Back in the Day

Today I was driving home from class when I was forced to pass through Boulder High School just after school ended for them that day. Now as I’m sure all of you know, you have about as much luck navigating roads near a high school as starting a wildfire in Antarctica. For some reason, high schoolers have a magical ability to completely ignore oncoming traffic. And this isn’t just in Boulder, where pedestrians tend to think even busy highways are yellow brick roads they are supposed to skip along. This applies to high schools all over America. I know it was that way at my high school on the Big Island.

These kids will bravely walk right out into traffic completely unaware of the fact that a two-ton piece of metal (my car) is speeding down the highway (at two mph), driven by an unstable person (me) who happens to have a very influential friend in the justice department (we’ll call her “Helga). Why do they walk recklessly into the streets? It could be the sense of invincibility that comes with youth and stupidity; it could be the pressure from peers to appear immune to fear; it could be severe mental retardation.

More likely it is because they have iPods in their ears while texting on their cell phones with their right hand while trying to hold up their saggy pants with their left. With all those distractions it’s no wonder these kids don’t realize there is a car coming at them; they probably wouldn’t notice if the Hindenburg crashed next to them. I remember things were different when I went to high school. Now it’s not like I went to high school in the Stone Age; I was there less than four years ago. But things have changed a lot since then. I remember as a freshman, I didn’t have a cell phone, a laptop, or an iPod. Whereas now elementary school kids bring these things to school with them.

And yet as I looked on at these kids gathering in their awkward little circles outside the school, no doubt discussing the things that seemed so important back then (acne, crushes, grades, acne, rumors, prom, figuring out how to look cool at prom with your parents chaperoning, etc), I realized that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This of course caused me to go into a fit of nostalgic reminiscence, which then of course meant I had to go look up the words “nostalgic” and “reminiscence.”

I was talking to some friends the other day that apparently had an awkward high school careers and say the words “high school” with the same tone and facial expression someone might make when they were discussing genital warts. On the other hand, I was talking to a former high school quarterback who dated the head cheerleader and is still convinced that the high point of his life came in high school (his words: “to be more specific, in the back seat of a Volvo”).

Anyway, I guess my high school career fell in between. I was never the most popular guy, but I was still well-liked enough to be elected class president (due mainly to voter apathy). If you had to put me into a group, I was probably a nerd, which is funny in itself since there may have been no student in the school that enraged more teachers and put as little effort into their schoolwork as I did.

That is not to say that I did not have some awkward moments. The main objective in high school was being cool. But as I was sitting in traffic watching those kids trying to look as badass as possible while loitering outside a 7-11 waiting for their mom to pick them up, I remembered just how few high schoolers managed to pull that off. I mean, it’s pretty hard to be cool when you still rely on your parents to go anywhere, have no money, can’t buy alcohol, have no idea what your hormones are doing on any given day, and have no idea what the opposite sex is thinking (although men tend to have this problem for their entire lives).

I had my fair share of those moments, which I am going to discuss despite the fact that many of the people involved in those moments are reading this. I can do this because I am confident enough to own up to the embarrassing things I have done in my life. Also, it is now legal for me to purchase and consume large quantities of alcohol, so I have a coping mechanism.

When it came to the other gender (women, in case you were wondering), I was as smooth as sandpaper. Normally when women would approach me and talk to me, I would have a mature and intelligent conversation - with my feet. Then I would try to fall back on my humor, but of course the joke would come out way worse than it went over in my head, at which point I would laugh and then run off in the other direction. I’m confident that there are girls who went to high school with me who till this day are convinced I am retarded. The low-light came when I asked some girl to the prom in my junior year. But we were in a computer class, and I mumbled “wanna go to prom?” so badly that I’m pretty sure she heard “can I have a CD-ROM," because she never answered me. She just sort of nodded and then started looking in the computer drawer. Or at least that is the story I am sticking with.

Anyway, I’ve gotten a lot better. Now, I confidently stride up to women, say one or two very inappropriate lines, get slapped, and watch them run away, which frankly I think is an improvement. I have the restraining orders to prove it. Anyway, feel free to share your embarrassing stories in the comments section for our amusement, under an anonymous name of course. But if you’re most embarrassing moment was that time some weirdo asked you to the prom in 2006, I might know who you are.