Category: Meme

Posted on

[high school meme]

Here’s a high school meme, grabbed from miriamjoyce:

1. Who was your best friend?

That shifted over the years. My two closest friends during high school were Ashley and Lorie, whom I met my sophomore year, but Lorie and I had a serious relationship and then a devastating breakup at the start of my junior year, and Ashley moved to Connecticut around the end of my junior year. So freshman year, I guess it would’ve been Katie Wiley, though we were never that close; she loved Tesla more than anything in the world then. And senior year would’ve been Josh Poretsky, saxophone sensation and all-around sexy brooding ex-junkie.

2. What sports did you play?

Didn’t.

3. What kind of car did you drive?

I had my dad’s old Toyota Corona 4-door sedan, painted black (poorly) and given red racing stripes by Earl Scheib, until New Year’s Day 1992. I had been to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I think, and had just dropped off Teresa Laddish. What killed that car was the requisite 12-point turn I had to do to get out of Teresa’s narrow driveway. I had a steering-fluid-pump leak that sprayed hot goo all over my car’s electrical system whenever I turned sharply, and that night, as I rolled down the hill back towards the main road, I saw smoke and then flames coming out of the hood of my car. I watched it burn from the gas station across the street. At one point a cop car came by and failed to put out the fire with their little extinguisher. Eventually the fire department came and finished the job. The car was totaled, but my tapes survived.

After that, my parents got me a little red Toyota Tercel hatchback that would rattle and shiver whenever it got much beyond 75 miles per hour. I would lose it in parking lots because it looked exactly like every other little red hatchback.

4. It’s Friday night, where were you?

That was a fraught question. I was often at shul and then at home for Shabbos dinner, but often I didn’t want to be. I would cut out some nights after shul, some nights after dinner, some nights before the whole Jewish shebang. If I was elsewhere, it was hanging out with friends: at Ash’s house with Lorie and Robert and Heather, or at a concert, or at the pool hall (which we thought it was funny to call the “poo ha”) with Josh Poretsky, or heading into San Anselmo with Amber Renwick.

5. Were you a party animal?

No. I went to hardly any actual parties.

6. Were you considered a flirt?

I was considered a flirt and a perv.

7. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir?

I was in jazz band my senior year, playing guitar ineptly. We went to the Santa Cruz Jazz Festival and sucked ass.

8. Were you a nerd?

Yeah, although I was always one of the semi-cool alternanerds. The whole nerd thing was a little vague considering how few people had any intellectual ambition whatsoever. There was sort of a crowd of folks who took honors English and spoke in sentences and liked to think about things, and I guess we were nerds.

9. Did you get suspended/expelled?

Nope.

10. Can you sing the fight song?

We probably had a roll-over-and-die song. Our football team won one game during my entire time in high school, during my senior year; before that, their big claim to glory was the time they managed a lead over Marin Catholic at halftime. Anyway, I attended one school sporting event ever, a basketball game where Josh Poretsky was required to play sax in the band, and that was for the purposes of picking him up and leaving.

11. Who was your favorite teacher?

Mr. Skinner, my senior honors English teacher. He respected our minds enough to be a demanding bastard, and he introduced us to lots of very cool literature: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Waiting for Godot, The Bald Soprano. My Orthodox Jewish prejudices annoyed him enough that he encouraged me to read Spinoza. He was a stickler for grammar and taught it well.

12. What was your school’s full name?

Terra Linda High School.

13. School mascot?

The Trojans. *snicker*

14. Did you go to Prom?

My senior year, I had basically none of my real friends at my school, and no girlfriend, and then they decided to have the prom on a boat, and I get ferociously seasick. So no.

15. If you could go back and do it over, would you?

I used to have this recurring nightmare that even though I was a Columbia graduate and no one was questioning my degree, I’ve discovered that I was a point shy of graduating properly from TL, so I’ve gone back to take one last class, and now I can’t pass it. The last time I had this dream was back in 2001, during the last and best period of my employment at DoubleClick. It suddenly dawned on me in the dream that I would have to decide, come Monday, whether to go to high school or to my job. So I asked my then-boss, Karen Delfau, what I should do. “Come to work,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. I’ve never had the nightmare again.

