Preface: To anyone unfamiliar with the intimacy, necessity, and benefits of having a best friend, this post will seem both alien and cloyingly sentimental. If you would like to avoid glimpsing into what I can recall, recant, and display of an ongoing awesome friendship, stop reading now. If you are hateful, ignorant, or devoid of understanding, then you probably aren't reading this blog anyway. To everyone else, I don't expect you to understand why I felt the need to write this: only know that I'm hopped up on massive amounts of coffee and I've been contemplating something of this nature since Sean and I left for college.
My first few memories of Sean were of this judgmental looking kid in Eighth grade. No sugar coating to it: we didn't really enjoy each other from the get go. I'm not entirely sure why that was, but considering how our lives intertwined in high-school, I'd wager a guess that we were too alike. Anyone with a younger sibling that encroaches on what they perceive as their unique personality traits can testify to how irritating it is having your identity - your sole "possession" on earth- seemingly replicated with ease.
That being said, we didn't have enough contact in Eighth grade for me to claim that we "hated each other." Being able to say that would make our time-tested friendship seem much cooler, so we'll stick with the initial hatred. The lack of contact was because I was only slightly connected to Sean's group of friends. While I chummed around with Ali Siddiqui, Chris Catino (whose friendship I could dedicate an entire other blog post to), Paul Tosello, and Kyle Harrison, Sean mainly dealt with people like Jacob Williamson, Robert Hassler, Cole Miltenberger, and a few others I can't remember because, as stated before, I wasn't in the pack. Many of these people would go on to make up the majority of my friends in high school, particularly Jacob, Cole, and the like.
Our lives only intersected insofar as our various friends connected. We also both simultaneously adored Mrs. Pulse. I admired her for her sense of humor and the way she exuded a feeling that you could speak freely without worry of censorship. Sean and I both despise censorship, and I suspect that was a major factor in how we felt about our English teacher.
Ninth grade saw the shedding of layers that would lead to a nearly indomitable partnership. We're talking FDR and Churchill here, or Hitler and Goebbels if you're aligned with the Axis. Sean and I sat at the same table for lunch on B-days, and while I could sense some tension at first, the way our senses of humor complemented each other made it inevitable that we would become friends. I'm sincerely glad that what was a chance arrangement of schedules led to this outcome, because (and I'm sure he agrees) our friendship has been a fundamental feature of my life for the past few years and will continue to be.
It was largely through that budding congeniality that Sean convinced me to join Newspaper. That too would be a defining feature of my life, and considering the amount of money SMU paid me to major in Journalism, I don't regret switching 3rd Pre-AP Computer Science for what would become a source of a wealth of inside jokes, friendships, amazing nights, horrible nights, and truly terrible puns (i.e.: The Snitchuation)
I'll be honest, I was terrified of Newspaper. Sean can attest to that, and while it seems ridiculous in hindsight (given that we came to be the mastheads of that class), that anxiety stayed with me throughout every story idea day (yikes). Mingled with my terror was an awe I was quick to hide. I was in awe of the part Sean played in the class as a freshman. He had already written multiple stories, and written them well, while I came in halfway through with no idea of how to use InDesign, how to deal with upperclassmen, or how to get chided for penning a beginner's attempt at a Feature (see: my story on Anonymous and Web Hacktivism).
Sean guided me through that process, though, and I came to get the general feel of writing the type of stories I would continue to churn out month after month (mainly stories consisting of 80 percent bullshit and 20 percent aforementioned terrible puns). Given that I would soon learn how frustrating dealing with beginners is, I'm thankful he was overtly patient. If my memory serves me correctly (although weed played a role in our friendship down the line, my memory typically serves me well), I went to Sean's old house near Ali Siddiqui's and he essentially wrote the story for me. I'm not ashamed to say it: I got Nikki Dahlson'd. It was humbling, but like I said before, I don't regret joining that class. I do, however, regret the number of times I brushed off Newspaper (as in, not doing a single interview until six weeks into my Freshman year of college) while Sean put in hours to build the website and deal with Mrs. Rose.
The crux of our shared classes was, as detailed above, Newspaper, but Sean and I both went through several other decently interesting subjects from Sophomore year onward. Excepting Newspaper, we shared AP Human Geography, AP World History, Pre-AP Spanish III, and Pre-AP Chemistry.
Those four classes tempered the major themes of our friendship and gave us enough face-time to develop tough-knit ties. AP Human Geography was, in collegiate hindsight, a pretty accurate glimpse into a college class. There was a greater amount of dialogue between the students and the domineeringly large, condescending, yet somehow likable teacher. This dialectic nature was aided by the minute nature of the class size (5 students: Sarah Ally, Patrick Graham, Lilly Darwish, Sean, and I) and the unconventional aspect of the course material. We got to negotiate through fields of study hitherto unknown to us, and if I could retake that same class I'm sure I would get much more out of it than my 16 year old self managed to glean (4 on the AP Test, not overly shabby). To keep it real, though, I don't mean to make it sound professional or especially enlightening. We mostly cracked jokes, talked to Patrick, and overwhelmed Ms. Cassetta with our ability to wend any conversation in the tangent of our choosing (Sean was much better at that than I could claim to be). Sean would come late most days, which was odd because he had recently moved close to the school. I don't really need to go into how that worked considering he's the targeted audience of this post (hey dude!) and he knows the mechanics of early morning organization.
