minotaur blues
Jan. 29th, 2014 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanama50 days until the vernal equinox
This was inspired by boredom, this topic on I Love Everything about everything one of the posters remembers from elementary school (which for me includes only The Angry Moon and becoming violently ill from their egg salad), and brutal cold. Told you it wouldn't last.
Lamp's story about the banana peels is awesome, by the way.
I thought of dividing things into Continuity, Context, the Happening World, and Tracking With Closeups, but twitter and facebook feeds and microblogging and those other things John Brunner predicted and even livejournaling didn't exist when I was in middle school. Nay, it was Geocities and chat rooms. And I didn't even have the internet consistently until 1998 or so. I'm pretty sure we had AOL briefly, because I got Exile: Escape from the Pit, and then I got Exile II from MacAddict and tried asking a friend to give me Exile III via floppy disk, which couldn't be done.
So here's everything I remember about middle school. Except for my listening habits, I already brought those up one fine day several years ago, where I sat around listening to the stuff I taped off the radio and writing down some very brief thoughts on those songs and then trying to piece together everything else from Wikipedia entries and posts on ILX. Reception was unreliable at best, you see.
Pt. 1: Minotaur Blues
I tried to draw a map but realized I have no clue how it all went together, even if I more or less remember what every room looked like. The school was divided into the jr and sr high halves, and the cafeteria was part of the sr. high half, but most of the time, the two halves coexisted in a city and the city style separate lives. Originally I wrote that the building was two rectangular corridors, but that's not true; I think the middle school half was just two lines, one atop another, a stairway in the middle of those lines, with the corridor leading to the senior high halfway up and halfway down those stairs.
The cafeteria had a DJ booth but it didn't double as an auditorium. On nice days, we'd get back to class by going outside and walking around the building, even though we weren't supposed to. And even on not so nice days.
There was a hill leading down to one of the athletic fields just beyond the jr. high's parking lot. We spent many a winter day riding down that hill in an inner tube.
There were two computer labs, one had Windows 3.1, and I really don't know the hierarchy of mid 90s Windows machines, one had LC III computers (in 1997, mind you), at the time I had a 132 MHz Power Mac, and to say the school district wasn't poor is a massive understatement. Oh, right, it's a public school. I didn't take art classes in middle school for some reason.
Also, there were two gyms.
I guess they were measuring rooms and measuring the light level and temperature with all this scientific equipment, and then we'd be compiling it into charts. My partner was Amy and somebody thought I had a crush on her because we worker on a project together.
It was a grade-wide project but since I was ahead in math, I missed half of it.
Here are the names of everyone I remember: Arianna, Jari, Steve, Alex, Bob, Ladd, Antoine, Scott, Scott, Nick, Zoë, Amy.
And there was a third girl, I can remember what she looks like but not her name. I think it may have been Aimee or Ilyree or Esselarea but it was probably none of those.
And there was one guy, Scott called him Grease because he used way too much gel in his hair, and I don't know his name.
And later on, there were Jason, Adam, Michael, Justin, Tim.
Good luck abusing that information.
For various reasons I went to a different high school.
Steve had hair like a vulcan, or a mushroom, or that guy from Dumb and Dumber.
Ladd had a habit of saying things like "Shit on a stick!" and stuff. He hid behind the doorway and lunged out at Bob and roared. According to him, Bob jumped five feet in the air. According to me, he jumped about six inches, not high enough to embed his face in the ceiling. Bob's name was actually Robert and he didn't like being called Bob. Later, Ladd drew James Bob as part of a presentation on the three branches of government or something. I know why Ladd was kicked out but I don't feel like I should go into that. Scott was kicked out and I don't know why. Nick moved.
Christian used these weird dadaistic insults like "you chicken nugget!" or "you puppy doggy" and "baloney." and they're all best imagined in a thick Romanian accent. I'm not sure if that's a Romanian thing or just his thing.
and because of that I thought when Homer was singing about his baloney's first name being H O M E R, I thought that baloney was a euphemism. You know.
Zoe I only know because Nick was saying that the kids have weird names.
Nick wanted to put anchovies in the teacher's coffee for april fools, but there was a blizzard that day (I lost power and wasn't able to print out a project for math). He still did it, of course. And once he made up a song about John and Lorraina Bobbitt. It went like this: In the bedroom, the mighty bedroom, John Bobbitt sleeps tonight.
