You know what’s always weird about school this time of year?       Signing yearbooks.

There’s several types of yearbook signers:

• Those who take up a whole page with giant, bubbly handwriting. These people probably don’t really care what they’re writing to you; they just want to make themselves feel important.
• Those who take up a whole page with an actual, heart-felt letter.  These people are probably some of your best friends. The letter is either sentimental and will make you cry and sad to graduate or it’s hilarious and will make you laugh until you cry and possibly pee your pants.
• Then there’s the complete opposite: The people who write “HAGS” and their name, if not their initials. Or they only sign their name/initials. (Warning: if I sign your yearbook like this, I probably sort of hate you.)
• There are those people who have one signature message that they write in everyone’s yearboook. This message probably goes something like this: “Hey! This year was so much fun with you! I hope you have an awesome Summer! We should totally hang out! Stay cool!”  Blah blah blah.
• Those people who, similarly, write the same thing in everyone’s yearbook but it’s only an uncomfortable little rhyme that they think is clever.  Example: “Some sign in front, some sign in back, but look at me, I signed your crack!”  (…..Yeah.  I’ve had that one before…..)
• There are those who write something just to write something. “Hey. Hi, hello, howdy, hola….  H is a fun letter.” (This is an actual entry in my own yearbook.)
• Those who read all the other entries in some one’s yearbook and secretly try to top them all with the ultimate yearbook message.
• And then there are those acquaintences who mention only a couple inside jokes: “Remember when you hit your head on a broom stick and got that bruise on your head for Homecoming? Sooo funny! See you next year!”  (Also an actual entry in my yearbook.) (I never did that.)

I’m pretty sure I’ve experienced all the above sorts of yearbook signers by now.  But, you know what?  I have one more year left and I hope that next year I’ll be able to read some messages in the back of my book and not think “I wonder if they actually meant it.”

There’s also a couple different MOs when it comes to people letting you sign their yearbook:

• Those who reserve three pages – each page for a different “bestie” to take up the entire space of.
• Those who won’t let anyone at all sign it until their BEST FRIEND signs it first.
• Those who secretly compete with everyone else to get the most signatures in their yearbook, regardless of whether they are actually friends or not and secretly check out everyone else’s yearbooks.
• Those people who are too cool for you to sign their yearbooks and lend it out to their exclusive groupies and whenever you ask if you could sign their yearbook always say that one of their cronies has it.
• Those people who tell you that they didn’t get one because they don’t want you to want to sign it.
• Those who really don’t take it that seriously but might appreciate the nostalgia and lets anyone who really wants to sign their yearbook. I am this person.

This is a response I wrote for my tenth grade English class. I thought I’d go ahead and share it with you. Please note, I don’t mean this to put a dampener on your day.

       Death is a varying factor in people’s lives – some people have never had some one they know die, some have been acquainted with funerals their whole life. And, in turn, grief varies in every person. Some people become numb and ignore the grief and some feel like life will never go on the same again. There are people who, when presented with a death, their personality changes into something angry and confused. Some people go to friends and cry on a shoulder while others cry and deal with the grief and pain privately. Every one grieves differently due to how well they knew the person, the friends they have, their past experiences with death, what’s expected of them, what else is going on in their lives – it’s impossible to list all of the reasons.

           All of my life, death has been a normality. I was born with all of my grandparents and great grand parents alive so, naturally, I’ve been through a lot of deaths and funerals. Especially now that I’m in high school, there have been a lot of deaths of kids in my school. My way of dealing with death probably isn’t considered healthy. I hate feeling vulnerable and weak, so I normally react very stoically to death. Also, in the deaths I’ve been through, I’ve only known two or three well. The others have been family that I was too young to know well when they died or I simply wasn’t very close to them.

            My granddaddy was killed in a car accident a few years ago. That’s had a huge impact on life for me. But not because I was close to him or we were really involved together or anything – I don’t think I even cried. But my mother has been more emotional since then – which is understandable. My sister started writing about darker things. My dad and sister were sympathetic and sad but, naturally, it wasn’t as hard on any of us as it was for my mother.

