Oddball Update

It was a couple weeks ago when I first realized that this June marks the ten-year anniversary of my graduation from high school. My high school days were tumultuous to say the least, with my entire four-year stint representing little more than one miserable experience after another — with the exception of occasional successes and shared camaraderie, not unlike those shared by a soldier and his squadmates in the course of a brutal war. When my friends and I finally graduated, it was one of the happiest days of our lives.

Ten years ago, after that graduation ceremony had ended, I embarked on what I fondly dubbed “The Long Summer,” so named because I wasn’t starting college until October. I chose the late-fall starting date because I figured I deserved an extra month or two of relaxation, after the four years of hell I’d just been through. That summer turned out to be everything I had hoped. Looking back, it’s become my Woodstock, my “good old days.” I’ve experienced even more wonderful times since, but you know how it goes — nothing will ever quite recapture 1998 again, when gas was 89 cents a gallon, I had a brand new girlfriend, a brand new Trans Am and a whole calendar of lazy days stretching before me.

(Actually, without much creative license, the preceding description of my heyday could easily pass for that of a guy much older than me!)

In a recent email conversation with my high school buddy Pooch, I remarked that I’d planned to dive into my old Oddball Update archives and post a commemorative entry, featuring some snippets of journal entries I’d written back in those days surrounding our graduation. Unfortunately, my busy schedule kept me from getting around to it, and now the anniversary date (June 7th) is nearly one month past. Despite the belatedness, I thought this opportunity was one too good to pass up, so here we go.

As some of you probably know, Oddball Update has existed long before this Internet-based incarnation went online in 2003. As far back as 1994, I’ve been keeping journal entries called “Oddball Updates” in documents on my evolving timeline of personal computers, until eventually I converted the whole mess into a private, Web-based blog that runs locally on my home workstation. With my entire junior high, high school and college history indexed in a searchable, non-linear format, I can now go back to nearly any time and see what kind of stupid music I was listening to, food I ate for dinner or pissy emotional spells I was going through.

Today, though, I’ll commemorate the 10-year anniversary of my Freedom From Hell™ by selecting a few choice paragraphs from that very time. Even if you previously weren’t aware of how much I loathed high school, you’ll no doubt sense a strong hint of that sentiment in these snippets.

WELCOME TO JUNE, 1998!!! Okay, okay, calm down jusssst a little…June is truly a wonderful month, no matter what year it is, but there is just a bit more school garbage to deal with before we can truly, honestly be free forever. Here’s the deal. Tuesday and Wednesday we have our exams, Friday is the senior breakfast (to which we received more of the school’s infamous “inviations that we literally cannot refuse”), and graduation rehearsal, and Sunday is the actual graduation ceremony. And after that…it’s a done deal. The last nail will be pried out of the coffin lid that was nailed shut on that formidable first day, August 23rd, 1994, and we will be home free. And what a glorious day that will be.
Oddball Update: June 1st, 1998

WE HAVE FINALLY ARRIVED AT THE OFFICIAL END!!! That’s right, on Sunday, June 7th, 1998, at approximately 5:00 in the afternoon, the 4-year battle for our sanity at high school officially drew to an close. And my friends and I have won. Now we’re on our victory lap, and there’s nothing those sons of bitches at that infernal school can do about it. Ever again.

I have to admit, the graduation ceremony was very nicely done. After it was over, we went to Mountain Jack’s for dinner. And after that, we had a little celebratory cake and orange sherbet punch for dessert back at the house. Overall it was a great day. And I believe it was just one great day in what is to become a long line of similarly great days. Tomorrow I’m going to run a few errands, work on my Wolfenstein game, and think about (and write to) my lovely girlfriend Apple, who I am rapidly beginning to think I will never be able to do without ever again. In a couple weeks I’ll get my new car, and in a couple of months I hope to spend time with Apple in Australia. Overall, things are really looking up. And I think they’re just going to keep getting better.

So here we are, not seniors in high school, not even in high school at all anymore…we’re high school graduates. Even dopey old [Big J], who pranced up there to get his diploma like some kind of nutbar, with a huge dopey smile on his huge dopey face (while everyone snickered quite audibly, I might add). Even [S], that jerkass….even [L], who thinks he’s such hot shit, but is really just plain shit…and all those other assholes, some of whom got what they didn’t deserve…they’re graduates now too. But you know what? I don’t care anymore. I am cleansed of them. They are off my hands, things of the past now. And they can stay there.

