Year 16

Signs that I'm aging: I'm wandering around the house repeating, "Don't forget to take the Cippro. Don't forget to take the Cippro." Yep. Life only gets better.

Eleventh grade. These school years get a tad too complex for this simple blog idea as they always span a two-year period in terms of age. Ergo; despite the fact that it says sixteen, I was also seventeen this year. Though, I'll always remember my sweet sixteen more anyhow. The candles, the cake, the blush, the eye liner. Getting together will all of my best gf's and laughing all night long.
Brief memory of my fourteenth birthday. I'll pretend like that memory has been expunged to protect the dignity of the blog. Laughter duly noted. The best thing about being 16/17 is getting to take the SAT. And then going around asking people what they got on their SAT, and zealously guarding your score or mentioning it to people casually in order to impress them. I scored an 1160. Is that low? Yes. Yes it is. As it turns out when I was a youngster roughly 1/2 of the test was math. Who needs math? Eggheads that's who. So Einstein and Edison and whoever else loves math can all go have some weirdo math party while the rest of us cook kids smoke cigarettes and write essays about how we're going to make money. Don't worry. I've let it go.

Since I've graduated from high school standardized testing has changed. Its been determined that the SAT is not only a great indicator for college performance but can also be applied to other facets of your life like dating and fixing cars and renting beach houses and pretty much anything you can think of that might make you a competent human being. Though, of course, if I wasn't so terrifically awful at math, and I was rolling a 1350 or up I'd retract all of what I said above and praise the test minus the sarcasm. Such is life. We like the things we like and then we come up with reasons to justify why we like or dislike them and everyone else be damned. It's the American way!

Off the top of your head you remember nothing from your junior year of high school. Is that they year you had Chemistry? Oh wait, you remember taking your last true math class and the triangles and obtuse angles pretty much driving you up the wall. Is that year a good one? Is it good to be caught in between high school and college? Were you content? You really don't remember. Perhaps because you were so solidly in that place, not dreaming of somewhere else. Being that age is like paddling offshore towards a distant island, discovering that it was much further away then you thought at the half-way point but finding a way to enjoy it anyway.

It's strange because I remember people kept asking me about college, and I'd come up with something resembling an answer that sounded moderately coherent. Little did I know that that is much of what adult life is comprised of. Sort of related quote from Mad Men that struck me as perfect: (At the conclusion of the work meeting)

Boss: Well. I'm glad everyone could make it sound like they are so busy. (The quote is gist rather than verbatim obviously as it would be a bit pithier). Anyhow, that's kind of what being that old amounts to. People start to ask you real adult questions and you have to start and formulate real adult answers. And for a while you're just making stuff up, pulling from previous things you've heard older people say until you've developed a spiel. You could practically sell someone on the idea of how much you've considered the various positives and negatives of each of the colleges you're considering. When really, what you've considered primarily, is the quality of local fast food restaurants and the relative "merits" of the good-looking girls in school. On these things you are an authority, but no one but your friends ever think to ask you about them. Thus, you begin to value peer friendships over familial ones.

The above is patently untrue as what I remember very clearly about that year was taking walks with my mom around the neighborhood at night and talking to her about all the things I was thinking. I mean, really talking. Not in the bs way you sometimes do with friends, not all that code switching, but like the real questions that start to trouble you. What of my place in the universe? If she does x does that mean she likes me? What does like mean anyway? How can you feel two very strong feelings simultaneously? If I feel like I want do something very strongly but don't, can I then say that I really wanted to do it? Wouldn't I have in fact done it? And so on...

You remember sitting on a bench and talking to a girl, wanting to ask her to a dance. But for some reason you could never get the words to come out. You kept saying other things, dancing around the idea. Tomorrow will be the day, you'd say. And tomorrow never was.

Negatives-Not being able to speak up.

Positives-690 verbal. And this is pre-essay portion of the SAT, which I would have destroyed. I'm retroactively giving myself like a 2000 or whatever a good score is on the new system.

Negatives-Having to learn to answer adult questions.

Positives-(see above).

Conversation
S to her sister on the phone: If you decide to read the blog it's best to do it in order. The part that's the most fun is looking at the pictures that he's posted.
M: (internally) I'm glad to know my blog entries are that entertaining. Maybe I should just turn it into a series of pictures w/o context.

It's occurred to me that this whole project is a bit vexed. The closer I get to my actual age the less I seem to remember. It's hard to look back and believe that I was the baby on the bed in the first picture. However, it's also hard to look back at the 16 year old without thinking to myself, "Oh, he knows nothing." I don't really mean it pejoratively though. I mean that that version of me really knows nothing of what is to come. I can't imagine knowing that I'd be in Washington D.C. after pursuing an MFA in creative writing when I was 29. It's damn near impossible to imagine. I want to say, "Oh the places you will go!" And oh, the places you will never go.

Elegy for a silk tree (Cont.)
. Childhood, in a way, has been about belief, not just Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but fairy tales, frogs and princesses and animals that can talk. You are almost certain that if you snuck out in the dead of the night, bare foot to stay quiet, and crept across the wet grass and molding leaves to the rabbit hutch, if you put your face up to the hutch and peered in, at the brown and white rabbit huddled on a mound of his own green pebbled feces, that if you can wait long enough, say, “I understand that you are alone,” that he will say some small thing back to you that will confirm that all of these things are true. That life, in a way, is about belief. For a long time, as far back as you can remember, you’ve known that a spirit lives in the silk tree that is in your side yard. You are aware that not all trees have spirits. You’ve seen the blank branches of live oaks in the park, the stoic limbs arcing in the air. But this is your tree. You do not know where you came upon this idea. Rather, the fact that the tree is an unbounded entity has always been a part of your thoughts. Though, when your head is pressed to the pillow, and the long etiolated fingers are tapping against the window, it occurs to you that it something that perhaps your brother might have told you, in the dark, a whispered thing, perhaps a thing that he once believed himself. In the existence of things