Comments

It’s like, you leave high school and you put everything that was that time in your life away to be reminisced but never seriously thought about again. You are, after all, grown up the minute you graduate. The strange thing is that things in high school were just as complex and difficult and, above all else, the same as they are forever afterwards, you just don’t realize it. It’s sad too, because if you get down and think about it, even though appearances were everything in high school, that was just because everyone was learning that that is everything at that time and so it’s just this big fucking deal. If you really look back though, things were so obvious and blatant back then, it’s too bad we don’t think about that stuff more. Now that we’re adults there’s all this pretense that doesn’t really exist and we keep living these lives thinking things have changed when they’ve really just stayed the same. As it’s said, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” The only problem is, you only thought you did, and where has it gotten you?

Posted by: tim k on January 19th, 2003 8:17 PM

Except I don’t feel as though I’ve put away childish things. Instead, I feel like I’m making up for lost time, feeling a lot like I did (or perhaps should have) when I was in high school. But now, the world seems to have changed around me. I feel so out of place. The non-existant but ever-present pretenses and social constructions are a bitch when you don’t want (and don’t know how) to buy into them.

Posted by: kasei on January 20th, 2003 1:06 AM

There is the difference from high school. We can look at it through the lens of hindsight. I, for one, believe I’ve matured a great deal in the way I think. Specifically, I’m more logical now and less catastrophizing and emotional. When I was in HS I was more paranoid. Being less sure of myself, the need for acceptance by those around me was much more acute. Not that I don’t carry baggage around from my HS days. As I look back through my memories, I see that the ‘cool kids’ represent the recurring antagonist. Its been almost 10 years since I was in HS, but I still see the ‘cool kids’ as the antagonist. I have all sorts of labels for what makes a ‘cool kid’. It messes me up a little. I work with people who, by my definition, are ‘cool kids’ and they are very nice to me, but I can’t help but being suspicious of them. How can they be trusted? Nostalgia is a dangerous tool. Its easy to wallow in it. It is most productive to USE it as a tool to compare how we’ve improved or degraded. Often we find we’ve changed much from who we were, which means we’ve fixed some things that were broken and broke some things that were right. So we can find characteristics in our past which we can try and reclaim while recognizing the areas we’ve improved. But one must be careful not to get lost in the past. Memories of the past always seem simpler than today. Perception is that way.

Posted by: Wonko on January 20th, 2003 4:42 AM