And there are lots of other bonuses, too. This is the year of The Long Summer™. We aren’t just temporarily free from teachers, from idiotic busywork, and from those beyond-idiotic rules and regulations. We’re permanently free from them. Never again will I arm my alarm for 6:00 a.m., tie a tie, set out a blue Oxford shirt and blue Dockers pants, and go to bed worrying about what sort of persecution might be brought upon me the next day… Never again will I scrape ice off the windshield of a black ‘93 Grand Prix while its engine idles reluctantly in the painfully cold Michigan air at 7:20 a.m… Never again will I have to worry about dodging insults, taking crazy directions, assuming responsibility for the many errors of the administration, wondering what I’ve missed…it’s all done, folks. No more, ever again. It seems almost hard to believe now, as I sit here at 1:30 in the morning on this glorious eve of my ultimate freedom…but it is the truth, and whether I believe it or not, it is fact.

And now, because this year, the year before it, and indeed all four of my years here have dragged on far too long with more harm done than good, let us revel in slamming the door on high school for all eternity. God willing, may The Powers That Be prevent such a catastrophic educational institution from getting its hands on me again. And this is the last we shall mention of it, for it is now time to move on — but before we move too far, let’s pause for a few months to rest, recuperate, and most importantly, enjoy our time off.

Oddball Update: June 7th, 1998

The funny thing about these ancient entries is, while I can still easily recall the jubilation with which I shut the door on my high school “career,” part of me wonders if all the vitriol was really worth it. Okay, pick your jaws up off the floor. Sure, I went through several periods of extended hell at that school. But I’m not sitting around here today still letting that get to me. Now, if I should happen to cast a snarky or disgusted tongue back upon those days, it’s done largely in jest — a dismissive ridicule of days lousy enough that they’re not worth remembering.

Now, understand: I’m certainly no master of Zen, but I’m trying. Oh yes; in the years immediately following my exit from high school, any reminder of those days would have quickly turned me into a bitter, percolating cauldron of anger. “Holding a grudge” doesn’t begin to cover it.

However, largely thanks to my wife (the very same Apple whom I mentioned in those decade-old snippets above!), I learned how to cool out and make peace with those memories. A few years ago, if the subject of high school came up, I would have remembered the schedule change disaster and psychological witch hunt of my junior year, or the belittling names Mister [S] used to call me, or the number of classmates we lost due to expulsions for drug use and crime. Nowadays, by contrast, I fondly recall the weekend evenings spent hanging out with my friends, or think of the Duke Nukem 3D gaming sessions, or remember the exhilarating freedom of driving my first car. I can call upon those other, shittier memories in my old Oddball entries, if I want to — and when I do, I usually just laugh.

Make no mistake, though — I would not be so complacent a second time, if I were faced with another controlling power like my high school that tried to mind-fuck me and place the blame for everything, even the actions of my peers, at my feet. Among the two common camps of operant conditioning, positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement, I am a person who absolutely does not and will not respond to the latter. Unfortunately, my high school — an old-fashioned Catholic institution every bit as modern as it was when it opened in 1958 — treated negative reinforcement like gospel.

I imagine you know the drill. Your teacher or principal makes your life suck until you do something right, at which point they’ll consider making it suck less (negative reinforcement). This approach is chosen rather than presenting some kind of praise or reward when exceptional work has been done (positive reinforcement). In my own life experience, I find that I am much more motivated to perform exceptionally to earn praise, than I am motivated to perform solely to avoid punishment. When the latter methodology is used, I tend to stop caring altogether. Removal of aversive stimulus alone is not sufficient reason for me to put my heart into a task.

In my school, they even took punishment to the next level — giving detention to every student in a classroom for the antics of a couple jokers in the back. The idea, I suppose, was to get us to police ourselves — to get the good kids to gang up on the bad kids and make them behave, because everyone had to suffer for the mistakes of a few. Instead, because the bad kids were usually the same ones who could beat us good kids to a pulp, those of us who strove to behave ourselves quickly wondered why we even bothered.

