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My AP English teacher recently suggested an interesting assignment that I feel I must share with the Newsvine community. We just started reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, keeping with the motif of growing up, she asked us to keep a journal of these last few weeks of our senior year in high school. I know journals are usually meant to be private but I'm curious to see how many people experienced the same mindset that I find myself in. I'll try and post more thoughts every couple days. So here goes:
Today I helped my friend with some yardwork because she has family visiting soon from Australia. The mellow, mechanical routine of raking leaves let my mind slip back to memories from elementary school. I remember that in 1st grade I used to make excuses to go to the nurses office because it was easier to feign illness than to make friends. I think that only happened about 6 times though. One time I even made my parents believe that I got bitten by a bug when I had purposely scratched my arm until it looked a little red.
I remember there was one kid who could make his coughs sound like a horn. There was another kid who could pee from across the bathroom and make it into the urinal. I must have played basketball with my friends at every recess for 3 years. PE was the @!$%# back then. There was one game where you had a 2-liter empty bottle between your legs and you had to try and throw volleyballs at other people's bottles but there were people all around you so you were never safe. It's almost as if they were breeding paranoia into us. That would make a good quote about life - "There's always someone trying to throw a volleyball at the bottle between your legs".
In third grade we used to run in the field and try to catch crickets. There was one asian kid who was really good at catching them but after 3rd grade I never saw him again. He must have been recruited and is now a professional cricket catcher. I swear, if there is a cricket catching all-star team then this kid was a child prodigy. Anyways, I remember one time I snuck a cricket into class after recess and put it in my desk. Two minutes later I forgot all about it until the girl sitting next to me screams like she was about to die because my cricket had jumped onto her desk. I volunteered to catch it (or re-catch it) and bring it outside. Needless to say, my cricket catching days were pretty much ended after that incident.
Right now it feels like I'm in the middle of a giant tug-of-war between my memories of the past and my anticipation for the future. If there was a way to measure the potential energy of this time of life I bet it would be off the charts. I keep thinking about how I've changed and how I really haven't changed.