16. What do you remember most about graduation?

Malika Ghazvani went tumbling into the gap between the stairs and the wall, then climbed out and shouted, “I’m fine! I’m okay!” And Mr. Skinner noted the irony of celebrating our individualism by dressing us all alike.

17. Where were you on senior skip day?

We didn’t really have one. Anyway, I was 18 in my senior year and could therefore sign my own notes. I used to waltz into the office with a note saying, “Please excuse Joshua Ross for all absences in the previous month,” with my signature underneath. I got a fair amount of leeway considering I mostly cut class to work on the school newspaper.

18. Did you have a job your senior year?

Nope.

19. Where did you go most often for lunch during high school?

Before I could drive, I had lunch out on the benches, then eventually moved to the upper hallway overlooking the benches, where I ate with the other semi-nerds. Once I had a car, I went to the mall most days and had a Chinese combo plate. During my depressive junior year, when I had few friends at school, I would take my lunch and drive up to a high hill and park, sitting in my car and listening to Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger a lot.

20. Have you gained weight since then?

Lots.

21. What did you do after graduation?

I temped at Lawrence Berkeley Labs that summer, and then went off to Columbia.

22. When did you graduate?

1993.

23. Who was your Junior prom date?

There was a junior prom?

24. Are you going to your 10 year reunion?

I was just back in the US and unemployed at the time, and that made too lousy a story, so I skipped it.

25. Who was your home room teacher?

We didn’t have home rooms.

Posted on

[false memories]

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don’t speak often, please post a comment with a completely made up and fictional memory of you and me. It can be anything you want — good or bad — but it has to be fake. When you’re finished, if you would like you can post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people don’t remember about you.

I picked this up from T and thought I’d post it here, even though no one ever responds to my memes. Please, post a lil sumpin sumpin.

Posted on

[ten odd things about me]

It seems almost unfair to limit it to ten, but here we go (meme from T):

1. I have a sort of sub-Tourette neurological tickiness that lodges words in my head and creates an uncomfortable, distracting pressure to blurt them (which I sometimes do within a nonsense sentence, to make it seem less weird). Those who’ve known me a long time can probably recite a list of the most frequently recurring words. This is worse when I’m tense, as during my last couple of months at STV, when a little ditty with the lyric “So hard to give a shit / So hard to give a shit” (in an Eastern European accent) ran constantly through my head all day at work.

2. When I was younger, it surprised me to learn that not everyone wanted to be a writer and make books.

3. I’m obsessed with Central Asia.

4. I don’t own any Legos because I’m afraid if I did, I’d never do anything else.

5. I get my hair cut by people with stripper names.

6. When I was a kid, I always wore out the left knees on all my pants; later, I had surgery on that knee for a torn meniscus. Coincidence? Who knows?

7. I harbor a fantasy that my maternal grandmother is decended from Romanian Gypsies.

8. Sweet mixed drinks make me queasy, but I’m fine if I have a glass of juice and shot of liquor separately.

9. When I eat cold cheese, especially cream cheese, on something warm and bready, my face feels flushed and sweaty, but it doesn’t change appearance.

10. Though I grew up in Marin, I’ve never been to Alcatraz or walked the Golden Gate Bridge.

Posted on

[musical friends meme]

So I picked this up from my cousin Louise over at her blog: What music do I link with my various friends and acquaintances? Metallica reminds Louise of me because she knew me back in my middle school days, when I was convinced that Metallica was the greatest band in the world. (I was a serious true believer.)

So I’ll start with Louise, and work through other friends to see what I come up with.

Louise: Schoolhouse Rock. I’m just a little too young to have caught Schoolhouse Rock as a kid, so I was introduced to it by Louise.

