I had an interesting fourth of July.
I'm assuming that most of you (if you're anything like me) weren't that cool in high school (or maybe you were, but you went somewhere like Milton, where nobody's cool ;-] Andrew). Like, I had my friends and we had fun, but I certainly wasn't tight with the kids who were dating all the prettiest jailbait and smoking pot at fourteen and all that.
However, my mom has a very good friend who she works with that has four children, each of whom is in among the cool kids of their age and class. They also happen to all be pretty good friends of mine, but in the family friend sense. There is one daughter, she's my age, and she's been one of the cool kids forever. We'd hang out, but there was clearly social stratification involved when we went to school in middle school and everyone knew I was the weird kid taking eighth grade math who owned a graphing calculator at the age of eleven. I was not cool. Still ain't.
Anywho, my family and I went out to celebrate the fourth last night and the kids, parents, everyone got hammered. My mom had about three drinks too many and once used the expression "going down" to describe the relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. I was abhorred. The girl insisted that I come out with her friends afterward instead of going home with my parents, so I did. It was sobering. The kids who once owned Marblehead High School seem to be stuck in the same ruts they were in eight years ago, the last time I really knew any of them. Not only have half of them quit college, they work at burger joints, liquor stores, and still get stoned every night. You never really see this sort of thing at Stanford, and even my friends from home who smoke weed every night still seem to be going somewhere, even if it just might be outside the borders of the town they grew up in.
I suppose we've heard stories like this before from everyone else, but I had to see it myself, and that was my experience. Also it was raining so they cancelled the fireworks.
Let's hear fourth of July stories.
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Well, my Fourth of July story may be ironic given your post... but I got high and watched fireworks. It was quite nice...
As for the rest of the post, I have had the same experience, except its my friends who were doing the smoking and going nowhere. A bunch of them seem to be coming out of that rut now and making something of themselves, finally, but it took a few years. You at least have the luxury of not being emotionally invested in the people you see doing that. It's a lot harder when its people you really care about.
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