irenzero

HIgh School is something that really puzzles me. I always tell people that I went to Punk Rock High School USA. I sat in classes with a few minorly famous people: Don Bulm from the band the Von Bondies, Dave Rothbart of Found Magazine, Netta Ulbie of NPR, and Andrew WK was there at the same time as my sister, but we really didn't have popularity as it existed in other places. There were a few kids that wanted that, but mostly no one cared, you were someone that people talked to or you weren't, but it wasn't like there were jocks (we didn't have any sports teams) cruising the halls looking for nerds, freaks, or weirdo's to assault (we were all mostly nerds, art fags, weirdo's, misfits, and outcasts that didn't fit at other schools). There was no prom, or home coming, or senior trips, plays, pranks, skip day (we claimed to have senior skip semester, many people had enough credits to graduate by the end of the first semester of their senior year and showed up to school when they felt like it).

we didn't have school colors, the closest thing was the hippie school, earthworks, that merged with our school in 1979 had school colors, clear and burlap. We didn't have mascots, or pep rallies, or school spirit. We had a world class Jazz band, the best art students in the district went to our school. We had kids that came from wealthy families or who's parents worked for the University of Michigan, and were able to go places, and see things that your average american teen wasn't, and we had kids what were dirt poor, in Ann Arbor terms of poor (I fell into that one).

I guess this is the long way of saying, no, I wasn't but no one really was. Some people were better liked, and some people were tagged as the more likely to make something of their lives. I have already mentioned some of the qusi famous people that I knew and was in classes with, but there were others who ended up on the street, or dead, one of them reportedly after scoring bad dope from Ministry lead singer Al Jorgenson, it was the whole range.

In think that in the end I was respected, because even though I was the outsider in the world of outsiders, I still got the biggest round of applause at the senior awards banquette. I was given the Socrates award, because I always spoke up for what I believed in, even at the cost of popularity, and the cost of being thought of as ok, or normal or any of that crap. At the end of the night the dean of the school pointed out that I had gotten the biggest round of applause, for in his words 'Having a different opinion', I look back and I'm not foolish enough to think that they liked me, but I know that I was respected, and as I pass through this world I find that so much more satisfying.

ok, I got writing this in a thread, and it got out of control..... if you flip back to my last entry, you might discover somethings about me that you'd have a hard time getting me to talk about if you met me face to face.....