Given that I still live in the same area, it’s striking that I have so little continuity with that period of my life.

Here’s an example of why:

When I was in my early teens, there were a bunch of guys who used to call me “Fido” and bark at me. Every school day, for several years. In retrospect, the odd thing about this was that they were not a bunch of louts — they were among the intelligentisia of the school. Part of the horror of it is that I didn’t do anything about it — I just took it. Tried to make a game of it. None of my teachers ever did anything about it, either, even though some of this was going on in class. I still have revenge fantasies on occasion.

Aside from the “happiest days of your life” lie, another lie I will never tell my daughter is “if you just ignore them, they’ll get bored and quit bothering you.”

College was a bit better, but I didn’t really start to like myself much until I was about 30. I’m now nearly 43, and the last 10 years of my life have so far been the best.

i loved high school. absolutely loved it. i still go back and visit every chance i get. i’ve been out for over a year, but i never stopped missing it. it’s an all-girls catholic school called incarnate word. we were attached to a university, so we had a lot of cool stuff other high schools didn’t. for example, since it’s not allowed to restrict college students’ access to the internet, they couldn’t restrict ours either. hence, lots of sneaking on aim and email, hehe!

the sneaking was what made high school so much bloody fun. we came up with so many ways to circumvent and break the rules. in college, there aren’t any restrictions, which is nice but boring. the only rule-breaking you can do in college is fail out, break the law, or get drunk, none of which interest me or sound particularly fun. also, college is a lot less personal. even though i go to a pretty small one, the professors are all stuck away in their offices or else off campus when they aren’t teaching, so i never get to know them. in high school, we had open mods, which was free time that we were supposed to use for homework. (haha!) we could go into any teacher’s classroom as long as he/she didn’t have class, and we could talk with friends, cram for tests, take tests, get help from teachers, talk to teachers, whatever. some teachers played movies or had board games. my history teacher had a couch and floor pillows and always played movies on fridays. i was really close to her, and also to my spanish teacher and soccer coach/government teacher, and speech teacher. i guess my high school was very unique, but it was also a matter of luck too. i happened to land with the right people, and our group was oblvious to whatever cliques there may have been. but as high schools go, mine wasn’t all that cliquey. we would frequently talk to people outside our typical groups.

and we had so many exploits, like sleeping during mass, hiding in the basement, and stealing soccer uniforms (it’s not as bad as it sounds, honest! ) i really really loved it, and i miss the closeness of high school. at college, i just go to classes, mostly with people i don’t even know (or like) and then i go home. there’s only one professor here that i’m really close to. it’s gotten better in my second year, but it’s still not like high school. and i was definitely not one of those popular alpha whatsit people, so i don’t think that has anything to do with why i loved it so much. i dunno, it’s kind of hard to explain. you had to be there.

i could talk about high school forever. sorry. i’m going to write a story about it and then maybe that’ll get it out of my system. but yeah. it was wonderful. and i don’t mean to make college sound completely crapola, because it’s not. it’s just not the same.

We had a big sister/little sister program but it always kinda fizzled out after the first week or so. I can’t even remember mine so she was nowhere near as cool as Maureen’s!

Just because you enjoy your school days doesn’t mean your life peaks there.

But the whole ‘best days of your life’ bit? Mm, not sure about that. Having less responsibility doesn’t always translate as ‘better’.

Also, my best friend who was with me at boths schools says I didn’t seem to pick up on some of the bad things, like the existence of cliques (I still can’t really remember there being many…)

Before the knuckling down years of VCE, i spent most of my time reading in the crappy understocked libraries. It was much more fun than getting embroiled in pointless high school drama.

there was also an amazingly tolerant atmosphere: i didn’t do any work at all for most of my third and fourth year, and hardly anyone batted an eyelid. lots of room to read whatever i liked (henry miller comes to mind. went right over my head, of course. when i told the teacher what i was reading he just raised one eyebrow and said ‘rather a lot of sex in that one, right? oh well’ excellent reaction.)

but by the sixth year i was thouroughly fed up with all the understanding: you could always get out of anything by pretending your guinea pig had died. and they expected me to work for my exam. so i got out. oh yeah! and then the headmaster said i would never go anywhere this way, and my mother just blew up. that was good.

Andrea L.: Bloody hell. I’m an older sister so I feel an obligation to defend other older sisters, but not this time! Your sister was so out of line I don’t have words.

I was humiliated many times during high school. The good news is that high school doesn’t last very long and now I’m the only one who remembers. But at the time . . . at the time it was hell. You have all my best wishes and sympathy and support. Hold your head up high and think of other things.

Little Willow: One of the best things about getting older is that as disaster unfolds around me I freak less than previously. Nowadays I’m thinking, “This is going to make the best anecdote!”

Parker: Mi casa es tu casa. Rave all you want!

That’s the problem with this kind of a post. I’m able to say high school wasn’t the best days of my life because I’m lucky and my life has gotten better and better. But that isn’t always the case. It’s good not to forget it.

some of these people leave school and go on to a good and interesting life and others find themselves living a life that is dull – or unfulilling – or gets derailed by a tedious job – or unplanned children – or a bad marriage – or they don’t make it to the big league (or the olympics or the A league or whatever)…

for them school days were their glory days…and they don’t welcome the way the world expanded after school and they were no longer the centre of attention.

for others the wide world is a wonderful place of possibility with so many opportunities to find out who they really are and to carve a space for themsleves. the wide world is a place that is so much more appealing than the narrow, limited, prescribed possibilities school offers…

opps – didn’t meant to rave quite so much…

or! like two nights ago for example. I was in my room in boarding school with my roomate and all night we talked about the school “hotties”. Then the next day every guy you talked about looks at you weirdly or laughs in your face. Then you realize that your older sister had put a web- cam in your room.

the humiliation has not yet eased.

he works for the local dept of education. i told him i was a writer, then showed him my home page. he and his table all did a double-take at that. i guess they assumed that by “writer” i had meant “i write bad poetry and send it to my family at chanukkah,” because they all exclaimed, “you really are a writer! your book was published! It was in usa today!”

afterward, I kicked myself for not having asked him if he knew what any of our other classmates were up to.

But yes – school years are some of the hardest, strangest, and most insane ever. I took a year off for real-world living before college, though, and when I did return to the classroom – I had a greater appreciation for it. I rather enjoyed college, so I guess I can’t chime in for misery on that count

Grad school kinda sucked though …