What is with people and beverage containers?
Seriously. It’s a thing.
We laugh and roll our eyes, but if you’re from my generation, you can’t deny that a big portion of your coolness factor in high school was the color combo of your Nalgene bottle and cap and how utterly covered in stickers that thing was.
(I had no stickers on mine. I was not cool.)
Also, you know that if social media had been a thing back then, it would be exactly as bad as it is with the Stanleys.
Hey!
Do you want to watch Ocean’s Eleven, but don’t have 127 minutes and/or don’t want to watch a bunch of attractive actors?
Have an 11-minute, Lego stop-motion version instead! Brought to you by me, when I was a senior in high school with way too much time on my hands.
I hate myself.
Wacky Peter
Yo! So let’s continue the home movie marathon, shall we?
So around the time of my last year of high school, I came up with this Lego character I called “Wacky Peter.” He had all these misadventures and was always dying. Mr. Bill-type stuff.
During 12th grade and the summer between graduating and going to college, I made a whole bunch of stop-motion Wacky Peter videos. Just like when I was a kid, I LOVED recording stuff and making my own movies and the like, so this was sort of the end of that era of my life before I went to college.
(I did this instead of having friends, which is a pretty common pattern for me, haha.)
(I also had my Cape Cod Radio Mystery episodes playing in the background as I worked/filmed, so that’s what all the noise/talking is.)
So here are all the episodes condensed into one video. There are timestamps for each episode in the comments in case anyone actually cares.
Welcome to Hell!
In other words, welcome to several weeks of home videos and other nonsense that no one else cares about!
First up: Hamlet performed by Legos. I made this sometime in 12th grade and my 12th grade English teacher let me show it to the class near the end of the year. They freaking loved it and a bunch of people mentioned it when they signed my yearbook, haha.
It’s actually crap, but so is the taste of 12th graders, apparently.
Anyway.
Nostalgia Music
So Nate and I were discussing music that was super nostalgic to us the other day. Surprisingly, I didn’t really get too much into music until the end of high school (probably because CDs were way too expensive for me to ever buy and I didn’t have the incredibly enabling device that is the iPod just yet). But a lot of the albums I did buy are ones that hold a high level of nostalgia. Any time I hear a song on any of these albums, it brings me right back to the time in my life when I’d play said album on repeat on my little portable CD player.
Let’s recall a few, shall we?
Good Charlotte – The Young And The Hopeless
I bought this album at Hastings because I LOVED “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” and then realized I liked all the other songs on it as well. I played this a lot in my junior and senior years in high school, and probably a little bit before that as well. “Girls & Boys” is underrated for how good it is.
Black Eyed Peas – Monkey Business
Senior year of high school. I would start this CD EVERY TIME I drove to school in the morning. I lived close enough to the high school that it only ever got through “Don’t Phunk With My Heart,” haha, but that and “Pump It” immediately make me think of those early morning drives to school.
Ashlee Simpson – Autobiography
Another one I bought because I loved one of the songs after hearing it on the radio (“Pieces of Me”). This was mostly my first and second years of college, I think. “Better Off” is such a sweet song.
Weezer – Make Believe
The summer in between high school and college. I listened to this album SO MUCH, yo. I bought it for “Beverly Hills,” but “Perfect Situation” might be my favorite.
Green Day – American Idiot
Another one I listened to incessantly during that summer between high school and college. I also remember listening to “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” back when I was in my bike-riding phase, but that was a few years earlier, I think.
Connor
This morning, I found out that someone from my high school passed away due to an accident.
I think this is the first person we’ve lost from our graduating class.
He had other medical issues that likely contributed to the accident, but it’s still wild to think about someone from my class is gone. We weren’t friends friends, but I certainly knew him from band.
RIP, Connor. You were a good dude.
