o/~ it's been a long day o/~

[katster]

Today was busy. Very busy. And somewhat emotionally interesting.

To explain, it starts in seventh grade, when a teacher I had was rather, well...she liked to pick on me. Well, that's not entirely fair, I'm sure she had her reasons. But it, along with everything else going on in seventh grade, made me feel unbelievably miserable and alienated. And it was, over time, somewhat corrupting, in that I remembered this teacher rather less than fondly.

So today, I trucked my diploma, the one I got last spring for finishing my master's program, around to the high school and the middle school, to catch old teachers.

In particular, I wanted to catch this particular teacher who had been so much a part of making seventh grade such a living hell -- well, she wasn't the only thing, I was being teased every day, I didn't really like most of my classes, my attempts to play on the school sports teams were meeting with disaster -- especially softball, which I wasn't the most coordinated, but has long been my favourite sport, and then to top it off as the capper to a miserable year, my favourite teacher was killed tragically the weekend before the last week of school. Everything is mixed up in that crazy horrible mixed up year. It's a wonder we survive junior high at times.

So today I stood on my own terms, as an adult to an adult, and showed off just what I had managed to do. And the response was so much better than I was expecting -- a "you've done well, better than me." This made me so damned proud you wouldn't believe. ;)

In the end, I get my vindication with the help of two degrees from Berkeley.

The other thing I've discovered is that nostalgia is a hard emotion to deal with. Hanging out on the high school campus reminded me of this. It's been nine years since I graduated, and it's still the same place except it's not. Dealing with those emotions is somewhat trying, but I'm trying to make my peace with the past and with this town. And as the Beatles put it:

There are places I remember all my life
Though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone, and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
But in my life, I've loved them all.

It was in some ways a very hard day. And I'm so full of conflicting emotions, you wouldn't believe most of it.

Today, I also talked to leto_bucher on the phone. That was fun, and I'll have to do it again sometime. :)

Tomorrow and Saturday are hard manual labour, as we're having a yard sale! Joyee! So I'm going to bed now.

Comments

Revenge...

[lirazel.livejournal.com]

A dish best served cold, etc.

Good for you.

And yeah, visiting the old HS is creepy. I've done this twice--once in college (when people with what looked like the same bodies but different heads shouted rude things at me in the same places where they had done so three years before), and when I dropped off the Wonder Offspring to take the SATs about, oh, nine years ago.

Put my stomach right into a huge knot. I don't think anyone was ever ready to leave a place as much as I was ready to leave High School.

Two summers ago

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

I had heard that the principle of my Junior-High had died of cancer. For a few hours, I seriously considered attending his funeral... to verify that the rat-bastard was really Dead, and perhaps to dance on the fresh grave. This was the guy that told my mother "I don't think your son is capable of finishing highschool" and then went on to bad mouth me, when I left his hell-hole, for the best high-scool in the country.

Visiting high-school is very much a home-coming experience for me, if somewhat spooky, because in the fifteen years since, I have changed so much, yet remain somehow the same. HS was my home at the time, more so than our apartment.

I'm glad you got to one-up the damn-fools who doubted you. The best revenge is always to be able to just carry-on with your life.