izzy and i all realized we had our purses still, so we got to carry those under our graduation gowns, aka: the giant purple mumus.
so the ceremony finally starts (i think we got there 5 minutes before this), the guy we'd been following was the first graduate ever not to arrive in time and got to sit in the very back, and during the ceremony my entire row takes out their cellphones and starts text messaging people. absolutely hilarious. and john hext and joey hazel were throwing their phones back and forth.... amazing. announcers killed virtually every name possible to mispronounce, alex was hilarious, valedictorians' speech was worse than normal, ceremony finally ends. hehe then izzy calls me while we're walking out, i drop my phone while trying to answer it, and the battery falls out because jamey had taken the back of my phone cause hed lost his. So i have to pick up my phone and my boucning battery (yes, it was bouncing) while my row was exiting. oh: and the band was playing this years marching music while this was going on. EVIL!!!
and after that was just a mob scene. all the cedar mill kids found eachother (ok, 4 of us, 3 of which will be going to college together next year. we're such slackers...), THOUSANDS of pictures were taken, clariece izzy becky and i finally managed to track down all of eachother and our parents at the same time, i got flowers (yay),... everythings was just fabulous
and then the grad party was HYSTERICAL. mostly due to the hypnotist. my god: hilarious. like... i cant even explain it, it was the most hysterical thing in my life. and now i know why half those people will never be strippers, and exactly why the other half should concider it a profession (my god.... some of those guys were BUILT!) and what made it amazing was that after knowing natalie for 12 years, my last memory of her will be the brittany spears impression and the supermodel walk ^ ^
then fire works went off (nice and illegal ones), got kissed on the cheek (odd...), said goodbye to some awesome people that ive only just NOW gotten to know really well and wont ever see again, our little group had breakfast at 5am, i will never again eat at sharis if i can help it (at least, never again after june 10th) and instead fo driving home we just randomly headed out to the beach before deciding that that was PROBABLY a bad idea since we'd been 21 hours, and instead all went home to sleep
AS OF NOW, I'VE FINALLY FINISHED WATCHING ALL STARWARS VIDEOS
first person in history to see them all for the first time in numerical order
first things first: finish off highschool credits, then paying fines so that i could finally get the tickets (and be elligible to walk. that would have been VERY bad). basically, this involved lunch w/ lara, driving, manicure (i just discovered i adore being pampered.... combine this w/ the free massages at my office and im set for life), free coldstones ice cream (leigh i adore you!), bank,driving, emailing 2 papers to myself thanks to my dead printer, forging a few signatures, driving, printing off emailed papers, lying about forged signatures (god im smooth), and then practice right afterwards. so basically, i finished my high school credits at 5:30 thursday.
thursdays ALSO the day the school finally realized, after TWO YEARS, that id passed CIM. they never entered my records from riverdale into their school system, so all last year while trying to do college aps i had no records of my sophomore year in high school. didn't look so hot. So they call my mom to say 'oh... btw your daughter passed CIM, and she needs to come to the school and pick up her chords'. so that was amoungst the numerous hours of driving on thursday w/ lara (this was before officially completing high school)
OK! NOW for the day of graduation!!!!
all started out w/ realizing i didn't have shoes to wear for it. so my sister, the shopping addict, decides we should go to nordstrome rack. for about 2 hours. let me put it this way: id found cheap, cute shoes and had even looked for, and failed to find jeans, all in about 15 minutes. then rest was kinda just standing around for me. after a good and long hour and a half, we get a call from my brother saying 'uhhh... yeah im in portland now, wanna come pick me up?' and the answer being 'hmmm we'll be there in a bit. we're buying shoes'
i think we finally managed to pick him up half an hour later.
went out for sushi, mad chaos involving my mom and her helping out w/ the grad party, racing back to the house so they could pick up my stereo for it (which i dont think i got back ever), and then i was left trying to find a last minute ride to the graduation ceremony
here's where the fun starts!!!