That ability to turn a class into a roost of jokes, good vibes, and tangents dominated the three other courses mentioned. In Pre-AP Spanish III, we would alternate between ragging on Mrs. Benitez (Boooooothhhhh) and Matt Robinson. The former because most high-school teachers are deserving objects of ire and the latter because he's both amazingly easy to make fun of and gullible enough to think he's in on the jokes. That being said, Matt didn't choose to be that way, and he was generally nice enough to cancel out the immediate effects of his apparent idiocy. Sean continued to study Spanish in Junior and Senior year, but I stopped because I intended to repair my GPA Junior year and as such I eliminated all clutter. As I'm studying Arabic now, I feel much more suited to the language and am not at loggarheads with the complexities of linguistics like I was towards the end of Sophomore year. My inability to succeed in that class was, however, also due to a bout with depression early on in Sophomore year that put a damper on the entire semester (damp as in I was failing Algebra 2 at one point damp).
AP World History is something that simultaneously deserves page upon page of exposition and requires no narrative (to Sean, at least). He understands the importance of that class, particularly in that it led to our taking AP European History. While we negotiated through chapter after chapter of the amazingly boring Stearns text, I'd like to think we had an overall decent time. Mrs. Prado, specifically, added to the atmosphere. Going in I had this preconceived notion of her as this hierarchical bitch that ruled with an iron fist (I often confuse my teachers with former Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher), but after a few months of her quips and exposure to her teaching style, I appreciated her much more. Again, I got a 4 on the AP Test, which I'll chalk up to either sheer plumb bad nerves, beginner's misfortune, or the previously mentioned "dampness." Another defining feature of that class was Keaton calling the pope the "poop." Let's just peg that Freudian slip on a fecal fetish (it would explain so, so much).
Onto Pre-AP Chemistry: a compound lol-fest, free-for-all, open-mic night, story-telling hour, show-n-tell, and year long free A (excluding the horrid 'Months of Graf'). That was also one of the classes I shared with Maddie, along with Quest a la Ms. Fowler, who we can all agree was an insane piece of work. My relationship with Maddie was above all an amazing experience, and I wouldn't take it back given the option. If there's anything that it can add to this blog post in particular, it's that throughout the period of time when I gave most of my attention, clandestine notes, and texts to her, Sean still kept our friendship alive, while I lost a certain amount of less well-founded friendships. I know my intimacy with Maddie caused tension between her and Sean, but for the record you both disliked each other almost evenly, and considering that there were no hard feelings between you towards the end of high school, I say let that hatchet remain buried.
I imagine the reasons we dug Mrs. Cruze were analogous to the manifold reasons we deeply admired Mrs. Pulse. She - at the cost of certain career positions and (I'm assuming) relationships - was incapable of/discouraged censorship. That quality, in concert with shades of Libertarianism and Capitalism, forms the fulcrum of our shared method of approaching sociopolitical phenomena. It's rare that Sean and I disagree on a topic, which one would think cancels out the possibility of interesting conversations, but we manage (through humor and intense bouts of free-speech).
Newspaper throughout the course of Sophomore year was definitely less nerve-wracking than it had been the latter half of Freshman year. We were still underlings, though, and that always establishes an overarching feeling of inferiority (at least it did for me). It wasn't until Junior Year that I felt like we had the complete run of the class, due in large parts to Sean's momentous position as Editor-In-Chief and the transitional period in which we struggled to strip the essence of a printed periodical and somehow (we never tried Alchemy) transmogrify it into a functional website. I'm not completely self-important (okay I kind of am), but if I had put in more effort/appeared to care about the Newspaper, it might have gone in a different direction and we might not have been at constant odds with the limits of poorly managed technology. There's really no point in wishing for that, though, because at the time I genuinely didn't care about the future of the Newspaper and even found a vague sort of satisfaction in thinking it would crash and burn after we left. I guess I wasn't in tune to how emblematic our own struggles were of the overall ambiance of journalism as a practice. Shit, indeed, is on tremulous foundations in the land of the Fourth Estate.
That I had my first experiences with weed Sophomore year didn't have an appreciable impact on our friendship. If I perceived that inaccurately, than I was either uncharacteristically unobservant or too distracted to properly metabolize the situation. In either case: my apologies.
For now I'll leave off this narrative and continue later with Junior and Senior year.
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