YOUNG HOOS aka the attentionseeker: lol high school

I also did what I asshattedly called "experiments in truth" (ludicrously jacked from Gandhi) where I'd do shit like not speak for a week, or wear my glasses upside down.

I also did magic tricks and wrote the left-wing column for the school newspaper.

I was an insufferable attention-whore geek in retrospect, but I had fun.

-- BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, June 9, 2008 8:55 PM

cf fedora quotes, hot sauce holsters quote

hoos did u meet your gf in h.s.?

too meta

I'd do shit like not speak for a week

lol so that's why you were wearing that erase board around your neck?

i would've sat in my corner with my book in high school, thinking you were cool

but thank heavens we're not all in high school right?

(xpost hahaha)

<3 this guy

i experimented with some precocious / pretentious affectations in high school, too

feel you, dawg

There's a high school picture of me floating around on the Internet of me dressed like a Degrassi High reject striking a Breakfast Club pose. ugh wtf high-school me

Dan, dude, you gotta linkspank that pic!

ya hoos i would've had a big crush on you, i think! =P

(Did I just use linkspank as a verb in a comment? WOE IS CYBER ME.)

No that is awesome! The dude who owns that site would be PSYCHED

i typed up a MANIFESTO for a GUERILLA ART COLLECTIVE made up of my drama geek / social exile clique

i posted the manifesto and it was promptly defaced

oh man

also i definitely experimented with "interesting" hats

i thought i was cool and funny for causing big yearbook controversy and helping the seniors (my class) lose the school spirit assembly. now i just realize i was an asshole. at least wearing a dry erase board with quotes is likeable.

i was obsessed with dada and tried to write dada poetry...only the whole "shyness" thing made it a silent hobby

oh man i'm not even gonna start

just start

xxxpost ahaha dude, you obv are still an asshole if you think that's likeable. i kid i kid.

oh man, the troubled memories are surfacing now

slam poetry, people. i did it.

lol manifesto is there a copy of that still?

adventures in linux tshirts

slightly less embarrassed by the lol a capella group

please start, i find this stuff so funny

haha so did hoos right??

i think i took myself too seriously to ever be wacky :-/

'so did hoos' = slam poetry

http://www.marvel.com/universe3zx/images/thumb/d/dd/Awesome_andy.jpg/440px-Awesome_andy.jpg

fuck i'm gonna say nothing here but...oh man

haha and in the creation of suspense i fulfil the first rule of attention-seeking :D

One of my friends used to greet girls with his penis. He once humped a girl into her locker.

...

Well that's far from charming.

He's now a youth minister.

WOW ok i'm not gonna top that, no point saying anything really ;-)

i think i took myself too seriously to ever be wacky :-/

-- deej, Monday, June 9, 2008 2:32 PM (Monday, June 9, 2008 2:32 PM) Bookmark Link

Same here. I think the most pretentious thing I did in hs was pretend I enjoyed Blackalicious more than Nelly. : |

oh wau @ dan's dude

i wore basketball sneakers, a tux top, baggy black shorts and a cat-in-the-hat hat to my prom, so i try to remind myself to be more patient of the hot topic kids.

good thread

the slam poetry thing was probably really good for me, actually, considering it let me interact with a whole lot of people outside any organized school environment -- i was pretty sheltered up til that point; having a group of strangers support & affirm my self-expression and my decision to write was pretty big turning point for me.

i brought one kid from my high-school to his first live poetry reading -- he's now a pro slam poet or something? (carl0s andres g0mez) so i guess that's to my credit or detriment, depending on how you look at it

oh snap yall i just saw this loll

hoos did u meet your gf in h.s.?

-- deej, Monday, June 9, 2008 9:20 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

yse

This thread is just begging for me to repost this photo:

http://static.flickr.com/53/132751375_b16ba5676c.jpg?v=0

xp: ysi?

YES

omgosh i want to be your friend jaym

i had a crushed velvet shirt at one point w/ silver buttons

around the same time i had a weird androgynous cambodian boyfriend who smoked menthols and liked to dress up in fairy wings

omg are you in that photo?

slightly less embarrassed by the lol a capella group

That reminds me, my high school had something called Cabaret Night every spring. It was basically a talent show. Every year all the guys who were in choir/musicals (which included my drama-nerd self) put together a song-and-dance number. One year it was "Standing on the Corner (Watching All the Girls Go By)." Another year it was "Gee, Officer Krupke!" My senior year I also did a solo performance of "Anything Goes."

omg are you in that photo?

OMG I'm the guy puckering my lips second from the left.

wow. priceless.

couldn't mistake that face :-)

you were so cuuuute!

(For the record, I wasn't a goth in h.s. But I went to lol summer arts school and met some goth-inclined girls and they decided it would be fun to play dress up one day.)

lol i ran an "underground newspaper" for a year

aka some one-sheets left in stacks next to the school newspapers in the library and other places

there was a guy in my university who carried a sign around with him, all day every day, and each week he'd change the message on the sign. he was only known as 'sign guy', until one day when he wrote a letter to the student paper saying that he did in fact carry his sign around the city and not just on campus.
and one day he disappeared, or possibly graduated.

I went to lol summer creative writing program at a college in the Berkshires and wound up with a boyfriend who let me put make-up on him and wore dresses because, you know, that sort of thing was fun. ha.

I wrote bad bad poetry and drank coffee even though I hated it at the time.

I changed into converse immediately after arriving at the prom and refused to dance to any songs although that might have been a wise decicion considering the type of music they probably played.

I used to carry around glitter adn sprinkle it on people when they needed that little extra sparkle.

so sad right now that my high school metal band's website isn't on archive.org ;_;

(XPOST!) That two-week summer arts program was a breeding ground for wacky and/or self-important attention-seeking behavior. Several guys walked around in skirts. I dyed some other guy's hair blue. My friend Jessie lay on the ground and we wrote all over her skin in marker.

Also, cloves.

summer arts program was a breeding ground for wacky and/or self-important attention-seeking behavior

Totally.

at one point i wore a giant alien-head pendant and dyed my hair green and wore almond-shaped sunglasses so i matched the pendant

You win.

This thread is making me realize the difference between "high school pretension & attention-seeking" and "actual sexual preferences." I.e. some weird high school attractions don't go away.

xpost is there a picture of this?

My dad has one somewhere. lol I was totes fattey in grades 8-10 though, I didn't exactly have the v-shaped chin required by the pendant.

As deej has alluded to, I did in fact have Tabasco holsters on my wrists.

Maria, are you saying that you were attracted to pretentious attention-seekers?

totes fattey with green hair, alien pendant and matching sunglasses, a fedora, holsters with hot sauce, practicing total silence, white board around his neck with a tupac quote, running an underground newspaper and performing slam poetry

haha so awesome

ya that beats my wacky blazer and one-act play set in a donut shop any day

unbelievable but also not really

LOLZ, my girlfriend told me earlier that she used to have a stuffed fake parrot that she wore on her shoulder for a year.

I wore dog toys around my neck and carried a briefcase for awhile.
These are not good memories.

xp You wrote a play set in a donut shop? Like this one?

haha only androgynous or cross-dressed ones jaymc

i am really impressed by the collective high school weirdness of ilx

totes fattey with green hair, alien pendant and matching sunglasses, a fedora, holsters with hot sauce, practicing total silence, white board around his neck with a tupac quote, running an underground newspaper and performing slam poetry

-- deej, Monday, June 9, 2008 10:09 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

hey i was only fattey for half of hs

i also spent my junior year (post-fattey) wearing red sunglasses. nobody called me on it, so i just left them on all day. they played into the "mysterious weirdo" persona i was using for my magician act at the time.

magician act!!