And so, being confronted by negative reinforcement on a daily basis in high school, I quickly fell into a pattern of disgruntled apathy, more so with some classes than others (the more negative the instructor, the more apathetic I became). It could be argued that I was only damaging myself (and my grades) by reacting this way, but even with my apathy I averaged a 3.5 GPA. Believe me, I never once lost any sleep over those remaining points — life is too precious to micromanage to the Nth degree.

I tell you all of this to provide some context to the discussion my friend Pooch and I had just recently. 2008 marks the 50th anniversary of our high school’s opening back in 1958, and Pooch emailed me to say he’d received a newsletter from the alumni office that spoke of a commemorative event. “All alums are expected to attend!” the newsletter barked, in underlined print.

We had a good laugh, Pooch and I, about how very much like our high school those words were. Not “we hope you’ll attend,” or “we look forward to seeing you.” With that place, it was always about issuing orders — even now, when they’re addressing men and women who could be nearly twice as old as I. “We expect you to be here.” Were I to reactivate the dusty, discarded synapses of my brain that were last used ten years ago, my gut reaction would be to wonder what the repercussions would be if I failed to show up, even knowing full well that punishing me now would be well outside the bounds of their authority.

After Pooch and I had a chuckle over that, it occurred to us that news of another commemorative event would probably soon be gracing our mailboxes — our own 10-year high school reunion. To be honest, the very idea of the much-vaunted Class of 1998 having a reunion makes me want to laugh myself into a coma. Our class was so utterly filled with lawbreakers and misfits, and so devoid of spirit — we were actually the first senior class to lose the annual Spirit Competition in many years — that few scenes could be so depressing as stuffing that morose group into the same room some ten years on.

But — as is always the way of the world — there’s always that one person in your high school class who, despite the passage of time, never seems to change a bit. When you were in school, he (or she) was the type of person who hung out with the preps or the jocks, was an all-important A-lister, and carried himself with a sort of Nomex-like invincibility. He would mouth off to teachers, dismiss rules and regulations as not applying to him, and usually get away with everything. He was either the kid you wistfully looked up to, or secretly hoped would get struck by lightning. It’s this same person who, years on, will be the one who contacts you and begs for you to help prepare or at least attend your class reunion.

Despite being a very below-average class, we were not deprived of our resident up-sucker. And there he was, ten years after the fact, printing a call for help in Pooch’s alumni newsletter, looking for people to assist with planning our 10-year reunion. Appropriately, he even has his own email address at the school’s official web domain, proving that some things truly never change. He was in love with the high school experience and he probably never outgrew it. He still takes some sort of identity from the high school he went to, ten years later.

The funny thing is, the thought of attending a class reunion doesn’t immediately make me run for the exits (or a firearm) as it would have 5 or 6 years ago, back when I had trouble keeping the vitriol from spilling anew whenever the subject arose. It used to be that I wouldn’t even know how to be nice to those people, particularly those who cut me down because I was overweight or hung out with the art types, the smart types or the other quiet kids. But now, I feel different. Not different in a positive way — more like different in that there’s an absence of emotion.

I think that if I went to a high school reunion, I would just stand there and smirk. Smirk like a mofo at how comical those four years seem, looking back on it all. About how we thought our entire lives hinged on whether or not Mister Klamponowski gave us an A or a C. Worried about getting yelled at by a crotchety old nun because our Oxford shirt wasn’t one of the approved colors. Pinning all of our hopes and dreams on whether our football team won Friday night’s game. Looking back, we were all fools, in the same way that every high school student is. We had yet to be shaped by untold years of life experiences, social interactions, love gained and lost, successes and failures. We had yet to understand anything about what life really is.

We’re completely different people now, all of us, for better or for worse. And I think that must inevitably be the point of a high school reunion — to demonstrate to those antiquated memories of people from your past, those static shadows of human beings who, in your mind, haven’t aged a day, how undeniably different we all are now. And it’s the ones who are still exactly the same as we remembered them, 10, 20 or even 30 years out, who are the sad ones — because they’ve climbed off the ladder of evolution at age 18 and taken a seat in the corner.

Nevertheless, fear not — I won’t be attending a high school class reunion, neither now nor ever. For me, the ideal class reunion is a get-together with my high school friends Pooch and Reaper, enjoying some activity that has absolutely nothing to do with those years. Because it’s not 1998 anymore, it’s 2008 — and fond memories of long summers aside, this is where I’d rather be.

Tagged as Life, nostalgia, school + Categorized as Life