[In no particular order.]
- Taking independent study band sucks.
- Especially when you take it so you can take ACE US History, and normally this wouldn't be a big deal, only the ACE history book is so damned dry you'd expect it to light itself spontaneously on fire.
- Even though you have friends that you could tell anything to, there are some things that you simply can't tell them.
- When your math teacher and your sophomore English teacher are married to each other, it's a little difficult to get away with writing in a composition book in class because she knows it's the novel.
- It's okay to have the same teachers for multiple classes multiple years.
- Unless you sit there in AP English wondering why she couldn't have retired before you got there.
- Trumpet plungers were not meant to be thrown at the wall for entertainment, unless of course they were, and yours truly still has the record for the longest distance from the wall and Andrew has the record for how many times in a row he could get it to stick.
- Of course I have a band lesson this period, and not just because I want to miss class.
- It's okay to "kill" people if you're going to process them in Forensics class soon after.
- Though it's not very helpful when the dead body keeps squirming because he doesn't like bugs.
- How to hawk baked goods in the crowds on vintage weekend outside the bars because they were the easiest people to get to part with their pocket change.
- FYEX (First Year Experience) had to be the more worthless "class" ever.
- One of the trumpets falling off the risers every year during the first week of school.
- "A wooden clarinet is the orgasm of clarinets."
- Being Raggedy Ann for Halloween my senior year and lifeguarding IAC's still wearing my red, hand-made yarn wig.
- Powderpuff Football. Only we forgot most of the time to go for the flags as it was simpler to flat-out tackle people.
- Scuba diving in the pool.
- The massive bruise on the inside of my thigh from the giant's ladder in Lifetime Sports
- Jesse's face when he found out I'd sprained my ankle playing indoor soccer in the middle of basketball season.
- Though, the above didn't really matter because it's not like I played in the games, anyway.
- Having whooping cough as a sophomore and continuing on with life like I wasn't trying to hack up a lung simply by walking from class to class.
- My love of films can probably stem from film analysis sophomore year.
- I can write flash fiction; it might not come out very good or make much sense, but I can do it.
- I vowed never to take any more business classes ever after sophomore year.
- Though we made the family "dream" of having an ice cream boat kind of come true that year, with the magnets to prove it.
- My classmates weren't as unobservant as I once thought.
- Humming the Vonage theme song in public yields a lot of interesting looks from boys in leather jackets.
- Music Club trips to NYC were, in some ways, the highlight of the year.
- Riding three hours to Buffalo on a school bus was an interesting experience, especially for my rear end.
- I got really good at getting on the bus in the morning, leaning against the window, and falling back asleep for the twenty minutes it took to get to town.
- I cemented how easy it was to live out of a Jansport backpack on a daily basis, in an academic sense.
- It's a bad idea to let your friend fake-bleed you at the Freshman Humanities Renaissance Fair in the courtyard because it somehow leads to higher-ups thinking that you and two other girls have been cutting yourselves.
- In order to get out of there as soon as possible, showing said higher ups the slightly oozing patch of psoriasis you've digged open on your ankle will do the trick nicely.
- You might think you have things under control, but until you break out completely and totally in itchy bits that may or may not leave scars because of something that you have no genetic control over, you find out just how much you really have to keep your head high to live with things.
- I found out that, sometimes, when you really love someone, you let them go to make sure you don't hurt them.
- The above, however, does not ensure that they will be there when you return at a time convenient for you.
- Eating school food made me the fan of tacos that I am today.
- I think I wasn't too far into my sophomore year when I realized that I didn't want to be one of the popular girls; I just wanted to be me, whoever that was going to develop into.
- How not to sugarcoat things.
- Sunday in the Park with George is a truly awful musical when you're eighteen and there's such shows like Avenue Q and Monty Python's Spamalot to be seen instead.
- I don't like rye bread, and while it might look similar to wheat, it sure as shit isn't.
- Never had the urge to drink illegally while in high school.
- High school is a different ball game that takes a bit to get used to, and it doesn't help when you're about as down as you could get when you get in there.
- I learned how to temporarily shut up and go with the flow because that's what it took to do a good job on a job that needed to get done.
- You can be a bit busted if you know how to sit there and superglue yourself back together while paying attention in math.
- How not to give a damn about certain things.
- How to make my mom understand that being in the nineties in calculus might not be something that I achieve, and how to settle for high eighties when I'm still trying my best.
- How to play alto saxophone because who ever heard of a clarinet in jazz band?
- The opening to Colt 45 while tooling around the nation's capital for senior trip.
- That it's kind of cool to think about double calculus as double potions, but it's nowhere near as cool.
- I can't stand Ernest Hemingway.
- How cool having a sister is, and how much we do, despite our age difference, have in common.
- Going to Open House still in a uniform and cleats is perfectly acceptable.
- Trying to get to first base in softball to listen to your dad give you advice and tell you bad jokes to make you giggle.
- There are things in life more important than soccer.
- The new basketball uniform shorts were the most comfortable things in the world.
- Riding on the bus with the baseball team wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
- Riding the bus, period, wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.
- How to feel like you're stretched in fifty different directions, but still together enough to get everything finished that you need to, and well enough that nobody thinks twice about it.
- There's only so many times that you can say, "Eh, tomorrow" because your tomorrows start to run out.
- What it feels like to finish something significant.
- Writing a senior thesis in five weeks absolutely sucks.
- Being yourself, no matter how crazy and unconventional that might be, is so much easier and so much more worth it than trying to be anyone else.
- I'm about as bad at economics as I am at math.
- I like dressing up and looking decidedly female every now and then.
- Coffee is not only lovely, but also a necessity.
- Going to Europe and then returning and having the opening night and subsequent three performances of the school play when you have no voice makes life very, very interesting.
- Graduation is one of those things that always seems like it'll never get there, and then when it's looming, you wonder where the time's gone.
- A locker only holds so much stuff before it decides it won't shut, open, or even move.
- The instructions, "Put in your combination and then continue to turn like a doorknob" would have been really helpful that first time standing by 477 and wondering how to get into it.
- I don't think I was ever late to English my first year because my locker was right across the hall from the English room.
- I took one art class, and that was more than enough for my four years in that building.
- Sadly, cafeteria food doesn't get much better when you hit high school.
- Cafeteria's came with vending machines.
- Get there early enough so that you have a parking space.
- Doesn't matter what kind of car you drive, just as long as you have one to drive.
- How I ever passed my Earth Science regents is beyond me because there were eight seniors in a class of sophomores, and most of us, since it was the end of the day, slept through most of it.
- AP Calculus, AP Economics, and AP English was going to be the death of me my senior year.
- New York State Regents are, for a lack of a better phrase, the shitty things on the face of the Earth.
- The SAT's are just as bad as everyone says they are.
- Giving blood is fun. What's not so fun is passing out and scaring the living bejeezus out of your two best guy friends when you fall out of your chair.
- Playing softball after giving blood is always advisable - when half the team has done it, what else can you do?
- Things weren't always easy. Do the best you could, and hope for the rest to sort itself out.
- NYSSMA is a great excuse to miss school, though they'll flay you alive when you have whooping cough and are trying not to hack up a lung while you play classical music.
- When in NYC, one must visit in a Starbucks. That is nonnegotiable.
- I was the band geek, the writer, the athlete, and the chick with enough brains to graduate tenth out of ninety-seven. It hasn't always been easy, but if you stick to what you know and follow your instincts, the end result is pretty good.
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