Between 8th and 10th grade, I wrote a 72-page play called A One-Act Play that was basically Charlie Kaufman before his time (with a few dashes of Seinfeld); the cast of characters included me, my friends and teachers, and a whole host of celebrities and fictional characters.

I wrote a 72-page play called A One-Act Play that was basically Charlie Kaufman before his time (with a few dashes of Seinfeld)

YSI!!

posted previously to ILE on "lol high school":

http://homepage.mac.com/arobinso/.Pictures/jjd2.jpg

these were not unusual fashion choices for us

it really was a different time wasn't it?

i was in, like, band

That's so low on the totem pole of shameful admissions so far made on this thread!

In HS, my wardrobe consisted mostly of black t-shirts, black hoodies, black jeans, and black sneakers.

I wanted to wear all black one year, but didn't have the money to replace most of my wardrobe. (The Salvation Army was not a solution, all the black clothes were washed out into different shades.) Too pathetic to be goth!

i was just a basic nerd that some of the popular girls condescendingly flirted with :-|

hideremetoo

I played Prospero in an unusually terrible even by hs theater standards prod. of The Tempest. Yeah, a thespian trapped in a man's, er, boy's body.

bad long hair + metal band.

magician act!!

-- deej, Monday, June 9, 2008 10:16 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Yeah grades 8-11 I walked around the cafeteria during lunch doing card tricks and coin tricks and "street magic" like arm twists and 'mind reading' and whatnot. My persona went from "mysterious stranger" ala David Blaine to "fedora-wearing hustler" doing three card montes (where oops suddenly all the cards are blank) or poker deals (where oh snap how did I deal everybody successively higher hands oh snap how did I deal myself a royal flush) etc.

And yes I bought the fedora just so I could look the part of a card shark out of Newsies.

my gang were basically the silent majority of sorta nerdy kids who now know how to party

only two of us have children at this point, and maybe three still live in town. COINCIDENCE???

HOOS, I will e-mail it to you when I get home. (I think I still have it.)

i was just a basic nerd that some of the popular girls condescendingly flirted with :-|

-- gbx, Monday, June 9, 2008 3:29 PM (Monday, June 9, 2008 3:29 PM) Bookmark Link

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

hideremetoo

-- HI DERE, Monday, June 9, 2008 3:30 PM (Monday, June 9, 2008 3:30 PM) Bookmark Link

And yes I bought the fedora just so I could look the part of a card shark out of Newsies.

I was obsessed with Newsies and new all the songs. In fact, I could probably sing them now if I really wanted too. Was also obsessed w/ "Swing Kids" and was a member of the Soul Asylum Fan Club. *hangs head in shame*

new? knew.

dead serious:

http://www.elmwoodmagic.com/ama/med/erdnasebook.jpg

^^^ fiyah

;_; wish i hadn't sold my copy in dire straits

you needed 75 cents? :(

I sold a box of books, including about 30 magic books I'd bought during hs, at a San Antonio Half Price and got about $75.

;_;

Haven't really fucked w/magic since then, but just in the last couple weeks I've gotten interested again. I'm gonna have to start re-buying those books.

big hoos: fuckin with magic in 2008

Some dude tried to use magic tricks to pick up a friend I was hanging out this weekend. Magnificent fail.

Yeah "mysterious stranger" worked on a handful of high school girls, you just look like a douchebag as an adult.

http://www.free-card-tricks.net/blaine.jpg

so glad i started this, the alien pendant thing is @_@

also HOOS i bet you still got the ledgerdemain skillz if you work this rust out

During "mysterious stranger" period I went w/o sleep for two days so that I could show up to school looking twitchy and pale and tired and muttering about the "things I've learned"

what are you talking about

"lemme show you"

*proceed w/mind reading trick or object levitation or whatever*

oh okay i got one

sometime during my sophomore year i went to a dance with my girlfriend at the time and my other female friend. at this point we all identified as bisexual at the time.

someone had brought a bag of jolly ranchers hard candies to the dance. and at one point, during a slow dance, we all kissed each other in turn, passing the jolly ranchers from one to the next.

this had the effect of spurring on several lurid rumors about the three of us (none of which were true).

hahah awesome

these rumors generally agreed that there had been an illicit three-way tryst in one of the history classrooms

(plz excuse the grammar failing, brain is heat-fried)

lol worst rumor ever started about me was that i was a satanist

"which, you know, its cool if he is or whatever, but i don't wanna hang out with him"

lol tolerant liberal suburbs

come to think of it, that 3way rumor probably insulated me against countervailing lol fag rumors for at least a while :\

lamest thing I can recall is carrying a frisbee with me everywhere and doing 'tricks' during my freshman year. but shortly after that, I was inexplicably elected class president, so I guess I was more "harmless and likable" than "weird and creepy".

I'm not too far removed from high school, though, so I'm sure things I now think of as okay will be cringe-inducing before too long.

i wore an army helmet for most of freshman/sophomore year of HS

most embarrassing thing is that for a six month period i would X up every day

every day

what was i thinking

damn son

you were thinking "today seems like a good day to put an x on each of my hands. i'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life!"

Velveteen powder blue shortsleeve Christian Dior shirt.
Blue and gold 1.5 inch wide tie.
Baggy ass poly-rayon black pants.
Bottom of armpit length curly hair.
Lesbian rumors about my girlfriend when she dressed me up for Halloween, gay rumors about myself and best friend any other time.

We were fuckin' heroes.

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/5414/imageuploadimagefw9.jpg

Ohhhh man this thread is gold and now I have to go to work, aggh...okay bye! may be back tomorrow with um...you know I don't think I can come even close to any of this so I might just continue to lurk...will think it over...

lol worst rumor ever started about me was that i was a satanist

aw memreez. i launched a one-man protest complete with sandwich board and megaphone against a prayer-in-school group holding a prayer around the flag pole. problem was it was the one-year anniversary of 9/11 (which, y'know, i still maintain is an insidious platform to influence people into making prayer a part of schools, but the timing, in retrospect, was o_0). anyway, cop told me i was being disruptive but they had a goddamn PA system, i had a little radio shack megaphone. the rumor from then on out was that i was a member of the taliban.

[ old high school friend ]: lol
i remember you wearing like a long vest thing and using a walking stick

I wore a neon-bright poncho and had a walking stick I had totally forgotten my suburban shaman phase lololol

i drove a vw bus and sometimes kids would hang out in it during lunch breaks and shit.

hoos, what half price books did you sell that to, i will totally put down cashes for it.

Man, all me & my buds did was try to note as loudly as possible that we were inoffensively iconoclastic. It would take one tedious, navel-gazing novella to 'splain all this.

that = books abt MAGIC

During the whole magician thing I started getting into Jeff McBride, a stage magician very public about his "neo-paganism." I read up on and got into bs "neo-shamanic practices," and then just cause I wanted to look/feel "earthy" I quit wearing shoes and had this tree branch I'd carry everywhere and wore this ridic poncho that I still own and use as a blanket.

I fear I would have been an asshole to High School HOOS.

hoos, what half price books did you sell that to, i will totally put down cashes for it.

-- m bison, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 1:11 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

damn man i don't even remember tbh, this was like fall 05. whichever one is closest to the utsa campus out at 1604 i suppose.

hoos if you dont post photographic evidence of at least 50% of this i refuse to believe any of it

I fear I would have been an asshole to High School HOOS.

-- milo z, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 1:14 AM (13 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

It would have been justified! But somehow I've gone my whole life without being bullied. I guess I'm just likeable?

Man I don't own a scanner but I can take photos of a couple yearbook photos xp

somehow I've gone my whole life without being bullied

Seriously like I grew up with a bum leg so I was always terrible at outdoor activities and had a raspy voice (in 8th grade my nickname was "Godfather") and was unusually short and wore glasses and did well in school. I hit all the benchmarks, plus I did all the ridiculous shit in this thread: why didn't I ever get beat up or something? I remember having that realization in 5th grade: "how come no one's given me a swirly yet? shouldn't that have happened by now?"

