January 27, 2004
Rise and Fall of Jared's Social Interactions, Volume 3, Part 2
My senior year was the best ever . . . I was one of the managers of the school store (the "head" manager during the 2nd semester) and that had me interacting with people all the time, both classmates working with me in the store, and the rest of the high school over the counter. Within a few weeks of school starting again (mighta been the very first week) we had Senior Retreat. We went to one of my favorite places in the world, the city of Panajachel on Lake Atitlan (a beautiful location surrounded by volcanoes and populated with local color). It was my birthday and one of the class sponsors had made a cake, and my mom had sent a cake, and I had a generally great time.
Digression (I don't have time for digressions, but I'm making one anyway): The first night we were there, almost everyone walked down to the lake (a good stretch of the legs from where we were). Various guys jumped in . . . shirts, socks and shoes came off, they ran out on the dock, and in they went. I was wearing jeans, but it looked like fun . . . While we were all swimming to shore, sputtering and blowing, we noticed it looked fairly empty, and we emerged from the icy water to find no girls, and no clothes. It . . . was . . . freezing. Fortunately, Miss Rensch (who was "chaperoning" our little walk) had been holding my jacket (which I was never without, and usually still am not), so I put that on and didn't die of hypothermia on the spot. It was a long walk barefoot on cobblestone though . . . We caught up about halfway and got our shoes back.
Side thought: That war between the sexes I mentioned in an earlier post . . . I'd say boys just generally have the upper hand in elementary. In middle school there is something like a balance of power. By the time you get to high school, it's fairly obvious who's going to win (on a very general level . . . I'm not talking specifics here).
Back on track . . . It was the strangest thing that year . . . Things I remembered as happening within, like, the first few days of school the year before (student council elections, High School Retreat) seemed to take months to arrive. My Bible class first semester was . . . interesting. We were given eight books to read and divided into two groups. Every two weeks or so, both groups had a 30-45 minute presentation to give on the book. I wound up doing 2 or 3 of them almost single-handedly and I believe there was only one where I hardly had anything to do . . . so lots of getting involved there.
Sidetrack again: The first presentation was on Pilgrim's Progress, and we were lost. I could do this one now, no problem, and it would rock . . . but the only thing that occured to anyone at the time was to film a movie version of a sort of modern-day Pilgrim's Progress. I wrote up a "script" (more of a plot summary) and we basically had a single afternoon where everyone could be there and film the movie. I knew from Dark Reign (heehee) that at the best of times, 20 minutes was about the most you could hope for out of an afternoon. The conditions were not optimal, thanks mostly to the three girls. They insisted on changing costumes after every single solitary scene. I think we got eight minutes on film, the day before the presentation was due.
No problem! says I. We show the movie we've got, hop up on stage in the chapel, and act out the rest, right? No time for rehearsals, everyone is just going to have to ad-lib. You guys know how to ad-lib, don't you? Well, you'll figure it out.
So that's what we did. I directed things from backstage, briefing the players on what had to be accomplished in the next scene in about 30 seconds, then shoving them out in front of the audience and listening in agony to the results. It wasn't long before I needed to go out as the Narrator, but I was busy in one of these briefing sessions, so I shove the script into the hands of one of the girls, and she went out. I finish talking to the others, and as I'm listening to her, I realize that she's just skipped roughly half of the story (I think she turned one page too many in my summary or something). So I run with that, instead. I grab the very shy girl who is supposed to now be pregnant (don't ask) . . . this will be her first scene because of everything we skipped . . . and the main character, tell them what to do, and out they go while I sit back to see what happens. And I'm waiting . . . and I'm waiting . . . and I'm still waiting . . . The girl has frozen completely. Finally, the main guy picks up the slack and converses with himself for the whole scene, gets the point across . . . somehow we stumble through to the conclusion, and it's all over at last. We got a B, which I don't understand, but didn't complain about. It was the only B we got.
Among the other fun presentations that semester, I "adapted" The Merchant of Venice, cutting out most of the subplots and adding in narration, to illustrate a point, and we performed that. The girls actually did good for once and had some fun costumes ready, and of course we all had to read off of our scripts as we performed (we pretended it was a dress rehearsal for the actual play).
