Interlude: The First

You have alighted upon a break in the book, a section of peace and quiet where my role is (thankfully) diminished and I bring you to some stories and happenstances which did not merit their own chapters alone and so have been collated in these Interludes. Chronologically, I am putting them at the end of the summer, right before the next school year starts. This Interlude is about high school, belying the purpose of this project explicitly titled Uni Days perhaps, but these are funny stories and I wanted to put them somewhere and I didn’t know what else to put here, so here we are.

The first story is one whose details I got only when in uni, talking to someone from high school, so it’s somewhat related to the theme of this collection, no? I was talking to this friend of mine, and she spilt the most horrible and wondrous story to me, but it requires some context so let me begin with this. The story begins with two girls who are both devoted to a certain extracurricular, the details of which do not matter, so we will proceed with it unspecified. So as to be able to more easily distinguish the two girls, I will call one Eleanor, and the other ***. So, Eleanor and *** are both very good at this extracurricular, and often compete as there is a ranking, ruled over by the manager of this extracurricular. *** thrashes Eleanor the rankings, for all four years. Well, I say thrashes, but I think they were sometimes somewhat close but I really don’t like Eleanor. Anyway, *** was always first—first between the two, but also just plain first; the two were competing for first and second in their group, essentially.

Now, this extracurricular has another component to it, with not-necessarily-identical-but-often-are-anyway groups. Here too, they competed for a bit before Eleanor bows out and essentially takes a management role (though she would probably object to that description). *** continues leading her little group, both in the original extracurricular and this attached component. By the start of senior year, the two are frenemies at best (I always thought them plain rivals, but I think *** objected. Sometimes.) and sparks fly from time to time, though nothing really happens. The two definitely have a tense relationship from time to time though. The story begins here, with Eleanor in a management role, and *** and yours truly dating.

The story is wholly housed in this variant extracurricular, the extra component, so from now on “extracurricular” will refer to this one. Every year, everyone in this extracurricular would partake in a Secret Santa (a secret gift exchange). Members would fill out a form detailing what they wanted (no candy, money, or gift cards allowed), and every other week or so, their “Secret Santa” would buy a gift and get it to them through some proxies at one of these extracurricular meets, of sorts. It was a lighthearted affair, with gifts often being things like slightly expensive pens, accessories for this extracurricular, or other such knickknacks. For the first three years, the Secret Santa assignments were stratified by gender. I never understood this rule, so I wasn’t too surprised to hear it was nixed in my senior year. The detail (read: drama) of this change are a touch tangential to our tale of Eleanor and ***, but important and interesting nonetheless—so bear with me for a moment.

Let us first take a quick brief of the hierarchy in this extracurricular. Essentially, there were two branches of “leadership”, call them executive and administrative. These were small groups, with only about three students in each, and with administrative sort of reporting to executive, and executive reporting to the adults. Eleanor was in the administrative branch, and a new girl, lets call her Chiffon (don’t read into it), was in the executive branch. There was a lot of drama between executive and the students they were executing leading, but no matter. As it was, Chiffon happened to fancy one of my friends, my roommate (featured in a few stories, such as Books). Because of this, she decided to advocate for the removal of the gender stratification and be assigned to give gifts to my mate. Very cute.

So Chiffon set herself up to be giving gifts to her little crush—but how? Well, I was mistakenly under the impression that pairings were randomly (or at least somewhat randomly) generated, but from what I understand now, the administrative students would assign people. This lead to some matchmaking, as Chiffon did, but also some other more cute things—as I mentioned, *** and I were dating, and though we didn’t go around wearing signs or screaming it at people, our relationship wasn’t much of a secret. This lead to some of the puppeteers scheming and making *** my Secret Santa; it was quite sweet, and I always liked getting little notes from my “Secret” Santa. All this is fine. However, one must remember, Eleanor is in the administrative group—the same group which decides these Secret Santa assignments—and Eleanor is evil. Eleanor lets *** give gifts to me, but Quis donatores ipsos donabit? I couldn’t be ***‘s Secret Santa, because small closed loops weren’t allowed, so someone had to be selected. So Eleanor, being the evil genius that she is, knows exactly who will be giving things to ***: someone who Eleanor knew (had?) fancied ***.

Evil.