           It was the worst for my grandmother, though. She was sad for what seemed like forever. She never really stopped being sad until she remarried. Well, she still gets sad, but it’s not constant anymore. I don’t think she really loves her new husband, but I think he distracts her enough to keep her from always being sad, always coming home to an empty house.

            Unfortunately, death is inevitable. Deal with it as you may. I don’t think there’s necessarily a right or wrong way to deal with grief, I think how a person deals with it is their own business and what works for them works for them. I’m only fifteen and I have already had an uncommon amount of death occur in my life and I know there’s even more left to come.

(Repost: from Brandy)

If he always gives you the last bite of his sandwich or the first lick of his ice cream cone, then he loves you.

If he’s seen your high school yearbook photo and says he still loves you, then he loves you.

If he’s counted all your freckles,- even the ones behind your knees, then he loves you.

If, right before sleep, he leans in, buries his nose in your hair and inhales, and when you ask what he’s doing, he smiles a smile that reminds you of a secret and says ‘nothing’, then he loves you.

If he tells you that you make chickenpox sexy, then he loves you. He’s lying, but he loves you.

If he’s laid beside you in a too small bed, in a too dark room and listened as you told him all the ways you feel like you are failing, then he loves you.

If he remembers the name of your arch enemy from the sixth grade and hates her because he knows all about how she started the rumor that you only used boys deodorant, when you didn’t- then he loves you. And he hates her. But he loves you.

If he’s ever attempted to wash your hair because you said that scene in “Out of Africa” really gets you, then he loves you.

If he makes sure that you never have to sit beside his friend Dominic, the one who never washes his hair and smells like the bottom of a dumpster, then he loves you.

If you are Salma Hayek, then he loves you.

If he’s consumed your mom’s burnt chicken, let your brother win the basketball game and laughed too long and too hard at your dad’s jokes, then he loves you.

If he told you how hard he cried when his dog childhood dog died, then he loves you. Or, he’s made up the story to get into your pants. But he could love you.

If he tells you, “I don’t know how to fix this, but I want to”, then he loves you.

If he sits through “The Hills” every Monday night, then he loves you. And possibly Heidi. But he loves you.

If during hour five of an eight hour roadtrip, he sees you are bored and flips the radio station to a horrifying boy band song and begins to serenade you with his best falsetto, while keeping the beat with his hand tapping your knee, and refuses to quit until you laugh, then he loves you.

If he’s ever bought you tampons, then he loves you.

If, while vertical, sober, and full clothed, and without hope or agenda, he tells you that he loves you, then he loves you.

If he knows exactly what scene in “The Bridges of Madison County” make you cry the hardest, and he waits until the movie is over before he begins to make fun of you for crying in the first place, then he loves you.

If his favourite stories are the ones of you as a kid, if he calls you ‘my girl’ in front of his friends, if he remembers that you like the kleenex with the lotion in it, if he lets you eat his french fries when you know they are his favourite, if he makes small talk with your grandmother when you can’t deal with her crazy, if he tells you that your cute victory dance is worth his own defeat, if he checks the road conditions before you leave for a trip, if he’s ever attempted to sew a button on your favourite dress when you are running late, then he loves you.

If he’s ever fallen asleep holding your hand, then he loves you. Of course he loves you.

Wishing a love like this for you this holiday season and all the days after.

       Last night was my high school’s first choir concert of the year!  It was also my frst performance with show choir. As nervous as I was, I rocked the concert! Oh, it was so much fun!  I performed two songs with my show choir, one with a select ensemble, one with the women’s ensemble, and four with the whole of Chorale.

       The ending piece was a medly of songs from the Lion King. One of my few complaints with that one is that no body had any energy. That morning, we were told to be moving around a little and smiling.  I mean it’s Lion King for goodness sake! Anyway, I told my dad about that at the afterglow.

          “Well, I saw several people moving; most of them were in the back row.”
          “Yeah! Because we’re tall! There’s more of us!      Maximum capacity for awesome!”

       I had a bigger group of people that came and saw me than ever before to any of my performances ever.

