Catching Fire

So. There was a bonfire on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, just like there is every year.

This year's was slightly sad, at least at the beginning, because it rained for like an entire week beforehand, so all the wood and all the ground and everything were wet and muddy and basically difficult to set on fire.

But we had a good time anyway, even if we only stuck around for like 10 minutes and barely managed to get any good pictures at all.

The operative word in that last sentence being "barely."

Because the ones we got? Pretty alright, if you ask me.

Bonfire 2010

We went to the "banfire" last night. Because OF COURSE WE DID. What self-respecting Rover wouldn't? It's the night before the Turkey Day Game, people. It's a TRADITION, practically a RELIGION in my hometown.

Shae already knows how to do the bonfire stroll, and she did a pretty good job of showing Joey the ropes. But as always it was very, very hot and very, very crowded, so we didn't stay long.

Just long enough. We were there long enough to know that our class's bonfires were the best ones ever. Except that my sister's bonfire (Class of '96) and my husband's bonfire (Class of '93) had NOTHING on the bonfire thrown by my class. Yo, I'ma let them finish, but the EAHS Class of 1992 had the best bonfire of all time.


OF ALL TIME.

=====

Whatever you're doing today, be good, be safe, and be careful. xoxo.

Street Survivors

Because "The One Where I Run Around Acting Like I Am Shooting A Lynyrd Skynyrd Album Cover" is too long, and also maybe more than a little bit obvious.

For the past 103 years, my high school has played football on Thaksgiving morning against the high school just across the river, our counterpart in new Jersey.

The night before is The Bonfire, which is at the end of a week of activities which are significantly primarily to seniors: the Sleep-Out, the Pep Rally, the ritual of dressing like lumberjacks and getting splinters from unload pallets off trucks.

We didn't take Shae to the bonfire last year -- I can't remember why, but I'm sure it made sense at the time. She didn't lose a step any way: she handled the stroll perfectly. Like a pageant queen, waving and flouncing and working the crowd. Queen of the Bonfire, already.

She already wants to know when we can go to the next bonfire.

2nd Runner Up

This the second-runner-up (or is that 2nd loser?) in the 2009 Miss "Which Of These School Pictures Is The Least Terrible?" Pageant.

Of course this is not really a bad picture, as school pictures go -- oh, believe me, I had some doozies, especially back in the day when my grandmother used to give me Ogilvie home perms in her kitchen sink -- but I am not all together thrilled with it, either; there's the booger thing, for one, and I assure you, this is not the way her hair was done up when we sent her to school that morning.

It's kind of ridiculous to get agitated over a day care picture for a 2½ year old, I know, but still I can't help but wonder: every teacher in that school is a woman except for the one dude who teaches kindergarten and has to wear the creepy Easter Bunny costume. The mother of one of the kids in her classroom is a teacher at the center. Honest to God, would it have killed any of them to straighten out her hair and wipe her frickin' nose? The boogers are one thing when I take her picture at home for free with my own camera, but they expect me to pay for pictures that include absolutely un-Photoshop-able snot pockets? Is that like a special early bird bonus or something?

(Also: Blogger went wonkers and this originally went up early. This is supposed to be the Sunday post. Sorry if this screws up anyone's blogreels.)

Fake It Till You Make It

Secret confession time: I'm a total fraud.

I was in choirs and musicals throughout middle school, high school, and college. I actually auditioned for many of these things. I've sung classical Masses with organs and strings and brass quintets, a capella medieval madrigals, medleys from Broadway shows. Beethoven, Bach, Sondheim, Gilbert & Sullivan, Irving Berlin. All of it, without ever once having a "proper" voice lesson, or even without being able to read a single note of music.

My very favorite music teacher, Mr. Milisits, told me once that I lacked skill, but not talent, and that anyway, I had the most important thing of all: a real love of music. Of course, I think he said that to all his altos to keep us around, but perhaps he had a point. I can't read music, but I can hear it, and when I hear choirs singing, especially at Christmastime, I can hear the different voice parts, and I appreciate them.

Because, listen: it's hard work, being one of maybe a dozen girls trying to sing harmony over what seems like three hundred sopranos shrieking the melody with no earthly idea of the concept of volume control. Just like the rest of life, I suppose.

Mr. Milisits finally got around to retiring last year. They had a banquet for him in May or June, I forget which, but I didn't go. I hope it is not one of those things I end up forever regretting. I don't know if I ever told him, but he was one of the best teachers I had in high school. Kind of like a musical Mr. Grier -- he knew what we were capable of, even if we ourselves didn't, and he demanded nothing less that our best.

Hot for Teacher

(Oh God, this one of those stupid walls of text: sorry.)

Photo from Panoramio.

That's a picture of Cottingham Stadium, "Home of the Red Rovers." This was supposed to be a "WTF!? Friday" about high school football. But while I was looking for pictures of the stadium, and then my high school, and then people I went to high school with, somewhere along the way I took a very sharp left turn and ended up discovering through my awesome Google-fu (and also patience, as this information was buried several pages deep in the links) that one of my very favorite teachers from high school is now a visiting faculty member at Wilkes University.

This doesn't surprise me in the least -- when I think back on his class (which was actually 8th grade, not technically high school, and perhaps that makes this story better, in a way), I always remember how much smarter he always seemed than any of my other teachers. Although I could not have possibly known it at the time, having never seen the movie (because I was a good girl and also I don't think we had a VCR, and I know for sure that we didn't have HBO), this teacher was very much Donald-Sutherland-in-Animal-House, albeit without the drugs ... I think. He certainly never encouraged me to use any, for whatever that is worth.

