My Mediocracy - On love, life and high school
Uploaded by Escada on Feb 27, 2002
I was sitting laughing. This was my graduation, but I was not giggling for any reason like the friends I would miss or the remembrance of good times past, I was just laughing my ass off. People had been telling their children about this occasion for years, they described it as a huge thing, “the turning of a page”, they said or “the birth of your adult life.” Bullshit, I thought. Those people had forgotten that for their class and every class since theirs it was just another reason to get drunk. I was about halfway from the back, in the middle of my row. At this time in my life, a time of supposed celebration, I felt, overwhelmingly, like a mediocrity. A feeling I was not accustomed to. This is what was so funny. What a sarcastically wonderful time to realize I was normal.
A girl in my honors history class was making her speech. She had sat two seats behind me for two years and always seemed to smell like bananas. Although I had never talked to her, I always wondered if she just liked bananas a lot or if she worked in the produce department at our local farmers market. I wouldn’t know if she worked there, because I didn’t shop for groceries. I only noticed this because in 8th grade our Biology teacher taught us how to put on a condom on using a banana. I still can’t eat a bananas without the feeling that I was giving head to every person in the room. She kept speaking and I kept trying, unsuccessfully, to concentrate on her naive advice. Campaign reform. Exiled Tibetans. Illegeracy. Aliteracy. And Ramon. My mind kept slipping away to more important subjects. Banana girl had no idea what problems she would face in her life. None of us did.
I could see my friend Ramon from my seat; he was a couple rows up. Smiling his huge smile, he was so happy to finally be there. He had been through a lot. Even with his injury, he moved like liquid, a natural athlete. I had met him my freshman year. Like all good friends, he noticed right away what was special about me, not only did he love my flaws but he created some also. He told me one day “I don’t buy designer socks, I buy white socks at K-Mart and have...