Graduation Night- Waiting at the Light

I forgot something funny from after the graduation all-nighter. When my friend Cole and I were driving home really tired and such. I kept stopping at stop signs and waiting for them to change all the while thinking this stop sign is taking a really long time. We were sitting there for at least a minute when my friend asked what I was doing. That startled me into action and I was fine until the next sign. After doing that twice and laughing about how stupid I was I stopped at a red light and then after I checked both ways, I ran it. We laughed about that and got on the freeway and got home, alive somehow. Sure was a good idea to just let us stay up all night and then drive home sleep deprived rather than drunk.

Jewel Songs

A few days after graduation my girlfriend and I were driving home one day and when we came to the stop sign off the freeway exit a song came on the radio and my girlfriend stopped and turned it up. She looked over at me and told me this song explained exactly how she felt about me. It was 'Near You Always' by Jewel she watched my face during the whole three minutes and a bit of the song to see if I felt it like she felt it. It is a sweet song and it was really a good description of how young love feels but it was just awkward at the moment. There were people waiting behind us and I was uncomfortably aware of them waiting for us to go and I was trying to make my eyes and face let my girlfriend that I did really like her very much but I wanted to do that and keep the car rolling. I must have looked impatient because she huffed a little and then turned right and drove down main street obviously frustrated with me. In retrospect I should have been more interested in her sincere expression of love for me and drank it in, inconvenienced motorists be damned. There are so few time in our lives when life is good and everything is right and I didn't appreciate it until it was gone. Too bad, I guess there's never next time. As a side note to this story Jewel actually shares my birthday and my birth hospital. She was born exactly four years before I was in the Payson Utah hospital. Cool beans right?     

All Night Jelousy

The idea of the all night senior party was to keep us contained and not drinking booze and then driving or doing ill advised sex to each other. The idea was to mix and reminisce for one last time sign some yearbooks and tell everyone we would always love them and never forget them. My problem was that for the second time in my life I was genuinely in love with a girl and it was driving me crazy with jealousy. Every time she would go and hug another guy and laugh with him it was like cold acid was being poured into my brain and I wanted nothing more than to keep her close to me and out of the company of possible kissing accident inducing guys. I had a miserable night purely ruined by my semi-rational fears that my girlfriend would cheat on me or spark an interest and leave me. I walked around and talked to some people but I was mostly trying to keep my girlfriend in sight. I never used to care so much because I could just go find a more or less interchangeable replacement but this was the first time since my first girlfriend that I wanted this one and no one else. Well, in fairness I wanted her to be all mine but I was still looking to keep my options open. That might not make sense if you are not a libidinous teenage boy with little empathy and life experience. We passed the night without incident or much entertainment and I went home with my friend Cole and my girlfriend went home with her best friend.

Graduation

I don't know what freedom and fun that high school students think lives just outside the confines of home life, free room and board, little to no responsibility and a place where all of your friends gather for a several hours a day but it is a lie. By May all of the seniors were ready to move on to what we thought would be more freedom, more money and more fun - because we were stupid. Whatever the motivation or compulsion to escape - freedom or exile was almost ours, ready or not. We were out of school a week or two before graduation and that is when it sunk in that I would not be achieving my goal of speaking at graduation. The graduation was held at the local college and it was the basic talking and blah blah and then we got to walk where you get your diploma and then walk over for a picture. I had toyed with the idea of doing something funny and memorable but I chickened out and did nothing. After the ceremony I got pictures with my family and went to say goodbye to all of the underclass friends of mine that were in attendance. We hugged and made the un-keepable promises we feel we must make on parting and I went home to get rested up for the senior all night party. It was supposed to the momentous marking of the greatest accomplishment of my life but it was one of the more anticlimactic afternoons of my life.

Last Show and Imagined Glory

I was banned from all school activities based on my sub-stellar. sub-lunar even, attendance and grades. That was going to include the senior 'sob' assembly where they play a montage of pictures of popular kids and friends of the producers while they play songs about how this was the best days of our lives. I was not above debasing myself and begging to, and I quote, 'Please, please, please let me do this one last thing.' All whiny and blubbery though. They cracked and let me if I promised to not make any naughty jokes or make fun of any teachers or administrators. I agreed and they allowed me to participate in the writing and producing of the final assembly of my high school career. I helped write a knock off of Don McLean's 'American Pie' where we cleverly replaced the lyrics about rock and roll with words about the Payson High school experience so that the chorus went, 'Now we're singing bye bye Payson High. . .' and lines about what we had done in high school. It all felt very significant and momentous because, at the time beset as we were with the myopia of youth, everything felt very big and very important and uniquely real. Probably like what was happening at the thousands of high schools across the nation more or less simultaneously.  They played memorial tributes and the photo montage and some kids said what they would miss and all the girls cried and all of the boys tried to comfort those girls in the most inconspicuously yet deliberately physical way possible. A good time was had by most and I convinced myself I had done an all time good job, but I doubt anyone but the people who worked on the show and I would even remember anything about it.

A Very Unfortunate Game of Tag

On one of our lazy senior-itis afternoons in school leadership class we decided to give productivity a miss and go out into the gorgeous afternoon and play some kissing tag. Kissing tag pits the boys against the girls with the boys on one side and the girls on the other. One person who is 'it' sits in the middle and a boy and girl are chosen randomly. If the person who is 'it' is a girl then the picked boy tried to kiss her before the picked girl can kiss him. Whoever does their job wins and the other person is 'it'. This is a perfect game if you are playing with all cute and fun people because, kissing. It is not fun if the ratio of uglies gets too high and you are trying to decide which kiss would be worse on the fly. This day the ratio was pretty good but about fifteen minutes into the game a girl suffered a womanly leak and didn't notice most of the rest of us did but I, at least, had no idea if it would be less embarrassing for me to tell her in front of everyone or for her to realize it later. The correct answer was both are equally horrifying. A girl tried to get her attention and quietly let her know about her accidental discharge but the girl was too into the game and didn't understand what she was being told discreetly and yelled at the sacrificial Samaritan asking her what she said because she couldn't hear her. The person trying to head off the problem just pointed a finger at her own crotch and nodded her head towards the leak now spreading around her crotch. The girl, still smiling and laughing a little looked down and understood screamed and grabbed her hoodie sweatshirts wrapping around her waist as she ran off crying. We all felt horrible fro her and discontinued the game and wandered over to sit in the shade and talk about anything other than what had just happened. To my knowledge none of us ever told someone else the story and definitely not with the girl's name attached, some things are just too shameful even joke about. It is one of those things I would love to ask her about after all these years and see how she felt at the time but I couldn't for fear that she would still be ashamed and had hoped it was gone and forgotten.

Girls are Not as Strong as Boys

I have mentioned lots of times how very much my girlfriend was into feminism. She was convinced that women had made and done everything of any note in the history of the world and that women were equal, if not superior, to men in every measurable way. One day when I was over at her house she started saying that she wouldn't worry about any guy assaulting her because all she would do is kick him in the nuts. I explained to her that since the very beginning of a boy's self-awareness when guys know they have nuts and that they are extremely tender they are the first thing we defend in any situation not just during the assault of a woman. She told me that if someone ever tried to grab her she would just fight loose using her anger and rage. I told her I didn't think that would be possible against a guy of any size or any strength. She insisted she could get away easily. So I challenged her to try and escape a basic wrestling hold I would put her in and she could try to escape using any weapon in her kicking, punching, biting, arsenal. She agreed a little over-confidently. You have to understand that at this time I was not much bigger than she was, maybe 10 pounds or so, and we were both in pretty good shape, having been rock climbing every day. I closed the distance between us in two steps and grabbed her arms to keep her from punching me I spun her around with her arms crisscrossed across her chest holding both of her wrists under her armpits. She started trying to kick me and so I settled her onto the couch and tangled her legs up in the leg scissor. Her brother who was taking the 'you couldn't get away' stance with me started telling her to trying get away and to fight harder. She was trying her best to kick and to bite but she was hopelessly overpowered and getting really quite angry. I wasn't saying much but her brother was laying it on and she was getting seriously furious. When I finally let her go after about 5 minutes she was exhausted but not so exhausted as to not slap me, call me in a-hole and tell me to leave. I tried to remind her that she had agreed to the challenge but she was hearing none of it. She stormed up to her room kind of rage crying. I followed up after and told her I thought we're just playing around but she didn't see it that way. I apologized and went home while her brother kept making fun of her something I wished he would've stopped. She called me a couple hours later when she'd calmed down and apologized for getting so angry. I never again mentioned this physical challenge reality check and she never asked for a rematch.

I Rig the Vote

Every year for the yearbook the student body was supposed to vote on a whole bunch of different people who would be the most or the most likely too. . . or the best something or whatnot. Generally, this was done by anonymous poll and the winners would then be announced and have their photos taken to be put in the yearbook. In my bid for just a smidgen of high school immortality I decided to go ahead and rig the vote. I gathered a couple hundred of the ballots and took them around to different classrooms, as I was supposed to do, but not like I was supposed to do I instructed everybody to fill in my name in every field. There were several hundred people who did follow the instructions I gave them making me far and away the winner in every single category. The teacher who was the coordinator of the yearbook was not amused as they tallied up the ballots and called me in for a little chit chat. She was under the impression, and quite rightly so, that I may have altered the natural flow of democracy. Yes madam, I am guilty of doing my job and I'm not sorry. She told me that I could choose one picture to be in and the second place person in each field would be in those pictures. Despite my longstanding policy of resisting authority, I agreed to these tyrannical terms and chose to be in the picture with my girlfriend as 'Most Outspoken'. In retrospect I should have picked most likely to succeed. That would've been nice, you know? Success. Outspoken is just code for opinionated and annoying.