The school’s team was pretty decent (surprisingly), and we ended up traveling pretty far for some of our competitions; the team would get shuttled by a few buses to these competitions. Note that most members have equipment which is integral to their participation. As hinted to before, there are subunits in the team, and leader(s) for each subunit. As mentioned, *** was one such leader. In her first year of leadership, heading another section was an interesting kid—let’s call him Crow (no relation to Kafka on the Shore)—who perhaps exemplified the idea of “do as I say, not as I do”, though I’m not sure he said anything worthwhile either. Crow was a notorious slacker, and was made leader basically by default. Crow chronically showed up comically late to practices (if he decided to come), wouldn’t stop talking, wasn’t particularly good at leading nor this extracurricular, and was just a pretty bad role model on a whole. Pretty funny guy though.

Ok, so back to the meets, and one meet in particular. Everyone had boarded the buses, and we were about ready to go. One of the coaches would come around and take attendance in a few minutes, and then we’d be off. As expected, the bus was loud, with a litany of conversations folding over each other to create an overwhelming cacophony. In the midst of all this, Crow stands up with a start and exclaims, explicitly, that he has forgotten his equipment in the storage room, and deboards swiftly. Conversations are immediately held, and the bus’s attention quickly turns to the funny site of this lanky, typically lounging kid race from the bus to reobtain his direly necessary equipment. A few minutes after he sets off, the coach comes in and notes that Crow is missing, and is brought up to speed by someone. So now, picture if you will, Crow running awkwardly back, carrying his rather heavy accessory, while everyone in coach—and the coach of this enterprise—watches and giggles. Ultimately there were no real negative consequences, and it was better he realized he didn’t have what he needed before we left, but it was hilarious in the moment.

As I was writing this about Crow, my roommate chimed in, revealing some heretofore unknown-to-me details. I didn’t interact too much with Crow, but my roommate was exposed to his section more often due to nature and structure of the extracurricular. At these meets mentioned before, there’d of course be students from many different high schools. All the buses would be in roughly the same area, and that was the de facto resting spot in between events, or for dinner or whatever. Apparently, Crow would scout out girls from other high schools as they filtered into their resting areas and would ask them out.

Anyway the reason I was writing all of this about Crow and friends is because at one point, someone from the school newspaper decided to write about this extracurricular. Their article was absolutely horrible, slovenly and ridden with major errors, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding about how this extracurricular works. It was as if an article about soccer said something like “Soccer players use their hands extensively to move the ball away from the goal and attempt to score”—sure keepers do that, a bit, but to say that is what soccer is about is ridiculous. There were plenty of other errors of a slightly lesser magnitude as well, things that are analogous to saying things like “In a soccer game, each team fields 8 players, one of whom is the goalie, whose main job is to help the team score”. It was so bad that it was funny, and was a major talking point for a while. This article quotes Crow, saying some nonsense about the difficulties of being a good leader, which was perhaps the highlight of the article, given Crow’s lack of authority on the subject. Even a few years out, a photo of Crow that was featured in the article could be seen pinned to some walls and whiteboards across the school. I knew that the author of the article was best friends with a member of the extracurricular, and pressed the friend for details. They wouldn’t divulge much as they were defending their friend—admirable but misplaced; the article was irrefutably terrible—but I did get some more context.

Many kids stayed at the library to kill time between the end of school and the start of practice. Chiffon (remember Chiffon? The executive branch kid?) was one of them, and I sat with her sometimes. One of those days (before the article was published), the article writer comes up and asks Chiffon if she would be ok with being featured in an article about the extracurricular, alongside the other executive branch kid (my mate who you’ll meet again in Snooker at Sundown). One of the two, I’ve forgotten whom, was less gung-ho about the whole affair, and asked for some time to decide. Now the following is a mix of piecemeal tidbits, conjecture, and poetic license beget by an aging memory, but I’m pretty sure what then happened was that Chiffon or my mate officially backed out; article writer wasn’t prepared for this it seemed, so they pivoted the focus of their story to leadership on the whole and spun something out—which turned out to be terrible. So with a bit more context it is perhaps, a touch more understandable why the article was so poor, and the fault cannot be solely laid at the article writer—but it is humorous none the less. Ultimately, to paraphrase Terry Pratchett, even it wasn’t the article writer’s fault, it was their responsibility to put out something good, or at least not riddled with compromising errors. I still don’t understand why they didn’t just ask their mate, the one in the extracurricular, to give their article a quick once over before publishing; I’m sure they would’ve caught and fixed most of the egregious errors.

