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The Things I'd Change

October 25, 2008 5:58 PM

he ten-year anniversary of my graduation from high school is quickly approaching. This is making me feel old. Very much so, in fact. But more than that, it started making me feel nostalgic. I mean, high school wasn't the best time of my life or anything, but it also wasn't the worst. (The worst, incidentally, was the one-and-a-half-year period immediately following high school.) I had some fun during those four years, and I actually knew some cool people. And I dropped out of touch with the vast majority of them in the intervening years.

But, with the advent of Facebook and MySpace, I've started finding a bunch of these people again. And something sort of interesting happened: I stopped being nostalgic. See, I searched for a bunch of people from my high school on Facebook. And I found a bunch of them. But I didn't want to friend very many of them at all. Then I found that someone had created a profile for "Apaches 99." (We were the Nogales High School Apaches, and I graduated in 1999.) So I friended that profile and then started looking through that person's friends. I found one person--one person!--that I wanted to "friend." And even then, that person wasn't really my friend in high school. She was more an acquaintance all through my time in Nogales and she ended up being really, really, ridiculously hot. That's mostly why I friended her--I wanted to see more of her pictures.

I mean, that's not counting people from high school I had already friended independent of this whole nostalgia thing. And I started thinking: if I had to do high school over again, I'd do almost all of it completely different. Here are some specific things I'd change.

  1. I'd be friends with different people. I don't mean that I wouldn't be friends with any of the people I was friends with. I'm thinking specifically of my two "best friends." I spent a whole fuck load of my time in high school hanging out with them and thereby not meeting new people, not talking to girls, and not feeling good about myself. Nowadays, lots of people accuse me--rightfully, I might add--of being far too picky about who I hang out with. But I apparently was the opposite of that in high school. I was so insecure and unconfident that I hung out with these two guys that were, objectively speaking, almost entirely worthless.

    Meanwhile, I was surrounded by not worthless people. I had plenty of acquaintances that were cool, social, outgoing, and altogether nicer to me than my idiot friends. So if I had it to do over again, I'd be more open to hanging out with different people and the novel experiences they would have brought with them.


  2. I'd try harder at school. I spent some time Facebook chatting with that one hot girl that I friended, and one of the things she told me was that she always thought that I was very smart. I think a lot of people thought that about me, actually. But the thing is that, like a young Anakin Skywalker, my abilities made me arrogant. I didn't have to work to understand things. Not at first, anyway. As a result, I was extremely lazy, academically speaking. This started to catch up to me towards the end of high school, but it really slammed me during college. Oh, and law school. I never developed any sort of study skills at all. So my raw intelligence might have been an asset, but I didn't cultivate that when I was in high school and the result was that I was a mediocre student all through college and law school.

    But more importantly, because I knew that I could understand high school math and history and whatever else well enough to pass the classes without working at all, I didn't learn much. I didn't read, I didn't study. So I went into college as an incredibly ill-informed person. And I'm still trying to make up for that now. And that sucks.


  3. I'd be more outgoing. As self-defeating as recent posts might make me seem, i was even worse ten years ago. I was afraid to put myself out there or to take a stand. I was afraid to stand up for myself, even. And the result was that I came off as a pushover. And when I think back on that, I'm really sad about it because that's not ever what I want to be and I'm sad that it's something that I was.

I could go on, but I think those are really the most crucial ones. It's not that I regret everything I was back then. To the contrary, I think that everything that makes me who I am now was there then, too. I just wish that I had had the strength to be myself rather than to let myself be influenced by the stupid, ridiculous people I was sometimes surrounded by.

Anyway, ten years since high school. That's not funny.



7 Comments


Santi said:

I love you.

October 25, 2008 7:45 PM



Frank X. said:

Very insightful. I think I would have liked to not focus on trying to be cool and instead embraced the person I wanted to be. I didn't really start doing that until near the end of high school. I also wish I were more confident then. And, I regret being a jerk to some people (Ishmael included). But, what can you do. Perhaps we wouldn't be the people we are now if hadn't had emotional growing pains in high school. Also, go Philies!

October 27, 2008 9:28 AM



Santi said:

I love you too.

October 27, 2008 8:20 PM



The Reeg said:

I loved high school, and I wouldn't change a thing. See, my high school was an outlier in the sense that the vast majority of students there were the kids of UW-Madison professors and grad students--and a lot of these professors, and particularly the grad students, were from abroad, and in the case of grad students and post-docs, didn't have a lot of money. Which meant that the student population was by and large a)really diverse (with regards to nationality/ethnicity and a little bit income, not so much parents' education levels) and b)really, really nerdy and smart. And fun.