Swirlies are mythic. Only people who get swirlied are people with older sibs in HS when they enter first year.

I have been reliably informed by ex-cheerleader ex-classmate that despite being bullied throughout jr high I completely put TEH FEAR into same bullies once I reached high school, purely for verbal retort skills. I was basically always writing a novel and would come up for air to deliver pithy insult after pithy insult to the point where cheerleaders waited with baited breath to see which of their enemies on squad I would take down next.

Also I was part of a knot of babypunx described by film/lit teacher as 15 going on 35. We had organized all these teachers to write us excuse notes to do whatever the hell we wanted, too; whether it was because they loved us or we had them wrapped around little fingers I do not know. Probs both.

lol i was on the persuasive extemp team (30 mins to research & prepare a 3 min persuasive speech on some controversial topic) and several classmates likened my relaxed-persuasion style to hov

i was like "do you listen to rap"
"nah just fuckin w/you man"

Persuasive extemp teacher referred to me as "my radical child" cause of anti-war buttons on poncho.

I was president of the political club junior and senior year - we hosted a debate night on the Clinton impeachment, the poster I got printed up and passed out w/o advisor knowing was a crayon drawing of a blue dress with a white splotch, COME in 48 point type, and then the actual info much smaller below.

I was, surprisingly, never even reprimanded.

looooooool that is quality

What the hell is a swirly?

ok jesus do not GIS swirly

swirly toilet, rather

Ah ok - I get it now. I haven't ever heard that term used before. We were just afraid of getting panced.

you spell it panced????? hahahahah!

http://www.elmwoodmagic.com/ama/med/erdnasebook.jpg
I found it in .pdf form!

:D :D :D :D :D :D

The heat is eating my brain. I guess it would be "pantsed"?

does ilx have a style guide we can consult?

i feel like jaymc should write one.

i think its pantsed, yeah

does ilx have a style guide we can consult?

The elements of ramsay's plain style/hardman argot (fourth edition)

pants'd

it is depantsed

DEpantsed? Now that's just crazy talk.

Oh god. I just found prom pic. I should bring to work tomorrow to scan and post - y/n?

the answer to "should i scan and post this" is always y

god help me but yeah the hoos is on the money right there

Ok true. That said, I'm pretty sure that his public would want Hoos to be doing the scanning/posting thing here. He probably doesn't need to scan though since he's a bebe. ;-)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51CH2YC4C0L._SL500_AA280_.jpg

oh shit i totally forgot the part where i hung out after school at the new age bookstore several blocks away, and how i became great friends with all the tarot readers who worked there

i get the feeling that if HOOS and i had been the same age at the same high school we would have started some sort of RADICAL SPOKEN WORD COVEN together

or at least talked about it in hushed excited tones over coffee at the Bickfords or Dennys at 3AM or something

I tried really hard to make the cool political bookstore my hangout, but it was half an hour drive away. Hard to force a hangout like that.

lolol xp totally man

i remember 'hypnotizing' several of my classmates reading a induction script from a book during an 8th grade field trip

man ILX i'm so so sorry if anyone thought i was cooler than all this, but i mean it's a true miracle i came out as reasonably well adjusted and socialized as i am

hey at least we never did LARPing

omg bickfords i miss rhode island

hoos had no need to larp, he was living the adventure already

i love deej's love for teen hoos

I wore grey woolen pants, a white shirt, and a blue and red striped tie just about every day. In winter I'd add a blazer with red piping, and maybe a v-necked jumper on extra-cold days.

what a sordid past!

Haha I was about to come here and also say we didn't really get up to shenans, because my high school like most in Aus had a uniform.

So I just worked my way round it as best I could by stretching the definition of "grey skirt" and "grey jumper" to its utmost limit with a Very Very Dark Ash jumper ("its not black, it is CHARCOAL GREY") and a long skirt that looked like it was made out of grey washing machine lint, so I looked something like Liz Fraser in her dorkier moments.

I was worse when I wasn't TRYING to be conspicuously weird and was just a complete idiot, like the year I spent with a bad perm and a home-made Nik Kershaw sweatshirt.

I got class/work all day Tues, but I'll try to snap some fotos Wed afternoon.

my senior year of HS, our newly elected governor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fob_James) instituted a policy whereby fifteen minutes of every school day would consist of moral teachings. Like the teacher would read a quote from churchill or some shit and we'd have to pretend to discuss it.

second semester my pal Kevin managed to nab the moral lessons binder out of the classroom where he spent afternoons doing college physics while pretending to be a math teachers' aide and made xeroxes of the lessons for the following month. we took the copies and a few of us wrote up our own material, matching the format in the binder.

I did a whole week on Nietzsche's "morality is the herd instinct of the individual" flipping it on its head so that "herd instinct" became the topic of discussion, and all the discussion guidelines for the teachers were along the lines of why bad things happened to people who didn't obey their herd instincts etc. etc. a whole five days of this. it was difficult because I was determined to make this pass as a genuine part of the curriculum

as luck would have it the timing of our early-morning operation to swap our new lessons for the originals ensured that mine was the first one that most teachers got to. not all of them bit but most did and a few didn't catch on at all, apparently. taught the whole week's worth of lessons. anyway it was such a success we all got impressed with ourselves and wound up getting busted and going to the suspension portable for a few days. then one of the science teachers took a copy of our morals and had me write a little blurb about the prank and put it in the Grissom HS 1996 Time Capsule.

the end.

^ the greatest story ever told

tom is a hero.

my jr. and sr. years my friends and i put out an "underground newspaper," using some very primitive desktop publishing software, whatever was available in 1986-87. it was called the inquisition (yes we were the monty python geek kids). highlights included "i'm very disappointed in you boys" talks from our principal, me getting thrown against a locker by a kid who thought something we wrote was about him (it wasn't) and a probably libelous expose of improper relationships between the track coach and his female stars.

i was also the drummer in one of the school's two functioning rock bands, which didn't make me cool because we were terrible.

also the first time i got drunk and stoned was on a band trip. what can i say.

That's beautiful, Tom, and I'll tell you what that move would have bought you at my school, were moral lessons deemed appropriate for the staff to impart: shitloads of extra credit.

See also raising arguments with easily-bamboozled admin staff. We had written a few band names on the outside of our lockers, the main excuse being when you're 16 the ability to write THE CURE on yr locker is First Amendment stuff. The very long-serving hall monitor came by and asked us if we wrote on our walls at home. Instant chorus of YES provoked a total brain melt.

That's no match to the time, aged 15, I arrived in school dressed head to toe as a "dorado" (gold statue, including top hat and face paint), completely unannounced. It was casual dress day and for some stupid reason I decided to go one further, under the pretense of charitable purposes.

I remember the butterflies in my stomach as the bus pulled up, expecting everyone to explode in gales of awe and fascination. Uh no, I got a wall of silence and the school day was pretty much the same.

The gold jumpsuit was one thing. The gold wig intended for a Supremes revival group was another. No photos exist.

I can't find any photos of my after school dress of black and white checked jeans and lime green or cyan t-shirts, a pity, I would have been very much a la mode nowadays.

School hijinks mainly consisted of running the roofs , abseiling off bits of the school and sneaking out through one young, gay, teacher's flat to go and drink and play table football at the ICA.

wish i could relay some hilarious high school high jinx but HS was a miserable toilet of hate.

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/9/e/7/9e7c33fa3120207b5657f7189b563859.jpg

actually i had a lot of fun in my film class.

http://youtube.com/user/Sheepfeed

Yeah, toilet of hate here. Basically high school for me was like, hang out with nerds, skateboard poorly, one time I shot a horse with a paint ball gun, graduate. I'm now on the work until I die portion of my life.