My second year was completely online due to COVID. One of the classes I was taking at the time was Calculus, with a teacher I will call Lentils, because I can and he has no say in the matter. So Lentils was purportedly teaching us Calculus, online. Learning anything online was (is) a nightmare, and obviously nobody was really prepared for a whole year of online learning, so the results were hardly spectacular. These lectures were synchronous (livestreamed), so we got pretty frequent glimpses into Lentils’ home life—one day he opened lecture sitting outside, with his face fully washed out by the sun, and showed us his backyard and his chickens. At some point during most lectures, we could hear his son attempt to play guitar, and someone (presumably Lentils’ wife), or sometimes Lentils himself, would eventually yell at him to quiet down. If I remember correctly, Lentils’ also got a cute chocolate brown puppy and showed it to us when it was quite little. We did some calculus from time to time too, I guess.

My statistics professor, let’s call him Sum, was an engineer by training, completely bald, and wholly believed in Ivermectin and co., and was more than happy to talk about it. I had him the first year in person after the lockdown, and he made his view very clear. I learned about paired t-tests and experimental design by way of “replicating studies” which agreed with Sum’s views. It was a wild class; though my year nobody really openly challenged anything he said, the next year there was a whole kerfuffle which spread like wildfire… On a whole, his class was interesting. He’s also married to one of the biology teachers, who did not make her COVID vaccine views as integral to her teaching as Sum did, but she was equally irritating in her own special way—being generally callous, passive aggressive, and short tempered when dealing with students.

Someone I only tertiarily knew would take great pride in (semi-frequently, often unnecessarily) saying that they were a “seventh-generation ***-American”. Their yearbook quote just happened to be something like “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” I doubt they planned that, and applaud them if they did.

*** had a few friends who were interesting, and she recounted some tales from time to time. One of her friends didn’t know what the Holocaust was. This friend was also into cryptocurrencies (to be fair, this was when everyone and their grandmother was minting or mining crypto). This friend was clearly unreal, but at a glance seemed competent enough. I’m pretty certain we learned about the Holocaust in some history class or the other, and even if we didn’t—it’s the Holocaust. It’s shameful and absurd that an (supposedly) educated, then-borderline-eighteen year old didn’t know about the Holocaust. I also feel a little bit bad for her.

Let me close with one of my own antics.

I took Physics in high school, like most kids in my school. I was taught by a new teacher who was known for being strict. I didn’t find them strict per-se, but they definitely didn’t take nonsense. I learned later (through a third party) that they had a PhD from Stanford and had quit a high level job at a major company where they were presumably very well compensated. When they introduced themselves, I vaguely remember them saying calling them “Dr. ***” was acceptable. Nobody called them that, because we were in high school. I think they were teaching so their kid could go to the school or something like that; I’m not sure and I never asked them afterward. Regardless, Dr. *** was our no-nonsense professor who was pretty good on the whole I’d say.

However, Dr. *** assigned homework. Now, that may not come as any surprise, as this is high school and homework is to be expected, but I abhor homework. All our homework was done on our own sheets, from problems in the textbook. Dr. *** would check homework by telling us to place our homework on our desks, and they would walk up and down the columns we all dutifully sat in, glaring at your homework. One day when they told us to pull out our homework, I blithely popped a sheet from my binder and set it on the table, and continued whatever conversation I was having with my classmates. After Dr. *** left and I was stuffing the page back into my binder, I happened to glance at the sheet I had presented and realized it was for last week. So I learned that they didn’t really check everyone’s homework—just the troublemakers and those who were struggling. I always scored well in their class and didn’t make trouble, so it seemed like they didn’t worry at all about me.

Being the clever little fool that I am, I devised a simple plan.

I began by taking a lined A4 paper, and folding in half lengthwise. This gave a nice two column setup. Then, I did as many homework assignments as it would take to fill out this sheet, front and back, with actual physics homework. My handwriting is decidedly not prim and proper—nor is it small—so while this wasn’t trivial, it eventually led to a sheet of paper overflowing with writing. I didn’t bother copying down the problems because that would be making more, boring, busywork for myself. Then, I’d chill out for the next couple weeks, swapping the side I’d present every so often as Dr. *** prowled the classroom, checking to see if everyone did their homework. It was glorious, and I often scrawled on that that sheet in a small twenty minute break just before class anyway, so I had close to zero physics home-work for a majority of the year. Mind you, I still learned everything; I did well on exams and could explain the concepts. I just really don’t like doing homework. Sorry for deceiving you, Dr. ***.