A Man and His Memories. Highschool: Part 1

Chapter 1: http://jelliott115.hubpages.com/_h7tjjfme2qu9/hub/A-Man-and-His-Memories

Chapter 2: http://jelliott115.hubpages.com/_h7tjjfme2qu9/hub/A-Man-and-His-Memories-Chapter-Two

Find me on Facebook! Jay.Elliott@earthlink.net
Follow me on Twitter! @jayelliott115

Undoubtedly, high school is always one of the more memorable moments in anyone's life. I find it difficult to think that anyone can say that they don't remember a single thing that happened during that time (assuming massive amounts of alcohol aren't involved).

Personally, I had a love-hate relationship with it. I believe this to be healthy though. There are people out there who loved it so much that they still frequent the bars and associate with the same crowd while proudly wearing the local high school jacket. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with hanging out with people that you went to school with, but there is a fine line between hanging out, and being overly proud of that girl you did 15 years ago. The bragging rights are indeed yours, proud jock, but let it go. She's got 3 kids now and is sagging in places she shouldn't be.

On the flip side to that, having an overly negative experience can also be detrimental to personal growth, assuming you can not recover from it. Take the kid that gets bullied every day while there up to the very day he graduates. What is supposed to be a social building block for people is now a horrible memory that will likely keep him socially awkward for the rest of his life.

The first few years of high school, for me, weren't the greatest. I had recently moved from a private school to a public school and was trying to find my way into the cliques that were already quite solid. I got to experience being the 'new kid' without even moving to another town. I actually did this several times over the course of my life. A total of 3 different high schools to be exact, but for now I am going to focus on the first time.

I remember walking around the square single-floor layout of the school and watching people. All the different groups of kids hanging around people they grew up with. Other kids mingling in an attempt to try to fit in quickly lest they be devoured and picked on by the undesirables. I chose to keep to myself. I knew two or three people at most and I didn't see them.

The sight of loners being picked on coupled with the lack of any social standing with anyone started to wear on me after a while. I needed to find my own circle. I didn't fit in with the jocks or skaters, and there were a lot of both at our school.

Yep, I was what I would now label a lame-ass. I played Magic the Gathering in the science room with my friends at lunch time, watched Simpsons in the same room (because the teacher was cool lke that), and envied my friends as they played DnD without me. I never truly understood how or why this started, but I vividly remember walking through the halls singing random songs from Aladdin. Now that I think about it.. we were a 1990s glee club. After I'm done writing this, I'm going to go hang myself. This me was completely and 100% opposite of what I was later on.

Over time I began to crave attention. There were people who would seek this out by dropping the N-bomb or cussing loudly so everyone could hear in order to achieve that, but I had a different means. I was more cunning. I would say something like "So I hear that AIDS was first discovered in a straight white male aged 25-30." This got me in trouble a few times with the teachers, and also with people who felt uncomfortable hearing things like that. It was almost as though people had become desensitized to the usual outburst of attention-mongering that my brand of it was truly shocking. This isn't to say that I did this all the time, but I did do it. This was when I first developed a taste for seeing people drawn outside of their comfort zone. Something about seeing someone in a fish-out-of-water state made me smirk inside. Knowing I could make someone feel that way was in a sense quite empowering to me.

I had a few girlfriends while in this stage of my life. I don't know how, but I did. Again, I would have likely beat myself up if I knew myself back then. They came and went with nothing really substantial ever coming from it.

Every now and then I would go on mIRC into a chatroom and talk with people. It was a hobby of mine. I could, in essence, recreate myself to be who I wanted to be rather than who I was. Not because I disliked who I was, but because I wanted to see how people reacted if I had been 'this type' of person as opposed to what/who I am. I even went so far as to have online relationships with people. I only remember four of their names. I think two of three may have been at the same time.. but if there is a 'zip code' rule, why can't there be a chatroom or server rule? In other words, "It's not cheating because it's a different room"? The one that stands out above the rest is a girl named Sascha. I don't think I ever forgot about her. She and I would stay up until obscene hours of the morning talking online, which eventually progressed to talking on the phone. This ended up being a real long-distance relationship that I never really told anyone about. Anyway, it was online and therefore not considered a real relationship that I would ever gain anything from.. .... right?