High School

To say "I can't believe it's already over" would be understating it.

High school ends in a matter of weeks. The reason I'm writing this now is because the time between now and graduation will be filled with work, more work, hockey, more work after that, a trip out of the country involving hockey, and miscellaneous occurances of work thereafter. I also have to make sure I pass Economics so I can, oh you know, graduate.

Of course this, outside of the whole "going to Canada" part, has become commonplace over the last few months. I wake up semi-late, get showered, get dressed, go to school, mosy on into either English or MIS a few minutes late, go through my day, go home, maybe take a nap, go to work, rinse, and repeat. The few exceptions being trips to Washington D.C. and Portland along with hockey games and practices.

If nothing else, it's given me more incentive to start writing and finish the best story ever written so that I can retire at around 30 and parade around the world generally not giving a fuck (I.E. getting myself in a position that will eventually get me a really awesome career).

Of course, there have been complications with that, things making the daily grind slightly more... grindy? English papers and Newspaper stories that keep me up until 3 AM, money problems, general laziness, and, history's old favorite, the opposite sex.

Yeah, that record's still playing, despite the fact that there's already an MP3 copy. It annoys me as much as it likely annoys all of you. I have girl troubles and it seems like I will for the forseeable future as well. It's a good bet that this has been mentioned at least once in the previous 34 posts on here. The difference this year was that I actually had the nerve to try fixing that situation instead of saying "It won't happen even if I try". I'm not going to reveal the specifics, but let's just say that what actually happened was the completely exact opposite of what I was going for.

There was really only one other interest after that, but my own self confidence and a pretty complicated social structure got in the way of me going further into that.

But back to high school.

The most memorable part of Senior year was most definitely the stretch of time between April 6th and 17th of April.

It started with the night I got a tour of the American Airlines Center as a prize for winning the Dallas Stars High School Media Day article contest, followed by watching Mike Modano's potentially last game in Dallas from a Suite two days later. Then a week after that was the Portland trip.

But the 17th, stretching a few hours into the 18th, was the best day of my life so far.

It started at 5 AM, Pacific time. I woke up and got dressed and packed and watched the news for a little bit before going down to the lobby of the hotel we were staying in. After some confusion about what the purpose of alarm clocks are, we took a "fairly expensive" cab ride to the Portland International Airport.

I thought that I would be up out and away by 8 AM, but after about an hour on the plane our Captain told us that something was wrong with the defroster and we had to get off. This turned into a two hour long struggle to get on a plane before 3 PM because, oh yeah, my senior Prom was in less than 12 hours a few hundred miles away.

So then we tried switching tickets with people that were on the pre-designated "late" flight, which ended up leaving three hours before the "early" flight. There were five people in the group on the early flight, each of us planned on going to Prom when we bought our plane tickets, but only four people on the "late" flight were willing/able (but in reality, it was just really just "willing") to sacrifice their tickets.

This sad old tale doesn't really need to describe who the odd man out was, though I did have an opportunity to go on the now earlier. I didn't really have a special somebody to disappoint by not being at Prom, being confident that the rest of my group would still have fun in each other's company, so I gave it up.

This sounds like a pretty shitty day though, right? Wake up at 5 for a flight at 8 that ends up leaving at 3? Yeah, at that point it was. Curses were strewn recklessly around at certain people who were on a jet to Dallas, fatigue started setting in, and Pokemon Heart Gold started getting a lot less fun than it was when I bought it.

But ohshitwaitforthisone.

The flight got in to DFW at 9PM. At 9:30, I showed up at the Macaroni Grill on Park and Preston where my Prom group was eating in a Mizzou t-shirt and jeans.

Basically, I ran in and said hi, got mugged by one of my friends, said hi again.

"Where's your suit?" someone asked. I looked down at my current ensemble.

"Oh shit!" I said, running out of the room they were in.

At around 10:15 I showed up at Southfork in a suit and tie just after my group had arrived. We partied it up until 5 AM. Best day ever? I think so.


This was once again a raw outburst of my mind at 3 in the morning. I thought it had some pretty cool parts, myself.