Tag Archives: high school

Roller Coasters and the Days of High School Drama

This blog post is dedicated to anecdotes, silly musings, and nostalgia. If you are hoping to find a purpose or point to the story, this is not the post for you.

Freshman year of high school I had this awesome (and really cute) friend- let’s call him K- who I hung out with quite a bit. The two of us would trade music, skip assemblies to hang out by the swings, and would frequently try to outdo each other in battles of cynicism. At my previous school I’d been a bit of an outsider, which meant that I refused to let myself believe that this good looking and somewhat popular guy might actually like me.

During the spring, he invited me to go to Six Flags with him. I was under the impression that he’d invited a bunch of people but no one else, for whatever reason, was able to make it that day except for the two of us. I was cool with that. I mean, we hung out alone all the time as it was- why should going to Six Flags be any different? Turns out it wasn’t really. Sure there was a bit more flirting and smiling than usual. I, of course, acted super brave and agreed to go on every ride he wanted to take me on no matter how terrified I was. But overall I left the park thinking that I’d shared a ridiculously fun evening with my buddy K. That was until I went back to school a couple days later to hear several of my friends ask, “Soooo, how was Six Flags with K?” (insert annoying voices and inflections here). “It was really fun,” I’d reply. Then, “Was it a date?” “Um, no!” “I’m pretty sure it was a date. I mean, it was just the two of you right? I thinnnnk he liikkkkeees youuu!”

All of a sudden my fun night had to be reassessed in my awkward teenage mind. Were they right? Looking back, it had seemed an awful lot like a date. I frantically dismissed the possibility and continued to refuse the thought that K might have feelings for me, although I was never quite able to view him in the same light again. Sadly for me, I didn’t receive proper confirmation that he had had a HUGE crush on me until senior year, at which point it was all too late. Sigh.

Skip ahead to the present. Perhaps you’ve guessed by now, but it’s been a while since I graduated from high school. Things aren’t quite so coated in drama the way they could be when I was a teenager. Nevertheless, I sometimes think back to who I was in high school and try to remember how I viewed the world once upon a time. Was it really so different from how I see it now?

On Sunday, the other C and I ventured to Great America for a high school style date. This time around, the guy was even cuter, more awesome, and I can say for cereal that he likes me. I’m pretty sure he’s figured out by now that I like him back. Teehee. For a couple of moments it sorta felt like we could be in high school again. Maybe, if we were really sneaky, we could trick others into believing that we weren’t really grown ups.

At one point we waited in line for the front row of one of the roller coasters and watched a group of teenagers duke it out over who was going to sit where. Two girls sat in the front row, which left one girl and two guys. One guy refused to go on and joined a group of other people by the steps. Two remaining. The girl expressed her anger at her friends for sitting in the scariest part of the train by saying “Eff you guys!” and flipping them the bird. The guy, not wanting to be seen with this monstrosity, sits in the row in front of her. Yelling ensues. Eventually guy reseats himself next to girl who continues to swear as the train pulls away.

C and I smile at each other, laugh, and are happy we’re not high schoolers anymore.

The End!

Eureka! (The Sentiment, not the Californian City)

First things first, mandatory self-imposed guilt trip: I FAIL at reading. I will do better soon! At least I’ve started reading the Economist again, which should count for something.

Now on to the real blog post.

Back in high school I was the type of kid who enjoyed her surroundings and didn’t worry too much about the future. Some of the other students at my school attended college fairs their freshman year, others spent their weekends at debate tournaments, and I did my best to cope with the fact that I was in freakin’ high school. I played between two to three sports a year, took extra classes and invented tutorials for fun, dabbled in drawing, painting, photography, and improv acting, and- perhaps the most time consuming activity of them all, pined over many a boy, as demonstrated by semi-emo, post-midnight poetry scribbled into my diary.