Havin' an alright time, though.

one time I shot a horse with a paint ball gun

I'll bite: uh.

I'm now on the work until I die portion of my life.

I remember throwing a hissy fit in 8th grade because I was "tired of getting ready for high school so I can get ready for college so I can get ready to get a job so I can get ready to die"

lol melodramatic teenagers

somehow I've gone my whole life without being bullied

Seriously like I grew up with a bum leg so I was always terrible at outdoor activities and had a raspy voice (in 8th grade my nickname was "Godfather") and was unusually short and wore glasses and did well in school. I hit all the benchmarks, plus I did all the ridiculous shit in this thread: why didn't I ever get beat up or something? I remember having that realization in 5th grade: "how come no one's given me a swirly yet? shouldn't that have happened by now?"

-- BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, June 9, 2008 8:27 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

Yeah I was thinking about that lately. Same here. I was the second shortest kid my class (which changed around junior year, I'm now 6'1"), I read comic books, would draw a lot, was mostly quiet though sometimes a smartmouthed little shitbag. The one time I got shoved in a locker I remember it being a really good time. Never got beat up. I always attributed this to having older cousins who were football players and wrestlers, but now I'm not so sure.

Then again I was always mildly athletic...one of the top runners in my class in spite of my height, plus I was a sort of a conniving dick puncher when threatened.

Shooting a horse: not really any story surrounding that! :D I had a paintball gun...there was a horse...2+2=

(It was a very long way away and barely reacted when hit! I'm a total softie and even this made me feel very guilty)

was the horse wearing protective goggles?

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/doggy-goggles431x300.jpg

did you walk around with that dog in high school?

http://www.thegifthorse-ma.com/store/image.php?productid=99

^^ nightmare

seriously wtf

who ties golf shorts to a horses head?

this from a guy who shot a horse

rabiesandhorsegoggles

I really think fashioning your pants into a horse mask takes a lot more plotting and crossed wires

I can't make my pants into a horse mask.

I remember taking out all the neon lights in the classrooms and hanging them from the roof of a big class, making it look like the neon lights had committed suicide, complete with a note telling of their distress and the reason why they had committed suicide. This story was fimed by a friend and we made a small movie of it. If I remember, they were all in a sect and the end of the world was nigh and they had to die or some such crap. This movie was left on a DVD in the principal's office. We put posters all around our school for the "Neon light liberation front". I think I still have that poster somewhere at home.

there is a short video production my friend carl & i made, but i fear it is long gone

it starred a blueberry muffin

I hope my friend still has that vdeo cause it was a lot of fun doing it, however silly it may be. We wanted it to begin with the MGM lion roaring on screen, so we cut a hole in a piece of paper and my friend put a sock on his hand, little ears on the sock and something vaguely resembling a lion's mane and roared all the while making his hand act like a lion (that does not make any sense I fear)

i was a fat goth. i looked a lot like the girls in the pic w/ young jaymc. i had that exact same bauhaus t-shirt.

i was a bit intense and never did anything really for attention seeking, besides trying to dress as gothy as possible for a teenager in greeley, CO. Oh, but I did write spooksy horror stories in my creative writing class and was really, really mean to everyone. I would have been really mean to a dude like HOOS. There was a guy sort of like that in my HS named Ty!er B3rry who would walk around in a cape playing his flute and being totally fucking giddy and I used to make fun of him a lot. It was geek on geek assault!!

it's true, geek-on-geek crimes are plaguing our nation's schools

it's almost too sad to think about

...who would walk around in a cape playing his flute and being totally fucking giddy

^^^would dick punch this

There's a guy in town here people call Pirate Guy (because my friends are a clever bunch). He's more the beard / long red hair in pony tail / trench coat / constantly juggling on campus type. Totally want to dick punch that dude and I've never even met him. I still feel that old high school prejudiced seething from time to time, not proud of it.

are you still a meanie? (xxxp)

this from a guy who dickpunched a horse

I'm kind of envious of you all who had these colorful characters in your schools (even though I probably would have made fun of 'em). In a town like the one I grew up in where you graduating class size is 80 you don't find a lot of juggling, caped adventurers.

(lol, xp)

I just found the girl in the Bauhaus shirt on Facebook, lol.

She's a lawyer now.

shocker

yeah, even i saw that coming

wait what?

confused now

odd, "transgressive" type in high school ---> lawyer/doctor/accountant as an adult

"SLC Punk"

but i know quite a few weirdos from HS who've stayed pretty weird

Nah, I'm pretty pleasant now. I think I was just annoyed there were no other alternateens around for me to trade mixtapes with.

In 9th grade I got really into logging onto the local BBS, called EXCALIBUR, I totally met a dude on there that I dated for a brief while from our RIVAL HIGH SCHOOL - his handle WAS TRENT REZNOR

He looked like Garth, like, from Wayne's World.

The high school weirdos I know who stayed weird either killed themselves or are named John Justen (HA).

Boy, people who used to be punks HATE that movie.

No wait I think it sucks too.

At my small school, the principal's office distributed an announcement sheet to all of the classrooms every morning. On the sheet, you'd see who was absent that day, what was for lunch, a daily quote, announcements that the beta club would meet in the library, etc. It was typed by the principal's secretary Debbie, and passed out by the hall monitor, Bryan.

I had this idea for awhile, so one weekend, I took a copy of the announcement sheet up to my mom's office at the newspaper. I found a typewriter with the same font and wrote my own version of the announcements with Calvin & Hobbes absent from kindergarten, lobster bisque on the lunch menu for Wednesday, the sixth grade taking a field trip to Hell, etc. I made fifteen copies, put them in a manila folder, and took them to school the next Monday morning. My whole thinking was that someone would read them, chuckle, and then forget about it.

My first class was drafting out in the shop. I asked to use the bathroom, ran over to the main building, and hung up the announcements on the little clips outside the classroom doors. It didn't take me long (only one hallway), and I was back at my desk with my compass and T-square in five minutes.

I was thinking the teachers would see the announcements before Bryan did, but that wasn't the case. By 8:30, Bryan ran into the shop and told my teacher that he needed a list of people who had been absent during the first period. My teacher told him that everyone was present and accounted for, why? The hall monitor, who was about out of breath, said that "Debbie was on the war path" for an individual who had passed around a threatening note to all the classrooms.

What?

After Bryan left, I asked my teacher what was going on. He said that "someone had passed a note to everyone saying all the kids could leave the class and go home." I didn't get why he didn't say that I had been gone for ten minutes, but later found out that he was assuming Bryan meant students who hadn't even showed up.

By lunch, it was a big deal. Everyone was talking about these Fake Announcements and what had been said on them. Nothing anyone said was accurate and it had all been blown out of proportion. The principal was actively persuing his leads and trying to figure out who had pulled such a prank.

I had no idea it would go this far. In my post-lunch Gifted & Talented class (I know), someone had gotten bootlegged copies of the announcements from an administrative assistant. There they were, my announcements, haphazardly at an angle on a copy of a copy of a copy, like those Xeroxed-after-Xeroxed copies of Mickey Mouse giving the finger. We all started pointing fingers at who did it.

Two days later, I'm sitting at a table in science lab when the principal comes in and sits down next to me. My teacher was going over a lesson, and the principal just sat there with his hands folded like he was just observing. Finally, after five minutes, he leans over and whispers, "Can you come to my office for a moment?"

I'm sitting there in front of his desk, and he point out asks me "Do you know who wrote the announcements?" I say I do. He looks at me for a beat and then asks, "Was it you?" I say yes.

He lets out this immense sigh of relief.

