The high school experience

As a senior in high school, I’m almost ready to say that I’ve “been there, done that” for the high school experience. (Not quite yet — a lot of things still need to happen between now and next spring to complete the trip.) But at the same time…I really can’t, at all. My high school experience has been so, so, weird, for reasons both personal and general.

The personal reasons need not concern us here–but let’s just say it involved me being a jerk for about a year or so (sophomore year). From that one year douchebaghood, a lot of social connections never really grew, and so I’ve been put in an odd kind of social limbo as far as class politics goes. And sure, I don’t blame them–I’d look warily at me, too, had they done to me what I did to them. But it’s changed things in such a way that I’ve been forced to move elsewhere amidst people in Pensacola to obtain satisfactory socialization.

But another thing that’s been missing that’s affected everyone’s high school experience at PHS is….well, a normal high school. My high school, Pensacola High School, is probably the black-sheep of all the high schools in Escambia County. PHS houses the IB program, a great number of kids living in near poverty conditions, a significant number of kids who are rich as hell, ESOL program (English for speakers of other languages), the IB program, and the HOSA program (a kind of health academy thing)–and there’s a large racial divide, with most of the black students being on the lower portion of the socioeconomic scale, and most of the white kids being on the upper portion. Sure, there’s overlap between the different groups–but in a lot of ways, it just serves to make a strange, strange high school. Not to mention the fact that we don’t have a gym (thanks, Hurricane Ivan), and only had a theater beginning this year, my senior year (thanks, Hurricane Ivan). Anyway, regarding the people in my school, I realized that looking at my senior class, I knew probably only 69 out of the total 200-250 kids that were there–all of whom are in the IB program. Everyone else…if I know them, it was either me feeling weird that day and talking to random people, or it was through theater or something extracurricular. IB is kind of like a drop of oil in a glass of water. We just kind of sit, separated, and don’t mix well with the other students–and a lot of times, I wonder why. I think it’s kind of a mutual fear, really. It’s sad. I wish I knew more people in my own graduating class. Maybe it was my fault for not taking enough initiative–or maybe just because of the fact that all of my classes have been honors, AP, or IB my entire high school career, and have inevitably been filled with IB kids. Whatever it is, I get the feeling that I have a tight knit family of 69 people, and about 150 strangers.

It really hit home tonight when I went to the Washington volleyball game to watch my best friend’s sister play. Their high school was full of people that seemed unified in a strange way–like that mutual fear of other students was missing. I didn’t know anyone there but Kirby (my best friend), but I didn’t have trouble talking to anyone, at all. If it were a PHS volleyball game, and I was without any IB students, I probably wouldn’t have talked at all. (I probably would have just sat there and tried to devise an experiment to find a function modelling the distribution of where the volleyball hits the court. (I’ve surmised so far that the line that divides the “no man’s land” and the “your ass better be there” is roughly parabolic.)) Washington just felt like a real high school–a coherent painting done by a real artist, not just someone who took paint buckets full of different colors and threw them on an already-used canvas. (But at the same time, saying that makes me realize that my high school is also a coherent painting–just perhaps from a different school of art.) I couldn’t help but think about how I might be today if I had gone to a real high school as versus a small magnet problem within a problematic high school.

 So, I guess thinking about it, it’s been a lot of fun, but it’s been different from the traditional high school experience. When I look at those old 80s movies about high schoo–with the hair, the sunglasses, the tights, and the used-to-be-cool slang–it almost has no effect on me. It’s a foreign land. And I just laugh with a kind of bitter amusement–the kind of laughter that contracts the diaphragm in twists of confused nostalgia for a place and time that I’ve never known.