JD Almost Dies

The was a girl in my grade who was the fairly pretty ponderous, introverted, poetry-sharing type who asked me several times for me to take her climbing or repelling. In the spring of our senior year there was the definite sense that the window was closing on when we could go. I had lost some interest because I had a girlfriend and the both of them knew about each other. To that end we organized a strictly platonic trip with her little brother along to make sure that it was going to stay that way. There was a gate across the road so we had to hike up about 3 miles carrying the gear and making small talk for about an hour. Her brother had told me how much he knew about rock climbing and rappelling and how he was pretty much an expert in all aspects of the outdoors. When we had hiked up to the top of the cliff we were rappelling off of I could tell right away he may have overstated his qualification because he was having trouble organizing the exact direction in which to put on his harness. We were on top of the cliff that was about 60 feet tall and he was not giving it the proper respect, walking back and forth towards the edge all willy-nilly in a way that gives the guide of any trip with any sort of danger a real sick feeling in the pit other stomach. I had asked him to please stop walking up to the edge until he put on his harness and his rappelling device. He told me he would be fine. To prove his point he walked one more time to the edge and this time actually did grab the rope that was already over the edge and leaned forward and until his chest and torso were literally over the void. Just like in every cheap thriller ever made, he slipped. His legs flew out from underneath him and luckily with the double rope in his hand he was able to stop himself from the plummet with just his legs falling over the edge. I've never been so terrified in my life. I don't think I particularly cared if he died, I really didn't know him at all, I just didn't want them to die on my watch and in my view. I yelled at him and instead of being sufficiently chastened and humbled by his near brush with death he was defiant, saying it was fine because he didn't fall off. We only rappelled one time each and then I took down the rope and I walked back down in a much more surly mood. For the next couple of weeks I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat gripped in night terrors convinced I was seeing this kid slide off the edge to his death. I don't think I've ever taken anyone, but my own children rappelling again. Especially not somebody who knew everything about everything and didn't need their safety equipment attached.

AP Testing and Gloating

I told you before the first class and only I have ever gotten an 'F' in was AP English. The teacher and I spent a lot of time, when I would go to class, arguing over whether or not different interpretations of the works were valid. Now that I've been through college and met with a lot of other literary criticism I know I was right. No one, even the author sometimes, knows why they wrote some of the stuff and if you want to chase down the final authoritative interpretation of any work you are on a fools errand. There are hundreds of schools of thought and personal interpretations of every great novel, play or poem and with no chance at objectivity all that have justification in the text can be equally viable. She was more of the opinion that whatever she thought was right was actually right and if your essays didn't reflect that they were wrong. The good news was that I had an AP test that would be judged by outsiders without her input. She told me over and over that if I used my style and my ideas I wouldn't do well on the test and that I need to do it her way. I disrespectfully disagreed. When I was reading the test and taking the test I was excited, this wasn't going to be hard at all. My confidence was justified when the couple of weeks later we got the test results back and I had scored better than anyone else in the class. I couldn't wait for the next class. Now, in my opinion, smartassery is an art and when I came in that day with my paper I was intent on painting my masterpiece. I asked quite loudly around what everybody else and scored most of had scored enough to pass but then I told him that I'd scored higher than all of them by not listening to the teacher. I told her that now objectively we could see which method worked better and if she felt like apologizing I would accept her apology then and frankly forgive her. She did not feel like apologizing, I forgave her anyway because that's what the bigger man does. I never went back to her class and I think that made us both happier.

I Am Inexplicably A Douche

There is no denying that I was generally a pretty selfish and self-serving kind of person or in the parlance of the day a (air quote), douche, (close air quote). Generally, though I was doing it for some sort of reward like a girl, or a grade, a trophy, or to take a shortcut to having a good time. There was one time after school though when I was going past the chemistry teacher's classroom and a kid I knew from Santaquin had just finished taking a makeup test and put it on the teacher's desk. He was a bit of a goofball but basically an okay kid so I don't know why I did what I did next. I went into the classroom took his recently completed test off of the teacher's desk and took it with me. My friend asked me why I took it and I told him something which wasn't the truth because whatever it was did not explain why I was being such a jerk for no reason. On the way home I took the test and tore it up into little pieces and threw them out of the window. Later that afternoon when the acid haze of douchebaggery had passed from my mind I tried to figure out why I had done that, but there was literally no reason. To this very moment I'm not sure why I took that kid's test, I mean I don't even think it was to be funny or anything, it was just a random act of un-kindness. I felt a couple times like I should tell them what happened or at least make up some legitimate sounding excuse as to why I had thrown away his test but I never worked up the courage. Once again, total class act on my part.

Coffee Forgiveness

Another funny thing about that chemistry teacher was that for his favorites he was not a huge stickler for attendance. If you missed a day because you just didn't want to come to class all you had to do was tell him you were off doing something more fun and he would excuse you. Or because we had him the first class after lunch if we are running late my friend Cole would buy him some coffee and then when we came in 20 or 30 minutes late he'd start to yell at us and Cole would tell him he got him a cup of coffee then hand it over and go sit down and it would be like nothing ever happened. I'm not sure if they teach that in college when teachers are learning to teach but is not a really good method for maintaining a sense of law and order. it would be pretty funny in a sitcom, but as I understand it those classrooms in high school situational comedies are more made up than real.

If Murder is Committed I Am on Point

My chemistry teacher used to joke about all kinds of things that aren't very funny to joke about but one day he took a line that was really scary. This particular day he was exceptionally mad at bird over something or another and threatened to go out to his car, get his gun, come back and shoot him. The two reasons I didn't think this is funny was first; he did have a gun and second; he didn't just say 'I will kill you' he told us the specific practical steps his plan would need to come to fruition. Everybody got really quiet and the teacher told my friend and I that he liked us pretty well so if he did end up shooting Bird in the head and then locked himself in his office and had his gun in his mouth threatening to kill himself that we were supposed to come talk him down. We looked at each other and then back to him and told him he had a deal. This is simply good manners, because if the psychopath who is threatening to shoot a student in the head asks you to talk him down from suicide you say yes. Common, flipping, courtesy, not to mention the oldest rule in the book. He never did end up shooting Bird, and its kind of a shame too, I would've been pretty heroic talking the madman out of whatever he was planning to do next.

An Old Girlfriend and the New One Don't Get Along

If you member back a little ways I told you about a girl in Florida that I dated, and that I led her on a little bit, what I hadn't really made clear, I think, is that I'd never stopped leading. So when she came out for a visit the next spring I was sort of committed to my new girlfriend but she was under the impression the we were still keeping our thing on a low simmer and were going to reignite it soon. The old girlfriend called me and set up a time we could get together to go rock climbing and I still chickened out of letting her know that I had another girl in my life. That would've been the ideal time to tell her, you know, Before they met? Anyway, I set up to meet her one afternoon that spring of my senior year in a parking lot in a town a few miles north so we could go climbing in the canyon that was close to there. The thing is somehow it worked out that my girlfriend found out about it and she invited herself along. When I pulled up in my truck to meet my Florida girlfriend I had my current girlfriend in the cab and there was no way that was going to end well but I pushed forward anyway. What added to the awkwardness of the situation is that they both thought they were my girlfriend and I hadn't really cleared that up. Also, somewhat ironically they were both dressed almost identically wearing khaki shorts, a white tank-top and boots with socks. When I first pulled up beside old girlfriend she looked pretty happy to be seeing me after a year. That happy look kind of melted away into confusion when she noticed there was a girl in the truck with me. I got out and said 'hi' and introduce my girlfriend not as my girlfriend but by her first name and did so conversely with my other old girlfriend. They were both looking each other sizing things up and realizing what the situation exactly was. They were pretty polite at first but then they started in with some passive aggressive jibes and both of them being quite high toned didn't help to de-escalate the situation. In fairness to them, this whole thing was entirely my fault. We drove up to the canyon across town, got geared up scaled a couple climbs and the whole time the tension is mounting and each girl is trying to stake her claim by making sure that she was as close as possible to me and touching me whenever she could to establish dominance. The problem being is that they were both way too intense to be cowed and things just got more and more uncomfortable. After about an hour climbing I feared violence was about to break out and I suggested we called it a day. When I asked what the Florida girlfriend was doing that night and before she could respond my girlfriend who was most adamantly against PDA reminded me that we already had plans and kissed me square on the mouth. That was the coup de grace in the Florida girlfriend, who I still thought was really cool decided she'd seen enough and said she was busy anyway and left. I never talked to her again. I just hope all of the other men she met in her life weren't such selfish jerks. I thought with all the public kissing my girlfriend was going to be more into me and reward me with some making out. But somewhere in her love addled mind she also felt that being brought along on a date with an old unbroken-up with girlfriend was not the coolest way to spend an afternoon either and she was cool to cold for a day or ten.