Apparently, he went after the seniors first, but then noticed that the list of seniors who were taking a "college day" (I added all of them) included a few people who weren't even at the school anymore. He then went down through the grades and came to me as a prime suspect since, I don't know how to say this, I was half-literate or something.

He was going to get me for using the school copier without permission, but I told him that I wrote and made everything outside of the school. Instead, I got probation for distributing written materials on school grounds without permission, the "Tony Alamo" rule. When I came back from the office to my English class, I got a round of applause.

I still don't get why it was such a big deal. Years later, I went to pick up my younger siblings from school, and there in the hallway was my old basketball coach. I hadn't talked to him five or six years, and yet, his first question to me was "Written any fake announcements lately?"

Like I said, it was a very small school.

This thread is awesome, and I was a high school weirdness amateur compared to many of you dudes. A little poetry, a little lit magazine editing, a little Star Wars RPG. I went to a private school where even the dorks were pretty well-adjusted and you had to be a total creep (see: the 11th-grader who traded Pokemon cards with the 6th-graders--I think even they were brutal to him) to get picked on.

I had a set of friends in the next state who took it all the way though: Dada actions, using a cane for no reason, fucking with people in the mall by being innocuously weird. I got some more mainstream nerd friends at home before I got totally sucked in, and I am pretty happy about that.

in 6th grade i ran a star wars fanzine

my monthly back page column was called "JJ's Corner" cause in 6th grade i wanted everyone to call me JJ for some reason

i would totally have partnered up w/ you on that fanzine hoos

going back to elem school the two really dorky things i can remember doing were

a) in 4th grade starting a 'corporation' with another kid called M&M Industries, the ceo was this monopoly man looking guy we drew & we were the vice presidents. we got like half the class in on it as employees & wrote them weekly paychecks until this faction splintered off to form L&M Industries & they wrote checks for like 7 kazillion dollars & we were like no man thats just not plausible but everyone went over to them anyway

b) starting some kind of private eye organization in 5th grade i think. that was also the year i spent about 3 months plotting w/ another kid on how we would take over the world. we also drew pictures of ATF agents crushing babies & shit because of some article id read in newsweek or something.

all of this stuff was considered pretty cool. i had a neat class.

5th grade - also the year about 6 of us spent a month or so planning a great summer moped cross-country escape that we all knew was bullshit but all pretended like it was actually gonna happen

ATTN Sara R-C:

Where's that pic from the time period after we saw "Heathers" and I started carrying a croquet mallet around with me everywhere?

oh man, my weirdness in 5th-6th grade still makes me wince. (of course, i had NO IDEA at the time how weird it was.) that's too early for this thread, i think.

Maria I think we have 10 year old you thread on here somewhere for examples of prepubescent weirdness from all over the globe.

Dan, I think I have seen that pic somewhere!

My HS was chocka with weirdos: the white breakdancer with full-on minestrone BO, the Culture Club twins, the extremely inbred Christian girl who was nonetheless proud of her ability to trace ancestors back to William the Conqueror, the knot of bendy 'modern dance' girls, a clique of punk metallers who called their gang Skullen Rose, one of whom was Squeaky Fromme's cousin, plus a Rocky Horror contingent loosely affiliated to theatre kids. I found out that the little runty girl who was obsessed with her future husband, Barry Manilow, still has not figured out he is not the marrying kind.

Some kid in my school printed out pixelated black and white pictures of various unpopular teachers taken from the school web site on A4 paper with captions like "THIS MAN FUCKS DOGS" or "DESTROY THIS FAT BITCH" and blu-tacked them up all over the place on the last day of term. Not a very professional job, but funny nonetheless. Nobody ever found out who did it.

oh my goodness, i hope you are wrong about that thread, suzy.

as to bodrick's post, i think that's mean, not funny. teachers don't like being called "fat bitches" any more than students.

It was funny because it was totally over the top and mean. I don't think people like to be accused of dog-fucking, either.

You all went to some interesting schools. Everybody at my comp was basically the same adidas-jacket-wearing, curtain-haired, gormless crisp munching Playstation addict. Myself included.

Yeah, but dog-fucking seems more over the top and less personal than a common insult like "fat bitch." Unless there actually were rumors of dog-fucking going on.

The teacher who asked me out after I turned 18 still works at my high school!

haha I wonder if I ever told that story (not as exciting as it sounds)

plz tell that story!

One of my friends started dating one of her English teachers after graduation. Now they are married and BOTH teach English! (And a kid got caught passing a note basically calling her a "fat bitch" in detail recently, which made her cry. So be nice, teachers are somebody's friends.)

I took Spanish my senior year because I'd exhausted the German classes at my high school thanks to summer language schooling. The guy who taught my first-year class was a new teacher in his... third? year at the school, so he was still pretty young (mid-late 20s, let's say 27 at the oldest). Because of my exposure to other languages and a natural affinity for linguistics, I ended up being able to pass out of his class and go straight into 2nd-year, 2nd-semester Spanish. During that one semester, we established a jokey relationship where I could basically get away with saying/doing whatever I wanted because I kept acing all of the quizzes and tests.

After encouraging me to jump ahead into the 2nd year class, he asked me if I'd like to get together with him sometime for a coffee. I politely declined.

Aww, that's not so bad. Did he know when you turned 18?

Yeah, the semester ended right around the time of my birthday.

I told you guys the story wasn't that interesting! There was nothing particularly scandalous about what was going on, particularly since he waited until I wasn't his student anymore to ask.

(The more scandalous story is the one about how one of the science teachers and one of the soccer coaches were caught during school in a men's room stall facing each other with their pants around their ankles by my friend who greeted girls with his penis.)

did you got to catholic school?

I think Suzy just meant don't sweat it, Maria, there are plenty of weird 5th graders:
Tell me all about 10-year-old you

hahaha no! MN public school be full of carefully-expressed homosexuality

Dan knows the rules of MN public schools: if you bring the LOLs and ace your tests, there is nothing you cannot do in a classroom (I once argued successfully that no, I wasn't taking an unexcused absence for the class I missed due to urgent school paper business and bus-missing and the usually inflexible Ass Prin backed down). Also they told us stuff:my fave English teacher let slip that my new and least fave English teacher was inhaling panic pills, so babypunks all tried to make her nervous the rest of the year.We had fun at HS purely because half of the teachers were weirdo martinets and the other half were Question Everything types who didn't like the weirdo martinets, laughed at our jokes and let us blast Blue Monday in the journalism office and the Clash in the art studio. The punks graffed SANDINISTA in huge letters between the two school buildings and nobody scrubbed it off.

Talking to people at the reunion thing over Xmas the other classes thought our class was fucking scary due to extreme cliques and the like.

if you bring the LOLs and ace your tests, there is nothing you cannot do in a classroom

I have pretty much made this my life mantra.

i had a 3ft wallet chain that i made from huge black and white yard-grade links bought at Home Depot. everytime I sat down there was about 10 seconds of "clunkity-clinkity-clunkity-clinkity"ness.

5th graders are the best until they turn into 7th graders

my same friend who was my co-take-over-the-world/atf baby-crusher-point-man also had a leather wallet w/ BAD MOTHERFUCKER sketched into it

having older brothers is both a blessing & a curse

I was a jock and a stoner in high school. crossing over was not as easy as it sounds, believe me.

When I was 16, I wrote an essay so fiery-provocative I was dead certain it'd fuck shit up global if unleashed. Like, did you know our history teachers LIED to us?

When I was 17, I wrote a poem that made teachers sit me down and ask me if I'd been sexually molested.

man im sure glad that when i was 16-17 i didnt write anything for school that wasnt about nuking commies

in the 70s teachers were oblivious to that kind of stuff. in 8th grade I wrote a paper about Catcher in The Rye and the nun asked me "do you parents know you read that book" and I said " yeah they gave it to me."