       And today, I actually kind of understood my chemistry class. And I got a lot done in AP English. I’m writing an essay on The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.  If you haven’t read it yet, I highly reccomend it. Anyway, while we were in the computer lab, I recieved a carnation-gram for sweetest day!! ME.  I’ve never recieved a flower from anyone in my school!                     ……Okay, so it was from one of my good friends, but nevertheless, it made my day!  Besides, she’s kind of one of those people where I’m surprised that she chose to pay to have a flower sent to me of all people, me of all her other friends. (Yes, I know that sentence could have been executed much better, but I couldn’t figure out a better way to phrase it. I’m saving all my powers of perfect sentence structure for my essay)

Thing to smile about #16:  FINALLY getting the time, chance, and reason to write a real post again!

     I’m home after the first day of school! I’m back to public school full time. Again. It started off really well because, even though I had to wake up at 5:30, I had a stupid good hair day! Just to clarify, that means my hair looked so good, it was stupid. And I was on the radio while I was doing my make up! I called in and the topic was “what are you looking forward to about school, and what are you dreading about it?”

     My answer?  I’m looking forward to utilizing my new wardrobe! But I was dreading the fact that you don’t find out which lunch you have until third hour. I’m always so worried that I’ll go to my third hour class and it’ll be empty and locked. Okay, that’d mean that I have A lunch. So after that, I would go upstairs to lunch. By then, the lines would be horribly long and it’d take forever for me to get food. Then I’d stand on my toes in the cafeteria, looking very much like the first day of school, trying to find some one I know. By the time I do (if I do), I’ll have ten or fifteen minutes left. It’d all be downhill from there. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, but I’ll get to that later.

     My mom drove me to school this morning (not for moral support, but to save me the embarrassment of holding a giant poster for AP English for a while at the bus stop and having to carry and protect it around with me through bus conditions, of which I had no idea what to expect). We listened to Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz in the car on the way there.

     My first hour is Chorale, which was nice because I’ve been in it for two years now already and it was comfortable to start off with that. Hopefully this year will go by much more smoothly than last year. Before the first concert, (our first actual performance was a funeral because) a boy named Tim, a bass in choir, died. Our Winter concert was moved to a nearby middle school because of a bomb threat at the high school – we learned that they were shutting down the whole building AFTER we had set up the entire bake sale. The next concert was enjoyably interrupted by the fire alarm going haywire in the middle of one of our songs. The last concert was the only one that went as expected. 

     My choir director is big on making sure we understand rules. This year, my school is actually enforcing the cell phone and dress code policies (now they’re not just taking our phones for the day, they’re keeping them until the next Monday). She went through our handbooks and skimmed over and lectured about different things.

     One rule that she pointed out is “pornography or other inappropriate display may not be used to decorate the lockers.” After the initial giggling of the class, a sweet girl named Molly shouted out, “What!?”   Now, Molly is a really sweet girl. She’s adorable and naive and loves Disney, musicals, taking pictures, and the Jonas Brothers.   It. Was. Hilarious. When she reacted like that. Of course, she meant it as, “What? People actually do that?” But it sounded as if she was miffed because they don’t allow lockers to be decorated with porn, and everyone knew how she meant it and how it sounded. Believe me, it was a lot funnier if you were there and especially if you know Molly.

     Some time during passing time here, I remembered that, when my mother and I bought the pair of jeans I wore today, we got a size that didn’t quite fit and our plan was to take in the waistband. We had forgotten all about that and I walked around in elephant pants all day.

     Second hour was Intro to Statistics. I like my teacher. He’s energetic, young, comfortable to be with, and friendly. He’s totally OCD about the cleanliness of his classroom. He seems like he really, genuinely loves his job. When he brought up giving us an assignment, the cliche groans of the students sounded.

     “Oh, I love the moans! When my students moan, I just get fired up.”  That was awkward. “It usually makes me assign more.”  The initial reaction of the class was, of course, that of a typical high schooler: Not quite reacting at first, then smiling or laughing to themselves, then catching the eye of a friend to share the amusement with. That’s why they’re “groans.“

     Anyway, my third hour, Honors Chemistry came. I just went straight to my class room, hoping I didn’t find out the hard way that I had A lunch. I don’t, I actually have D. My teacher made us sit in backwards alphabetical order, with the “A” last names in the back row. He went off on a tangent about how “so many teachers make their students sit in alphabetical order and he doesn’t want to be usual.”   Great point, right? Because making your students sit in backwards alphabetical order is so out-of-the-box and totally goes against the main stream culture of teachers.

