Friday, August 29, 2008
Diary: August 1996.
This month struck me as I climbed out of a dizzy and wonderful summer. This summer I had participated in the restaging of The Seventh Dream at Flint Youth Theatre, attended the Reynold's Young Writers Workshop in Granville, Ohio, came back just in time to see the Smashing Pumpkins in concert with my best friend, got a crush on a girl, took a trig class at Mott college, played Friend Hare in FYT's version of Bambi, and started dating a 16-year old named Lori. And all this was before August.
August got off to a rocky start.
First, I broke up with Lori on my birthday. She attributed this to very selfish and sitcommy motives which I will not connect to a full explication, except to say that while my motives were pure (we had nothing in common), I could not have had worse timing. But what was I supposed to do; we'd only been dating for about two weeks. This led to only the second major argument I'd ever had with Paul since we'd become friends six years before, but we patched things up pretty quickly. Lori seemingly forgave me too, though there was an Act II to follow later that winter.
Second, one day early on in the month, my mom decided to drive out to Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp to pick up my brother and sister and to hear them in concert. On the way I was reading the Hopes and Dreams guide to the University of Chicago. Now I knew that I wanted to go to college in Chicago, but I'd always had a strong pro-Northwestern bias because I'd heard such rave reviews of its theater department. I almost wrote off the U of C at once, because I heard that there were stringent core math requires there, and ever since I'd flunked math twice (for marking periods) in eighth grade, math left kind of an icky taste in my mouth. All this changed when I picked up Hopes and Dreams. The rhetoric was entirely different from anything I'd ever encountered before, and the stress was on the enterprise of learning and critical austerity. It conveyed a hunger that encompassed and went beyond the more straightforward practicalities of almost every other school I considered, and yet it still seemed more grounded in the realities of the world than some of my other choices: Sarah Lawrence and Kalamazoo. I had a nice conversation with my mom about all this, and by the time we got home, late that night, I felt as if I'd made up my mind already.
Third, some of the kids from that play and I spent the end of the summer driving around, playing Capture-the-Flag and drinking slurpees all over the Carmen-Ainsworth school district. It was an odd combination of people, myself, Bree, who had also been home-schooled, Josh the homophobe, another Josh the Überqueer, Demetrius who loved Madonna, Jessica the Republican, Perrico of the baseball bats, and at least a couple other strange and odd characters.
Summer felt more and more perfect the further it progressed.
Where were you in August 1996?
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Diary: In July, 1996.
One of those times I tend to look at historically (as I've also been reading about the Roman Republic and Empire this month):
I was absorbing the changes and developments of the last year, and gearing up for the powerful effects of the year to come.
That is:
I was taking a trigonometry class as Mott Community College so that I'd qualify for Precalculus as a senior that year; it was the second most-advanced class my high school offered.
I was also playing "Friend Hare" in the Flint Youth Theatre production of Bambi, which was a lot of fun. It was a surreal, ephemeral, dark-tinged version of the story, compared to the Disney version that everyone is more familiar with. During this month I'd gotten over my relationship with She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (Swomunoben) and my crush on I-Can't-Tell-You to develop a new crush on a girl named Diana. She lived in Woodcroft, in a massive old house that once belonged to a General Motors CEO. Her parents were lawyers, I think. There were big Doric columns under the porch out front, and the halls were narrow, the ceilings fifteen or so feet high. I went over to visit with Demetrius and Perrico and Josh and the others, and we'd watch TV. Diana was never the slightest bit interested in me, and I was only broken up about it for a week at most. I started to notice a girl named Lori instead. I asked her out and she said "yes," though we only went out for a week. She was jealous of my friend Katie, which was silly, and by the time September rolled around, Lori disliked me enough to key my car.
July was also when I got the Admissions packet from the University of Chicago and read their propaganda book (Dreams and Choices ? – was that it?) while riding up to Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp to visit my brother and sister. The book electrified me – it was the first collegiate sales pitch that defined study as a vocation, and a passionate vocation at that. All of the others had stressed their state-of-the-art facilities (Northwestern), progressive teaching philosophy (Sarah-Lawrence), study abroad (Kalamazoo), and career incentives (University of Michigan). For four years I'd had my heart set on Northwestern, but the book changed my mind in an afternoon. And I think anyone with a brain in their head would agree that the U of C was a better fit.
On the 4th Demetrius and I went to see the fireworks in downtown Flint, but we were almost set on fire when we jumped a fence by the river to take a shortcut through Riverbank park, not noticing that rows of sparklers had been strung up right over our head. I spent a lot of time driving around with Perrico and Demetrius and Josh, a lot of time at Paul's. We went to the mall to buy the Tonight, Tonight single and ran into Swomunoben in the food court. I was so startled that I walked off leaving my at the table Taco Bell. Back at Paul's house, we ate pizza pockets instead. Later that month we got into our first argument in about six years. A week later I went for a ride with Katie (was this the incident that made Lori so jealous?) and told her that I couldn't get over Swomunoben, and that I wished I'd never met her. Katie told me that this was silly, which surprised me. She had a strong dislike for Swomunoben and I thought she'd indulge in my admission. But she said it was the only real romanic event that had ever involved me, and so whatever I thought about the end of the thing, I ought to be grateful for the experience.
I had spent a year preparing and taking notes for Urbantasm, and I started the first draft sometime during the month. I wrote sixty pages, taking John Bridge up through the end of sixth grade.
It didn't seem like such a momentous month at the time, or even recently, but looking back on it now... I have to say...
Where were you in July, 2006?
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