A meme I can actually sink my teeth into

(courtesy of cyan_blue)

Nickname in high school?

Didn't really have a consistent one. I did have one friend who nicknamed all the members of our little group after Mortal Kombat characters. I was Sindel; I'm sure anyone who's played the game and has met my Attack Hair(TM) can easily see why. And I had another friend who gave all the members of a different little group Latin names. Mine was Lupa Mirabilis ("strange she-wolf," according to him, though I get a lot of people interpreting it differently), and I used it as an online handle for years, though I've moved away from it lately.

Sport you were into?

Eh, badminton was kinda fun, but I took gym class no longer than I had to. I did spend a year or two taking archery lessons at a range over in the next county, though. That was serious fun, but expensive at times.

Had a circle of friends?

Several, and they shifted over the years. To some extent I stuck with my best friend from junior high and the circle that formed around her (and the other circle that formed around her later, before the first circle sort of re-formed again), but I did drift away a bit during freshman year to hang out with some of the guys from band and science club (one of whom I admittedly had a crush on, but crush or no crush he was one of the most entertaining people I've ever known), and toward the end of senior year, when my best friend and I were starting to drift apart anyway, the folks from that year's Academic Decathlon team started hanging out together a lot, and they were mostly guys so I felt more comfortable among them. Both that group and the original circle remained in contact after graduation and still get together during summer and winter breaks (or at least they still did two years ago, which was the last time I had a chance to visit the old hometown myself.)

Best subject?

Math and French. Straight A's in both without even trying, at least until calculus whapped me upside the head.

Worst subject?

History. I can never remember dates unless they're dates of things that happened to me or someone close to me. That was the problem I had with history in general; all these events we had to learn about were too impersonal to get any kind of foothold in my brain. If only history classes were taught from a perspective of "this is what it was like to be Joe Schmoe living in country X in the Yth century," like for example if the textbooks were all works of historical fiction, then I'd enjoy history a lot more.

Perhaps there should be a third category here: Worst Subject that Should've Been My Best. I did excellent work in my English classes but almost failed one semester every single year because I didn't actually bother to do the work half the time. Just couldn't get into it for whatever reason. Fortunately all my teachers either handed out extra credit assignments toward the end of the year or let me make up work they weren't strictly supposed to let me make up, and I pulled off B's and even A's in the end.

A teacher you owe life lessons to?

Don't know if I can chalk up any life lessons to my teachers, really, except perhaps for a few "life's not fair" lessons. I had some really good teachers, but they didn't teach me Profound Things, they just were generally cool. I think the serious life lessons didn't start to hit me until college, and even then I owe them more to friends than teachers.

A teacher you wanna kick in the ass?

Well, my AcaDec coach was aggravating to deal with plenty of times, enough so that we got into a yelling fight at one point. Then there was the guidance counselor with whom I also got into a yelling fight (some people turn out to be assholes at the oddest moments.) And of course there was my biology teacher, who would mis-grade papers because he was lousy at math and then refuse to re-grade them. I was late to my next class countless times because I'd stayed after to argue with him, the most memorable occasion being when I discovered a puzzle he'd posed on an exam actually had two correct answers--and he marked me down for putting down both of them. I never did get him to see the illogic in that.

Oddly enough, though, it seemed that for the most part the teachers who annoyed the living hell out of me were among the ones who had the greatest respect for me as a student.

Freshman year:

Much like junior high, only with a bit less mockery and a few more happy memories.

Sophomore year:

Much like freshman year, only with heavier coursework.

Junior year:

This was the year things started happening for me socially. I discovered the goth crowd and, later, the gamer geeks, and more importantly, guys finally started to take an interest in me. The degree to which I blossomed as a result of that was just phenomenal. My stepmom worst enemy moving out of the house was no bad thing either; pity it was only till I graduated.

Oh, and that was also the year I realized that not being a Kinsey 3 (though I wasn't familiar with the Kinsey scale at the time) didn't mean I wasn't into girls at all.

Senior year:

This year I finally found my real niche among the aforementioned geeks and AcaDec folks; somehow I feel this was when I found myself in some important sense, or at least began to. I still consider this the one year of my pre-adult life that I can really say was a good one, though I did get my emotions fucked with a bit in a way I won't describe further here because it was part of a situation I'm still dealing with.

Your best friend was?

