Life Was Easier 20 Years Ago..

Some old high school stories I love to tell the tale....

If I could turn back time, I would totally go back to high school. My high school years rocked!

I started at Hillcrest High School in the fall of 1995. Most of my friends from jr high came along with me. My sophomore year, I met a few new friends along the way. I joined up with some environmental club, which proved to be pretty uneventful. Made out with some of my male friends (most of my friends in that group were male). Turned out I had to teach him how to kiss, he would literally suck my face off. I called him the human vacuum. It only went on for about a couple of months. I went out with another boy briefly, before I went out with the high school sweetheart.

Sophomore year brought a fun injury: I dislocated my left knee during aerobics/ gym class. How did I do that? It's a story I love to tell. I was trying to stretch my leg on the wall, I must've apparently kicked too high, next thing I knew, I was on my ass on the floor, my kneecap was facing outward to the left, and a big purple balloon was forming where my kneecap should've been. And yes I was in a lot of pain. So while I wait for the ambulance to take me to the hospital for the people there to reset it, I get stuck sitting with the two high school football coaches trading injury stories. Talk about adding insult to injury, as I was already in pain. When I got to the hospital, as I was being moved, my kneecap popped back into place. I got stuck wearing a bulky kneebrace for two weeks, I walk into 10th grade health class with this thing on. Before class I catch my health instructor with a porno mag. I knew there were rumors of this, but now I confirmed the rumors were true. To this day, that knee still bothers me when it rains.

The summer between sophomore and junior year, I take drivers education. The reason I took this class in the summer was because my 16th birthday falls in the middle of July. What an adventure in itself was. One of the driver instructors at least on the driving range was the same football coach that sat with me when I dislocated my knee a few months before. He took the liberty to tease me about it the whole time. Now on the driving range and the written test was not that bad, however, when it came to driving on the road and my road test, let's just say it was all by the skin of my teeth. I take a wrong turn on the freeway, end up at a bagel place for bagels. I get called driving ace for the rest of the time. I barely pass my driving test with an 80 percent which is enough to get my license. To this day, the only reason I passed my test is because the road instructor that gave me my test went to high school with my mom 25 years before that, and my mother would have given him crap if I didn't pass.

I start junior year by getting my my first holes in my ear pierced, and my first actual date that October. My first actual date went really well, I went with a good friend of mine from jr high. It was a girls choice dance and we went with another couple of friends of ours. To give you an idea of just how cheap this date was, we went to McDonalds across the street from the school dance. Like I said, it was a fun time.

I took a mythology class and a graphic design class that year, and got my first taste of total geekdom and I liked it! Especially my graphic design class. In that class I was truly in my element. I got to play with computers, run printing presses, silk screen a shirt (which I still have) and make my own personal centerfold of David Duchovny half naked. (Well it was a scanned picture from a book I had with text underneath but still cool and went on my wall nonetheless). I had the best instructor ever for that class, he was the only instructor that actually treated me like an adult, even though I was only 16 at the time. The next year he ended up leaving due to a divorce that left him living out his car and forced a necessary leave. I still to this day wish I could find him on Facebook or whatever and thank him for believing in me and getting me where I am today.

February of 1997 comes around, and girls choice dance comes along again. I ask out the one that became the high school sweetheart. We had fun, and we ended up going to prom together, but we didn't hook up till his graduation night a few months later.

The summer of 1997 between junior and senior year was eventful and also emotional. That June, I went to a show with my boyfriend, had fun kinda a late night. One week later my mom gets a phone call from her older sister saying my cousin had been killed in a hit and run accident (I'm tearing up as I'm writing this, so bear with me). What happened was him and his buddies were heading out on the freeway, when all of a sudden, my cousins buddy's truck stalled. Being the awesome man that he is, my cousin gets out and tries to fix the problem, all of a sudden, some jackass speeding, swerves over all four lanes and hits into the two trucks, pinning my cousin underneath, killing him instantly. He was only 19. His funeral was a casual affair, but pretty packed, because he had such a good heart and an even more awesome personality. His death even today is still pretty hard.

I start my senior year at Hillcrest for the most part enthusiastically. I was in an awesome relationship so serious it was almost like we were married. (I still to this day take that relationship for granted.) I was taking my favorite class along with another graphic design class. But I sunk my teeth into H-TV (audio visual, video editing). I was in charge of broadcasting and editing the morning announcements and school happenings. I even did an entire show start to finish myself including the editing. As I watched myself on TV, I noticed that, yes, I was wearing a purple tank top, but my bra strap was hanging out. I didn't realize until later that that show was one of the most memorable and one of the most watched.

Me and my boyfriend attended most of the dances that year, and we even hosted a little Halloween party, but one fun experience with the group comes to mind: Maceys parking lot. Now you ask, what is that? Well, it's a story we all love to retell. There was about eight of us one night, just screwing around, when we decided to go cruisin. We start off by going to the grocery store named Maceys. We try to take off in the car without one of our friends who was well on the hefty side. He gets pissed off, so he starts running after us (and believe me, it was just funny seeing the fat kid run) and then proceeds to jump on the back of the trunk and ends up denting the trunk lid. So just for that, we drive by his crushes house, radio blaring, and he proceeds to yell (while he's still riding on the trunk, btw)—"I love you!!!" I don't know if she ever heard, but the whole experience was funnier than crap. We had a lot of good times as a group, some stupid stuff, but we mostly stayed out of trouble.

I graduated from Hillcrest June of 1998 with a 2.6 GPA. My boyfriend leaves on a mission, I start working that summer, but I will save my working experiences for a later chapter. To this day, we all still pretty much keep in contact with each other, including me and my high school boyfriend. Good friends are hard to find and I am especially grateful that I have some awesome friends that still stick together to this day. We weren't the most popular bunch, but we are just a few misfits that just got together.