Musings on Well...Things in Life

The Schiavo case continues to drive the headlines. Enough that it has completely overshadowed the deaths of ten people at the hands of a crazed teenager on the Red Lake reservation. Do I think that the reason this story isn’t getting the play that Schiavo and Columbine cases is racial, as well as the practical reason that Red Lake is 250 miles from the nearest large city, and is on sovereign Chippewa land, and thus difficult to work in. Still the question of how a Native American teen could latch onto these kind of radically awful beliefs is a story that needs to be covered. While I appreciate the moral positions of both Michael Schiavo as well as Terri’s parents, the question of how to protect ourselves and the most vulnerable youth from the most vile forms of hate mongering need to be discussed too.

By the way, I just saw Billy Graham’s daughter Anne on TV. Wow, it looks as if her face had been basted in its own juices for several hours at about 20 minutes a pound. Seriously, I’ve never seen any kind of color like that on a human being, only on a Thanksgiving dinner table. Not that she’s a bad person, I’m not saying she is, I’m just saying that she has an inhuman pigmentation to her skin. If that was makeup, then somebody really needs to be fired at MSNBC, because I learned that I could look orange under lights in high school.

I was thinking about the conversation that John, Bohne, Kopec, Chelsea Sadler and myself had after Cabaret. We were talking a bit about high school, and how it was difficult to have patience with some people just coming out of high school, because they can sometimes still carry the personality front they had to put up in high school. In thinking about it further, I really have to disagree with some of the stuff that was said last night. I appreciate the fact that for seniors, it can sometimes be frustrating to deal with people who are still putting up the front. But its also true that for some of us, many more than would like to admit it, early in our Freshman year of college, found high school to be the most horrific of experiences because, frankly, as Eddie Izzard puts it so well, this is the ugliest time we’ll ever be in our lives. And yet at no point in our lives are we more concerned with our appearance and in being accepted by the kind of people we might not otherwise want to be with at any point of our lives. For those, like me, who spent high school kind of floating between groups, and not really fitting in with anyone, trying to fit in with that top tier of the beautiful and popular people is what you want. I was tolerated by those people, and frankly, part of me wishes I hadn’t gotten to know some of them as well as I did. And obviously, I know I shouldn’t have spent that much time trying to be like them.

On the other side though, for those people who did everything to not fit in, and to try and shut out all of the pain by being disgusted by it, whether that’s how they really feel or not, its hard to shut that off.

I had it easy when I got to Albion, or at least I thought I did. I was so close to home. I would occasionally talk to my old classmates at their new schools, and I could go home and watch the football games, and then return to Albion. When Homecoming came around and I saw a lot of them again, I kind of began to realize how small they made me feel, not out of trying (though a new book says that one in twenty people is really a sociopath, so maybe some of them really did mean to make me feel like crap). Then I got back to school and realized I was the only one making an effort. And then it hit that I really didn't like high school, in fact, the only thing that kept me from being an emotional wreck was trying to just get through the week, week after week, and so I wasn’t looking at what I was actually feeling more than on a day to day basis. It was then I realized that I really was in a place where I had to change and reveal my true self. Luckily for me, I first had supportive hallmates who were able to transition me into college life, rather than the proto-High School life I had been living at Albion. Then I found theater again and made the greatest friends I will ever make in my life.

Not everyone is as lucky as I was, some people need to keep up their fronts longer, the pain might be too deep, or the cynicism too set in to make the transition a smooth one, and so people sometimes keep up the front. But the greatest part of college is that it almost always forces you to be yourself at some point, and so the shell does get cracked. Maybe we needed to think of that a little more sometimes.