I would rate my high school experience overall a 6.5.
My friends were a solid 9. No complaints there. Here’s how you know they performed well – they’re still largely my best friends today. Enough said.
Schoolwork was a 6. I should have done better grade-wise. To be fair I do have a moderate case of ADD. and it was undiscovered while in high school. That aside, I could have edged up the GPA a bit. But, fuck it. I got into the school I wanted by November of senior year and I had lots of cheap whiskey to drink. I was in the honors classes, but definitely one of the dumber kids. So, not a lot to bitch about there, either.
While I wasn’t super cool, I did have one of my best friends who was super cool at a rival high school. If I didn’t get invited to the big parties at our school (mostly I didn’t), I would hang with the guys at the other school. Over there I was cooler than I was at my high school. I highly recommend this strategy if you’re a teenage misfit. Pretty much every teen comedy has some version of this dynamic.
My dating life, however, was a 0. Now,the main issue is that I was terrified of women. Like a lot of adolescents I thought I was beyond ugly. My lot in life was that I was destined to be alone without a woman. Even with that understanding I still was social. Studying comedy your whole life pays off when you want to be around women without actually talking to them. So, instead of dating I played a went bowling with my buddies, played lot of guitar, watched a lot of HBO comedy specials, and smoked a lot of grass. Not that my lack of tail was entirely my fault. Not one woman had the decency to throw herself at my feet.
Fast forward ten years. Our first reunion was put on by someone else and was a hell of a lot of fun. By this time I was comfortable in my own skin. I even managed to start dating one of the hotter chicks from the class who was surprisingly single. That part isn’t important. I just wanted to brag. Because guys who brag about stuff like that are really admirable and not secretly insecure even at age thirty-six.
I was told by a few girls from my class that I would be planning the fifteen year party. I mean, I don’t even drink. It’s not like I pull together rave bubble parties on weekends. The reality is nobody else would have planned it. It was also a lot of fun. Since I put the party on I received a lot of attention. I was married at the time so there was no restroom handicapped stall shenanigans.
Note – I’ve never taken a young lady to the stall of a bathroom. That seems like the worst place in the world for a physical expression of love. The handicap stall does have rails, though.
Quick tip – If you don’t go to your reunion because you hated high school, I say go anyway. I found that the dicks just don’t come. Only the fun people show up. Plus, at least seven people will be thrilled you showed up.
Well, I had a hard enough time passing pre-calculus, so I thought our twenty year was next year. Turns out I was off by an integer. An integer of one. But I’ll probably still plan it. First, I really like doing this stuff. Second, I’m not a control freak – I literally ask everyone’s opinions on what they want to do, and we vote electronically. That way if it sucks, hey, not my fault.
The last reason is also attention. I do enjoy when people come up and thank me. I like kissing the women hello on the cheek that used to not know I existed.
Bottom line – I love being able to go back in my mind to high school and do the shitty parts over. In the psychedelic book Still Life With Woodpecker, Tom Robbins ends with this scribbled on the last page. “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
Well, he’s wrong. Actually you can’t go back and do anything over. The pain of the past is the past. It happened. But you can take the present and insert people from the past and do it up right. And that feels even better than if you could go back. Trust me.