So we had to be at the U.portland around 6, no later than 6:15, and if we got there after 7 we basically couldn't be in the ceremony (theyd seat you in the very back or something). we mapquest the place, find a semi-direct route there, and take off 20 minutes later than we'd initially wanted to (bad omen. very very bad omen). this is after my sister spent 30 minutes trying to primp me up in numerous outfits before finally saying 'well.. what you were wearing originally would be fine'. GRR!!! so not cool!
so we take germantown, an extremely curvy, somewhat dangerous one-lane backroad to get to the middle of no where in downtown portlad, which coincidentally is where we needed to go. so we're going, we're driving, we're managing to stay on the road until we nearly crash into the cars infront of us, which are all stopped as far as we can see. notably, the farthest ahead you can see at any point on that road is maybe 7 cars, but still. everyone was stopped. so we're thinking 'ok, we still have half an hour'. 10 minutes later, we've moved about 10 cars lengths and keep randomly screaming at the cars infront of us in frustration. by the time we got to the bridge, we were starting to get hoarse
after we cross the bridge, our directions stop making sense and we gradually become more and more confused. So our natural reaction is to find someone else driving there we know and just follow them
Unfortunately, this lead to us trying to follow someone that was one car behind us. who was trying to follow us at the same time. (YES I REALIZE THAT THIS MAKES NO SENSE!!!) by this time carol and i were both making panic calls on cellphone saying 'where the hell are we?!' and text messages other people saying "just so you can laugh at me, im fucking lost and going to miss my own graduation"
So after getting incredibly frustrated, we pull into a burgerville, where dan, the guy we'd been trying to follow despite him being behind us, decides to lead this time cause he 'knew where to go'(bullshit). so hes driving, we pass the correct street w/o turning onto it, he keeps goign endlessly, takes a huge U turn and by then im like "we have 20 minutes til the ceremony starts and hes busy making U-turns!!!" so, extremely frustrated, paniced, stressed, etc, we just stop following him, we're both on our cells trying to figure out where we are still and whether or not we're going the right direction. by this time im calling people who graduated last year trying to ask for help and theyre giving up and are about to mapquest it for us, but no one even knew the address for the place.
SOMEHOW we make it (thank you alice...), we park a fairly long distance away cause everything packing place is taken and we're freakishly late, we grab our crap and start sprinting in high heels clutching onto our graduation gowns. AAAAAANNNND JUST to make matters worse, my tassle falls off during all this. so it was a very last minute scramble w/ the vice principal ripping through extra graduation gowns and caps trying to find tassles for me and ester (who had apparently also lost hers... least im not the only one)
then to top things off, carol izzy and i all realized we had our purses still, so we got to carry those under our graduation gowns, aka: the giant purple mumus.
so the ceremony finally starts (i think we got there 5 minutes before this), the guy we'd been following was the first graduate ever not to arrive in time and got to sit in the very back, and during the ceremony my entire row takes out their cellphones and starts text messaging people. absolutely hilarious. and john hext and joey hazel were throwing their phones back and forth.... amazing. announcers killed virtually every name possible to mispronounce, alex was hilarious, valedictorians' speech was worse than normal, ceremony finally ends. hehe then izzy calls me while we're walking out, i drop my phone while trying to answer it, and the battery falls out because jamey had taken the back of my phone cause hed lost his. So i have to pick up my phone and my boucning battery (yes, it was bouncing) while my row was exiting. oh: and the band was playing this years marching music while this was going on. EVIL!!!
and after that was just a mob scene. all the cedar mill kids found eachother (ok, 4 of us, 3 of which will be going to college together next year. we're such slackers...), THOUSANDS of pictures were taken, clariece izzy becky and i finally managed to track down all of eachother and our parents at the same time, i got flowers (yay),... everythings was just fabulous
and then the grad party was HYSTERICAL. mostly due to the hypnotist. my god: hilarious. like... i cant even explain it, it was the most hysterical thing in my life. and now i know why half those people will never be strippers, and exactly why the other half should concider it a profession (my god.... some of those guys were BUILT!) and what made it amazing was that after knowing natalie for 12 years, my last memory of her will be the brittany spears impression and the supermodel walk ^ ^
then fire works went off (nice and illegal ones), got kissed on the cheek (odd...), said goodbye to some awesome people that ive only just NOW gotten to know really well and wont ever see again, our little group had breakfast at 5am, i will never again eat at sharis if i can help it (at least, never again after june 10th) and instead fo driving home we just randomly headed out to the beach before deciding that that was PROBABLY a bad idea since we'd been 21 hours, and instead all went home to sleep
AS OF NOW, I'VE FINALLY FINISHED WATCHING ALL STARWARS VIDEOS
first person in history to see them all for the first time in numerical order