I Get Cheated On

Alright, now back to the girlfriend already in progress. By the spring of our senior year we've been dating for a couple of months we were pretty much understood to be exclusive. That is to say I understood that we were exclusive, she may have been fuzzy on that fact. A kid that I had to kick off the friend team in junior high because he was dishonest and a bit of a turd had come back from Idaho for a visit and was staying in a house right next to my girlfriend sisters house. I had known that they were hanging out a little bit but one day when I came over to her house to chill I overheard her on the phone talking with her girlfriend about how she didn't mean to but they had just kissed. She talked to her girlfriend about how bad she felt and how she did not know how to tell me. After I heard her, I made some noise like I was coming in for the first time and played it cool like I didn't know was going on. I was hurt a little but not so much as I found an opportunity for some real top-level manipulation. I came in over-nice and over-cheerful telling her how much I missed her and how much she meant to me. That said put her into some deep guilt and I decided to keep my foot on the gas pedal of shame. I asked what she been up to, she said not much so I asked if she'd been hanging out with my old friend. When she told me that she had, I acted excited and asked how he was doing. She was getting more and more sad and was looking wracked with guilt. I started asking her what was wrong because she looked sad, she said she didn't want to tell me, I sat down by her gave her a big hug and told her if anything was wrong I was there for her. Then I pushed her over the edge by telling her the only thing I cared about was that she was happy. She broke down crying and said she was sorry, I asked what she was sorry for. She said she didn't want to tell me, so I said that was fine and laid back on the bed. She was still sitting up and she turned and told me it had to do of my ex-friend. This is when I really turned it on, I asked if he was okay, pretending that I was hoping he wasn't sick or something. She said that he was okay but that they had done something. I was still playing it cool, pretending I didn't know already and asked her what she had done. She finally worked up the courage and got out that they had been wrestling around and when they went to the floor he'd kissed her and she kissed him back but that then she felt immediately guilty and came right home. I whipped up the saddest face I could have and said a line that I had heard from a movie somewhere, "I guess I just love you more than you love me." Bam! She tried to give me a hug and stood up and told her I needed to go think about this she asked me couple times not to leave but I felt my leverage was increased by my absence. I went and got in my car and drove up the canyon and sometime during that drive it actually sunk in that my girlfriend had kissed my douche-bag ex-friend and my fake indignation and manipulative ways give way to actual rage and puppy dog hurt.

I Somehow Forgot a Whole Love Interest

Somehow in all the excitement to tell you about everything that was happening I forgot an entire love interest. The whole girl and her friends actually. One of the perks of being a senior was that they had a new batch of young and untainted women coming up who viewed us as older wiser and possessing of cars, driver's licenses and money. Most of the girls our age had already been picked over pretty well and everybody knew who had dated whom and all the various details of their love lives and other such gossip. With this new batch of girls there was a group of friends who had quite a few cuties so my friend Cole and I preformed a little joint maneuver to get two of them separated from the pack. I was under the impression that these young ladies would have a lot less self-esteem and therefore be much more susceptible to suggestion. I asked the one of them I had singled out to a dance, the cheapest of the year. It was called 'Recession' reflect its inexpensive nature and the idea was to do everything on the cheap. For our date we went up the canyon and climbed to the top of very tall pine trees and tried to swing them far enough back and forth to jump from tree to tree. I never worked up the courage but my friend James pulled it off several times. I think mostly we just watched him. We went dating, dinnering, dancing, good-timing and at the end of the night I thought a little kissing would be a forgone conclusion. That was because I was older and cute and had shown her good time and she would do what I wanted I thought. I made my move and she politely declined and said that she liked me as a friend but she was not very interested in me romantically. What new devilry was this? She was acting like a full-blown regular person with their own tastes and interests, who knew? Cole was having a little more luck with the girl he was perusing and I think they turned the corner into kissing, borderline going out, when things came to an abrupt stop in one of the funniest breakup stories I've ever heard. I don't want to mess it up, so if you're reading this and you feel like it Cole, you might want to tell your version in the comments.

I Bet You He Dies

That chemistry teacher was never really a stickler for that newfangled political correctness and whatnot. He was always telling us massively inappropriate stories about blood, gore and dismemberment which you might find very appealing if you are a fan of the 'Saw' movies or the Holocaust. He would start out telling us that he had a funny story about something in the tone halfway between fond reminiscence and giggly recounting, he would then tell us about a time a lady's head got blown off or some other charming tale. She'd been using a pressure cooker and didn't know that she needed to release the pressure before he took the lid off and when the lid came off, in his words, it took the top of her head clean off and blew her brains all over the room. That is sure enough funny stuff. He told lots of other stories of warring paramedics, or maybe it was war, paramedic service. Either way if you had the sense of humor of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer you would be rolling your seat. There was a man scheduled for execution that January that I was in his class and he offered an open wager to the class that some bleeding heart liberal would get him an appeal or a pardon before they shot him and that was eating a hole in his soul. He offered coffee and donuts as stakes if someone would take the 'he gets shot' side of the wager. I decided to take him up on that and the deal was struck. Just his normal teacher-student stuff. That night the man was indeed shot with three executioners bullets through the heart; Hooray for me! The next day, true to his word he did have a donut for me when I got the class and he said it was a small price to pay for that scumbag to be shot. His only lament was that he didn't get to see it personally. Yeah… That's what we were all thinking.

The Wheels Come Off. . . Literally

The dance we were going to was The Sadie Hawkins Day dance where the girls asked boys and therefore far fewer people went. After the cute, quiet girl asked me she brought by my shirt which was the Sadie Hawkins Day dance tradition so that we could all be matching matchers. It was actually a really nice green corduroy shirt, much nicer than any I had so I kept and used it for a long time after the dance, like for ten years or so. The kids we were going with, mostly athletes and their girlfriends, jet setters as we called then. They were almost all football players except for two kids it been on the wrestling team with me. We weren't exactly friends on the wrestling team but we knew each other. Even though I didn't know any of the kids we hit it off really well and by the end of our date and dinner were all laughing about inside jokes. The funniest thing was after dinner we all went to the bathroom before we left to go to the dance and three of us were in the bathroom together and we overheard an old man doing mighty battle with his bowels, swearing out and cursing God. This struck us as exceptionally funny and we repeated things we heard him say for the rest the time I knew those guys. Thank-you random stranger with gastric-intestinal struggles, you sir were comedy gold. After the basically uneventful dance the kid who was driving us in his family's van noticed a little rattle, a thump and some vibration. True to my hamartia of always knowing something about everything, whether I do or don't, I suggested maybe the van was simply out of alignment and that sometimes driving faster was the key to smoothing that out. For the record, driving faster is virtually never the solution to a car problem. Fortunately for us he only tried my solution for a couple of seconds until he decided to stop the van and see what might be the problem. The problem was four of the five lug nuts on the front passenger tire had broken completely off and we were down to a single lug nut holding tire on, and precariously at that. Even I didn't have a solution for that so we had to stop on the side of the road and wait for rescue. A lot of people claim the wheels fell off of their date this is the only time, to my knowledge, it literally happened. We finally rounded up enough rides and we all got home and as I had promised to I called my girlfriend to tell her about what we've done and play up the comedy of the night and down play any close dancing and cuddling then may or may not have gone on. After I'd gone away to college I did actually go on one or two more dates with that Sadie Hawkins girl but nothing ever really came of it.

I Go Out on a Date With Another Girl

Even though I had a really steady girlfriend I was still prone to little flirtation especially with the cute underclass girls that were in my chemistry class. There was one there that was really cute and had a boyfriend who was also in class. I used to make a point of insinuating myself between them, turning my back to him and asking her how she was doing. She was a cute and shy type of girl who blushed when I flirted with her which was nice. She was much more Martha Stewart and less girl power than my girlfriend. Which is the kind of woman I have a little trouble getting interested in usually because a lot of times they're really eager to please and I prefer a little abuse from my females. Anyway after a couple of weeks of flirting and sitting by her and whatnot I had heard that she broken up with her boyfriend, who was actually a pretty cool kid, so I bet I felt a little bad for him, but more excited about my prospects. There was a girls choice dance coming up and I playfully begged her to ask me even though I had a girlfriend and I knew my girlfriend wasn't going to take me. So it was a half joke, have hope sort of situation. And lo and behold she did ask me out and I asked my girlfriend if she thought I was okay and my girlfriend laughed and said, 'Sure, whatever, I am not taking you'. So I did whenever, which is generally not a good idea if a girl suggests to do whatever.

