What I was like in highschool

It was the early 90's when I first stepped onto the high school bus for the very first time wearing the school uniform policy white ankle socks while I noticed other girls were already breaking the rules and donning white slouch socks instead.

The next day I wore my slouch socks and didn't get away with it.

I wasn't part of the in crowd that all played a variety of sports and hung out on Saturdays at their brothers rugby games, I blame that entirely on not having a brother....

I did however come from a family home where my parents were house parents to 5 or so way-ward teen boys at a time. That was awesome. Not.
Surprisingly none of them were part of the sporty in crowd either, they were more the type that wore Iron Maiden t-shirts under the school policy jacket even when it was 30 degrees and carried a white sheet of paper around in their pocket to be signed in and out of class everyday.

I spent my teen years floating among groups that were somewhere in the middle of these.

I entered highschool somewhat disillusioned as to what I hoped to accomplish. The years prior I had read up on Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume religiously, watched every single episode to date of 90210 and was ready to take on everything the glamour of popularity had to offer me.

Unfortunately in my experience (maybe blame my small town?) the class bitch didn't look half as hot or make a group of gorgeous fun friends like Kelly Taylor did on the show.

It wasn't until I was about 23 that I realised I did it all wrong back then. It finally dawned on me that to make lots of friends with great people it works in my favour to just be really friendly and nice! Amazing revelation there.

So I guess you could say I was a slow learner.

Academically I wasn't interested and I was lazy. I did well in English and Art because I tried in those areas, everything else bored me senseless.

 The subject that I dreaded though had to be P.E, mostly because I hated getting changed in the dead of winter into awful little green shorts and yellow t shirts. When we had elective sports on a Wednesday afternoon I took debating and theatre sports, (before I got my own car and just went home) no change of clothes needed, and I was actually pretty good at them. I won a $12 cheque for a speech I gave on Violence in the Media to a group of old fellows at the Rotary club one time.

front row on the right is me 13

I had started high school as a hardcore Drama nut ready as ever to be cast lead in the school annual production, I did one show, in the chorus, and never went back for more.

As I got to 15ish I had friends in the cooler side of the middle scale (I had it all ranked out, trust me) and we discovered parties and stealing parents alcohol and how to hold your best friends hair back to vomit. We spent our pocket money on 10's cigarettes and lots of air freshener and stain remover.

This was the year I also developed a slight wee crush on my art teacher. He was a middle age bald guy that most kids hated. But I thought he was awesome. I think it was because he was the first person to really look at me (and not at all in a creepy way) and say "Hey you've got talent, and you can do this if you pull finger and work at it".

I didn't get into a lot of trouble at Highschool, yet I was in no way a goody-good either. Basically I think most of my teachers just gave up on me and stopped hounding me for homework pretty early on. I did break a boys arm, but was never caught. I foot tripped him during peer support training in a game involving trust of all things. Terrible I KNOW!

My interests during  high school revolved largely around the pop culture. Labelled clothing, bags, shoes, labelled anything and everything were  HUGE.
 My school bag was a ridiculous Country Road tote style bag that all my friends had too and wore around our backs, boys loved to come up behind us and flick it's contents all over the ground.

Lip balm was big. Body shop brand it had to be, apricot, strawberry and kiwifruit were the favourites.
I had the "right" shoes that were made in a one off shop in Christchurch that made leather shoes especially to fit your feet and had swear word names for the soles to choose from.

The first "pop alcoholic" drinks came out. The coolest one was called Vault which had a metal tab on the packaging rumoured to double the alcohol content if placed inside your drink (it didn't of course). But even though it tasted like rancid wine it was cool to put these tabs on your shoes. Yes indeedy.

I listened to the Top 40 and video recorded my favourite clips in the first few years, then I discovered alternate rock and the grunge era had me scouring op shops for old Men's cardis and going to parties with FUDGE in my hair. I became an art room groupie and had any time access to the art room and dark room which made me feel a bit speesh.

Yeah I had it so mixed up.
I had all the right things, for some pathetic reason I liked to pretend my parents were well off even though we absolutely we not back then, but my personality and attitude was so poor.
I was pretty won over by all things teen media related which in hindsight really was not a good thing for me. I collected Girlfriend and Dolly magazines for years which filled my mind with such S@#*! and really gave me an obscured concept of what/who I was meant to be.

So I pretty much wouldn't want to do it again thanks. And trust me, YOU wouldn't want me to do it again either.
Thankfully I changed.
A lot.

Today I'm linking up with Mama Kat's pretty much world famous writing workshop

you should totally check her out she is hilarious!