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Park/3369/pink4.jpg
^m coleman in his glory days

Between the babypunx and the Skullen Rose girls we brought down the guy who handed out full-color anti-abortion leaflets as we boarded our buses by insinuating he was there to check out all the young ass.

Dazed and Confused is a solid approximation of my high school experience, really. A few dumbass meatheads, but by and large the cliques were fluid and got along.

this thread is way better when its stories about BIG HOOS because he was in high school only like four years ago

i still rock like 40% of the t-shirts that i wore in high school

btw dudes combed the yearbook and only found pics of me w/red glasses, those'll be up shortly

i feel like antexit and i should tell our alternative high school stories.

i wasn't all up in the yearbook, all i could find were the official photo from junior year and my pic w/the persuasive extemp team

http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08243/glasses2490.jpg
middle hoos. red glasses, "mysterious stranger" persona. somewhere on the internet are promo photos for a magic show w/"mysterious stranger" holding a flaming fan of cards

http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08243/hippie561.jpg
late hoos. "shaman" period. nb pomp, sideburns, bamboo necklace. you can't see that i'm not wearing shoes.

dude hoos you look different in every picture

<3 hoos

http://www.quizilla.com/stories/6197455/i-fell-in-love-with-a-shapeshifter-what-was-i-thinking-chpt-1-his-first-day

lol i used a headphone cord w/the headphones cut off to secure the dry erase board around my neck

I took Spanish my senior year because I'd exhausted the German classes at my high school thanks to summer language schooling. The guy who taught my first-year class was a new teacher in his... third? year at the school, so he was still pretty young (mid-late 20s, let's say 27 at the oldest). Because of my exposure to other languages and a natural affinity for linguistics, I ended up being able to pass out of his class and go straight into 2nd-year, 2nd-semester Spanish. During that one semester, we established a jokey relationship where I could basically get away with saying/doing whatever I wanted because I kept acing all of the quizzes and tests.

After encouraging me to jump ahead into the 2nd year class, he asked me if I'd like to get together with him sometime for a coffee. I politely declined.

-- HI DERE, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 4:46 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Link

LOL I KNOW PRECISELY WHO HE IS TALKING ABOUT

o man i wouldve hated all of u so much in hs

^this x10000

it's okay, we hated you too. Wasn't that the point?

jhoshea/milo otm

yeahhhhh

deej/jhoshea tiresome

More pictures please!

Also, Big Hoos, sometimes it is hard to believe you are real. And yet you are so real that you are more real than...I don't know, peanut butter.

I would have had a crush on your teenage HOOS, but I was at an all girls boarding school, so my crush would have been relegated to a few letters (handwritten) of devotion, trading a few buttons for our jackets, and...maybe a mixtape, after we both had graduated.

I'm pretty sure the only thing that made me really stand out is the huge afro I sported through the latter half of hs. Come to think of it, I was Huey Freeman.

o man i wouldve hated all of u so much in hs

-- jhøshea, Wednesday, June 11, 2008 12:10 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Link

it's okay, we hated you too. Wasn't that the point?

-- El Tomboto, Wednesday, June 11, 2008 1:17 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

just a comment on my extremely judgmental teenage attitude - imagining my reaction to hoos w/a white board slogan necklace is loling me

http://blogs.trb.com/features/family/parenting/blog/smalljbats-thumb.jpg

basically otm, i dont think any of us are saying that reflects positively on us or who we were

i can't really say that i had the same social temperment all throughout highschool -- i shed a huge amount of loser anxiety by the time i reached my senior year -- but even in the most awkward depths of my freshman, my attention seeking behavior was never as ball-out wacky as HOOS'. my style was to read weird esoteric shit or precociously advanced lit all by my lonesome and hope someone would strike notice how unique and deep i was.

by my senior year, i had moved on to coming up with elaborate inside jokes with pals and generally giggling my tits off when we would make them in public.

^ delete 'strike' (was going to type 'strike up a conversation with me')

bottom line: none of us were the quarterback/cheerleader type, the ones who peak in high school.

The idea that the quarterback/cheerleader types peak in high school is a lie to make everyone else feel better. (Of course, the good part is that nobody's comparing anymore, but still.)

also turned into kind of a bully towards my classmates during junior and AP english class discussions:

'well, the meaning is totally, i mean, it's like, open to interpretation'
"NO IT'S NOT."

oh i forgot to mention that during all 4 years i was on the football & wrestling teams :\

actually I have no idea what happened to the quarterbacks and cheerleaders in high school, so you're right.

but this thread, enjoyable as it is, reminded me of how being a teenager is pretty miserable by definition. I had good times in high school, wasn't pathologically depressed or anything but what an awkward phase of life.

yeah I was on the swimming team. we didn't have cheerleaders.

I was pretty involved in sports all my life, though that tapered considerably after middle school.

I remember doing stunts like this:

once a friend of mine borrowed his dad's movie camera and tape recorder and we drove out to the Northgate Mall and walked around "interviewing" people (w/no tape) until security guards intervened and brought us to a windowless office where their boss yelled at us, threatened to call the cops, finally "banning" us from the mall.

i know i posted a couple hs sports pictures somewhere on ilx before, didn't we have a wdyll in high school thread?

Most of my high school experience boiled down to: skateboarding with a deaf kid, fooling around with computer graphics bs, reading comics, trying to make a video game and failing miserably...that deaf freind and I were always up to some kind of barely legal hijinx though I can't remember what ANY of it was. I have all these blurry memories of shooting things in his back yard, small fires, trying to catch squirrels with some pop bottle / bait tied to a string contraption, driving out in the country and pulling the emergency brake for giggles... just a lot of relatively unimaginative small town boredom killing.

in retrospect i cant believe how focused and smart about how i spent my time i was. high school sucked, but i was really just counting down the days as productively as i could have been given the circumstances

partied * made art * wore ridiculous clothes * was an insufferable jerk

i fuckin hated high school. didn't get bullied or anything like that - just your typical teenage angst. i was chubby, and shy and awkward around everyone except my close circle of friends. i thought i was the boringest and least talented and least cool of all my friends. i avoided engaging in any kind of student-life activity. the only memory that stands out is turning up to our fifth form school ball (i was 15) completely stoned off my face (for only the second time) thanks to my big bro. rumours spread like wildfire that night and for the next couple of months: 'omg did you hear about justine yeah i thought she was a nerd but she was WASTED at the ball! yeah total stoner!'

could not have been further from the truth.

I always worried about how unexciting my life was and how I was wasting my youth. I figured by the time I finished college I'd be settled in a career and getting married and out of time for excitement. High school would suck so much less if we knew enough not to worry about stupid shit like that.

The idea that the quarterback/cheerleader types peak in high school is a lie to make everyone else feel better. (Of course, the good part is that nobody's comparing anymore, but still.)

-- Maria,

this is absolutely not true in my experience, unfortunately (note i am in no way the quarterback type but a couple of my good friends were)

going home & seeing old folks is always v v depressing

Some of them are doing very well indeed, if they were clever enough to become lawyers or accountants or IT people but the vast majority were 'join Dad's business, marry classmate after college' B-student types and according to my spies, have not really moved on emotionally from the best years of their lives.

i think the distribution is totally random to be honest.

nerd schadenfreude @ jocks gross

i mean unless you're one of the grown-ups in "friday night lights" (the movie)

I guess I'm not one of those, then, because the B-studes are not miserable in these lives and there is little joy to be had in imagining they are; my friends who were escaped cheerleaders are much more likely to indulge in this kind of thinking due to personal internecine clique shit and discovering that some of these were not especially nice people or did not 'grow out' of such inanities.

