This wasn’t quite what I had in mind when I said I was going back to high school to dominate athletically.

Been meaning to post this one for a while:

I saw some of my 90’s high school friends this weekend at a tailgate before the Pitt and Navy football game. I couldn’t drink per my new regimen, though the temptation, beers, and boozers were all around. But after watching a parking lot filled with tons of college kids trying way to hard to act rowdy before the game, I was grateful for my teetotaling.

One of the weirdest things about seeing this now that I’m back in high school is how clear it is that college students are way less mature than high schoolers. This is something I’ve always contended but seeing the collegiate crowd a day after being in high school made it more clear to me. Maybe “mature” is the wrong word, but there’s something incredibly annoying about college students to me.

From my experience, both the first time around and now, high school students, by and large, have a certain degree of individuality and cleverness that’s enjoyable. College students, on the other hand, drive me nuts. There’s much less room for uniqueness. Personalities seem to become more crafted and trying to act cool trumps all. I’ve always felt that from a personality perspective college ruins a lot of good and interesting people.

So my message is this: don’t go to college! No, not that, but if you do go, just stay who you are and find people there who don’t care if you do or don’t drink and prefer weird jokes to beer themed humor.

Sitting here on a Sunday night, dreading the school week.  Last week I had tons of tests and quizzes and was pretty worn out when the weekend rolled around.  Now the week is about to start again and the majority of my thoughts are negative; not enough sleep, run down, can’t even stay up to watch the football games, too much homework… pretty standard high schooler stuff.  On top of that, I realized I needed to put a post up and decided to take the lazy way out by finding a high school news story and just commenting on that.  But when I typed in “high school” to a Google news search my perspective on the week did change a bit.  Things, it appears, could certainly be worse:

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Special Needs Teacher Killed at Texas High School

NY students suspended over raw-meat hazing ritual

Felony charges in bus attack

Axe - Wielding Pupil Wounds Several In German School

Florida school officials won’t go to jail for praying

High School Drug Ring Shut Down, Police Say

Tony Danza shows high school students who’s boss

Missouri high school students arrested after $30000 theft

2nd arrest for teacher in alcohol, pot case

Student Stabbed to Death in Florida

Masked police chief sparks brief school lockdown

Cops arrest suspect after gunfire near Houston high school

Extra police near Fenger High School after beating death

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There’s about 100 more of these, and that’s just a sampling of the first page of one day of high school news.  As much as I hate to admit it, I have it about as good as possible.  Yet while these awful occurrences are pretty much inconceivable at Trinity, within a five mile radius there are multiple high schools that this kind of stuff happens in all the time.

This train of thought, and post, would have seemed very trite to me the first time I was in high school.  If someone tried to give me the whole “Don’t take how good you have it for granted” spiel would have been annoying to me.  That is if I paid attention to what they were saying at all.  But somewhere along the way that stuff starts to click in your head.  Maybe it’s when you actually get exposed to some of the kinds of people that populate the Google news stories you develop a different perspective on it but there certainly are worse things in the world than my complaints and thank goodness I’m in high school where I am. 

Complaining to resume as normal tomorrow….

When I see people from high school who are not taking care of themselves and looking prematurely old and weird it makes me feel like they’re betraying some kind of bond or something. Like they’re doing something unfair to me by reminding me of how old I am. Where as when I see someone who looks the same, it makes me like them more, as if we’re on the same team.

The same goes for anyone from high school who has a totally different personality and acts like they’re a serious adult…all it does is depress meI don’t even want to think about how depressed I make people when they see me. Although, to be fair, maybe I depress them with the fact that I still act like I’m in High School, which I am, so in that sense I guess they only have themselves to blame for their depression. Have I mentioned I’m deliriously tired again?

The girl in this video might be taking the “not getting prematurely old” thing a little far though…

I was so exhausted when I came home I fell asleep on the recliner at 6:30 and just got up now at 5:00 AM. I have a ton of homework to do before school I’m going to start on right after this post. I’ve found I have two different times I can fall asleep. Either between 1 and 3 AM, which obviously isn’t good because I need to be up at 7:00 AM for school, or immediately when I get home where I pass out from exhaustion.

One thing I’ve noticed is how much more productive I am when rested. I spent my study halls in school yesterday trying, trying, trying, to get my homework done, but it just wasn’t happening because my mind was so ready to shut down. Now that I actually caught up on a little sleep, it should be a breeze. Knowing this, I don’t even try to fight staying awake when I get home and just make sure to set an alarm so I’m up in time to do my work.

Seeing how important sleep is, I don’t understand how culturally there’s this weird attitude towards it. It’s like we’re supposed to be ashamed of wanting and needing to rest. Every school I’ve ever been to has kids who just don’t naturally get to sleep at a time that’s in line with the school schedule and who suffer for it. I’d go as far to say as a lack of sleep is the primary cause of my failings in school the first time around. There’s tons of evidence to support that teens need a different schedule than what the school system is on.

What’s nice is the principal at my new school gets that, and believes school should start later. We start at 8:15 which is actually pretty late by most high school standards, but still earlier than most any adults jobs start. The problem is for school to start later the entire city school system would have to change their busing times. This is something I’d love to see happen.

Read the link below, it explains it in pretty straightforward terms:

http://www.cehd.umn.edu/pubs/ResearchWorks/sleep.html

NOTE: It’s amazing how much easier it is to write these when the other option is doing homework.  I have no excuse now for not having any of my work done today.

Someone in my class was talking about Mark Long of The Real World. I tried to hop in and sound cool by saying something about Eric Nies who was on Season 1. No one knew what I was talking about. Even my reality TV references are dated.

Here I am in the some newspaper in 1994 being recognized with the other National Merit students.  The best and brightest of our school…and me.

I had a 1.7 GPA at the time.

I found out we have to read Beowulf for British Literature.  To be intentionally moronic I’ve been screaming “I AM BEOWULF!”. I know the terrible movie came out but I still have no clue what the book/movie is about.  Dragons?  Overacting? And, most importantly, is it too late to win all this Beowulf 3D promotional gear?