High school
Monica, here for spring break, decided today to go visit some of our old teachers at the high school and invited me along. I agreed, reluctantly, and we went.
Impressions:
The smell. Did high school always smell like that? That sticky, unwashed body smell? Ew. Did I really wade through that every day for four years? Ew.
The old and the new. Since our leaving five years ago, they've added a new wing, a new gym, a pool, a courtyard, an auditorium, and several glass-encased hallways and offices. The parts of the school we remembered all looked old, dirty and peeling, while the rest was shiny and new. It was strange, and we didn't like it. We saw our English teacher, and he had been upgraded from the small, windowless classroom we had remembered to a large, A/V-ready room with big windows and a built-in speaker system, which he used to play us some classical music. It wasn't entirely unfamiliar, though, as he'd brought with him his old Humphrey Bogart cardboard cutout and several old movie pictures and posters, and added a prominently large Lauren Bacall poster. The room also had an "escape window," with I noted with great amusement, especially since he was the sort to hang the words "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" above his door.
"Did you know..." We had to first check in at the (new) front office, and when we told the people there (some of them students) what we were there for and when we'd graduated, we got a lot of, "Oh, if you graduated in '02, did you know..." Some of the names we recognized, some we didn't. Most of them were people we'd known of, but didn't associate with or particularly like - members of other groups in the caste-like social system of high school. It reminds me of a phenomenon I've seen on Facebook and during the few times I've run into other people from my school: that even though they wouldn't have given us the time of day back then, we now have some sort of bond. I feel a bit bitchy right now verbalizing my attitude toward the people I went to high school with, but the truth is, for the most part, I've kept in touch with the people who mattered, and I feel no need to connect with the others.
It was a surreal experience. It made me glad to have a life now.
Impressions:
The smell. Did high school always smell like that? That sticky, unwashed body smell? Ew. Did I really wade through that every day for four years? Ew.
The old and the new. Since our leaving five years ago, they've added a new wing, a new gym, a pool, a courtyard, an auditorium, and several glass-encased hallways and offices. The parts of the school we remembered all looked old, dirty and peeling, while the rest was shiny and new. It was strange, and we didn't like it. We saw our English teacher, and he had been upgraded from the small, windowless classroom we had remembered to a large, A/V-ready room with big windows and a built-in speaker system, which he used to play us some classical music. It wasn't entirely unfamiliar, though, as he'd brought with him his old Humphrey Bogart cardboard cutout and several old movie pictures and posters, and added a prominently large Lauren Bacall poster. The room also had an "escape window," with I noted with great amusement, especially since he was the sort to hang the words "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" above his door.
"Did you know..." We had to first check in at the (new) front office, and when we told the people there (some of them students) what we were there for and when we'd graduated, we got a lot of, "Oh, if you graduated in '02, did you know..." Some of the names we recognized, some we didn't. Most of them were people we'd known of, but didn't associate with or particularly like - members of other groups in the caste-like social system of high school. It reminds me of a phenomenon I've seen on Facebook and during the few times I've run into other people from my school: that even though they wouldn't have given us the time of day back then, we now have some sort of bond. I feel a bit bitchy right now verbalizing my attitude toward the people I went to high school with, but the truth is, for the most part, I've kept in touch with the people who mattered, and I feel no need to connect with the others.
It was a surreal experience. It made me glad to have a life now.