In HS I just thought I was living out Pretty In Pink in realtime, except sans affairs with country club boyz as was saving self for 'real life' in a 'real city'. Later I discovered I was assessed in hindsight as ahead-of-curve fashion plate who hooked classmates on New Order; am in fact holding up small Smiths promo poster in class group photo. Fine now, but I caught a lot of grief for my dress and interests at the time.

I always worried about how unexciting my life was and how I was wasting my youth. I figured by the time I finished college I'd be settled in a career and getting married and out of time for excitement. High school would suck so much less if we knew enough not to worry about stupid shit like that.

-- Maria, Wednesday, June 11, 2008 9:27 AM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

new cash sitta

i had an interest in the smiths in high school too but I KEPT MINE HIDDEN

^Respeck knuckles dude but my Smiths interest was OG, had absolutely immobile quiff hair throughout 11th grade, vintage Jaeger silk shirts, golf sweaters, Levis and dogtooth blazers. It was also the era of the old lady brooch as top-button decoration and TONS AND TONS of bracelets made from things people could buy at the hardware store. I still own and wear a few of the shirts.

*which is to say someone had to break that glass ceiling so you could know better!

whatever i had friends who were into the smiths in jr high u not all that suzy

I don't understand what any of that has to do with liking the Smiths in HS.
I thought it was all about "Meat is Murder" and being vaguely suicidal.

i tagged MISM in the jr.high restrooms once. that was some trend setter shit for the 7th graders

yeah basically none of us would have been friends in high school

My high school was so small I don't think any of us geeks would have had much choice.

Like I'm certain not a single person growing up in Windom, MN had heard of the Smiths. Some of those lines of division dissolve a bit there.

Not sure how old the j-ho is so I mean no offense in just saying this was going on in realtime, in MN, as the records were being released.

lol u cant stop braggin

i am 99.99% certain no one else at my high school had heard of the smiths

the lesson to be learned here is that perhaps we were ALL smiths fans

You're so projecting, j-ho. I am actually in despair at being oooooooooooooolllllllllllld.

sorry but no - regardless not trying to give you a hard time - just doin a little zingin

I would have TRIED to be friends with you, TOMBOT.

I shouldn't really contribute to this thread since I went to lol all girls boarding school. So I would have swooned at all the boys, sort of.

lol i never listened to the smiths but i wrote a terribly misinformed concert review for the school paper describing as band as "like the cure might have sounded if they hadn't been on anti-depressants"

I probably would have been friendly with everyone on this thread.

Except for HOOS after reading that description of The Smiths.

like the cure smiths

xp to self

haha that came out all mangled

wrote a review of some local band describing them as "like the smiths might have sounded if they hadn't been on anti-depressants"

i wrote this despite not listening to the smiths until my freshman year of college

Yeah, that would have put you on my list.

I was right though!

lol this girl i was interested in made me recite the entirety of "It's the End of the World As We Know It" as penance for my lackluster REM review

Hoos, you do mean "had they BEEN on anti-depressants." ? I hope?

Although I guess the Smiths on anti-depressants could be like the Cure.

I was right though!

about them being a smiths-ripoff act i mean

aimurchie u correct in yr parsing

the fog of college obscures one-liners from live reviews from 6 years ago

i guess 4 years ago whatever

HOOS you need these:

http://www.americantrails.org/i/tools/shovels.jpg

When find time capsule, you will note a parchment scroll with correct dates of respective band formation. R Smith and Morrissey 'enjoyed' narc of small diff rivalry fondly remembered by Smash Hits readers.

thanking u for tools for the future

yeah the cure are waaaaaaaay more goth/emo/depressive whathaveyou than the smiths ever were

<3 the cure btw but its true

it was just hard to wrap my brain around the Smiths on anti-depressants.
Tens of thousands of listless, vaguely suicidal, droopy fans suddenly jogging and getting jobs or something.

carry on with the lol memories, HOOS!

morrissey was an excellent cross country athlete who held several jobs before launching his smiths career

...and was on 'strange pills' for years as a teen.

xp - True and an author as well!!

I remember reading about the Smiths before I ever heard them and thinking they had to be awesome punk rockers with a name similar to the Ramones and a record named "Meat Is Murder". Then I heard them via the one goth chick in my school and was so fucking pissed off that I pretty much hated any British "college rock" on principle for years.

I love the Smiths now by the way.

WOW! I never knew that!
I just associated the Smiths with listless, vaguely suicidal teenagers in the HS years.

Every day is a lesson on ilx!

I wish Morrissey would take up the XC again.

OK - thread is totally going in wrong direction but I still remember first time I hear The Smiths. I'd gone into the city to see a friend and he'd made me a mix on which one side was all Smiths and the other all Moz solo. I remember sitting on the LIRR and listening to it and being completely blown away. Am pretty sure I ran home to call bff and tell her that I'd found my favorite band ever! I think I was 15. lol.

I love how all of you has turned on BIG HOOS the signboard carrier as soon as he posts a slightly negative review of the Smiths.

We love a HOOS, he just stumbled into a spanking machine run by oooooooollllld people.

i can only hope and pray that he is busily scanning pictures RIGHT NOW!

I remember reading about the Smiths before I ever heard them and thinking they had to be awesome punk rockers...

I thought the same thing about 10,000 Maniacs. With a name like that, they had to be INSANE.

I thought the same thing about punk, sort of. I had such high expectations that it was disappointing to actually hear. But then I discovered metal, which was what I had expected punk to sound like!

sometime in my sophomore year i went from earnest attention-seeker to angry cynic

wish i could turn back the tides of time

i was always angry cynic in school

gets u a lot of cred!

For me metal meant Dokken, Ratt, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, and all the other bands that the burnouts wrote on the desks in study hall or on their jean jackets and I thought it kind of sucked. I read about punk in Thrasher magazine but it was like a year until I heard a new kid's Black Flag tape and it was way more awesome than I imagined it would be.

Difference = Maria was born in like 1985?

Slutsky and I wore matching tuxedoes, top hats and army-surplus gasmasks to our prom. I got so hot in mine I think I had to go home after about a half an hour.

Hey! I did not turn on Big Hoos. Just wanted to get that out there.

That doesn't sound that good if taken out of context. oops.

HOOS is still on my list.

Sorry dude.

my only moment of HS glory was getting the pta president to ask the principal for a 'recall' on all the yearbooks. what can i say, we liked 'slanted and enchanted' and tried to make the whole yearbook look like it. it was called 'the little black book' and the cover was WHITE. the best part was the insert with end-of-the-year quotes in the back. whoever didn't turn one in, which was like 70% of the school, got 'i can think for myself' for their quote, lol.

Slutsky and I wore matching tuxedoes, top hats and army-surplus gasmasks to our prom. I got so hot in mine I think I had to go home after about a half an hour.

-- antexit, Wednesday, June 11, 2008 7:44 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

you forgot the point where i got beat up (well punched in teh head a bunch of times) on the dancefloor!!!!

pix

i wonder if i have any

The guy who wore the funny tuxedo to junior prom brought two dates to senior prom (both friends). As I'd gone with a few dateless friends, I really didn't get why they wanted to be duplicate dates.

We're all just scrambling around, waiting for another Big Hoos reveal.

Everything at lol All Girls Boarding School was scandalous, but I had to keep it as mild as possible since my mother was a faculty member AND a dorm director.
Getting expelled was not an option. kinda sad, I guess. My potential for getting expelled was nipped in the bud!
I did manage to spend most of senior year stoned - while living in my mom's dorm -and as a member of the student leaders/advisory board.

yall my peoples! no apologies necessary!