High School Band Throwback
This song came up on shuffle earlier today, so we gotta blog about it:
I don’t have any other songs composed by Michael Kamen, but this one is fantastic. I remember we played this in high school and I really enjoyed playing it. I can’t remember if this was one of the songs we played for critique at Disneyland or if that was the Pirates of the Caribbean song. Or something else.
I WASN’T BLOGGING YET, SO THERE ARE NO CLEAR MEMORIES OF ANYTHING
LOVE the chords at 1:21, OOF.
I found the piece I took to State Drama
So when I was in 12th grade, one of the elective classes I took was drama. I don’t remember much from it other than us performing Ayn Rand’s “Night of January 16th” (I was Magda), us dicking around a LOT during class, and the tryouts and subsequent state drama competition.
I had two pieces I performed for the state drama competition. One was with my friend Bethany; we did a scene out of Hamlet. The other was a solo piece that my drama teacher thought would fit me very well. It was called Twirler, and after just a little digging on the Tubes, I found it here.
I remember practicing this. I remember buying a baton and making my costume. I remember practicing a southern accent.
(I don’t remember saying the “n” word, though; surely I would not have been comfortable with that. We must have subbed it out with something else.)
I remember the tryouts, too. The regional ones were held one weekend in our high school building and I had to give my “Twirler” performance in one of the math rooms, which just shot my anxiety straight through the roof.
But both of my pieces got called to go on to the state competition held somewhere in the south – either Twin Falls or Idaho Falls, I can’t remember. We couldn’t do the one with Bethany because she had some sort of other prior commitment, but I went and performed “Twirler.” They said I would have gotten into the final round had I not gone over time.
Which, you know, is how things always go with me.
But yeah. I just had a sudden flashback to that piece and wanted to see if I could find it.
END!
High School Color Fun
Let’s time travel back to high school for a moment, shall we? I had this book (well, I guess, I technically still have it, haha) called “The Dewey Color System” by Dewey Sadka. It’s a personality test book that tells you about yourself based on the combination of your favorite primary color and favorite secondary color (with more info based on how you feel about other colors like black, white, gold, teal, etc.).
I was obsessed with this book and made everyone I know take the test (which is just, again, picking your favorite primary color and your favorite secondary color).
Here is said book:
As you can see by how beat up it is, I used it a lot. I actually did a “stats” project in my 11th grade psych class where I looked at the frequencies of people’s personality types with the Dewey Color System and compared them to the frequencies of their Myers-Briggs personality types. Of course, I knew ZERO about stats at the time so I was just comparing the frequencies without any sort of test of statistical significance, but I did go back to the data a few years ago and tried to chi-square the hell out of it for funzies.
[Edit: I can’t find that blog for whatever reason, but it’s out there.]
Anyway. I think the test and results used to be online for free, but now it looks like you have to pay. SAD! That was the whole point of this blog, haha.
Edit again: alrighty, found the blog in question. Looks like I didn’t do anything that looked at Dewey vs. Myers-Briggs…just Myers-Briggs-related stuff. I wonder if I can find my data anywhere?
Edit again again: No data on both tests, but I did (of course) write down some of the results of the Dewey test in the front cover of the book. All those letter combinations at the top are the combos of favorite primary (Blue, Red, Yellow) and secondary (Green, Orange, Purple). The letters at the bottom are representing the six “intermediate” colors for which people were supposed to choose two as their favorites and two as their least favorites (Gold, Indigo, Lime, Magenta, Red-orange, Teal).
Also, my grades in high school were abysmal.
Algebra: my worst enemy in high school. Also, how the hell does one get a C in Wellness?
I miss my friendies.
I am extra lonely tonight for some really weird reason. So I’ve been thinking of friends of the past (since I don’t really have any friends right now).
I’ve had three main groups of friends in my life (I don’t count elementary school, ‘cause all those “friends” I had in first and second grade were quick to abandon me once I was deemed “uncool”): my high school group, the band geek group in college, and the guys at the house in college.
Things that remind me of my high school friends:
- Being hooligans in the hallway during lunchtime.