We'd instantly bonded when we met in junior high, but during high school our personalities started to diverge--or rather, the ways in which we'd always been different became more and more obvious, especially as I started to develop my own personality and rely on her less (and spend less time in her shadow). We continued to spend a lot of time together but found over the years that we understood each other less and less, and our life paths started to take wildly different directions (they've diverged even further since.) We still keep in touch, but more for old time's sake, I think, than for any other reason. Granted, there's a powerful lot of old time's sake there; having each other around during those early years did a lot to keep us sane, and I definitely wouldn't be who I am today if it hadn't been for her. It would've been nice if I'd been more assertive more of the time, but that was a general problem of mine and something I eventually got over.

Your worst friend was?

I never had a friend screw me over or anything, but I did have one or two who were difficult to have in one's life due to things like their consistently getting involved in really dysfunctional relationships. And when you've got a friend who keeps getting involved in really dysfunctional relationships and there's also lots of sexual tension between you, things tend to get Weird. Especially when said friend is also the first person ever to have let you know he was physically attracted to you, thus causing your self-image to improve drastically, but at the same time causing you to be more susceptible than you should be to his attempts to get into your pants given that you know damn well he's not somebody it would be a good idea to get involved with. Not that I actually yielded to those attempts, but a few things happened that I kicked myself for afterward.

Cafeteria food sucked?

We didn't have cafeteria food, we had snack bar food. The hot pockets weren't too bad, and the make-your-own-sandwiches were nice. And the salad bar had baked potatoes--no butter, but they weren't bad with semi-melted cheese on 'em. But then I'm quite adaptable when it comes to food. We ain't no gourmet cooks in my family.

Most hilarious school rule?

None of 'em were that funny, really. The most ridiculous was the tardy policy they instituted my junior year or so: classroom doors were to be locked as soon as the bell rang, and anyone not in class by then had to go straight to detention rather than "disrupt" the class. Apparently one student missing fifty-five minutes of class was better than thirty students missing a quarter of a minute. Most of my teachers didn't give a shit if you walked in a minute late, but the security guards would send you directly to jail without passing Go if they saw you anywhere without a hall pass after the bell, so whenever I was late to school (which I was chronically, I admit), I had to duck into the nearest friendly teacher's classroom and ask them to write me a pass.

Wore uniforms?

Nope. Standard dress code, pretty much, but no uniforms.

How was the prom?

Reasonably fun, like the homecoming dances I'd been to. I was pissed at my female friends, though, because when I'd refused to go due to the bloody high cost of tickets they told me they'd spring for mine, and when I went ahead and bought one and asked them for reimbursement, they remembered saying no such thing. I'd asked my crush (who was also one of my better friends at that point) to go with me, but phrased it cagily so he could interpret it as either a date-date or a "just going as friends" thing, and would hopefully say yes after interpreting it whichever way he wanted to (I'd decided I'd rather go as just-friends with him than go with anyone else anyway.) It worked, but unfortunately we did indeed seem to be just-friends (though for some reason he presented me with a very spiffy present when I arrived at his house that night). I still had a good time, though; we went with half a dozen of our other friends and had the usual amount of fun hanging out before and after and dancing our asses off during.

Who were the prom king and queen?

Oh, gods, like I keep track of these things. They damn well weren't friends of mine, and I'm glad of it. Let the snotty brats have their popularity contests.

Any achievements?

Assloads of academic awards, stellar test scores, and too many AcaDec trophies to carry. If only I'd kept up that level of achievement through college.

Were you popular?

Heh. I think I may already have answered that question. I had friends, and by junior year or so I mostly wasn't teased or anything. The popular set left me the hell alone and I left them the hell alone. Yay.

Best song that reminds you of high school?

Huh boy. There aren't any contemporary songs that make me think of high school in general, but...our school song, which we sang at every pep rally and, for some reason, every time any group of us got back from a field trip, was sung to the tune of "Far Above Cayuga's Waters." I've never actually heard the original song, but if I ever did, any time in the next ninety years, it would bring back alllllllllllllll those occasions in a sort of blur. I don't think that counts as a "best" anything, though. It hasn't been long enough for me to be nostalgic about it; right now I'm still in the "oh, no, not that song again" phase. Apparently it takes a while to wear off when you've heard it that many times--and the general cheesiness of the surrounding circumstances, and for that matter of the lyrics, probably contributes a great deal to that effect.