I Discover and Consume the Hitchhikers Guide

For the record, I didn't learn any chemistry in chemistry class. The teacher was not very focused, not very knowledgeable, and not very interested in us. What he was prone to was long meandering stories almost always with an inappropriate-for-the-age-group payoff, and spasms of rage which I have discussed previously. In fact we were so busy not learning diddly that we ran out of time and didn't even get started on squat. All this not learning left plenty of time in class for goofing off, messing around, messing off and, God willing, even goofing around. We would talk, joke, flirt with underclass girls, you know? The basic required stuff in the core curriculum for chemistry I would assume. Most of it wasn't very productive but one day one of my brothers friends who sat in front of me had a book called the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I was drawn to it because it had the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters on the cover. If any of you are fans of the book will recognize that I stole that last line from the book, if you're not a fan of the book, I made up that last line all by myself and it's pretty funny. Anyway, he was a pretty mellow kid named Jeremy and asked if I could borrow the book because he said he had finished reading it. I got one page into it and I was hooked. The book I had my hand was actually five separate books that had been bound together into one big omnibus edition and from the time I started reading in the alleged chemistry class straight through until about four o'clock in the morning I was consuming some top-notch sci-fi parody comedy as fast as I could. I finished all five books in about two days and then had that missing-a-step in the dark feeling I get when there is no more story and I am still unsatisfied. I have recommended it to anybody who asks me ever since. In all honesty though, the first two or three books a pretty good but the last two are not quite as clever and wearing a little thin. Yet and still, one of my all-time favorite books, so chemistry class was not a complete waste of time. Well, I thought so at the time until I went to college and had to take chemistry 101 and realized that I had not learned one shiny sliver of a damn thing at all about chemistry or following advice from the cover of books, and I panicked.

The Chemistry Teacher Hates Bird

I had missed one other required class for graduation and that was chemistry. It was a class that was generally taken by sophomores but I had been in AP physics which somehow does not fulfill the physical science requirement that chemistry did. Either way at least my friend had missed it too and I ended up in a class with almost all sophomores including my brother and his friends. The teacher was ex-military and current psychopath who was right on the tipping point of rage and outburst all day, every day. It would seem that someone like that would be a bad fit for someone with my predisposition for smartassery but we hit it off from the first day and every day subsequent to that. There was another kid in the class with the same disruption disease and he was not so fortunate as to fall in the good graces and anytime someone was going to get yelled at for anything it seemed to be him. I actually liked the kid a lot and we had always had good rapport but for every joke I got off that gave the teacher a chuckle this poor guy was getting yelled at for basically the same antic. His last name was Bird and that is all that he would call him and sometimes just yell or say 'Bird' in a tone that indicated warning and great displeasure. The teacher also used him as the butt of his often crude scientific metaphors. When he was teaching us about measurement and significant units he mentioned that kilometers would measure the distance from the earth to Uranus making units like a centimeter or millimeter irreverent in a measurement of that size, while meters would measure the distance from his foot to your anus, Bird, and in that case the difference of a few centimeters might mean the difference between correction and child abuse. At this point he would show how a toe forward kick to the anus would most likely constitute abuse while a side footed kick would be simply disciplinary. A distinction that I am not sure holds up in the most strictly legal sense and was most likely not found codified in the schools official policies regarding pedal-anal contact in terms of depth and toe orientation. A tragic oversight and a dang shame if there were no line-drawing illustrations with the incorrect foot orientation crossed out with a red barred circle and the correct foot position accompanied by a green check mark. No doubt some liberal kumbaya-pothead-hippie had made it so that there was supposedly no appropriate manner in which to kick a student in the butthole, disciplinarily or otherwise, never, ever, with no consideration for foot positioning. Tragic.

WNBA is a Thing

>My proto-feminist girlfriend was into everything girl power. At the end of our senior year of high school the evil minds over at the NBA thought that their product was too dynamic, too fast paced and they wanted to offer something that sucked a little more and was less interesting to watch. They were at the time mired in the unrelentingly dominate Chicago Bulls lead by Michael Jordan and they thought that was the perfect backdrop to introduce the WNBA. The 'W' there stands for “Women’s” and if you were a fan of some rather slow back-to-the-basket ultra fundamentally sound dribbling leading to a layup or a set shot then you were in luck because they had delivered on that promise. The games were excruciatingly slow and there was a lot more 'dribbling it off of your foot out of bounds' than you would see in the more interesting men's version. I remember watching several games in which both teams scored less than 50 points. You are probably asking, 'If it was so bad why did you keep watching?' That's easy, I was whupped. The oldest disease of the smitten and like any addiction where the dealer controls the supply the addict must at times forgo the luxuries of freedom and dignity to ensure the supply. I would push back mildly with a couple of smart-A cracks but there was a limit before my girl would give one of those non-verbal or verbal signals that we had enough joking about the gawdaffle sport we were watching if I wanted any chance at getting my fix. I would settle in and hopefully find the sweet release of sleep while women beset by glandular disorders tried and mostly failed, to put the smaller than average basketball into the hoop. I watched about 10 games that year and at one point I even bought tickets for and traveled to and consumed that product in person. They had done a pretty good job on the television of keeping the angles low to hide the fact that the stadium was all but empty. We were there at the game we watched with about four or five hundred diehards and a lot of echos. It was even more painful to watch in person because I couldn't go to sleep and there was no advertizing to break up the two-hour ordeal. When it was over even my girlfriend had to admit that a 32-46 game was a little boring to watch and that cooled her jets a little. I have not seen asingle WNBA game since that night and I am always shocked when during the NBA finals every year they run promo's for the league terribly juxtaposed with the highfaluting images of the best in the world doing what they do. It always fills me with rage and I try and call my congressmen or someone to get it off the air because I find it offensive.

I Run Lots of Miles

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had neglected my physical education in favor of math, science, and advanced placement English. Well, the state has rather strict rules about that kind of thing and they will not let you graduate without knowing you were physically fit. I had to make up for three years of skipping out on PE in four weeks to be qualified to graduate with my class. The way you made up a PE credit was to take a fitness pre- and post test which included a few metrics like push-ups, sit-ups and the big mother of the all, the mile-and-a-half run. The push ups and situps were no big deal it was only as many as you could do in a minute. The key with all of this is that to pass you had to improve pre- to post test and each pre-test had to improve one to the next, so I had to work a little math. I am not a good runner so I was trying not to die when I made up for slacking. I can't remember the exact rule of thumb for how long after a workout you should taste blood but I think I was over that ideal time what ever that time is. The mile-and-a-half had a max time of 15 minutes for the pretest so I ran one a day for three days at 14:50, 14:30, and 13:00. The next week I ran the post tests at 14:00, a 13:50 and a 12:50 for three qualified times proving to the coach and the state that I was the type of guy who was fit enough to be called a Utah high school graduate in a manner not at all a mockery of the principles our great forefathers held forth for the education of our bodies.

50/20 Again, This Time With Beratement

I told you before about walking the 50 miles in 20 hours race, I actually ended up doing it three more times. The middle two are not terribly interesting just a lot of walking and a lot of pain. The fourth time I did it though there was some drama. The drama came almost entirely because this time through I brought my girlfriend. I told her it was a good experience and that she would do fine and it would be fun to do, because I am a liar. My dishonest methods for convincing her to come along aside she did really seem interested in trying a test of her endurance. We started out two blocks from my house early in the afternoon figuring to get a jump on it and it was pretty smooth sailing for about the first 10 miles. I find that in a pinch even those without much athleticism or training can do about 10 miles before they collapse. 10 to 25 miles starts to weed out all the people who were not really that interested or dedicated. On the route we were taking miles 10 to 25 went through a canyon across a highway and into the night and that is when we started to slow our pace and settle into the grind. By the time we got to the halfway mark all of our friends given up and gone home so it was just her and I in the dark cooling night. From the halfway mark of the 35 mile mark she started to get increasingly cranky about the physical pain. I'm the type of person who actually likes to hear someone else complain so that I can in turn be stoic and its kind of a power trip. It started to make her even more angry that I was acting like I felt nothing and I wouldn't complain. From 35 miles to 45 miles, which took us about three hours, she stopped and yelled at me a couple of times and even punched me a time or two to try to get me to complain which made it a lot funnier for me and the distraction was more than welcome. I think the race can be divided into three equal parts, the first 30 miles, the next 15 and the last 5. That last 5 miles when the sun is coming up and you have walked through the whole night and every part of your body is in immense pain and the only thing that can keep you going is the humor you find in your girlfriend's unadulterated rage. That last 5 miles took us about two hours and for virtually the whole time she was yelling at me, cursing at me telling me, telling me how much she hated me how stupid an idea this race was and I would just tell her that if it was too hard for her she could just quit. It was especially delicious because she was always going on about how much more pain and suffering women could endure than men. I was making very calm and understated observations about the intense pain that was racking my body and how the key for me was to let my body be subject to my will. When we turned the last corner and were only a half of a mile away from the finish line she broke down and was crying and leaning on me and telling me she was glad that we did this thing together. I was in no condition physically or mentally to be leaned upon in any sense but she wanted to walk in together hand in hand and I was too far down the rabbit hole to resist. Arm in arm we stumbled to the finish cried, hugged and got in the car to drive home. I was so tired that I drove off the road and into a field when the road unexpectedly teed. I backed out and got us home okay. I dropped my girlfriend off and then went to bed and didn't wake up for 18 hours.