We dissected chicken wings in life science and nick asked if I dissected the Purdue Guy. And then we dissected frogs and I think Steve did the wubbawubbawubbawubba wb song with one of them. And someone else found out a frog's last meal was a crayfish. And they smelled of formaldehyde.
One of the classes I had was in the ass end, in a cramped room that Scott called The Romper Room. It wasn't quite as awesome as having classes in the detention hall in high school.
There was a class trip to Mt. Monanock, and Antoine told me about all the local fauna, which included rock monsters, legged snakes (actually salamanders), and rabid monkeys that escaped from the zoo (actually chipmunks) according to him.
Due to the really crude graphics in Exile II version 1.1 or whatever, Nick thought the game involved a platypus eating a knight guy. He also mistook "arcology" for "college for darth vader." That didn't actually happen in the school, mind you. It's just something I felt like pointing out.
I blocked most of 7th grade out of my head.
Around this time, Princess Diana, Mother Theresa, and Mobitu Sese Seko died. I got punched in the face for pointing this out.
His surname and Mobutu sounded similar, you see.
Pt 2: Sarajevo Melancholy
Here's some context: The Yugoslav Wars were a three way catastrofuck.
By this time, Yugoslavia, not Guatemala, was the flashpoint. Justin saw a photograph in USA Today or something and was wondering just what the green thing was, and said "you've heard of fast food, well, here's flying food" because the photographer captured a loaf of bread at the top of its parabola.
I actually knew someone from Bosnia. That wasn't until later, though. She was class president or something. If you'd pardon the digression, I never really talked to her even if she was friends with someone I had a crush on (please see Lo Rez Moon Lit for the reasons I'm glad that one never amounted to anything, despite everybody and their mothers knowing), I only knew she was from Bosnia because she, four others, and I had our artwork on display at the public library. I don't remember what it was I had on display there. I don't think it was my mixed media homage to Pearl Jam, which was probably my second favorite thing I did in Studio Workshop.
And one guy brought a furby. Jason bounced one of the cafeteria sausages. Jason would refer to himself as The Cheese.
I know I asked this in the Question Club but probably not here. And I'm pretty sure I asked things like "what would you do?"
Burning question: If you found an ocarina on the ground, played it, and your life was suddenly reset to your twelfth birthday, what amenities of the 2010s would you miss the most?
I just thought of my next burning question! Stay tuned!
This was inspired by boredom, this topic on I Love Everything about everything one of the posters remembers from elementary school (which for me includes only The Angry Moon and becoming violently ill from their egg salad), and brutal cold. Told you it wouldn't last.
Lamp's story about the banana peels is awesome, by the way.
I thought of dividing things into Continuity, Context, the Happening World, and Tracking With Closeups, but twitter and facebook feeds and microblogging and those other things John Brunner predicted and even livejournaling didn't exist when I was in middle school. Nay, it was Geocities and chat rooms. And I didn't even have the internet consistently until 1998 or so. I'm pretty sure we had AOL briefly, because I got Exile: Escape from the Pit, and then I got Exile II from MacAddict and tried asking a friend to give me Exile III via floppy disk, which couldn't be done.
So here's everything I remember about middle school. Except for my listening habits, I already brought those up one fine day several years ago, where I sat around listening to the stuff I taped off the radio and writing down some very brief thoughts on those songs and then trying to piece together everything else from Wikipedia entries and posts on ILX. Reception was unreliable at best, you see.
Pt. 1: Minotaur Blues
I tried to draw a map but realized I have no clue how it all went together, even if I more or less remember what every room looked like. The school was divided into the jr and sr high halves, and the cafeteria was part of the sr. high half, but most of the time, the two halves coexisted in a city and the city style separate lives. Originally I wrote that the building was two rectangular corridors, but that's not true; I think the middle school half was just two lines, one atop another, a stairway in the middle of those lines, with the corridor leading to the senior high halfway up and halfway down those stairs.
The cafeteria had a DJ booth but it didn't double as an auditorium. On nice days, we'd get back to class by going outside and walking around the building, even though we weren't supposed to. And even on not so nice days.
There was a hill leading down to one of the athletic fields just beyond the jr. high's parking lot. We spent many a winter day riding down that hill in an inner tube.
There were two computer labs, one had Windows 3.1, and I really don't know the hierarchy of mid 90s Windows machines, one had LC III computers (in 1997, mind you), at the time I had a 132 MHz Power Mac, and to say the school district wasn't poor is a massive understatement. Oh, right, it's a public school. I didn't take art classes in middle school for some reason.