- That one lady (I don’t know if she was a teacher’s aide or what) who thought our shenanigans were hilarious.
- That one guy who thought our shenanigans were blasphemous.
- Harassing Alan.
- Harassing Aneel.
- Those stupid cardboard stilts that almost killed me in the bathroom.
- Going to the Co-Op, buying a loaf of bread, and then just sharing that amongst us for our lunch.
- Zach and those “Emergen-C” pouches. He would just chug those.
- That time I accidentally* threw the loaf of bread at Aneel and almost got detention.
- Stalking Lead around. All the time.
- That stupid “porn” reading of “To Kill a Mockingbird” that I did that had everyone cackling.
- Prom dress shopping at Ross!
- Being hooligans in that field across from the university.
- MSN conversations!
Things that remind me of my band geek group:
- Band (duh).
- Playing at the football games while paying zero attention to the game itself.
- “Please touch my butt…please touch my butt!”
- Being hooligans at Shari’s.
- Being hooligans at Denny’s.
- Drag shows!
- Rock Band basement parties at my dad’s.
- That basement party that was basically an orgy, let’s not lie.
- That time we all drove out to Idler’s Rest and spent half the night crying/venting about how our lives were not what we wanted at the time.
- R O B D R A M A
- The nerd-fest that was the band table in the Commons. Oh my god, that table was fun.
Things that remind me of the guys in the house:
- NOODLE FRIDAYS.
- Incessant Rock Band playing.
- Quoting pretty much every viral YouTube video from 2008.
- All the weird relationships in that house.
- Getting impulse piercings in Missoula.
- Late night conversations with Sean (he got off work after midnight and I was always the only one still up).
- Reliving our childhoods via movies on Netflix (and making fun of said movies).
- Being hooligans in Shari’s.
- Otter Pops!
I miss having friends.
*It really was an accident. I was swinging the bread bag around like a nun chuck and the bread launched through the bottom seam and nailed him in the face. Right in front of our security guard.
Thoughts on Lead
It is November 20th today.
As you may or may not know (depending on how long you’ve followed my blog and/or how much attention you pay to past blogs), November 20th is the birthday of the person known as Lead.
Lead, for those of you who don’t know, is the nickname I use for the person that I had a massive, massive, massive crush on all throughout the end of elementary school, junior high, and high school (and it would have started earlier, I’m sure, except he didn’t come to Moscow until 5th grade).
I have long since ceased giving a single fart about this guy, but just the date “November 20th” brings him back into my memory because he was a serious part of my existence for about seven years of my teenage life.
Today, that also brings up something that I’ve come to realize about my mad obsession with this dude that I’ve never really shared. This is a realization I made a long while ago—like, 8th grade, maybe—but was one I kind of kept inside hoping that it wasn’t true, because that truth was more pathetic than frantically stalking a dude for the sake of true love.
(At least, that’s what my 14-year-old brain convinced me of).
This realization? I wasn’t obsessed with Lead because I was in love with him or was soul mates with him or any of that lovey nonsense. I was obsessed with him because I wanted to be him. He was everything I wish I was, especially in junior high and high school when I was so painfully apathetic about, well, pretty much everything but Lead.
The guy was popular. The guy was good-looking. The guy was athletic. And most of all? The guy was smart.
Like… S M A R T.
I don’t know if he actually had a genius-level IQ, but I’m 99% convinced of it. Super smart. He put everyone else at that garbage bag of a school to shame with what he could do with his mental prowess and how easily he seemed to do it. He got a full ride scholarship to some school in Montana after he graduated, but I’m sure if he didn’t take that he could have easily gone to MIT or Harvard or Oxford or something like that. And he would have blown those fuckers away at those schools.
