Eek! A scary russian kid from my high school just sat down next to me in the lounge and leered his creepy “i-know-you” grin at me. Thank god these laptops are totally mobile while still retaining their connections…!
by krisis
high school
The funny thing is, i really almost would drop out of school if i found a reasonable alternative. Me… super-involved, happy… the kind of student that would commit hari-kari if my GPA dropped below a 3.5 for longer than a single quarter. I suppose what makes me remarkable (or, remarkable when compared to an average drop-out) is that i feel like a need a reason. In reality, i don’t feel like i’m getting anywhere. I don’t feel as though i’m being taught a single marketable skill, and i don’t know if i’m ever going to learn any. No one has managed to challenge me while keeping it interesting. Not once. Not since Junior Year of highschool. That year in my american history class i had to research a dead person. We had a picnic in a cemetery and we had to chose a tombstone of someone who died previous to 1900, and we had to write an outline of their life: pictures of where they lived, spouse’s name, what they died of, what hospital they were born in. I’ve never had to even contemplate a task as harrowing, and if a professor asked me to do the same thing again tomorrow i’d drop his class in a split second. In the absence of challenge i’ve grown so complacent and afraid of my own mental effort that i’m actually afraid to do anything intelligently. Should Philosophy have really been as hard as i made it out to be? Would it help you if you knew i didn’t read any more than 20 pages of any of the textbooks? What if i told you that i haven’t read more than 20 pages of anything the entire time i’ve spent at Drexel? Yes… i purposely handicapped myself and at last check i had a 3.6 GPA. It’s days like these i wish i made it into an Ivy League school … but my effort is all circular now. I need a challenge to rise to, but i’ll probably shy away from it anyhow.
The sky is a sort of pinkish blue. It’s funny how the fade from one to the other occurs; once i was trying to paint a tiny inch or two of horizon onto an acrylic piece i was working on for art class and it just wound up as this sloppy red-white-and-blue mess. But the sky right now … defies the color spectrum to define it. It isn’t so much violet in the middle as much as the last strands of pink are reaching upwards to entangle themselves with the trailing fingers of the blue.
Obscuring my open sky view is the chunky concrete side of a row home. I can see the evening sky through a break in the the row of houses where one house had been years ago. The empty space is defined by the utterly flat wall of the neighboring home on which you can see the faint outlines of rooms and stairs. Construction amazes me; sure, its not especially hard to build up a single house from the ground up, but to then go back into its empty frame to install electricity and water and heat and everything of the sort amazes me. They built a new dormitory on 32nd street over the summer, and i watched it grow from the ground up until my friends moved into it the day before classes began. Even after having watching it wind its way up i still don’t really understand how it was possible… there’s a building there where once there wasn’t one.
Scale really amazes me. The same way the building of a dormitory seems staggering in comparison to a single row-home that no long exists, distance awes me. I can walk the width of the entire city in a day, and in a car i could drive nearly across the entire state of Pennsylvania. There’s a girl who came to Drexel this fall from Los Angeles, and the space between here and her home is hard for me to grasp. Sure, it’s all tucked safely within the boundaries of the United States, but coming from L.A to Philadelphia to go to school is nearly the same as coming from England. That space … i can’t measure it realistically in footsteps or city blocks or even miles. The idea of a mile loses its coherence when presented in such quantity. Is it just 2000 times farther away than the coffee shop is from me? Maybe, but does that help me to understand it any better? Distance is measured more easily in what comes inbetween: Pennsylvania Dutchland, and Chicago, and endless fields of grain, and mountainous states with less population than Philadelphia, and the San Andreas Fault. Or, maybe i’ve got my geography mixed up.
In about 24 hours i’m boarding a plane to Florida. The distance isn’t as great, but it’s still a bit stunning … i’ll be passing over friends in at least three different states that i’ve never even been to on my way there. It’s a three hour flight, yet it takes six hours to drive from my destination to DisneyWorld in Orlando. I used to have to use mnemonic device to remember if it was Disney Land and World. It’s funny what will stick out in your memory after years of relative obscurity.
I haven’t been in the air since i was in 8th grade. Since then… well, i’m obviously pretty different. I don’t know how airplanes make me feel anymore; before they were a joy and the turbulence was better than any rollercoaster i’d find in Florida. Now rollercoasters make me a little bit nervous, and i’ve known the detached fascination and horror of watching the news report the crash of a plane – knowing all along that i just lost the possibility of having hundreds of conversations i had been planning on having after the summer was over.
All of that is just the distance between me then and me now. It’s hard to really comprehend the difference six years can make in a person, whether it be in days or weeks or seconds. But, you can measure it by the landmarks left on my life. At least that way it isn’t such a daunting task. To be sure, it’s been a long while since i last took to the sky, but i’m still the same person – and i’ll be boarding a plane that’ll tear into that not-so-violet evening sky in 24 hours.
I haven’t seen anyone from highschool in ages and ages. I had a whole lot of friends in this year’s senior class from my various activities and extracurriculars (mostly because last year’s class was a bunch of idiots), and i haven’t seen any of them more than once or twice since i graduated. And then of course there are members of my own class, who i lost touch with as soon as graduation was over. I’ve just never been good at staying in touch with people when i can’t see them. I suppose i just have a hard time cultivating a relationship over the internet when i know full well i could be cultivating it in person (whereas with ‘net friends i’m fine with just chatting online). Or… or maybe i’m just a lazy and horrible person who is much too into personal time to pursue all of his old friends whether it only be to NJ or all the way out to CA. Either way, i need to ditch the habit.
Me and theatre is ugly. I found out today while at the seasonal choir and band concerts that i don’t like watching large ensembles of performers… i like situations where i can focus on a single person. I’m like that at rock concerts too – i pick one member of the band at a time and zero in on them to the point of excluding everything else that’s happening. What it comes down to is that theatre was the only way for me to be on stage in high school, but now it’s not. When i started doing theatre, my only skills were my loudness and my huge memorization ability, so theatre was the only thing for me. But, i developed other skills like public speaking and guitar playing and emceeing events while i never developed (or cared to develop) those essential skills of getting into character and moving comfortably on stage. And here we are. I jumped at the chance to do theatre when i got to Drexel, and i had fun doing it because of the people i met, but by the end of last year i realized that the only character i was interested in playing was myself (evidenced in how pissed off i was initially when i didn’t get into hair, a show about long-haired singing teenagers). I tried out for the fall show, but as you can see in the archives, i hardly cared when i didn’t get in. And now auditions are on tuesday, and getting a part partially or totally precludes me from guitar ensemble, active participation in the newspaper, and running Battle of the Bands effectively. And i’m expected to be there.