:D :D

Gotta admit the reservoir is starting to wane (mixed lolaphors) though I was reminded today that I was twenty minutes late to the second half of the AP English Literature exam because I was outside the building dancing in the rain. My friends were like "Wait don't start yet there's someone missing!" and then I came in soaking wet and barefoot and grinning and proceeded to drip on my Tolstoy essay.

haha dancing in the rain k-lassik "free spirit" behavior

I was once ten minutes late to work because I was dancing in the snow on the walk up. The real light and fluffy kind with huge flakes falling everywhere. I think I had Taj Mahal on the headphones.

I hate when "free spirits" look down on people who don't like dancing in the rain! I don't enjoy cold showers with my clothes on particularly, sorry.

What if it's one of those hot summer rains?

^ that it was

It was the end of May in Texas, shit was like 89 degrees.

I think I had Taj Mahal on the headphones.

-- RabiesAngentleman, Thursday, June 12, 2008 1:28 PM

awwwwwwwwwwwesome

I hate when "free spirits" look down on people who don't like dancing in the rain! I don't enjoy cold showers with my clothes on particularly, sorry.

-- Maria, Thursday, June 12, 2008 1:28 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

yeah no one else ever danced w/me, which was no big thing. i was refreshed.

It was a 6:00 am shift, no idea where I had all that energy. Had to be the Taj.

Dancing by yourself kinda rules!

slam daze

http://lh6.ggpht.com/JustinSmith1986/SFHvWGWkklI/AAAAAAAAAEM/asEC74TXeuQ/00002.jpg
http://lh4.ggpht.com/JustinSmith1986/SFHvWAfugZI/AAAAAAAAAEU/wzQGfUQUGlo/00003.jpg

damn you internets

once more w/feeling

http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08245/00002692.jpg
http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08245/00003844.jpg

ok that bottom photo is fantastic

i would like to hear stories about them

the 2000 nat'l poetry slam championship took place in providence, and i had just graduated high school -- i knew several of the members of the providence team and was pretty entrenched in the scene at the time. i volunteered to assist at events, handling venue admission, merch tables, etc.

the result was that i ended up hearing hour after hour after hour of really awful confessional poems, political poems, poems about being abused, raped, discriminated, and victimized, poems about sexy erotic sex or poems that were basically memoirs or stand-up routines passed of as poetry -- the huge majority of which were mediocre at best -- only a few poets were actually interesting, none of whom, i believe, made it to the final event. the worst were the teams that had figured out the formula for the most positive audience reaction and played it out ad nauseam.

really turned me off to the whole idea of slam.

also s@ge fr@nc1s afterparty snorefest amirite

oh god i forgot abt that

but even in the most awkward depths of my freshman, my attention seeking behavior was never as ball-out wacky as HOOS'. my style was to read weird esoteric shit or precociously advanced lit all by my lonesome and hope someone would strike notice how unique and deep i was.

this sounds depressingly familiar...

the result was that i ended up hearing hour after hour after hour of really awful confessional poems, political poems, poems about being abused, raped, discriminated, and victimized, poems about sexy erotic sex or poems that were basically memoirs or stand-up routines passed of as poetry -- the huge majority of which were mediocre at best -- only a few poets were actually interesting, none of whom, i believe, made it to the final event.

Yep. I saw a half dozen poets who really moved me and a whole lot of the Worst of Slam Stereotypes. I came home not really wanting to do it anymore.

We were really pleased with ourselves because one of our major group pieces was (we thought) interesting meta. Basic message was "yeah, we all kinda fit stereotypes" (I was the angry political poet fwiw), "but these slam archetypes wouldn't exist without the genuine sentiment on which they're based: there wouldn't be 3307023587 angry political poets if shit wasn't really, really fucked up etc"

We also had a "Large Singing Black Woman Poet" and "Latin Sex God" and "Angry Black Feminist" in that piece, all 4 of us doing some self-parody. Total lolz in rehearsals.

lol in addition to being "Angry Political Poet" i was also "musician name-dropper poet" making non-sequiter refs to Hendrix and Miles Davis

"a half dozen poets" IS a very good band name.

re: photos

Top photo is me & (self-described) "the entourage gay" Randy. His shirt says "PINCHE SHHHHH," which was the name of our slam's newsletter. I am wearing a mesh trucker hat that says "POET" on it jesus christ hoos what the hell

Bottom photo is me & Anthony Flores doing a piece called "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" about showing gratitude to our progenitors. Anthony talked about his grandparents' lessons in humility and understanding the use of literary mysticism through Blake. Sample line: "I took diction from Whitman/stole rhythms from Miles/and learned verbal friction from Cummings"

It got us to the finals stage cause it was novel choreography and not especially poorly written, if I may say so.

lock thread.

hoos, u are the best for your contributions to this thread

<3 everybody for suffering through all these stories

fwiw in the morning before school i also used to lay on my back in the middle of the school courtyard w/a blindfold on, trying to work my way into a trance by listening to didgeridoo techno

i wore a sharkskin blue suit+tie to school every friday for most of my junior year

I said lock thread because I thought it couldn't possibly keep getting better - so much pressure on the Hoos - but I guess I was VERY WRONG! Digeridoo techno, blindfold, etc.!

There's something about the way you reveal the details that just makes it so easy to mentally conjure an image. That's probably why we're all demanding pics. It's almost better just left to the imagination, tho.

But the pics are also very great. Were you at an Improv for that poetry slam thing?

That was at a comedy club. Our other venue was a rock club, which was cool but weird. I wasn't 21 yet, so they only let me in to perform. I came in, did my 3 minute poem 'Stop for No One (The Mighty Ducks)' about the day I scored a touchdown in gym class in 7th grade (oh my god oh my god please ignore the numerous paragraphs about anarcho-syndicalism and "reading marx from the left" that is so much more embarassing than the fucking trucker hat "solidarity & love" oh my fucking god), and then I had to stand outside the club.

more slam photos, at home @ puro slam! in san anto. possibly my favorite photos of me in existence:

http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08246/haircutpoem870.jpg
http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08246/yearr658.jpg

enter neckbeard:

http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08246/photos025539.jpg
shirt says "pop culture whore"

yep.

surely these two are further evidence for those of you who think i am actually a different guy in every photo

oh yeah three image limit

here's last one again

http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08246/funtimez002596.jpg

whats the story behind the garbage bag

i wish it was some hilarious shit but rly it was raining and i had a persuasive speech to give

some rain was not gonna stop me from using my patented dean scream attention-getter

Hoos Improv =comedy club. The brick wall is sort of a cultural signifier.

I like the transparency of the trash bag - seeing the yellow tie underneath adds layers of meaning.

But I can't even think because those cabinets are making me feel dizzy.

lol 4 billion cabinets

When I was 17 I, completely sincerely, recorded my own audio version of "La Jetee" onto the PC in a cod-French accent... it sounded more like a mixture of American/Jamaican/Russian/Swedish and the disillusioned coldness of the original narration was considerably lost upon playback.

No-one except me has heard it.

ysi

thats a given

big hoos: fuckin with magic in 2008

-- Mr. Que, Monday, June 9, 2008 10:56 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Link

for real

i'm sittin here at work realizing i have an embarassment of riches to fuck around with

producing cards from cookie bags
using our matchbooks for fire tricks at the bar
using room keys for coin matrices

sooooo many opportunities i'm geekin the fuck out

The idea that the quarterback/cheerleader types peak in high school is a lie to make everyone else feel better.

quarterbacks don't peak in high school. offensive linemen might, though.

i was an offensive lineman so ^^^ this is obviously false

Premiership officals to thread.

I'm not getting married, but when I do I'm having the Hoos there with the card tricks - at the old peoples tables!

friend emailed this to me today

blue jeans & white t shirts........................& hawaiian shirts

http://i51.tinypic.com/2wc4750.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/V9bVvTY.jpg

cool guy