That’s what I wanted. I wanted to be that smart. I probably could have faked my way through high school a lot better if I’d given a crap (I think my cumulative GPA at the end was like a 3.5), but it would have taken work. I would not have been able to do it with the ease he seemed to do everything.*
This is the Amateur Hour psych student in me, but I think I hid my jealousy of him with admiration. I thought, “hey, if I can’t be this guy, maybe I can get him to like me. If he likes me, that means I’m good enough to at least be liked by a dude of this caliber. So let’s do that!”
Anyway. I know, I know, stupid shit. But I figured I’d mention it now that I’m so far removed from him that I don’t even think we’re Facebook friends anymore. Or at least, I’m no longer obsessively checking his Facebook like I used to. Haha.
Pathetic.
*Yes, I know I might be wrong about this. He made it look like it was easy for him. Maybe it wasn’t. But goddamn, he sure made a convincing argument that getting through school was as easy for him as slicing butter with a hot knife.
Goodnight Aneel
Back when I used to think I was both talented and hilarious, I made a little parody of “Goodnight Moon” for my high school friend Aneel. Considering all the drawings were in MS Paint, I’d say it’s not too bad.
Check it:
Ten
So 2016 is just all about the milestones. Today, for example, marks exactly 10 years since I graduated high school. I’m not going to do a “here’s all the stuff that’s happened in the past decade” ‘cause I already did that for my decade blog anniversary (see this post), but it’s still a big deal in my opinion.
Ten years is a long time. A lot has changed, and most of it in ways I would have never expected. I certainly could have never predicted that at 28 I’d be living in Calgary, working on my second graduate degree, and engaged to be married.
I also wonder, every once and awhile, how all of these dorks are doing. I never talk to anyone from high school anymore.
Is your life something you would have never expected 10 years ago?
A POST TO END ALL POSTS (not really.)
Here are some bullet points that apply to my life right now:
- I live in Calgary
- I’ve been keeping a daily record of my life for the past 8.75 years
- I have a math degree
- I have someone wonderful to love (and who loves me back)
- I’m still in school
- I am in a graduate program for statistics
- I like teaching (statistics)
- I like walking for exercise/pleasure
Ten years ago, I was in the midst of my junior year of high school. If you had told me even one of these bullet points was going to apply to me in ten years, I would never have believed you. If you had told me all of them were going to apply to me at the same time, I probably would have just laughed at you. But here I am, ten years later, and they all apply.
Hell, if you would have told me any portion of these points even five years ago, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.
Life is weird.
What proportion of praying mantises are atheists?
SCREW YOU depression, I’m trying to be a functioning adult.
Didn’t go work out this morning. Instead, curled up in bed and cried for two hours.
I wonder how many calories despair burns.
I also forgot to pack my broccoli/hummus for snackies at work, though, so maybe that’ll balance some of it out.
Stupid.
Not even watching the new Metalocalypse episode (once I finally dragged myself out of bed) cheered me up, even though it had the most badass ending ever.
Blah.
Maybe posting old recently-discovered pictures from senior prom would cheer me up?
(Me, Amy, E’raina, Tanna, and Aneel, left to right, on my back porch)
(Amy had so many wardrobe issues that night)
(I lost approximately 10 pounds of glitter off that dress while dancing that night and yet it still sheds excessively)
Meh. Aneel in a martini apron is still pretty awesome.
Old Vaio is Old
My stuff came this morning, yay!
First thing I did involved digging out the monitor to Big Compy and hooking it to Old Vaio (the one with the busted screen). Laughed at all the old crap from high school senior year and all my undergraduate silliness.
Examples!
Haha, I’d totally forgotten about the time I recreated Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” using flour, water, and food coloring.
Spinning pineapple drawn and animated in Flash! I had this titled thereisaseasonturnturnturn.gif. (EDIT: apparently you have to click on stationary pineapple to get it its own page. It’ll spin there.) (EDIT 2: apparently it depends on your browser)
A bunch of my silly high school friends and me at a bowling party. Poor Aneel.
An experiment with eyeliner and some eyeshadow back when I actually had eyeliner. I might still have some, but who knows where it is.
