*sigh*
The high school world is a bizarre place. Or maybe I’m the oddity (likely to be the case). Graduation has not hit me, prom-excitement eludes me, and the tearful farewell still seems far, far away. Maybe I trapped myself into the bubble of now, because now just feels like a still moment in the midst of change.
Or maybe its like the stream of consciousness of the entire school. As if the whole school was one breathing entity, and through it flowed a river of senior concerns (prom, graduation, and whatnot) that seem to avoid me. Or maybe I’m the one doing the avoiding.
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
-Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942)
Not that there is much to avoid, since proms and graduation ceremonies are experiences shared by the 3 million or so high school students across the nation each year. Really, the experience itself is not that special. It’s not the fact that I went to prom or that I graduated that makes it special.
It’s the people, and the friends I’m leaving behind. It is this illusion that these people would never go away that bothers me. I don’t like sad good byes, because I’d like to think that I will see them again.
While everyone around me wants to grow up, I could care less. While everyone wants to leave the horrors of high school, I want to stay here. Or the more nuanced answer–at times, I want to leave and experience more, yet I couldn’t help but look back and wonder at the value that I now saw as I was leaving:
“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Other times, it was a more general feeling. I detested a stereotypical adulthood because it only meant more responsibility. I could not see myself in an office desk, yet I wonder whether I would pick the easy, boring job over the more hazardous, exciting job if I had grown that desperate. I really wonder.
A few updates–
My mom insisted that I buy a smartphone (unusual role switch) even though I liked my flip phone fine. Admittedly, my flip phone isn’t the greatest. It stores around 200 text messages at one time, which means I need to delete a lot of texts regularly.
This can be a good thing, forcing me to remember dates and go through my inbox (yes, it acts like an email for those of you who have never owned a flip phone) quickly. This can also be a bad thing, because I cannot open new messages until I have cleared the old ones out, which has been a problem for a while. I solved this by reading Groupme text messages on my laptop and deleting those on my phone.
Anyways, there go my plans of graduating without a smartphone.
Now, people will be texting me left and right and taking advantage of my new “freedom.” I should probably set a 24 hour policy with text messages.
Second, I have to make up one AP exam due to a testing date conflict. So while (almost) everyone else is partying, I will be partying with a book and a laptop. That’s okay, since I’m sure I could party harder in one year of college than in all four years of high school combined. But then again, I was never a party person, so I can wait (forever).
And of course, a doodle, taken by my new phone, sideways in all its courtesy:
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I won’t be starting the doodle challenge again until Thursday night after my exam. So stoked for that day.
The Doodler Process 