One thing I remember is how he loved shaking up the "establishment" of Enriched kids. This teacher used to change his seating chart every 5 weeks, based on your placement in the class. Students with better grades ended up in the back of the room, and the ones who needed more help were in the front. I transferred into his class two weeks into the marking period, so I ended up in the front by default, which is where all these "gifted" kids who had known each other since elementary school thought I belonged. I was practically a foreigner to them, and they all thought I was beneath them (especially the girl who would eventually become the Salutatorian of our class, who quite frankly I never thought was anything less than a bitch, anyway -- funny how the uber-religious turn out like that, isn't it?).

Anyway. I was only in class for three weeks before the seating change. Other students in the class used to snigger at me when I had to diagram sentences on the chalkboard, because rather than just do what I was asked, I always had follow-up questions: what if there is a semi-colon? what if that "if" is changed to "when"? wouldn't it just make more sense to turn this mess into two separate sentences, instead of this compound-complex monstrosity with passive voice and verb tense problems? The other kids hated it -- secretly I think most of the time they had NO IDEA what I was talking about -- but I know my teacher loved it.

Which is why he made a Very Big Deal out of the fact that, when he did the first classroom re-org in October, I ended up in the far back corner, the seat reserved for "Patient Zero," as he called me. I stayed in that seat for the entire rest of the school year, which just about pissed everyone right off.

That was the point at which I decided that these people might have more money than me, and they might be prettier than me, and they might have more friends and fancier pedigrees and maybe they might even actually be better than me, but by God: I was fucking smarter than all these bitches.

So I suppose you can see why I haven't been to a high school reunion yet. Been out of high school for 17 years, and I am still bitter.

Oh, what did I learn in that class? Don't remember. We read Great Expectations and Jonathan Livingston Seagull and wrote papers on the meaning of life (mine was "live well, laugh often, love much"). Mostly I recall this teacher very fondly because he was the first adult who treated me, even at 13 years old, like a Person with Potential and not just some punk kid. He empowered me, demanded that I work harder and be smarter and think different, and even though I can't always put an exact finger on what he taught me, I still can tell you exactly what his greatest lesson was:

Girl? You are fucking awesome, and don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise, because you and I? We know the Truth.

And when I have those days when I want to quit my crappy cubicle job, when I get disgusted because my scratch-and-win early retirement plan isn't working, and when I think about what I want to do "when I grow up," when I am ready to have a job that my daughter and my husband can be proud of me for?

On those days, I want to be an 8th grade English teacher, just like Mr. Grier. Because he stepped in and saved me before it was too late, and I can't think of any better want to repay the favor than to be just like him.

This Mid-Life Crisis Moment is being brought to you by the letters E, A, H, and S, and by the numbers 92 and 15.

So ... 15 years, 4 months, and 11 days ago, I graduated from high school. I was 18 at the time, which makes me 33 years old now. (Remember that for the next time you hear someone ask me how old I am, because odds are I won't be telling that person the truth. Usually, I round up and say I am "almost 40," so people will tell me how good I look -- "ohmigod, you don't look 40!" To which I humbly but nonetheless knowingly reply, "Thanks." Because I am vain and selfish and I will get my compliments however I can; I don't look like I'm almost 40. Because I am not. It's a weird ethical calculus, I guess, but in my head it makes sense. Yes, I know I am kind of a jerk that way, but being smart and being jerky are not binary conditions. But I am digressing.)

I have been poking around, and it doesn't look like my class has a reunion scheduled before the end of the year. Those people suck. For some reason, this comes as a great disappointment to me. To be perfectly frank, the odds of my voluntarily attending my high school reunion are approximately equal to the odds of me getting myself sperminated by Josh Beckett anyone who isn't my husband. Which is to say, about (∞-1)ⁿ against. (Definitely take the under on that one, boys and girls.) I know I am fifteen years removed from the alleged so-called end of my adolescence, but let's face it: I am still bitter. High school sucked hard, and I don't like remembering it if I don't have to.

Just the same, I am disappointed that there doesn't appear to be anything going on. Paranoid schizophrenic sociopath that I am, I can't help but wonder if this is some kind of personal affront. I didn't go to the last reunion either -- I was even more bitter and crazy then than I am now. What if I missed out on a crucial memo or something? What if all the cocktail napkins had some top-secret password on them that I am supposed to enter into a special website where I can download all the specs of the mission? How am I supposed to know what is going on?

These feelings are weird, even to me, because I am not really all that interested in what everyone else is doing. I went through that not that long ago (OK, wow, a year ago already?), and it took me to a very ugly and unpleasant place that I am not particularly interested in visiting right now. But when I have to think about high-school-related events that I plan to avoid, it makes me think about high-school-related events that I would like to relive, and it makes me kind of sad to realize that there really aren't that many of them.

Essentially -- and I mean zero disrespect to anyone who actually knew me in high school -- my entire highlight reel of high school looks like this:

Greece. 1992. April, I think. In this picture are, left to right, Ellyson Stout, Analia Regina, me, and Vivian Schoeppner. (Not pictured is the 100 lbs. or so that I have gained since then, but don't worry -- it's mostly boobs and anyway, I carry it well. Shut up.) In the background is the Acropolis. That is one of the bluest skies that I have ever seen, before or since. Even with all the smog, the noise and the pollution and the zillions of people, I can't remember anything ever smelling so sweet. Freedom. The whole wide world, laid out in front of me, and I was going to take it on, guns blazing. I was going to be a sportscaster, dammit! I was going to do play-by-play on Monday Night Football, ferchrissakes.

Wait ... I was pissed because those people suck? Hmm. Guess I'm the sucker.