Our love is God, let’s go get a Slushie

One of the only worthwhile things at my godforsaken undergrad institution was Chapel at Six, every Monday night. To this day it remains the model for what I look for in a church experience. They also ran a “service learning” program with the motto “College IS the real world – it’s just not the WHOLE world.” They were the only people there with any sense of perspective. But I digress…what if that’s overshooting the mark? What if in fact, high school is the real world? And it’s not the whole world – but the whole world IS high school?

Think about it. What is modern America – the politics, the culture, the attitude – but the nerds vs the jocks writ large? The punk kids versus the rednecks? The art and band nerds against the bitch gang in the girls’ bathroom? Everything unbelievably superficial, nothing but scorn for sincerity, and the real problems of life completely overlooked? And here’s the thing – high school comes with a built in time limit. Survive through the end of the 12th grade and roll out. But if real life has become high school, when do we get to graduate?

I think sometimes that maybe I really do need profound psychological help. It would explain a lot – like my profound distaste for contemporary high school movies, my abiding love for Heathers, my tendency to still identify with the just-slightly-weird-enough kids, my obsessive interest in gifted education for somebody who doesn’t even have children…The fact that I can still see the patterns of the old days two decades on may be proof of advanced psychosis…or maybe I’m just brilliant. But if I’m so bloody brilliant, why can’t I find a way to get the hell out of school?

(Or at least stop thinking so fondly of Heathers? You sure couldn’t get that film made today…)