Ah, high school! Those were the days! Oh wait, I didn’t go to high school. Whatever. They were still the days. Whatever “the days” really means.

And they really weren’t “the days,” anyway. Who says that about adolescent years? A lot of people, actually.

They were “the days,” if that’s meant to imply that the days were awkward and weird. Because that’s what they were. But only in retrospect.

I’ve seen a lot of photos of my two older sister’s high school days. Whenever I see one I think “wow, I’m glad I wasn’t that awkward.” But then I realize I was. Probably more so, since I was the home schooled kid. Perception plays a big part of awkwardness and telling someone you are ‘home schooled’ makes that perception, whatever this perception is, bigger. The words ‘home schooled’ generally evokes images of anti-social, geeky people learning how to bake bread.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning how to bake bread. I would have loved doing that. Baking bread smells amazing.

It’s usually delicious, too. Especially with homemade raspberry jam (that you learned how to make while in home school!).

Anyway, eventually you look back on your life and realize everyone was awkward, everyone was geeky. 10 years from now we’ll look back and think we were all sorts of awkward. This means two things: we’re all hopelessly awkward, or we’re not at all. I vote not at all because that means we can all just move on and not worry about what we look like.

So, I’m the guy in the back left of the photo. I don’t remember my date’s name. I remember having a hard time with her name that day, too. It’s weird. I can’t remember her name, yet I see people I saw once 15 years ago I know who they are and what they do. Okay, maybe not to that extreme, but still. My name-remembering ability seems to be mere random coincidence. So if I call you George when your name is, in fact, Sally; I’m sorry. I apologize now.