There were these five obnoxious skanky bitches who thought they were the "popular girls," except no one liked them and everyone ignored their Real World-esque antics. They wore expensive skanky clothes, stabbed each other in the back like Jack the Ripper on a coke binge, and didn't have any friends except for each other. And they didn't even like each other, they were just shallow and insecure and bitchy.

Other than that, there wasn't really a "popular" group and there weren't even really cliques since everyone was chill with each other. Sure, some groups of friends were tighter than others and there were people who didn't like each other and exes who had drama and whatever, but that never led to gossiping and vicious rumor-spreading and exclusivity and the like. Social circles were pretty fluid and open. Anyone who tried to start a rumor failed epically, since people were very "live and let live" and just didn't really give a fuck about the shit high schoolers like spreading rumors about. I can't name a single person, or group of people, who were ostracized by anyone in the school (except for the catty bitches described above, but that was less ostracization and more, "No thanks, I would rather have friends who actually like me").

The only minor difference I can think of was between the kids who smoked weed and drank before senior year and the kids who didn't, and that was only because of our divergent choices regarding how to spend our time on weekends. Once people got older and almost everyone started experimenting with illicit substances, there were these massive fantastic parties where practically the whole graduating class--despite being 250 strong--crashed some poor parent's house and got to' up. My brother and I hosted a party where, I shit you not, everyone except for like 15 people in my graduating class and his graduating class showed up. Which means that there were just a tad less than 500 different people in our parents' house throughout the night. Seriously, we went through the directory and did the hungover math the next day. It was the best time ever.

I know that my fond images of a roomful of bright, ambitious teenagers, of many different races, with many different hair and clothing styles, from many different kinds of family backgrounds, smoking weed and chugging whiskey and yelling and snorting coke and making out with each other is sort of a weird mix of kum-ba-ya cheese and typical high school idiocy, but it was good times and I wouldn't change anything about it. Even the kids who didn't drink or smoke weed--including my friend Maya, our 4.0-never-wore-makeup-or-name-brand-clothing-a-day-in-her-life-totally-awesome-nerd prom queen, and a bunch of other great people--were wholly accepted and came to parties anyway to enjoy conversation with their shitfaced friends (and offer us much-appreciated rides home). It was just so fun, and it was the perfect balance of work and play.

No backstabbing or widespread gossip or shunning, strong support for good grades, lots of actual friends with whom I'm still very close, amazing silly times had by all. Yeah, I can't wait for my high school reunion. It'll be fun as hell.

October 27, 2008 10:38 PM



Ismael Tapia II said:

Santi!!
You hadn't posted for a while, so I wasn't sure if you were still out there. But it's good to see you're still around.

I love you, too.

On a different note, I always thought you were miles ahead of most people in terms of the whole "being comfortable with yourself" thing. You were--and are--one of the people I've always looked up to in that regard.

Mr. X,
Ha. So you are alive! There was some question as of late.

You were kind of a dick to me at times. But that was mostly back in middle school, and, really, I don't know if the adult version of yourself can be held responsible for that. You more than made up for it in college. You know what I'd love to do? Get drunk and then get some Jack in the Box. That would be good times.

You know, I remember you being generally well-liked in high school. I don't think you had nearly as many people dislike you as I did. But, then, you're a less offensive person. Also, once you did start being completely yourself, in college, you were the shit. So, yeah. We should have both learned that much earlier.

The Reeg,
I don't mean to give the impression that I hated high school all around. I definitely had some fun during those four years. It's just that I wasn't as comfortable in my own skin as I am now, and I wish I had been because I think it would have allowed me to have an even better time.

The sort of high-school experience you describe sounds awesome, but also like the sort of thing that could only happen in a city like Madison.

Also, I've always--always!--been baffled by people doing coke in high school. I mean, I know someone who once referred to cocaine as "such a high-school drug." I was like, "Really?" I mean, Jesus, cocaine? I drank a grand total of, like, seven alcoholic beverages in high school. Other people were doing coke? Was I behind the curve or behind?

October 28, 2008 12:06 AM



Marel said:

You couldn’t pay me to iognre these posts!

July 9, 2011 9:18 PM






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