     I ended up in the second to last row. My teacher proceeded to go on and on about how people who sit in the back always get poor grades. About how, when he was stuck in the back in high school, his grades suffered, how the two students who failed the ACT test were ones that sat in the back, how, if we sit in the back, our grades “immediately go down at least a third of a grade,” yadda yadda yadda. “If you sit in the back, you suck and you’ll fail and it infallibly reflects your responsibility and character.”   Ugh.

     He’s also paranoid! I need a graphing calculator for Intro to Stats, but I can’t use it for chem. So I have to have two calculators with me, why? Because my chem teacher’s philosophy is that, because we are able to store answers on graphing calculators, it means we absolutely will save them (I don’t even know how!) and pass them out to our friends. Heck, maybe we’ll even sell them with the drugs and parking passes, hand grenades and spiked gatorade we all bring to school for our financial gain.

     The tests for that class are, from what I gathered (I don’t know for sure because I wasn’t paying attention because I was sitting in the back, being irresponsible while my IQ steadily declined every minute I sat there), usually are multiple choice, true/false, and matching things – all three have frequently saved my caboose in class. If you miss a test, you have to make it up, of course. But if you do have to do a make-up test, it’s all short answer. Yep, I’m having perfect attendance until, at least, second semester.

    Oh, there’s more. He’s not particularly aesthetically pleasing, and is kind of… just… weird. He, too, made sure we knew about the new rules in school (as did my teacher for Intro to Stats, but he didn’t make it weird, so I didn’t mention it). However, after glossing over the main things, he picked up a student handbook and read a dress code rule out loud. He savored every bit of it:

     “The showing of cleeeavage is inappropriate, and the wearing of provocative (enunciated sharply) clothing that exposes or highlights BREASTStststs and/or buuttawhcks (buttocks) is unacceptable.“

     AwkWAAARD. As if that wasn’t weird enough, he continued to go on saying that he’s a chemistry teacher, so he’s so used to saying words like “penis” and such. He told us that, while the school board covered this rule as they briefed the teachers and staff, he had raised his hand and asked if he can say “boobs,” too.   I….   Ugh. Class seemed to drag on forever because of my aching, gurgling stomach and the second hand looked like it was rotating around the face of the clock more slowly than usual.

    Lunch was uneventful, expensive, and annoyingly crowded. I found a choir friend (who I’ve known since freshman year and who I acted in Macbeth with this summer) to sit with, which was awesome.

     Finally, my last class came. AP English 11. So far, my favorite class this year. My teacher is great. She’s fifty-six, energetic, and kinda crazy. Her hair is short and modern and greying. By looking at her, you can tell that she’s the creative, artsy/writer type. When she told us about herself, she explained how she paints rocks. Odd at first, but she continued to say that, when she travels, she looks for rocks that some how resemble a heart. She paints them bright, happy colors with nail polish – several layers. That’s a lot of nail polish. She told us that at the end of the course, she brings in all the rocks and lets you pick out one for yourself!

     One of our assignments is to bring in ten pictures that “mean something to us” or describe us in some way. Clip art, cut out from “mazagines” (yes, she really says it like that), our own photography, anything. Extra credit if you bring in twenty. Once we have everyone’s pictures we’re decorating the bulletin boards in our room in a collage of “ourselves.” I am a photographer, so this is possibly my favorite school assignment ever! I asked if all of my pictures can be of my photography and she said yes. I’m so excited! I get to pick twenty of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken and show them off! Every one will see them! Whether they like them or not, whether they stand out to them or not, they are pictures I took and created that they’ve never seen before. Ever! I get to show them a new image and viewpoint they’ve NEVER seen in their entire lives! Gah. I love this.  :D

     So that was my first day. All in all, very good.

Thing to smile about #4: Being way more confident about yourself than you have been in a long time. 

     At almost this same time last year, on a Monday, I was sitting on the porch of my boyfriend-at-the-time. I was sitting on the cold, cement steps, in an oversized hoodie. His arm was round me and my hair was simply and carelessly pulled back. I had on little make up because most of it had been cried away earlier that morning. It was raining and dreary – appropriate weather for the most recent, tragic happenings.

