Improved Specimen

I’ve been indulging myself in nostalgia over the last couple of nights. I’ve been reading the blogs of a few high school friends – I won’t say who, I’ll just say that none of them are people I kept in touch with. The blogs haven’t been updated in years, so I’m not reading about what they’re doing now, but about their sophomore, junior, senior years of high school. I’m mentioned in a few entries, if only in passing, and the anecdotes spark memories that I haven’t thought about in years. It bums me out to know that I might as well be a stranger to people that used to be some of my best friends. That’s life, it happens, I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’m allowed to say that I miss them, right?

Whenever I tell someone that high school sucked, what I really mean is that senior year sucked. I hated senior year for a number of reasons. I was on Accutane, an acne medication with side effects of depression and irritation that probably played a bigger part in my general dissatisfaction with life than I would have admitted at the time. I spent an hour in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic before school every day, enough to put anyone on edge. My social life was a bit lacking due to circumstances beyond my control (long story for another day). I let that one bad year taint my memory of high school as a whole, but I always forget that I genuinely enjoyed freshman year and sophomore year, at least. I’m remembering friends in the years above me that I haven’t talked to since they graduated because the whole MySpace/Facebook thing hadn’t hit yet. I think I liked looking up to people more than being the top dog myself.

In a further bit of nostalgia, last night I read a bunch of old documents on our home computer. Some are old essays from school, some are brainstorms or outlines for movie scripts that I whipped out in bursts of inspiration and never looked at again, some are short stories that I actually finished, and one in particular was a one-act that I abandoned in favor of the one I ended up putting on as my senior project. It’s good, but it’s really personal and a little bit emo. There’s a monologue (that I actually copied and pasted from my now-defunct Xanga) about “this kid” who thinks his purpose in life is to help others because he’s given up on the possibility of happiness for himself. For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea for one of the major characters to die in a car accident and then deliver a posthumous monologue that, in retrospect, reads eerily like a suicide note. The writing is good enough and I like the general premise that I had, but there’s no way I could have put that onstage.

I’m realizing, not for the first time but more strongly than ever before, that I’m a completely different person than I was two years ago. The biggest change probably came during my first semester of college (living on Blanton 2nd, for example, helped me grow a pair of balls), but lessons that I learned as early as my first weekend in Austin and as recently as last semester continue to shape who I am. I read stuff that I wrote during junior and senior year of high school, and I don’t even recognize myself as the author – the words are familiar, but the mindset behind them isn’t. When I say (and I think I’ve said it on here at some point) that I can’t believe I did a lot of the stuff that I did in high school, I say it because I can’t in a million years imagine doing those things now. I’m not gonna lie – for a while, I was a little bit of a creeper. I stalked a girl on the Spain trip (at the time, I thought I was being “outgoing” and “friendly”), I followed people around at play practice, my primary method of communication was AIM, little stuff like that. I learned more social skills in my first two weeks on B2 than I did at every high school dance combined.

This mindset bled over into college, of course, and as such, I think I made some bad first impressions (besides the obvious). We got back from a party on some random Friday night, and upon seeing a guy and a girl disappear into his room, I spent the next half hour trying to convince people that “she was probably being raped.” My friend Kate basically lived on our floor; she only slept and kept her stuff at her room in the Castillian. She made a passing comment one night about how she didn’t want to walk all the way back there, and I tripped over myself offering her my bed, our extra mattress, etc, even after she said no several times. I write these anecdotes with a smile on my face, out of embarrassment as much as reminiscence. Shortly after that, within the first month, I learned that one can, in fact, be too much of a nice guy, and that when that happens, he’s seen as a pushover, as pathetic, as someone who’s trying way too hard to be liked. I’m still not perfect, but I’m definitely an improved specimen.

I wish I could do high school over, I guess. Not the classes and the living at home stuff, just the social part. There were a lot of people, older and younger, guys and girls, that I really liked, but because of how I behaved around them, they probably didn’t like me back quite as much. I feel like I’ve finally realized some obvious truth that everyone else already knew, and now that I’ve grasped it, I wish I could start over with some people.