For one presentation we got the teacher to put all the guys in one group and the girls in the other. Just because of the competitiveness there, both of the presentations were really good (ours was better). The guys had wanted to open up with something making fun of the girls (we knew they were going to do interpretive dance, because they always did) but I, knowing how much trouble that would get us into, talked them into something more subtle. We all wore pink armbands as an obscure reference to Mr. White's Government class from a few weeks before (he had illustrated freedom of expression by saying people could freely wear pink armbands if they wanted to protest womens' education, or something like that). *sigh* How was I supposed to know anyone else was paying attention. And yeah, I took the fall for that one . . . It was my idea, wasn't it? . . . It's not like I was just trying to keep them from doing something really stupid, right? *mutters angrily about bloody females* It didn't help that we got a standing ovation from the girls for our presentation (before they made the connection, of course).
Bah. Anyway, Servant Days was a lot of fun, again. We went to Rio Dulce, in the eastern part of the country, and stayed in a hotel that was actually on the river (I could see water through cracks in the floor). We worked at a nearby orphanage which we had to get to by boat. The first thing we did when we got there was haul about a hundred 100-pound sacks of chicken feed from the boat to the storage place near the coops. Chickens are nasty and they smell horrible, by the way. We then spent most of our time repainting the inside of one of the boys' dormitories. Exciting. There were cockroaches everywhere . . . the most enormous ones I've ever seen . . . and, of course, plenty of spiders and spiderwebs and cobwebs. I remember somebody finding a 3-pack of condoms when we were moving stuff out of the way of the walls . . . one of them was missing.
There are a million other things to remember from that semester, but I'm going to move on so I won't be here all day. We took our finals a week early and the time for Senior Trip rolled around. The trip involved a 10-hour drive to the Caribbean coast of Honduras, spending the night in a hotel there, and short plane flight to the "island paradise" of Roatan. It was gorgeous, and the resort we stayed at was even better (the name eludes me . . . it was run by Italians, I think . . . in any case there were a lot of Italians there). It didn't take us long to get ready and hit the beach, which led to an interesting . . . "complication" if you will. I go running out there with about half of the guys in my class, and we immediately noted something . . . I used the word "interesting" a second ago, I believe. *is treading lightly* How shall I put this for maximum effect?
The members of the male sex were not the only members of the human race on the beach who were without . . . tops. So where does one look? I know where most of them were looking . . . and I saw quite a few hanging jaws as I swung around (laughing . . . hard). When the "chaperones" heard about this not long after, I believe there was some fervent prayer from them on the subject. It must have worked. Most of that week we had skies that were partially overcast, which didn't cramp our style any, but it drove the sunbathers to other pursuits. Of course, it wasn't overcast the entire time. There were still . . . yeah. And sometimes they migrated to the pool. And sometimes they played in the pool while we were playing in the pool. However, unlike the less prudent, I merely report what took place and remain entirely neutral on the subject.
I had Trivial Pursuit cards and spent hours (and every meal) asking and answering questions with Mr. Fry, Mr. White, and Ms. Rensch. I also had a chess board, which came out one morning when it was raining particularly hard. I played one game with Mr. Fry, and this guy kind of wanders over and stands there watching us. I believe I lost (Mr. Fry had an obnoxious habit of losing miserably and then beating me with a surprise move . . . pretending to just suddenly have noticed his salvation . . . when he only had a few piecese left). However, Mr. Fry then hopped up and had the guy who was watching sit down to play me. I was immediately aware of what was about to happen. The man was probably 50 years old, bald on top, and had on thick glasses. He was thin, almost emaciated, and his shoulders and general posture were rounded as if he spent a lot of his time hunched over a chess board. As I set up the pieces, he lit himself a cigarette with a smooth, quick motion and leaned in to consider the board, the cig dangling lazily out of one corner of his mouth. He was, to my mind, the stereotype of a European Grand Master of Chess. I was beaten before I made my first move, and I knew it, but I held on and tried to give him a run for his money. More importantly, I made Mr. Fry play him when I was done and went snorkeling.
*sigh* I think I'm filling up this post with anecdotes in a futile attempt to hold off the inevitable. I have half a dozen more waiting right now, and if I thought five minutes, I'd have as many more again, and so on. It was a wonderful week at the end of a wonderful year with wonderful friends. I had willingly allowed myself to be emotionally involved with my class and I will always remember that year. But it hurt like hell when it was over and everyone had to go their separate ways. It still does. (I hadn't realized how much until I wrote that.)
I did decide one thing out of all that, though. I decided that it's worth it. So I haven't tried shutting out friends or the need for friends at LeTourneau. Be that as it may, it just got really hard to type. And I have nothing more to say, you're mostly up-to-date. I'm going to go . . . do something else now.