My life was not a John Hughes film

I did some edits to the last three titles, because I realized that it is probably helpful if the blogs that are based on different items from my to-do list (even if the original item is just a launching point for whatever I blog about) are clearly labeled. So, from now on, they will be.

Today is not from the task list, but is more post-reunion analysis. In addition to what people wrote about me back then, I also did get some responses to the Nostalgia week posts, and some things from conversations, and that caused me to think and reflect also. It’s just what I do.

One person remembered me helping her with English homework, and explaining what the teacher was going for, and then getting an A. I don’t actually remember that, but I do remember helping people a lot. I think in high school it was mainly in English, as I was on a downward trend in Math and Science. Oddly, in college it was always helping people with Spanish, though maybe that was because I only took one English class, and college students are less likely to ask someone who is not in the class for help.

Another memory was my doing so many activities, and one person gave me undeserved credit for being the glue that held the different cliques together. I’ll go over the activities later, probably in two separate posts, but on the clique thing, I guess I can’t take credit because I didn’t even think that there were cliques. Now, I can be pretty oblivious, and there will be more on that later, but other people thought there were cliques, and maybe I was missing something.

It was something I thought about. I had social groupings explained to me in junior high, and my mentor’s definitions were influenced largely by “The Outsiders”. There were pops and socs (popular, social), who dressed trendily and went to parties with chocolate cake (maybe because they were rich and poor people could not afford cake?); and stoners and rockers who dressed the same, but rockers did not take drugs; and then there were nerds. There was probably some other term for a person who had nerd popularity but was not smart, but I can’t remember. Obviously, I would have been a nerd.

In high school, I think I originally thought you were either popular or unpopular, and I probably would have put it all to being attractive or not, but I saw that it wasn’t that simple. There were people that I could not have placed with one group or another, and some who seemed to have really good crossover appeal.

The thing is, and I know many people who see The Breakfast Club and feel like that was totally their life, I never saw any open hostility between groups. I saw open hostility between people in the same groups, but in my view (and maybe it was naïve) it seemed like anyone could talk to anyone, popularity was more about whether you dated and what parties you went to.

I really only thought one group was terribly exclusive, and that was Masque, the revamped drama club. I would tell you that those were the worst snobs in the school, and the most corrupt, but maybe it was only because I had more information on it.

I went all six years to Chehalem, which fed into Mountain View. When I was in fifth grade they changed the boundaries, and my neighborhood changed to Aloha Park. That’s where Julie and Maria ended up going. Aloha Park fed into Five Oaks, the other junior high that fed into Aloha. Of the students my age who were affected, we could choose to go to sixth grade at either Chehalem or Aloha Park, but would then go on to Five Oaks. Four of us finished at Chehalem.

Initially I was very depressed about this, and was sure that I would be a lonely outcast for three years, but then I ended up making some friends, and adjusting, and by the time I got to Aloha I knew about 75% of the student body because of the boundary change. There were other changes though.

The group I hung out with at Five Oaks had primarily been interested in drama. Several of the people I had been closest to at Chehalem were interested in drama. I had been once too, but then I rebelled against it in 9th grade, and quit both the club and the class (switching to yearbook staff and guitar class—I was pretty good at yearbook, but horrible at guitar). I did try an Intro to Drama class at Aloha, and it was fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I did many other things while my friends did plays. This is why I knew things about what was happening in drama, without being a part of it myself.

I guess it could have been alienating, but it wasn’t really. As friends started experimenting with hazardous things, I didn’t really feel estranged from them. I worried about them, and whether they would be okay, but I was always busy, and I didn’t hear the worst things until later anyway.

So I talked to drama people (who were my old friends), and athletes (whom I managed), and nerds (who were really just smart people, and whom I had classes with), and people who did not really fit in any of those categories but I had known for years, and I wasn’t really thinking about any of it anyway, because conversations seemed completely open. It was just dating that seemed closed off, not because of my social standing, but because of my lack of attractiveness, and I did not let myself think about that. And now sometimes when I look back and realize that it was possible that someone was attracted to me, well, there’s nothing to do about it. I can only try and be better now.

But I wonder if there were boundaries that I missed –because I can be quite oblivious, or class lines that people perceived, but it was their own issues holding them back—which I can relate to a lot.


24 minutes walking outside (not counting the trails in the forest or any of our fun stuff)
Crunches
2nd Nephi 33 – 2nd Nephi 26