The Taurus is the Most Expensive Car of All Time

There was a time as a young man that I suffered severely from migraine headaches. One of those times in the spring of my senior year when I driven up to the mall with my brother and good friend Cole to do some shopping. Because I had a headache I turned the controls of the 1978 Ford Fairmont sporty two-door model to my friend so I could relax in the passenger seat and wait for the neurological storm to pass. He was at the stick for about 20 seconds when he lurched forward and hit the most expensive car in the entire world, a Ford Taurus. We were going about 2 miles an hour when the car struck but when the guy jumped out of his car he acted like we'd assaulted him and his family personally. His wife and baby were in the car, he didn't check on them before he came out looked at the car. He said we ruined the bumper, which would cost two grand to fix, because the plastic shell had popped up in the center about 1 inch. My brother, ever the pragmatist, walked over and pressed little bubble of plastic down with his finger and it popped right back in place. You would think that would mollify the guy or that his wife was telling it was no big deal, or the fact that my friend and I were obviously terrified of the ramifications of wrecking a car on the freedom and finances of a 17-year-old. You might be wondering why was referring to the Ford Taurus the most expensive car possible, I mean it seems laughable, but that is what the guy kept saying. He was going on and on about how we really messed up and how we couldn't hit a more expensive car. When he was otherwise occupied my brother mentioned that we could have hit any number of more expensive cars by throwing a rock in virtually any direction. His wife had just about talked him into giving us a pass when a Dudley-Do-Right busybody from the local bike shop came running out with her portable phone saying that she saw the whole thing and she already called the cops. Okay thanks, idiot. Then we had to wait there for the cop to arrive, he had to survey the damage, get all of our insurance information, and hear both sides of the story. It took forever. My friend was explaining that he had gone from driving his truck which had differently shaped and sized peddles and that he'd slipped off of the brake and slow rolled into the dude that wouldn't let this thing go. After we got all sorted legal-wise, we hit the road and spent the rest the afternoon and most of next week making fun of the dude and his super-expensive car. I can't remember exactly what happened with the insurance on that thing but I want to remember I had to pay my dad back a deductible but it still wasn't very much. Cole was kicked off the substitute driving team, he'd had the car for less than a minute when he wrecked it with laser like precision into the biggest douche bag around. Maybe that wasn't his fault, but why risk it? I shudder to think if he would have hit a Corolla. 

Spring Break - Lots of Making of Outs

This spring break trip came just recently after my potential girlfriend became my actual girlfriend and just past the day she let herself into the carnal cabal of the kisser-faces. The upshot there was that she was possessed with the converts zeal and wanted to try out some making out when ever there was time. There is nothing more entertaining on the face of the earth for a large group of people on a trip together then to have to constantly wait for the PDA couple to be ready for group time. We were not making out in front of everybody but we were definitely taking more than our share of private walks, naps, and stolen moments. At first everyone was being pretty cool about it but by the third day the rest of the group was getting a little testy and they were starting to make comments that seemed to me like they were getting a bit irritated. The problem was that in the scales of fired up pubescent sexual frustration the opinions of a couple-of-eight dudes and chicks was easily over-weighed by the sweet kisses of a pretty girl. Eventually there was mutiny and the group broke up with the three unattached boys heading into town to find babes of their own. In theory that could have happened, but based on how unhappy their were at the end of the second and third days out woman hunting I had the strong intuition that they had not been as successful as they had hoped. The other girls and one other couple stuck it out with us and moved from Red Cliffs into the nearby town where my girlfriend's best friend's sister lived to take some real showers and to sleep on some couches and beds. We left her sister's house in the morning and drove back home the back way through a town called Virgin which compels all and sundry to stop at the city welcome sign for a picture. The trip back was quiet and everyone in my car but me fell asleep. If you cannot be at peace in a car full of good friends and memories then you may never be.

Something I Forgot From Last Summer

I ran into an old friend last night at Costco who reminded me about a time that she and I and another friend blew up my dad's truck. Truth be told they actually didn't have that much to do with it except for being passengers. My friend Jordan, the girl I would meet much later at a local Costco, and I had driven up to Salt Lake go clothes shopping for school. That means this story would've taken place about eight months before spring break so some sorrys are in order, and now the story is too. Anyway, we had driven up there to the VF factory outlets which purport to have various outlet stores but I've never seen Lee jeans actually sold anywhere else. I think it's just a front. We shopped a little and we hung out a little and we were heading home in my dads newer truck when we were heading up the hill at the point of the mountain I put the truck in cruise control at about 70 mph (1.21 megajoules for the international audience). That was a pretty good idea, until the engine exploded. I don't mean exploded in the sense that a cooling hose came off and a bunch of steam came into the cabin and that made us all scared but there was no harm done. I mean exploded in the sense that a piston broke off from the crankshaft and came out of the top of the engine and almost out of the hood. The other half of the piston still attached to the crankshaft had somehow got flipped around inside the engine and jammed about 200 holes through the oil pan before it to came to a halt. Was it exciting? More like terrifying. All I could think was that I had to tell my dad that his truck exploded. Of course none of us had a cell phone at the time so we had to pull off to the side of the road and wait for some passersby to help. After a few well-meaning but useless Samaritans stopped a police officer came by and let us radio to dispatch who then called my dad and told him the bad news. My friends Jordan and Jessica got in a call to her sister and a little less than an hour later she come and picked them up and they abandoned me to my fate. I had to sit and wait on the side of the freeway for two or three hours while my dad organized a get the truck home party. His brother is into truck repair and had access to a towing thing to get it home. When he got there he said never seen anything like the engine coming out of the hood and the oil pan. The whole time we were loading up the truck to tow it home to see if there was anything we could do about getting it fixed my dad was running a constant nonstop stream of things he thought I did wrong to make the engine explode until my uncle finally stepped in and said that actually something like that was just bad luck and there was no way I could have prevented it or caused it. That shut my dad up for the afternoon but he forgot the next day, and week, and month and if it is mentioned still to this day he remembers that I was , to quote him, 'romping on that engine' to make it explode. The moral here of course is if you romp on engine your friends will abandon you and your dad will be mad at you for the rest of your life. 

Spring Break - Some Gay Guys Get Really Sunburned and Play a Guitar

Our next-door neighbors at our campsite where gay couple in their 50s from California. To that point in my life I've never met a homosexual couple and 'gay' was use only as a pejorative for something boring, uninteresting, lame or effeminate. They were there hiking, painting and camping in Red Cliffs pretty much like normal people as far as I could tell. Besides having shorter shorts than most guys and not wearing their shirts enough they seem like pretty okay dudes. One day when we were heading out hiking we passed them on the trail as they were setting up easels to paint a gnarled tree growing along the path. One of the guys, being quite furry and quite sunburned, had huge flakes of skin peeling off and sticking into his back hair in a horrifying image that haunts me to this day. My girlfriend and her friend stopped and talked with them for a little while and they offered to come by later to our campsite and play some guitar and sing some songs. My girlfriend enthusiastically took them up on that offer but I was little wary. What if they came over and did gay stuff? What would we do then? We would be left without recourse because we had invited them into our campsite and I was not sure if the same rules apply to homosexuals as do to vampires but I was pretty sure if you invite them in that's bad. We hiked for a couple of hours and came back by to see that they had done a pretty good job of doing a watercolor painting of a gnarled tree sitting in the path, the sort of thing that everyone knows is technically art but generally ends up a thrift store when the person who loves it dies. We got to camp, made a fire, made dinner and we talked and joked sitting around the dying fire our new friends made good on their offer and came by with a couple of guitars and an unrealistically cheerful attitude for people completely sober, so I assumed that they were not. I was right they pretty early on confess to having partaken of illegal mind altering herbs and alcoholic beverages. I was really nervous then. Gay, drunk and high? How could this possibly and well? Why am I writing so me rhetorical questions? The last one wasn't rhetorical, I was wondering if you had some insight. They asked what kind of music we liked, and my girlfriend told them all the girl singers she liked and we told them Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Somehow these guys knew all about those bands and how to play their songs. I guess people even way back in the 60's and 70's knew about the Beatles. They played their guitars, sang songs and invited us to sing along when we knew the words. I didn't know if this was how homosexuals normally acted, but this wasn't gay at all, it was actually pretty cool. We all got into it and had a pretty fun night, when they were too tired and ready to head off they played a two guitar, well harmonized version of 'The Boxer' by Simon and Garfunkel. It was amazing in the cool, quite, new moon night with the light of the fire makeing a warm circle around our impromptu concert and I snuggled in tight with my girlfriend while they sang. When they finished we applauded, they said goodbye and I never saw them again. It was the first time in my life that I can remember thinking that there might be more in heaven and earth than was drempt of in my philosophy.

Spring Break – McDonald's Wake Up Gambit

I'm really not much of a sleeper especially out camping. I'm one of those people who is a night person and morning person. The kind of person I am not is an afternoon person. Maybe that's my Hispanic heritage, that I don't technically have, that compels me to an afternoon siesta. No matter the cause, any time I was on campouts or sleepovers I was always the last one to go to sleep and the first one to wake up. Then I had to sit around and try to entertain myself for next four or five hours while everybody else sleeps in. After the drug stupor day the next morning I woke up at five o'clock knowing I had a long way to go until actual morning. I stealthily found my keys, got in my car and drove the 8 miles into town for breakfast at McDonald's. While I was there I got enough for everyone else and brought it back. This was partially altruistic and mostly excuse for me to wake everyone else up so that we could get going. Somehow though, after I woke them up I miscommunicated the fact that the food was for everybody so I was sitting at a table at the campground eating all by myself with three big bags of food and a whole bunch of guys there looking at me. I thought maybe they didn't want any and so we stood there in a McDonald's standoff until I asked they were sure they didn't want any at once the miscommunication was resolved and the food was devoured. The ruse had worked and I had everybody up and going rock climbing and like I've always said a McMuffin is a small price to pay for getting a jump on the day.

