In the sixth grade, I met my first best friends. That was the first time I had a consistent group of friends that I could always rely on. We made each other laugh and we spent every moment we could together. we enthusiastically discussed TV shows we didn't understand before school and played Chinese Hopscotch at recess. We had fights over crushes and dumb things like why we didn't share out bologna sandwiches at lunch. But we were inseparable at school and I was happier than I had known. That was also the grade that I really discovered how good it feels to make people laugh. That's something that lives with me. I was so disrespectful in class but sometimes even my teacher thought I was funny with my little jokes. I remember dancing in the school yard to make the girls laugh and splashing around in the mud to get a few giggles. To this day, nothing makes me happier than seeing somebody's face explode into a laugh or slowly fold into a smile. If you want to know about good things, happy people are good things...my favorite.
I started homeschooling in the seventh grade and I lost touch with a lot of my friends. Although my best friend had also started homeschooling that year. We joined the same band and saw each other every Thursday afternoon and slept over at one or the other's house like every second weekend. I made some of my favorite memories with him. We took guitar lessons together and discussed whether a girl in a bikini was hotter than a naked girl or not. We obsessed over cars and dreamed up plans to buy school buses and fire trucks. Everything was funny somehow. We looked down on people who got upset over stupid little things. We laughed at all the other teenagers who complained about their parents and freaked out about how hard their lives were. We were just funny, happy people.
When I was in the tenth grade, my mom signed me up to be confirmed. This process required that I attend weekly preparation meetings at St. Michael church. I quickly realized how much I longed to be surrounded by people again. I missed that part of school. Sure I was smart, but what good did that do me if I didn't have anybody to show it off to? So I started going to Bishop Carroll High School. Where I met my next best friend. With him I discovered a whole new way to have fun. We spent every single school day goofing off and making life the most fun it could be. It's hard to imagine that we found a new way to have fun for six hours of every day. But it was beyond fun. The memory of that whole year altogether completely eclipses that of the Disney World trip. The whole year that was tenth grade is definitely in my top 3 memories of everything so far. Playing squash with crumpled up paper in the English resource center, dropping bottles of Pepsi from the fifth floor, emotionally torturing the CTS ladies (I guess the Religion, Library, and Math ladies too), making faces behind teachers' backs in seminars, silently laughing our faces off in the library, not-so-silently laughing our faces off there too, firing off pen rockets in the cafeteria, licking soda off the floor in the basement, smashing an apple into bits against the wall, making parkour videos in the stairwell, going deaf in the library...every moment was the best moment ever.
Episode 2 - A Bucket of Beeps
11 years ago