again, not good with the titles!
thursday, june 7, 2001
oh, oh, i'm online! yes, i'm shocked too. well, technically i was online last night as well at maria's place, but 7 hours looking for obscure kate bush video clips and myl�ne farmer websites doesn't count.
yes, my first official meeting up with a friend since getting back from america came into full effect yesterday. it manifested into an awe-inspiring 13 hour long visit, complete with "must tell every detail of everything i've done, seen and heard the past 4 months" marathon monologues and whipping out snap shots and whatnot out of my large, black bag. and, of course, the obligatory outrageous net.surfing.
it was fun. even walking home at 5 am was fun - in june, 5 am is very different from 5 am in december. walking through a cold, terrifying forrest versus walking through a green goldy forrest complete with a very early sun and random animals bouncing across lawns... pretty pretty summer.
i was surprised at the amount of people outdoors at 5 am. i'm guessing the abundance of not so steady on their feet teenagers had something to do with last night being high school prom night. tomorrow is the official "kick out" of high school for the seniors. once again, i have a friend graduating and will join up with her family and thousands of other students families outside the school with bunches and bunches of flowers to hang around her neck. everyone knows the one with the most flowers hung around their neck, staining the fresh, white clothes wins. it's just the way it is.
it's 5 or so years since my high school graduation - i know, nothing, really, but the kids graduating now look so small and tiny and bouncy. they'll spend all weekend getting drunk and giggly, and monday the unemployment offices and guidance counsellors will face feet and more feet of hungover kids asking "okay, now what?"
i know that monday was real scary for me. i think it took me at least another week or two to even manage a call to set up an appointment. graduating just ain't that much fun when your grades are, um, how should i put this - really, really stinky.
that last semester i even got suspended for a while because of spotty attendance record. go me! (i must say, though - a student won't go to classes, and somehow someone in charge decides the best way to go is to tell the student they CAN'T come to class for a week or so. clever thinking.)
i got scooped into adult classes to better my grades, a.k.a "something to do to pretend you're not unemployed." the classes consisted mostly of women in their fifties with their coffee/heavy perfume/nicotine smell and other shell-shocked high school graduates with nowhere to go taking classes like biology 101 (to be fair, i needed the course - i once scored 3 out of 100 points on a high school biology test. s-m-r-t, that's me).
a few more adult classes, a lame internship at the high school scraping gum off lockers and shredding paper, a horrid 3 month experience with 40 other unemployed local people locked into a former factory building getting microsoft word experience and getting pep talks on how to act on job interviews and what type of fonts and paper to use for our resum�s i was finally off to america.
(of course, those years also held new friendships, relationships, travelling about and whatnot as well, so i would hardly call them a complete waste, just, um, professionaly?)
i can't say that was exactly the future i envisioned the friday i got kicked out of high school and had bunches of flowers hung around my neck. i can't say it turned out badly either though - it just took a bit longer than i thought. and that's that. boring rant over.