     The Friday before was a regular school day. I had survived my first hour class, Honors English, and had routinely sang through second-hour Chorale. Lunch was as boring and uninteresting as it usually was. I had, again, not brought anything to eat and had, again, half-intentionally, not brought money to buy food. My table consisted of a few girls and fewer guys, all of whom I currently or previously shared choir with, except for one girl, who I met during the musical of the last school year. Three guys and four girls at my table, usually.

     Two of the girls were inseparable – they still are. They were both energetic and loved everything Disney and musicals. The girl I had met in the last school musical had red hair and played the piano. One guy had moved to America from Mexico before his sophomore year. I had met him the year before. Another was a boy I had gone to homecoming of freshman year “with.” Both were in Chorale. One boy was a freshman (who had come into the high school from the same middle school as I had attended), a bass in my choir, and the quietest one at the table. None of us really went out of our way to talk to him, but it wasn’t as if we ignored him or shunned him in any way. For the preceding couple weeks, he had offered to share a part of his lunch or had offered me a dollar or two. That Friday was no exception. He offered me some of his meal, consisting of a bag of chips, a carton of milk, and a burrito. Not particularly being a fan of any of those, I declined gratefully.

     The rest of that day was normal and uneventful. Or, rather, I assume it was uneventful because I don’t particularly remember anything else happening that day, or even the next. On Sunday, the speaker at my church (which was half an hour away from my home) had commented on the death of two local boys that had died in  a car crash. He named them and, at the time, it didn’t cause any bells to ring or any lit light bulbs to appear above my head. When I got home, I checked my Myspace (as I did religiously). When I looked in the bulletin space, I saw bulletin after bulletin entitled “Tim, we will miss you” and “Tim and Josh” and, finally, “RIP Tim and Josh.”

    Still, no connections were made in my mind.  I Googled the names of the boys and found some blurbs and articles. Nothing stuck out to me. That was until I found a picture of them. One face struck me: the pale skin, short hair, relatively large lips many shades darker and redder than the rest of his skin, the familiar posture.  I couldn’t understand, Tim had just offered me his burrito two days ago and would, surely, be back to offer me more high school cafeteria food the next day. Was it really him and his older brother that had been the subject of all those Myspace bulletins?

     That Monday confirmed my questions. First hour was fine. But, as I entered the choir room, I saw girls hunched over each other with tissues, eyes and noses matching shades of pink, foreheads wrinkled, their shoulders quickly rising and falling. Other girls were comforting them and guys where in their seats, their heads lowered, solemnly quiet. Once class started, I noticed a couple people hadn’t shown up. That class period was when it hit me: Tim was dead.

     Class that day was everyone sitting around my choir director on the floor, talking about Tim, listening to a school counselor, and crying. Lunch was odd. I don’t think any one ate. The girls were crying and the guys were silent. When I got home, I just wanted to go talk to my boyfriend.To just be with him, at least. I was surprised when my mother agreed to drive me a half hour away for that.

     We were sitting on his porch in the rain. I eventually just started feeling bad in general and ended up listing everything I thought was wrong with me or was an example of my dorkiness, excluding physical things. He sat there, responding by taking what I listed and shining a positive light on it. In really cute ways, he explained how my having blonde moments was endearing, or how being a bookworm added to my intellect, which is enticing. The conversation trickled to other topics.

     I loved the cool air and the sound the rain made when it hit the metal roof of the porch and then slid off onto the concrete, into itself. My mother had told him to make sure I stayed dry before she left. Defiantly, I would walk out into the rain. He stayed on the dry porch, watching me. When I stood and looked at him, and he saw I wasn’t coming back on my own, he followed me, wrapped me in his arms and escorted me back under the roof.

     The last two paragraphs were actually all I intended this entry to be. I never meant to write this much. But I felt like I should explain the rest. Hopefully, people will have enjoyed it just as much.

Something to smile about #1: Sitting on porch steps while it’s raining with some
one who doesn’t care what the weather’s like just as long as you’re with them.

Rest in peace, Tim, Josh. You have been, by no means, forgotten. Never will be. See you later.

=]