How anyone at the age of 15 or 16 could possibly know what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives was beyond me. I barely knew what I was going to do at the weekend (some things never change). Occasionally my more ambitious friends would pester me with questions about where I wanted to go to college, which would result in my having a minor freakout sesh.

Why hadn’t I cared more about improving my GPA, or joined more clubs, or taken AP lit instead of taking extra electives in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and creative writing (which led to me winning an award senior year in English BTDUBS, bam!), or? Why did other people want to move away from home? Was I really so strange for liking my parents and for knowing that I could obsess over a band and get away with it because I was still a teenager?

The freakouts never lasted long. I’d moved enough times by that point to understand that life’s little bits and pieces pull together eventually, some more easily and quickly than others.

Instead of drawn out plans I tend to have moments. Either I’ll reach a place, read a sentence in a book, or meet someone new and think to myself, “Yes! This is me.” In other words, “Eureka!” There will be much debating prior to the moment, many dilly dallyings and doubts. Perhaps my life could be summarized as the moments and periods of waiting in between.

An example of a moment would be my first experience with Trinity College (Connecticut) where I went for undergrad. During the summer of 2002, My mom and I embarked upon a tour of liberal arts colleges on the East Coast. I still had no idea who I supposedly was (did it matter?) or where I belonged. After one information session after another I quickly determined what I most certainly did not want from a school- a heavy core curriculum? No thanks (isn’t the beauty of liberal arts the ability to choose?). I didn’t want anything to do with Pennsylvania and thought Maine seemed a bit far away from everything. Then we got to Trinity and I had that moment. I fell in love with the campus, imagined myself eating at one of the cafeterias, and wanted to be one of those students lounging on the quad. I figured I could deal with the salmon-colored pants and the pearls as long as I could have an old chapel and a strong history department within a five minute walk from my dorm. As we left I told my mom, “I’m coming back here.” Apparently Trinity felt the same way because I matriculated into the class of 2007.

Do I think I could have been happy at another school? Of course. Did I ever regret the fact that I didn’t do more research about other schools after visiting Trinity or try harder to get in somewhere else? Nope. I never, not even for a second, considered the possibility of transferring. Whenever anyone asks me how I enjoyed it, I always answer that I loved it. These moments of mine are pretty damn incredible.

It had been a while since my last one, but I finally had one tonight. It may involve going back to school again (crap)…and taking the LSATs in October. It’s an idea I’d previously considered but could never commit to. I’d prevented myself from thinking about it since graduating from the LSE because the idea of studying more, and for a long time, is exhausting. But now it’s all I can think about and I plan to hunt it down.

I went to a Trinity careers networking reception this evening and wound up chatting with one of the panel members, who happens to be a partner at a fancy pants law firm in SF. He’d also studied history at Trinity- we’d even had one of the same advisors! Imagine, he experienced one professor at the start of his career and I experienced him on the verge of retirement. He urged me, while insisting that he wasn’t, to think about law and I laughed the thought off instantly. “It’s not for me,” I muttered. Then I went home and realized how wrong that statement was. Maybe it wasn’t for me, once upon a time. There certainly wasn’t anyway I could have handled it after graduating from Trinity. But I’ve since made my way to the (freakin’) LSE and survived. I know I can handle the workloads because I’ve already faced them.

Here are a few reasons this makes sense:

-I get excited about cyber laws and digital copyright.
-I think doing research and writing about it is fun.
-My friends don’t call me “Sassoline” for nothin’- I like to argue.
-Having a background in History of International Relations, Law, and social media, would make me an official badass (international and/or technology law here I come!!).
-I have a pretty sweet memory, which has caused my friends much frustration on numerous occasions.
-I don’t like it when rules aren’t followed properly (i.e. the car MUST be sighted before “shotgun” can be properly claimed).

You may think this is a pretty big decision to have made within a few hours, but remember, once I have a moment I have to give in to its power. The moment never (or rarely) fails. And really, there wasn’t ever so much a question of me not wanting to pursue this but of me not being ready. Now I am.