Spring Break My Friends Fight the Drugs

The next morning we went out hiking and two of the guys that were with us were getting a little restless because there were no girls there for them. On our way back from hiking up the river they were making plans to go into town and see if they could encounter some of those low self-esteem spring break girls of legend. The only problem there is a they hadn't brought a car so they were asking if they could use mine. I was super excited about that idea because they both had woken up saying they had a headache and the only painkiller that was available was some Tylenol PM, which if you're unfamiliar with that particular OTC drug contains a bit of a sedative. They had been fine for the hour or so we were hiking but when I started to come back they were looking pretty droopy. They were almost falling asleep walking as their heads would roll all the way down to their chests and then they would snap back up and look around kind of confused. When we got back down toward camp in the asked again if they could borrow my car and I told him that would be a firm no. They said they were just fine and they could fight through the effects of the nighttime Tylenol but I honestly wasn't entirely convinced. Definitely not convinced enough to loan the my car; my one possession on earth besides my clothes. They were also not welcome to borrow my clothes. I told them they should lay down and take a nap for a little while but they said it was too hot and they wanted to go find some girls. So we compromised, I agreed to drive them into town and drop them off while we went grocery shopping and we would pick them up a couple hours later when they found all the women they needed. We drove into town and dropped them off as planned but when we came back four hours later after some rock climbing and grocery shopping they were nowhere to be found. These were those pre-cellphone times when you got lost it could be a long-term to permanent thing. They didn't have a ride back to camp, back home or anywhere. We sat and waited for about 45 min. for them and it was starting to get late and I was starting to get pissed. I was driving around in a bit of the cranky snarl when we saw them the park leaned up against a tree, sleeping it off. I guess in the end the sedative won and I had been absolutely validated in my assessment about their driving abilities. We collected them up and put them in the car and drove back to camp. We woke them up enough to get them into their beds and they slept the rest the night as per their plan for wild debauchery. Those were actually the only drugs any of us took on spring break and it sucked. See kids? Drugs are bad. 

Spring Break - A Nutless Car and Brushing Our Teeth

We left on our trip late in the afternoon and my poor wussy car was so very gutless that when we would come up to a big hill on the way down it couldn't, even in its lowest gear, get up the hill with five passengers and their gear. Two different times I would build up as much speed as I could on the run up to the hill and then about half way up all of my powers would be consumed and we would slow, sputter and stop. Then the three dudes in the back would have to get out and walk the two miles or so to the top of the hill where I could pick then up again and we could ride down hill and along the flat bits together. This transportation hiccup was making the get-out-and-walk-ers a bit testy and I was getting anxious after the second hill that I might have to ask them to walk again but thankfully there were just the two insurmountable mountains on the way down to our campsite. We got to our campsite at dusk and we just had time to set up our tents and build a fire before dark. I had never been on a big mixed gender camping trip before and I was not sure who was supposed to do what because I had always had some structure and direction in camping. What I did know was that I was going to sleep in the same tent with my girlfriend, hooray, and two other people, boo. When we had eaten and were ready for bed a bunch of us went at the same time to the water spigot to brush our teeth. When we got there and started brushing we all were brushing wondering how long we needed to go to not seem like we were the kind of person who would brush insufficiently. I was done in thirty seconds but I kept brushing, determined to go at least as long as my girlfriend and her best friend who was with us. It had turned into a dental hygiene cold war and we all had been brushing for something like 5 minutes when a girl finally broke and spat and rinsed. We all followed suit and she asked if we had all been waiting to see how long everyone else was brushing to not look like the dentally retarded outcast. It was one of those bizarre social situations one nearly never finds themselves in and the conventions are not well delineated and so things can get weird.

Spring Break – Ditching My Friend

For spring break my girlfriend and her best friend had planned a camping trip to southern Utah to a semi-secret little spot by the name of Red Cliffs. By semi-secret I mean there is a forty place national park camping ground with running water and toilets. Real undergroundstuff, like Cat Stevens. The problem was that there was room for 10 people in two cars and those spots were taken. The rub there was that my friend Cole was left out. Cole had a bizarre existence for a high schooler, he worked as a baker at a local shop and had to start work at godforsaken-o'clock in the anti-meridian. The upside of this was that he had to head home for bed at a very early time on nights before work and he was going to have to work during spring break. Meaning that he couldn't have come if he was invited which I was not at liberty to do any way because it was not my trip and there was no room. I choose not to discuss that fact with him and opted instead to try to avoid him for the week running up to spring break even though we had two classes together. I don't really know why I wanted to avoid the subject coming up but then again I am a big fan of ignoring things an hoping it goes away eventually. I could tell Cole was mad and that his feel-bads were hurt that he was getting ditched but I just passed him in the hall finding something else to look at or someone to talk with to pretend I couldn't see him and have to deal with it. Real stand up guy right?

All Alone At Wrestling Recognition Night

Even though I've been disqualified from extracurricular activities, including wrestling, I had been on the varsity team so they invited me to senior recognition nigh. It was an event held in the gym where we were all getting some made up award, even and especially if we weren't very good. The fact of the matter was that most of us weren't very good, we were terrible so there was no shortage of creativity in finding some exotic thing to praise and put on a plaque. I told my parents about this Wednesday night activity weeks in advance so they can come support me in my moment of wrestling glory. When the night came they had both forgotten, made other plans or something. Long story short - I go to wrestling recognition night alone with my girlfriend. After a speech from the coach about how great we were they called everybody up on the mat to receive their awards. They said the biggest contributor to a kid's success, the main thing, is always the sacrifice their parents have made. Then the coach went on to talk about the unsung glory of moms bringing kids to wrestling and washing their clothes and making sure they were taken care of and how that leads to their success. All the while I stood out there the only kid out of the 12 seniors without a parent. It was humiliating and embarrassing that I was the only guy that was stand out there alone because my parents were too busy to support me. I was obviously squirmy and self-conscious when we were to give the flowers that the coaches had supplied for us to our mom as a tribute of gratitude for all the hard work they put into our success. My friend Quin's mom was there and alone and rescued me by coming to stand me with her son and she got to roses out of it. They gave me an award for most improved wrestler. Which is an old chestnut of the backhanded compliment award. You did suck worse, but now you don't suck as much, hooray! I collected my little plaque and collected my girlfriend and I went home. I can't really remember what my parents were doing at night, I think it had to do with my dad working and my mom was at a church activity. Either way, we could definitely say that my success or failure in wrestling could not be chalked up to the unending devotion and dedication of my doting parents.  

I Am a Funeral Hypocrite

If you remember back, I told you about a kid who died the day of prom, a kid that I had no emotional attachment to but that I pretended to so that I didn't ruin the mood that I thought might get me kissing. You know? because I'm a heartless jerk. Well brace yourself it gets more jerk-like and more heartless if you continue to read, so if you had an unreasonably high expectation of my strong moral fiber look away now before it gets worse. I will let you know when you can look back and thus leave your high opinion of me unblemished. The funeral for this guy was the next Friday, the day after I got kissed actually, and I wanted to go because everyone who was anyone was going. They would cry and they would hug girls and they would get sweet kisses from their girlfriends. My friend Cole who is burdened with a sense of authenticity about his character was very skeptical about a bunch of posers going to pretend they were sad for a kid they didn't even like in real life. While I was talking to Cole I agreed with him and said there's no way I'd go. I didn't know him and I didn't care about him so why should I go it would be cheap, right? But then when my girlfriend said she was going I forgot all about my strong convictions and emotional authenticity and loaded up and went. My friend Cole was pretty disappointed. When I was there and listening to his family and friends talk about what a great guy he was and how it was so sad and all those things I felt nothing. My girlfriend was crying so I did the great old fake-out - looked sad and then put my hands on my face and rubbed my eyes a little so to look like I might've been crying. If this seems like an insanely shallow thing to do that is because it was. After the service for the kid that I didn't care about in any genuine sense, but saw as an opportunity for my personal gain I did get some nice hugs and some sad looks and that night, some more kisses. I have done lots of crappy and shallow things in my life but for some reason this disingenuous sorrow for the dead stuck in my mind is a particularly turd-ish thing to have done. Cole let me know it was a particularly turd-ish thing to do when I went back to school and saw him. That's what friends, good friends, are for. They will not lie and tell you everything is good when something is bad. If you have been looking away you can look back again, I'm done saying all the crappy things about my personality, until tomorrow.

