Come on, COVID crisis. Because going to high school isn’t, like, scary enough without you lurking around. Because I mean, like, oh my God! It’s high school, you know?
Shoot, just the thought of it has me talking like a goofy late-80s teenager.
Thanks a lot, COVID-19!
You just had to pile on with fears of contracting your virus and agonizing over whether to send my only child off to her freshman year in a pandemic. Because going to high school in normal times wasn’t hard enough?!?
I mean, most of my memories of the high school experience lie somewhere between being stuck in a vice grip and dropped in a sausage maker. Plus, I still have regular nightmares over how to say “algebraic.”
As we approach this major milestone for my daughter, I’ve found myself reliving more and more of those wonderful days. Transported back to an era when I wore clothes so bright and colorful that it ensured retinal damage to anyone who looked at me. (On particularly dry days, I could even start brushfires.) Shirts were a patchwork of different fabrics that resembled a designer hobo tent. Yet, in spite of this and my poof-ball hair, I fancied myself a pretty cool dude, strutting about the halls in my skinny legs that looked like chopsticks in a pair of oversized canvas boat shoes.
Boy, I wish I could talk to my delusional high school self. Tell him to pull it together and stop acting like he knew it all. And then stuff him in a locker for good measure.
High school always felt like some kind of mad scientist’s experiment. Throw a bunch of overly-excited teens amped up on hormones, testosterone and bad music into a giant petri dish, tell them the world is theirs (which to a hormone-ravaged teenager sounds like, “Do whatever you want … just don’t flip the car,”) give them a car to flip and then let them strut about and make total fools of themselves.
To make matters worse, there were girls!
I had little-to-no experience with members of the opposite sex by high school. This was thanks to spending most of my elementary school days in an all-boys Catholic school. It was directly across a busy Tampa street, and two barbed wire fences, from the all-girls Catholic school. I recall German Shepherds who licked their lips if we so much as looked over there.
Not that we would. The girls were intimidating and confident. They laughed and taunted us in our khaki pants and white polo short-sleeved shirts, all streaked in grass stains and dirt. Our pants had large holes like the meteor-pocked surface of the moon.
We were a sad lot.
“I can see more skin than pants!” they would hoot and whistle at us.
It left me ill-prepared for high school. Free of the Catholic school circuit, I went to a prep school where they encouraged the “mixing of the sexes,” as if it might make us better individuals. Not drooling, babbling, brainless baboons who would stop at nothing to prove we deserved to be kept behind barbed wire fences patrolled by German shepherds.
Regularly being around high school girls helped me in my already-advanced journey toward total awkwardness, and skilled me in the ability to string together total nonsense when in their presence. To this day, researchers are still studying the cryptic mutterings, drivel and gibberish that came out of my mouth in hopes that it might actually contain coded secrets of the afterlife or answers to quantum physics’ mysteries.
These ramblings made about as much sense to me as … algebraic. All I knew was a girl would approach me in the hall, remark on how my shirt was giving her headaches in class or resembled a hobo tent, and then I would set forth a stream of words that sounded like a macaque trying to read poetry. Three days later, I would wake up in a psych ward and a nice orderly would ask if I wanted to try Jell-O again.
Yes, that was a fun time. As close to being dropped in an alien civilization with no guidebook or translating devices. A stranger in a strange land. Filled with unusual types, like the sophomore in my PE class who told me stories about “things” that I didn’t even know were things. Or the school dances where I learned my bones must have been fused together by the way they made me appear as if I had been electrocuted. Or the propensity to get little bits of dissected frog in my poof-ball hair, which no one would tell me about.
Come on, COVID crisis. Let up so we can get over our fears of catching the virus and back to our everyday concerns over clothes that burn out retinas and making sense of awkward high school boys like me.