disalarming

I’ve been on Facebook a lot since being in Hong Kong, seeing as access to the website isn’t blocked in HK. One thing I’ve noticed while surfing Facebook is that amongst my high school acquaintances from my class in Australia there is an alarmingly, and increasingly, large amount of us have been/are getting married and/or babied.

For example, off the top of my head:

• One girl with a 4-year-old son
• Three girls with two children under the age of 4
• One boy with a one-year-old son
• Two girls that are married

I’m the same age as my friends that are married or with children, and I can’t even begin to fathom marriage or parenthood. I still remember the good ol’ days in high school where my friends and I would gossip about so-and-so and the biggest thing we had to worry about is whether or not we failed the math test or if we would get a date to the next school dance. To think that now some of us have much bigger things to worry about makes me feel so old!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I never really experienced rites of passage that people typically do throughout childhood and adolescence. I had an unusual upbringing in the sense that I was consistently uprooted due to a number of overseas moves, which led to my general lack of knowledge/interest about these “traditional” rites of passage.

Here are a handful high school rites of passages I never experienced:

• Graduating from primary/middle school in order to enter high school
  I left my first middle school in the US at the end of sixth grade, which meant I missed out on the eighth grade graduation. At my new school in Australia, students graduated from primary school in year six and not year seven. I transferred to my Australian school at the beginning of year seven, so I had just missed out on graduation. The first time I ever graduated from anything was when I completed high school!
• Sweet sixteen birthday party
  My sixteenth birthday was a quiet and lonely affair. I had just moved to Chicago from Australia, and I didn’t know anyone in Chicago besides my immediate family. My sixteenth birthday “party” was comprised of myself, my mother, my brother, and a chocolate cake. It was nice, but definitely not the sweet sixteen bash many kids expect on their sixteenth birthdays.
• Driver’s license at sixteen
  I didn’t get my driver’s license at sixteen. Honestly, I was never bothered by this, I managed just fine without one. Besides, I think sixteen is too young to drive; the thought of the sixteen year olds I know on the roads scares me.
• Getting my first car
  This ties in with the whole driver’s license thing, for obvious reasons. However, I also have zero interest in getting a car of my own. The area I live in has good public transportation, and where I go to for college has excellent public transport. Ideally I’d like to live in a city like London, Paris, or Hong Kong after I graduate from college, all of which have phenomenal public transport and there is no need for a car. I don’t want to deal with car payments, insurance, maintenance, gas… it’s all money I’d rather not spend on something I don’t see as needing.
• Getting my first job
  Unlike most teenagers, I didn’t get my first job in high school. I was on a student visa in Australia so I legally was not allowed to work, and then my final two years of high school took so much time and energy out of me that I didn’t even want to think about a job. (I don’t count babysitting gigs as an “official” job.) I did get a job at college though, it just took me a little longer than most of my classmates to get the ball rolling on the job front.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

As I am home for my spring break, I decided that I should stop by my high school for a day and visit. Despite my love/hate relationship with my high school, I knew that I would return to my alma mater whenever I was in town again, because it definitely had a huge impact on the person I turned out to be. Even if I have mixed feelings about the school itself, some of the best teachers I’ve ever had are still there, as well as some of my friends who were a year or two younger than me, and of course I want to see them as often as I can when I am back in town.

It’s funny how my perspective of high school has changed since graduating. Now that I am 3/4 of the way through my first year in college, I am much more appreciative of some of the classes and activities I experienced in high school, because as corny as it sounds, it did prepare me for college. At the same time though, I wish my high school hadn’t been quite so rigorous, and that we didn’t have a million and one graduation requirements in addition to the standard ones¹. It would have been nice to have some space to breathe between classes and to catch a break when going home for the day, rather than being at school from 8am – 3pm, play practice/sports practice from 3pm – 5/6pm, and then going home and doing homework from 6pm till the wee hours of the early morning, before going to sleep and repeating the cycle all over again. We all got the good grades, the college acceptance letters, and a stellar academic record, but not all of us managed to experience our adolescent years to the fullest.

I like going back and visiting my high school because it’s like getting back in touch with my roots again. Even though I transferred into my high school at the beginning of my junior year, it’s a place I will always feel like I have a connection to, especially when the teachers that taught me are still teaching there. I love going back and talking to all of my teachers, giving them updates on my life in college as well as my life in general post-high school. Most of my teachers have made the transition from teacher to friend, and the friendship I have with them has been invaluable. Teachers are fantastic people, and I am very appreciative of the fact that I know they are there for me both as friend and mentor even though it is no longer their duty to mentor me as I’m not one of their students anymore.

In a few years time, I expect that I will visit my high school less and less, and perhaps stop visiting there once and for all once all of my friends have graduated, and new teachers slowly replace all the ones that taught me. But it’s not necessarily the school building itself I like going back to, that make me want to return and visit again and again. It doesn’t matter whether I see them in my high school building or not, what matters is that I am able to see them and we are able to catch up about all the things that have happened since we last saw each other. It’s why that even when I am on break from school, I find myself retracing my high school steps and keeping in touch with people that I once saw every day in my high school career.

1. Aside from the usual four years of English, three years of math, etc. that most high schools require for graduation, school plays and sports teams were graduation requirements at my high school as well as community service. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.