A Kiss at Last

After my abortive attempt at making the kissing after prom I didn't know exactly where I stood with my would-be girlfriend but when I talked to her the next day she was as warm and friendly as ever maybe even more so. It was confusing, and not in a good way. She had told me that the reason she didn't want to kiss me a prom was that she had never kissed someone on the lips before and she was too nervous. I said that was okay, but I did not think it was okay. I was thinking how bad could it be? She did get significantly more cuddly and we spent a lot of nights from prom till the next Thursday cuddling and hanging out. The Thursday after prom I was at her house after her parents eight o'clock bedtime. We were downstairs watching TV of some sort and when that ended she turned off the TV and turned out the lights and sat next to me in the dark. She held my hand and then leaned in really close until her warm sweet breath was on me in the dark. Like the fortunate hiker who stumbles upon a deer in the meadow, I held completely still, barely breathing and trying to not spook her and ruin the magic. She started kissing my neck, then my ear, and when she had worked up the courage she kissed me full on the lips. I was torn on my opinion of our first kiss, it was not the most technically sound kiss I had ever encountered, but it was passionate and intense and she was beautiful and I was in love. We kissed a little more in the dark basement not quite under her sleeping parents but pretty close. I had kissed lots of girls before but I had never felt such a sense of accomplishment and exhilaration as I did walking the four blocks home that night. I mumbled elated congratulations to myself while I made goofy celebratory fist pumps and 'heck-yeah' faces as I bad-A strutted back to my house. It took a while to get to the kiss, and it was a little sloppy and moist when I did, but it was the best kiss I had ever earned. That night I was all redemption and forgotten failures. I had trouble falling asleep and I laid on my bed in my darkened and considered how great the world and everything in it was.

Matt and I Debate and No One Cares

The story of my would-be girlfriend and I cools off for a couple of weeks, so to fill the time while we wait for more news on that front I will tell you about some other stuff that happened. When I went back to school after having been banned from everything I was still in the debate class I just couldn't participate in extracurricular activities. One day the debate coach from a neighboring school dropped in to see how we were doing things, as he wanted to learn how to win debate competitions like our coach had done. My coach offered to send me and my little brother over to his class at a high school in a town a few miles away to have a live Lincoln Douglas debate and to illustrate for the children what one might see in the heat of fake word fighting so they would not be scared. It was exciting because I had in my mind the idea that somebody actually cared about Lincoln Douglas debate. Here's a spoiler: high school children as a rule do not care that much about formal debate - except for dorks, geeks, and nerds, and who cares what those guys like, right? My coach told him that I had won lots of tournaments but that my style was a bit convoluted and esoteric. I was not really sure what esoteric meant but it sounded like a compliment to my not insubstantial powers of smart-being. My brother and I drove over to the neighboring high school and we set up a 35 min. or so debate. I cannot over emphasize how blindingly boring debate is anyone who is not a debater. A speech class usually has mostly people who are not that interested the class per se, they just heard it was an easy 'A' if you liked to talk. This class was no exception. There were about 40 kids who were there to listen to my brother and I debate the resolution that individual liberty was more important than societal good. Oh, now that's a juicy one. As I relate this story of how badly we bombed this gig I got a little debate twinge and wanted to start writing a quick couple of notes on the resolution, it is like nerd alcoholism you are never cured just in remission. By the end of my first speech, which was 7 min. long, we had lost the room. The teacher kept asking people to quiet down and quit talking but that wasn't doing too much to maintain order. My brother got up for cross-examination and people were openly talking to each other, then he gave his speech and I cross-examined him. I had to get up and give another speech and at this point anyone who's ever lost a room in any sort of public performance knows the agony of pressing through and finishing when you are being actively ignored. We did push on through and then the class was supposed to ask us questions, no one did. One girl said she didn't know why we were there. You and I both sister, you and I both. They voted on the winner and most likely because I had spoken last they said I won. This was not the most horrible thing that ever happened to me in my life but I had somehow gotten into some inexplicable macho posturing about being a good debater and this did put in perspective how exactly bad-A I was for being a debate super Amadeus. Not bad-A at all that's about how bad-A I was. 

Prom - I Go For Kissing

Now there, I've been caught lying and repented now I will go back to the story now. After we finished up at the courthouse, where the prom was being held, all done crying over dead peers and dancing a little we headed back to a friend's house; or more accurately a friend of a friend's house. At that time he had the fanciest house I had ever seen, by today's standards it's pretty average, anyway we were there under the pretense of watching a movie. When we got there my date and I changed back into more casual clothing and I sat close to her on the couch hoping we would get into some hand holding or something more. Other couples were engaging in various stages of cuddling and kissing and heading off to more private venues. I was starting to get pretty jealous when our host and his date, a very cute girl, headed back to his bedroom for some mutual respect. . .probably. After a couple of hours the movie wrapped up and we decided it was time to go home so I drove my date the whole doing that junior high kind of thing where I put my hand on the seat in between us hoping that she would meet me half way and hold it. I had been pretty exclusive with her, hanging out every night, doing stuff, and going on several dates, for about two months which to my young still forming mind seem like an eternity. I was more used to getting right down to business on day one, or date two, or in extreme situations date three. She had been a harder nut to crack. We pulled up in my little white truck in front of her house and I turned off the engine. I unbuckled my seat belt and turned towards her and asked if she wanted me to walk her to the door she said 'no', pretty firmly. I talked to her for bit about what we did and what other people did and if she had a good time and what she thought about the dead kid. She had her hand on the door handle and was looking towards her door which is a universal symbol for dates being over so I told her that I had a really good time put my arm close to where I could gather her in around her waist and tried to close the distance for little smoochy smooch. My vinyl seats made her next move preternaturally quick as she spun on her butt and rotated her knee up and into my chest to block me from the impending kiss. She said, 'No.' In the firm manner one uses to address a dog that is about to poop where he mustn't. It was absolutely humiliating and much beyond salvageable. She said that she was sorry but that she didn't want to kiss me. She opened the door and closed the distance to her house rather quickly. I stayed there in the dark car for a moment, confused and facing a kiss-less existential crisis. I decided that if I was going to have a pity party I should do it on the way home. The problem was I only lived a few blocks away and that didn't give much time for an angsty self-pitying rage cry at my failure, at the idea that kids could die, and at the confusion I felt about the girl who as far as I could tell I was in love with. I tried pulling it together before I went in – I cursed myself, and my abortive attempt at kissing, and the fates, and the gods and the universe. I pounded the steering wheel, dried my tears, and went in to tell my mom what a great night I had. When she asked why I'd been crying I told her that a boy I knew from school had died that night. I wasn't really crying about him but the idea of youth snuffed out and love unrequited but it seemed like too much to say and I was tired.

Prom - Cole Caught Me Lying

My good friend and faithful blog follower Cole noticed that I was lying about what I did at prom. He reminded me that my trip to the zoo was at another date and at prom he went on the daytime date with me before we went out to dinner where I started telling the truth again. What we really did was more disastrous than not finding the zoo. Along with Cole and our dates we went out with my little brother his friend's and dates. What we decided to do was a classic of buying ourselves a gift that we knew we would enjoy. We went to an indoor paintball arena. This was a poor idea because we drastically misjudged our dates pain tolerance and interest in simulating war. Very early on most of the girls had enough and were sitting around pissed off and fidgeting in the staging area while the remaining hardcore chicks and the guys played on to use up our already paid for paint balls. Most of us had welts and bruises from where we had been hit but for the boys it made little difference because at the dance that night we would be wearing wrist and ankle length clothing. The girls would be much more exposed and they were really getting pretty mad about what would show that night when they were dressed up as fancy as they had in their whole lives. One girl, I want to remember it was my little brothers date but I may need to be fact checked on that as well, had been shot under the mask and she had a bloody bruised vicious looking welt right up on her face. I had remembered that my date was mad about something before dinner and this was what it was not that not finding the zoo thing. Not finding the zoo did happen exactly like I said but it was another night. 

Prom – A Kid Dies and Ruins the Mood

>By the time we got to the prom and went down for our little walk on the promenade, got the pictures taken and started dancing my date had calmed down from the slight of me wanting her to eat dinner. Nobody was really doing because it is hard to do and still look amazing in really nice clothes. Also you can dance only minimally in really nice clothes especially because they are rentals and I at least was nearly frightened senseless at the thought of losing my deposit. We did dance a little and stood around talking people passing time when somebody announced over the PA system that a kid our age had died. He was not really a friend of anyone in the group but we did all know him. He was a nice but effeminate guy that I had teased a bit about being gay and I think most guys had joked about him being gay. Unless he was running deep cover he actually wasn't gay and had been out snowmobiling with his date before prom. While they were riding they had gone off into a ravine or off a cliff or something and he broke his neck and died instantly his date was in bad shape too but she was from another town and no one knew her. I was not actually that torn up about this dying business, I had not known the kid really well, I had one class with him as a sophomore and I had been in on a large group date with him in the party. I was sad in a general sense of 'that's too bad somebody my age died' but I honestly wasn't personally affected. All the girls at the prom started crying though, wailing and needing hugs. This would normally please me as it would seem like a way to get some physical contact with girls but these were decidedly unsexy hugs, slobbering and goobery from crying. I was afraid, in my spectacularly self-centered way, that I was losing my chance here for a little making out. That was the truth, a kid he just died - snuffed out in the prime of youth and I only considered whether that would affect my chances at getting a little kiss action. Surprisingly that's not the least and disingenuous thing I ever did concerning this kid actually; but that is a story I will have to get to. The mood of the prom had come down quite a bit and we left early to change back into regular clothes and hang out at a friend's house and while my date would try to watch a movie and I would try and score some sweet lovin'.