Also, there were two gyms.
I guess they were measuring rooms and measuring the light level and temperature with all this scientific equipment, and then we'd be compiling it into charts. My partner was Amy and somebody thought I had a crush on her because we worker on a project together.
It was a grade-wide project but since I was ahead in math, I missed half of it.
Here are the names of everyone I remember: Arianna, Jari, Steve, Alex, Bob, Ladd, Antoine, Scott, Scott, Nick, Zoë, Amy.
And there was a third girl, I can remember what she looks like but not her name. I think it may have been Aimee or Ilyree or Esselarea but it was probably none of those.
And there was one guy, Scott called him Grease because he used way too much gel in his hair, and I don't know his name.
And later on, there were Jason, Adam, Michael, Justin, Tim.
Good luck abusing that information.
For various reasons I went to a different high school.
Steve had hair like a vulcan, or a mushroom, or that guy from Dumb and Dumber.
Ladd had a habit of saying things like "Shit on a stick!" and stuff. He hid behind the doorway and lunged out at Bob and roared. According to him, Bob jumped five feet in the air. According to me, he jumped about six inches, not high enough to embed his face in the ceiling. Bob's name was actually Robert and he didn't like being called Bob. Later, Ladd drew James Bob as part of a presentation on the three branches of government or something. I know why Ladd was kicked out but I don't feel like I should go into that. Scott was kicked out and I don't know why. Nick moved.
Christian used these weird dadaistic insults like "you chicken nugget!" or "you puppy doggy" and "baloney." and they're all best imagined in a thick Romanian accent. I'm not sure if that's a Romanian thing or just his thing.
and because of that I thought when Homer was singing about his baloney's first name being H O M E R, I thought that baloney was a euphemism. You know.
Zoe I only know because Nick was saying that the kids have weird names.
Nick wanted to put anchovies in the teacher's coffee for april fools, but there was a blizzard that day (I lost power and wasn't able to print out a project for math). He still did it, of course. And once he made up a song about John and Lorraina Bobbitt. It went like this: In the bedroom, the mighty bedroom, John Bobbitt sleeps tonight.
We dissected chicken wings in life science and nick asked if I dissected the Purdue Guy. And then we dissected frogs and I think Steve did the wubbawubbawubbawubba wb song with one of them. And someone else found out a frog's last meal was a crayfish. And they smelled of formaldehyde.
One of the classes I had was in the ass end, in a cramped room that Scott called The Romper Room. It wasn't quite as awesome as having classes in the detention hall in high school.
There was a class trip to Mt. Monanock, and Antoine told me about all the local fauna, which included rock monsters, legged snakes (actually salamanders), and rabid monkeys that escaped from the zoo (actually chipmunks) according to him.
Due to the really crude graphics in Exile II version 1.1 or whatever, Nick thought the game involved a platypus eating a knight guy. He also mistook "arcology" for "college for darth vader." That didn't actually happen in the school, mind you. It's just something I felt like pointing out.
I blocked most of 7th grade out of my head.
Around this time, Princess Diana, Mother Theresa, and Mobitu Sese Seko died. I got punched in the face for pointing this out.
His surname and Mobutu sounded similar, you see.
Pt 2: Sarajevo Melancholy
Here's some context: The Yugoslav Wars were a three way catastrofuck.
By this time, Yugoslavia, not Guatemala, was the flashpoint. Justin saw a photograph in USA Today or something and was wondering just what the green thing was, and said "you've heard of fast food, well, here's flying food" because the photographer captured a loaf of bread at the top of its parabola.
I actually knew someone from Bosnia. That wasn't until later, though. She was class president or something. If you'd pardon the digression, I never really talked to her even if she was friends with someone I had a crush on (please see Lo Rez Moon Lit for the reasons I'm glad that one never amounted to anything, despite everybody and their mothers knowing), I only knew she was from Bosnia because she, four others, and I had our artwork on display at the public library. I don't remember what it was I had on display there. I don't think it was my mixed media homage to Pearl Jam, which was probably my second favorite thing I did in Studio Workshop.
And one guy brought a furby. Jason bounced one of the cafeteria sausages. Jason would refer to himself as The Cheese.
I know I asked this in the Question Club but probably not here. And I'm pretty sure I asked things like "what would you do?"
Burning question: If you found an ocarina on the ground, played it, and your life was suddenly reset to your twelfth birthday, what amenities of the 2010s would you miss the most?
I just thought of my next burning question! Stay tuned!
