Let's Talk About Our High School Life !

This idea came from me surfing Ryan Adams on YouTube and he was singing one of his more youthful angsty songs Come Pick Me Up (which i love and i believe was in Cameron Crowe's movie Elizabethtown).

Accompanying him was Neil Finn and Janis Ian. Remember her? Anyway that song of hers which i have linked above At Seventeen came out when i was seventeen years old. I related to that song SO much and made it my teenage anthem. (Especially the "clear skinned smiles" lyric because i had terrible acne and was so self conscious about it.) .

So it got me to thinking that we should all share stuff from our high school years. But first be sure to tell us what year you graduated so we get a feeling for the times.

1. I graduated in 1975 as a new senior student in Tacoma, having just moved here from Colorado Springs. I never ate lunch once in the cafeteria that whole senior year. It was awful being a new senior so i talked to a school counselor, and shortly after with her help, enrolled in Vocational School so i didn't have to stay on the high school campus except for two periods a day. (I took a library assistant voc tech class that was nearly a whole year course.)

2. I attended three high schools - (Get out the violins! Poor me, right?) I was a  junior in Colorado Springs (we lived there only one year) and a sophomore and freshman in Zama, Japan.

3. We were military and my dad was a low ranking E-5, non-comissioned Air Force sargeant - so with four kids and a non-working mother, we were poor, (like free and reduced lunch kid poor), only too proud to apply.

4. With my babysitting money i bought vinyl records at the PX on base. I wore out Cat Stevens Tea for The Tillerman and Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, (which incidentally is still some of my favorite music today).

5. I dated an African American football player for nearly my whole sophomore year. He was my first real boyfriend. This was when we lived in Japan.

His name? ....Michael Jordan. He was a senior. His dad was a West Pointer army officer. The year was 1973, which was a pretty turbulent time for blacks and whites to be dating, but on base in Japan it was different. My parents tried to stop it at first, but then my dad relented and Mike spent a lot of time with my family, even visiting me in Colorado when we moved away. Mike was super polite, raised with class, a very cute and sweet man. All the teachers loved him and he was popular for the right reasons.

6. I used to dye my hair blonde myself with Clairol's Midnight Sun and it was just terrible (and why i don't mind spending lots of money today to pay a professional.) When i was a junior i tried to dye it back to it's normal brown shade and it turned khaki green. And it was like that for awhile before i could fix it again by dying it more red.  I also used to iron it with a real iron.

7. I never got below a "B" grade in all of high school (but i have to admit to taking the easier classes: Spanish instead of French; no harder math class than algebra, etc.) and i never missed turning in my homework. Not even once.

8. My favorite movie was (I hate to admit this because it's so cheesy).....was.....Love Story. And as I have mentioned here before, I had a girl crush on Ali MacGraw.

9. My favorite book was Catcher in the Rye and Gone with the Wind. (I read them both twice.)

10. My favorite class was Creative Writing. I still remember my junior year teacher Miss Tarver and how pretty she was with her super long straight hair. The reason i remember her is because one time when she handed back one of my stories she told me that I was too young to write so well and that she had liked my story so much she had given it to a friend of hers to read. (I remember being most fascinated by her sharing it with a friend!)  She encouraged me to send it to a magazine for publication. (I did, of course, and saved all the rejection letters.)

I also liked math and had some excellent math teachers, but i don't remember their names.

11. I never went to the prom my senior year. I did go to one junior dance in Colorado that was not prom. I sewed my own dress and went with a guy I knew from Japan who had moved to Colorado before us. He wasn't cute, but he was in college so i thought that was cool.

12. I had a babysitting job for four kids from 3-6 pm nearly my whole junior year in Colorado.  I made 50 cents an hour. The year was 1973. I think that job is the reason i never had kids. I used that money to buy records and Clearasil.

13. I never drank in high school, but my parents once let me have some pink champagne when i was a junior and i was so sick the next day. I never smoked pot either. I was a goody-goody and spent a lot of time in libraries, probably had something to do with not having that many friends since we moved a lot. I was a senior before a lifeguard asked me out to a kegger. I didn't know what a kegger was, i thought beer only came in cans! (I went to that kegger, but didn't drink anything.)

OK, so what were your high school years like? My school years weren't really all THAT terrible, at least i was never bullied or beat up, but my clothes and hair were always wrong and i always felt out of place, especially my last two years. And like most people i know, there is not enough money in the world to make me want to relive them, even knowing what i know now.


Notes to Self:                                                              
Sunrise: 6:48 am
Sunset: 7:22 pm
High temp: 65 degrees
All time blog posts: 48,261
Last iTunes purchase: Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits
Last Book read: Brewster
Longest run this week: 45 minutes