Also, of the 50 songs I currently have rated 5 stars, 22 of them were rated 5 stars back in the era of Old Vaio.
That is all.
Mmm, fresh data!
Hey ladies and gents. NEW BLOG LAYOUT! Do you like it? Please say yes.
Anyway.
So this is some data I collected in my junior year of high school. I asked 100 high schoolers a series of questions out of Keirsey’s Please Understand Me, a book about the 16 temperaments (you know, like the ISFPs or the ENTJs, etc.). When I “analyzed” this for my psych class back then, I didn’t really know any stats at all aside from “I can graph this stuff in Excel!” (which doesn’t even count), so I decided to explore it a little more. I wanted to see if there were any correlations between gender and any of the four preference scales.
The phi coefficient was computed between all pairs (this coefficient is the most appropriate correlation to compute between two dichotomous variables). Here is the correlation matrix:
First, it’s important to note how things were coded.
Males = 1, Females = 0
Extraversion = 1, Introversion = 0
Sensing = 1, Intuiting = 0
Feeling = 1, Thinking = 0
Perceiving = 1, Judging = 0
So what does all this mean? Well, pretty much nothing, statistically-speaking. The only two significant correlations were between gender and Perceiving/Judging and Sensing/Intuiting and Perceiving/Judging. From the coding, the first significant correlation means that in the sample, there’s a tendency for males to score higher on Perceiving than Judging, and for females to score higher on Judging. The second significant correlation means that in the sample, there’s a tendency for those who score high on Feeling tend to score high on Perceiving, and a tendency for those to score high on Thinking to score high on Judging.
The rest of the correlations were non-significant, but they’re still interesting to look at. There’s a positive correlation between being female and scoring high on Extraversion, There’s a correlation between being male and scoring high on Feeling, and there’s a very, very weak correlation between Feeling/Thinking and Extraversion/Introversion.
Woo stats! Take the test, too, it’s pretty cool.
Today’s song: Beautiful Life by Ace of Base
I’ll be your particle if you’ll be my accelerator
So apparently some chick I went to high school with is engaged to Ludacris now. I don’t remember her AT ALL, and I don’t think she was in my year. Still though, small world.
Anyway. Interesting article.
Sorry, slow day.
Today’s song: Explosive by Bond
Seventh
You know what I miss? 7th grade. It was a fun time. I know none of you know (except for Aneel), but it rocked.
Haha, I remember messing around with Ross after school, and Jimmy, his son (who was a coat, I think) and Nell, Aneel’s puffy marshmallow coat. And then that whole thing with Ross throwing the snowballs at the white trash truck with the gun rack in the back. Man, that was hilarious.
Knowledge Bowl. Now THAT was fun. Me + Aneel + Ross = fail at every competition (mostly because we messed around and were always one person short of a full team) but hey—it was fun.
I miss it. It was not high school, and it was not catholic school.
Ah, the wonders of a camera phone…
So after losing and rediscovering my cell phone YET AGAIN, I decided to look through all the crap from high school I’d had saved on it. Here are some of the things I found:
~Aneel with barrettes in his hair
~E’raina’s butt (there were quite a lot of these…)
~Alan’s butt/crotch/him coming after me
~E’raina’s Ramen hair!
~Amy’s boobies
~E’raina and Amy gettin’ down dirty on the floor (with my encouragement)
~Hunter’s crotch
~A video of Amy and me dirty dancing in front of my physics classroom
~A video of me being chased by Amy and randomly stopping to strip (me stripping, not Amy, unfortunately)
~A video of Aneel’s glasses case and me stealing it from him
~A video of me groping Hunter
~A video of me grinding on Hunter
~A video of me grinding on Aneel (actually, there are about three of these)
~A video of Aneel drinking soda, him accusing me of wanting to cause harm to him, and me saying, “No, I don’t! I’m taking pictures of your crotch!”
I miss these days. It’s a wonder I never got detention/suspended/shot for this crap.
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