I wasn’t particularly good at puberty though I certainly tried my best.
I paid a lot of attention to what other people were doing in middle school and high school because I was still trying so hard to figure out what I should do.
These were the years of my childhood where I steered off the path my brothers carved and started pursuing my own interests.
Baseball gave way to summer musicals. Dropping basketball gave me more time to read and write. Instead of accumulating baseball cards, I started buying comic books and sci-fi fantasies.
At times I was annoyingly enthusiastic with the theater kids while at other times I tried on aggressiveness with the football team (though I couldn’t play because of an incomplete collar bone, I was on the team as equipment manager and friends with most of the players).
Then during other times, I’d hide in the back deconstructing everything with the jaded kids only to later commiserate with the overachievers about how important it was to get into a good college.
I was an aberration: an amenable rebel. As I figured out how the world worked (particularly my high school administration) I lined myself up to successfully jump through all the necessary hoops, but I immediately resented the hoop holders.
For example, the first time I ever drank alcohol was in the Superintendent of Schools’ basement.
That fact sounds so much cooler than it actually was when I don’t provide any context, so I won’t. I mention it merely to illustrate how I awkwardly I toed the line: I was a good enough kid to be allowed inside the Superintendent’s house but bad enough to steal his liquor when he wasn’t paying attention.
The strangest thing about adolescence is that it is the quickest time in your life but when you’re in it, it feels like it will never end.
My senior year of high school was mostly spent agonizing over the fact that even though I’d turned 18, my childhood just kept going. I was still living at home in the same small town with the same group of kids I’d known my whole life.
Even though I really liked almost everyone in my grade, I desperately wanted out. I channeled this frustration into a public access TV sketch comedy show my friends and I created called “Surprise! We Found Your Mom.”
Our most popular sketch – and the one that got us in the most trouble – was a satire of the popular MTV show Celebrity Deathmatch.
Instead of featuring claymation figures of popular celebrities fighting to the death, our skit was called Faculty Deathmatch and depicted Play-Doh renderings of our high school teachers fighting to the death.
It was a huge hit that instantly went “viral,” which in 1999 meant that several people taped it on their VCRs and showed it to their friends.
The “virality” of Faculty Death Match taught us that, while video gives you full control prior to broadcast, you can’t control what happens once it’s out there – like who makes their own copy, where those copies are shown, or how it is received.
We had never imagined that the tape would get replayed throughout the school, or that our teachers would actually see it. We were just trying to make our friends laugh.
Since we used the public access TV channel, the school had no direct oversight of our activities and after many chats in the principal’s office, they decided the only thing they could do is ban us from filming on school property, which worked for us.
Luckily, this all happened when students were still allowed to have a sense of humor and the thought of violence inside a suburban public school was utterly absurd. A few weeks later, the Columbine High School shooting happened and humor’s freedom went out the window.
The administration couldn’t ban public access TV shows, but they promptly banned trench coats, which the shooters had famously worn.
This was a problem because the character I played to host the show was an Englishman named Mortimer Gaffbeeb who always appeared in a blue trench coat under a black umbrella while he searched for his missing mom.
I once again found myself in the office, but this time for being a known trench-coat wearer.
With great earnestness, the Vice Principal told me that he had seen me wearing the trench coat in the past and warned me that continuing to do so would be considered a threat to the school.
Somehow wearing a trench coat outweighed the controversy from simulating several faculty members’ deaths, which given the sudden gravity of our formerly light-hearted offense was more than fine with me.
I promised to never wear the trench coat on school grounds again and breathed a sigh of relief two months later at graduation when I finally stepped away from the stupidity of adolescence and into the stupidity of young adulthood.
*September 24, 2020, started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday. Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflecting on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today I’m focused on my adolescence. Daily-ish reflections may be found on my Facebook Page or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.*
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