Prom – Tastes Fishy

For the dinner date portion of our evening we went to the nicest restaurant that was available within 20 miles and was also in our price range. It was a swank little steakhouse by the name of Carvers it has since gone out of business in that location largely because of their high prices and shady business practices which I will enumerate straight away. I opened the menu and steadied myself as I started noticing the prices and got a little panicked because I didn't know that appetizers cost $10 and that dinners cost $30. I sat back and nodded approvingly while trying to find the least expensive thing for myself and endure the brunt of my dates order. I was hoping against hoping that I had enough brought enough cash to cover the meal. she started up by ordering a stuffed portobello mushroom appetizer of which she took one bite of and decided it tasted like human fleash, gagged a little, hurried for a cleansing sip of soda and pushed aside. Well there was a quick $10 experiment that I'll never get back. When we're going over the entrée menu she asked if the swordfish was very fishy, because she hated fish and the waiter assured her the swordfish was not a very fishy fish and she would probably like it. I thought for $24 she better like it. Anyway, it may come to little surprise to those of you who were able to guess from the 'fish' half of the name swordfish that it, brace yourself, tasted like fish. This also got a single nibble, a gag and a quick trip to the sanctifying flavor of Pepsi cola. I was getting pretty irritated about laying out $40 now for her meal which she done nothing with but taste, gag and drink a soda. I ate mine all the way down to the glazing, and then ate hers all the way down to the ground including the human flesh flavored portobello appetizer. No wonder they went out of business selling swordfish that, of all things, tasted exactly like fish.We headed out to go to the dance and as we left the restaurant which just cost me $90 for the two of us to not eat dinner she informed me that she was starving to death needed to stop at Wendy's to get kids meal. She got a chicken nugget kids meal and some ketchup the put on the chicken nuggets and said that was the best thing in the world. I pointed out there was a way we could have gotten them and saved $90. Or, with a little bit of deduction, realized that the swordfish would taste like fish. This made her very defensive and she was in a huff for about an hour as we drove to the site of the prom. I guess the important part was the experience and what price can you put on the experience of turning your nose up and fate gagging at dinner?

Prom - The Zoo is Hard to Find

My plan for prom was to go out to someplace far away in the big city to impress my date with my awesome knowledge of the landscape and my world wise savoir-faire in providing exotic romantic experiences. To that end I planed to go to visit the zoo. Hey, kids love the zoo and in the eyes of the law we were still technically kids. The zoo closest to where we lived was sort of like a prison for animals. If you like seeing big cats pacing in a cell made of cement blocks, sad and doing the cat equivalent of dragging a cup against the bars then you were in for a treat - a real treat. I looked up the directions of how to get there but in the dark ages of middle 90's the GPS was not readily available, the cell phone was for yuppies in movies and the internet was basically useless. I wrote down the directions which, like all directions, assumed that I would stay on the path set out and not make wrong turns rendering them useless. The morning of prom I went and picked up my date, drove up to the big city, got off the right exit, got off the second right exit and then proceeded to miss the zoo completely. I then tried again and then I tried again and my date was getting pretty evidently cranky with me for not knowing my way and I was trying to pretend like I was almost there and this little snafu would be shortly remedied. I stopped and asked directions and the guy at the gas station gave me directions which I tried following and still couldn't find it. I stopped another place for directions and the guy didn't speak English and I got the wrong directions as well either by misunderstanding or simply because that guy hated teenagers looking for the zoo. By the time I had not found the zoo this time we'd been driving for about 2 1/2 hours not gettign there and the vibe was not the charming hand-holdy pre-kissing one I had hoped to cultivate. I know it's pretty impressive to a date when you get lost and this was no exception. I eventually conceded that we didn't have much time left in order to make it back get changed and meet our group for dinner, so we we stopped at a Subway restaurant, ate lunch and drove home in a bit of a crank. Pretty slick.

Prom – I Make My Move Early

I thought that the prom, with its literary and cinematographic reputation for being the time of great sexual transition in a young man's life would be a great time to get my first kiss from my girlfriend. To that end I made some rather extensive plans to ask her out, and thus stake my claim, well before the time generally considered reasonable. Generally, 2 to 3 weeks before a dance was sufficient time to ensure that you would have a date that wasn't barrel scrapings. Not that everything you find when you are scraping the barrel is necessarily barrel scrapings per se it is just there is a good chance that is what you find when you wait till all of the good dibs have been dibed. Even with two weeks maybe you didn't get the particular date you wanted first go, but then you still had some built-in buffer before you may be on the verge of beginning to have to scrape barrel where you would find whomever of God's precious daughters that were left over. The logic is sound. To avoid any confusion about who was who's date I made my move about eight weeks early. I got my little arts and crafts project together, which was the modus operandi for inviting people to a dance with you at my high school. I think it had something to do with putting secret message in an Oreo and putting lots of decoy Oreos into a jar, or that could of been the way that she answered me with a similarly mandated arts and crafts project. Either way she said yes and she told me a couple times running up to the big day that other people had asked her if she had been asked already, boys and girls included, and they were all very surprised that she been snatched up so much in advance. I was not ashamed that I was the earliest of iron striking birds and no-looky leapers, I got what I came for and I made sure of that. I went to work making plans with other friends about the required day-time activity and how we would not be meeting up with them until dinner. I was planning a romantic date for two and glommers on need not apply. This, combined with my woeful lack of direction in big cities turned out to be a bit of a mistake by which I mean it was a major cluster mess.

Test-Tacular

On our drive up to the town where the test was being held our crazy friend Ray sang that Denny's jingle that goes, '$1.99? are you out of your mind?” theme song for the grand slam breakfast probably around two or three hundred times. It was pretty awesome the first 10 times and then started to pass over into a tedious mantra that hung heavy on un-slept nerves. We got to Denny's with the rest the rejects and social misfits that show up at four o'clock in the morning and ordered ourselves a round of grand slam breakfasts which I believe I paid for because I was the only one who had any money. When we finished up our delicious, nutritious and fortifying brain food - hotcakes, two eggs and two strips of bacon. We showed up at the college where the test was being held to get signed in. At this point I was running on adrenaline and a high amount of vibration was coming from my ears, or maybe my brain or the little bit of gushy stuff between the ears and the brain. Sorry to get you side tracked on a bunch of medical mambo-jumbo but for those in the know that kind of stuff is interesting. I got my test books and my room assignment and waited to see what was on an ACT test it turned out it was a lost knowledge party of things I had did knew.. . ago, except for a concept called radians which I guess we had not had time to cover in geometry class. I felt pretty strong going into the reading section when the proctor wrote the wrong time on the board so when I looked up from reading the first of five sections it appeared that I only had 20 of the remaining 60 minutes. I was confused at how I took so much time reading one section of two pages and answering the questions. I panicked and I started reading at a reckless pace to get the other four down in the next 20 min. If you had done as well on the math part as me you know that is roughly 5 minutes apiece, carry the radians by the square root of the derivative. I got all done and everybody was looking around when the proctor glanced up to see why everybody was restless when we had an hour left to go. He looked at the board and realized he'd put the wrong finishing time apologized and corrected it. I was in a tough spot because now I still didn't have enough time to reread and do them right so I settled for an in depth review. I felt like I had done pretty good for not sleeping all night watching the stupid Dazed and Confused and eating Denny's for breakfast and also being cheated out of a reasonable pacing time on the reading section. I got a 32 out of up possible 36, well above the mean, or the median, or the radians and I am still not sure what those words mean.

ACT Prep

The ACT is a testing right of passage for all those graduating seniors who want to go on to college and even for those who don't want to go to college but who have parents who want them to go to college. I did want to go to college and I needed an academic scholarship as well as other scholarships so that I could go to school for free. In light of that urgent need I did absolutely nothing to prepare myself to take the test. The Friday night before the Saturday test I went out with a couple of my friends, stayed up all night, met some girls, tried score some weed and ate at Denny's. That had not been the plan at the start of the night. There were four of us who had to take a test the next day so we decided to all sleep over a one guy's house and then next morning we get up and go to the test together and make sure nobody missed their ride. What actually happened was that we loaded up and went the next town over to “drag main”. That is a game where a bunch of hillbillies go on Friday and Saturday nights who had nothing to do basically drive up and down the street trying to find girls. These mythical girls who for some reason want to be picked up off Main Street and then go 'hook up' were hard to find. This plan worked almost exactly never. It was on the night when it was a terrible time to try that it did. After an hour or so of fruitless driving and flirting we came alongside a group of girls who asked us if we had cigarettes, we did not have cigarettes but they said we looked cute so they asked us to follow them. Where they wanted us to follow them was over to police officers house whose son sold marijuana. There plan was for us to buy them some weed but we declined the offer and just followed them back to their house and Springville. It was a ratty little place and when we walked in one of the girls mom's asked if we had any G-D weed. We had not so they didn't even bother to ask our names and we were treated as ambivalently as is humanly possible. We were naive and thought that there was still maybe a chance to get some making out this evening and so we stayed and watched that golden oldie of stoner cinematography the godawful Dazed and Confused. For the record, that is the stupidest movie in the history of stupid movies and only potheads enjoy it. They could actually use quotes from that and Fast Times at Ridgemont High as a quick screen drug test. That and face tattoos. We finish up the movie at about two o'clock in the morning and started to realize we were not going to score any sweet kissing action this night. That is when we start thinking that if we drove back home, and then get to bed it will be three or four in the morning not leaving much time before we had to wake up two hours later to be the testing site at seven o'clock. The only practical option at this point was to stay up all night, eat dinner/breakfast at Denny's and then go to the test. See? Completely logical.