And so we change, even if sometimes that's just into dead people.

[channonyarrow]

Bear in mind right now, I feel no guilt at all over my high school career, and minimal guilt over my life in general.

Yes, there are people I have known whose arses deserve serious kicking, and I really, really hope I don't wind up in a room with some of them because only one of us will walk away. If you think I'm joking, you don't know me as well as you might think you do.

And yet, and yet. Perhaps it's because it's spring, perhaps it's because I'm avoiding doing things like taxes and laundry, but I've been thinking of people I knew in the past for a couple days now.

The conclusion I've come to is, generally, arseholes, the lot of them.

I went to the "fun" high school, by which I mean "in an intellectual sense it was amusing." It was the high school for several different (radically different) economic areas, including the six-and-seven-figure-income suburb, and the po' people who lived in Pac Highway.

Notice that I said nothing about cows. I would imagine that there were, statistically speaking, absolutely zero cows in the school's catchment area - but for some reason unfathomable to me, THE hot thing in my junior and senior year was the redneck look. Pickup truck, jeans (this of course is generic), western shirts, cowboy hats, and the all-important ring on the butt pocket of your jeans from the can of Skoal. Well, that was all if you were male, which I am not. Nonetheless, it was at least an interesting statement in an age of girly conformity or extreme iconoclasm. I don't remember the fashion for girls, and I suspect that was because there wasn't any.

Basically, the point of this post is musing, because I have no amazing thing to declaim, other than, perhaps, the nature of coincidence. You see, we played rotating principals while I was in high school.

The first one retired after my sophomore year. The second...let's see...the second was found to be having an affair with the wife of one of the vice principals, and literally did a no-call no-show. I think we had a substitute for the third one for the rest of that year. The fourth one was a nice, bright shiny little person who had all these wonderful goals about making the school a good place to be.

He also ran into me. And I don't mean that as some sort of I EAT SCHOOL FACULTIES or anything. But what I wanted to be in high school, assuming I couldn't be a vigilante/hitman/rockstar/knight with really cool hair, was a reporter. Or, more specifically, an editorial reporter.

Bear with my egomaniac backstory digression here.

See, I had this rep, or at least I believe I did, so it comes to the same, of Telling It Like It Is. This actually earned me the ire of a school board member when I criticised her omgspeshulYalebound child's Health Fair and its many and variegated stupid aspects. I was unable to write a followup article because, and I don't quote, I was such a bitch about the first article.

Well, if YOU want to run a Health Fair for a group of students, don't schedule it for an early-dismissal day when most of them aren't going to show up anyway, and don't make it so that you can get marked off on your attendance if you don't attend it. That's just what I remember now, eleven years later.

Armed with all that, I was given (god alone knows why, I don't) a copy of the new principal's resume. Oh, wait, I was supposed to write an introduction to the school for him. So, of course, I needed that information. Or someone thought I did.

Anyway, on with the article and reading the resume and omg this person hasn't stayed very long at his jobs. In a lot of cases, he'd been somewhere for six months before leaving.

I don't remember what I said in the article. Cleverly, I don't have the copies of the papers any more either so I can't even guess what was said. I do know, though, that I was determined to find the instance of malfeasance that led this person to work at places for not very long and Expose It To The World And Win The Pulitzer Prize.

What assholes we highschoolers be.

In the end, after a year of uneasy alliance and constant watchfulness on my part - my shoviness got me onto Committee 21, which was redesigning the school's approach to teaching for the new century and was, incidentally, one of this principal's brainchildren - there wasn't anything that I could be arsed to find.

Then, however, the rumours started. That so and so had seen the principal on Capitol Hill with a man and they were holding hands and omg gay.

Bear in mind that my "peers" had the enlightenment of squid. My peers actually drove one girl who came out as bi to change her name and move to another school district.

And if you knew her, that took quite a lot of breaking to achieve.

But, you know, the dread gay. OMG, we'll all get it.

Suddenly, The Crucible makes sense. Personally, I don't care about someone's sexuality, and I never really have, though I do remember being at least slightly surprised - bear in mind, this was high school, back before the dawn of time, when I didn't know anyone who was out of the closet, and in most cases didn't realise there was a closet of any sort involved. And to quote someone else, I was personally so far back in there that I could see Narnia. This was back when knowing a gay person was like knowing a straight person is now for me.

While I'd like to wrap this happy anecdote up with some sort of story about how we all learned to Just Get Along and no one panicked and nothing happened and we were all close to being adults and hey, adults, at least here and in our generalised economic strata don't care, that would be nice and Disney. You would not BELIEVE the howling mob that the student body turned into, in very polite ways. There wasn't a mob with pitchforks at the door demanding his resignation, but the undercurrent was there.

So he left again at the end of the year. And I will never, ever know, in my continued battle with coincidences like this, whether he thought I was out to get him because omg rumours or I suspected something or what, or if he even considered it.

But I do. I do now. I look back at some of those coincidences and wonder what part people think I played in them. And whether it's possible that we play the parts that others see us in, whether we believe we've taken that role or not.

But I can't even say that I regret that whole incident. I regret nothing about it, because I didn't do anything to get him thrown out, nor did I find anything that I would have used to have him forced out.

That's an anti-climactic ending.

"Then I kicked him down the stairs."

Comments

[skid-rose.livejournal.com]

Well, that was all if you were male, which I am not.

I didn't realize that. I'm not sure why. Go figure.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

Most people don't. I might have to create a poll about this to find out why that is. I mean, those silly evaluation things always say that my writing is male, but I can't imagine that there's that much validity to an internet quiz created by BlogBoy.

And god forbid I should post a picture ever. *g*

[skid-rose.livejournal.com]

I think your writing has been solidly gender-neutral, because there's nothing inherently "male" about the style- not that I consider such a thing to exist- there's just been nothing to indicate one way or the other. Actually, the ability to mask one's gender without even trying is pretty righteous.

Maybe it was just all the Cassidy icons.

[ingopixel.livejournal.com]

i was slightly involved in a fresh-out-of-college teacher going batty and refusing to come back to our class my senior year. really, i was hardly involved. i just sat in the back with roy and wayne and stuck foil gumwrappers into the desk-station outlets to make loud popping noises and little clouds of smoke. it was yvette who really threw him over the edge. she goit into a fight with either him or another class member every single day and had to be sent to the principal's office where apparently no discipline was ever brought down upon her. i let everyone copy my homework, so as long as people were busy writing something he did't care.

[skid-rose.livejournal.com]

Who was that?

[ingopixel.livejournal.com]

i don't remember his name, he taught business law for about three minutes until we drove him away. the next sub came and told us that he was afraid to come back.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

You ate the sub alive!

That was always a fun game, but we never had such cool results.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

I got into an argument one time with my seatmate in History class about the answers to the quiz, and the sub never noticed. It was the same sub as the time seatmate and I started discussing the fact that really, we'd been assigned a young and pretty sub but this one had killed her and stuffed her in the closet.

She never did stop us from laughing that time.

[galloglach.livejournal.com]

And to think that Health Fair choad probably has a job in the Bush Administration by now...

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, of course not. Despite being fascist reactionaries when their dear daughter's stupidity was exposed to the world, that family is Good Democrats.