Jenny: This is a tough one — we’ve spent so long together now that a lot of music reminds me of her — but after her semester in Salamanca during college, she came home with a CD that she played, slightly apologetically, of a Latin pop star she’d really come to like: Shakira.

Daniel: Daniel and I were music buddies for a long time, and he was instrumental in shaping my current tastes, so as with Jenny, it’s kind of meaningless to pin it down to one particular artist. But of all the artists I didn’t like until Daniel taught me to hear them, probably my favorite today is Talking Heads.

T: We also shared a lot of music during our long relationship, but two artists in particular stand out: Yukari Fresh, a treasure she found in Japan (and whose music is woefully underappreciated in America), and Solas, the Celtic band good enough to get me to go with Thekla to the town of Doolin in County Clare, Ireland, and while away the evening in a pub, sipping Bulmer’s cider and listening to very, very good Irish musicians. (It was a brave sacrifice.) I also think of Thekla in association with Erin McKeown, whom we first saw at the Postcrypt coffee house on the Columbia campus (where I met Thekla) when Erin was just a 19-year-old bundle of hippie wool tumbling in from Brown University to blow our minds at an open stage night, and Noe Venable, who went to high school with T.

Lori: This is the Eskimo one, who I dated back in college, and she’s the one who convinced me that I should really give Everclear a try (the band, not the beverage). Their album Sparkle and Fade is the only good thing they ever did, but it’s a lyrically rich, underrated gem from the mid-nineties era of post-punk, post-grunge hard rock that would’ve been working-class except nobody had a job. (Did we really elect a second Bush?)

Berit: The lyrics of Everclear’s “Santa Monica” are a good summary of how I felt about my relationship with Berit as it collapsed over the summer when I met Lori. But the musician who brings Berit most strongly to mind is, of course, PJ Harvey, whose power to make Berit squirm with erotic delight was something I could never match.

Lorie: This is the non-Eskimo Lorie, the one I’m still friends with (and really need to call). Back in high school, when we first dated, I spent a lot of time lying in her room, inhaling second-hand cigarette smoke and staring up at her magazine photos of Mike Patton’s torso (which was very nice in those days). Lorie and Ashley were rabid fans of Mr. Bungle, Patton’s first band (Ash even had the side of her head shaved, just like Mike), and also fans of Faith No More, whose “Epic” video is a classic document of the late-eighties thrash-funk moment, when dressing like Arsenio Hall while rapping over heavy metal briefly seemed like a great idea. (Trivia: Though FNM T-shirts insisted that “THE FISH LIVES!”, the fish in fact died. And the answer to the question “What is it?” was widely agreed to be “Losing your virginity.”)

Ashley: Ashley was also a music buddy for many years, so there’s a ton of music I associate with her, especially all those obscure Bay Area bands we used to go see: Bluchunks, Fungo Mungo, the Limbomaniacs, the Deli Creeps, MCM and the Monster, Dizzybam. But it was later, after I’d come to New York for college and Ashley had moved to Norwalk, Connecticut, that we would spend weekends in her odd little attic apartment above a flower shop on a windswept highway intersection, drowning our loneliness with Rolling Rocks, excessive flirtation and hours of listening to Soundgarden (What is it with Ashley and fish-abuse videos?) and Morphine.

Lauren: Bhangra, yo!

My father: Stan Getz. Lester Young. Oscar Peterson. Miles Davis. Slim Gaillard. Lord Buckley. Crosby Stills & Nash. Sly and the Family Stone, who he and my mom used to see live at the Electric Circus.

My mother: All of that, plus Ray Charles, who played at the first rock concert she ever went to.

My sister: Little Mermaid. Sorry, Shana. I know you’re older now — heck, I’m going to your college graduation this spring — but you did watch your Little Mermaid video about 10,000 times.

Did I miss anything obvious? I don’t think so — at least not involving anyone I still know. Enjoy the music.