dpsobe@cs.wm.edu
It was a good weekend too.. We crashed the Great GrapeJam-A-Thon, and Bill and Madeline showed up when Joanne said no to Eric (Mads was pretty bummed.) Then, Caitlyn and Mia had the chance to Dean Cain, and we all chatted with the Grapes! (Plus, I chatted with Stan Lee on Friday. That was cool.)
In addition, my dorm went online on the Ethernet system on campus. So, just to prove I could do it, I wired my old 286 computer on to the network, and so this piece of junk is it's own node on the Internet.. :) Too cool, huh? I can't get anything graphical to work yet, so I have DOSLynx, NCSA Telnet, and NCSA FTP rigged. It's funny -- it's faster on this machine than my roommate's 486 which has the older 19.2 connections.
Now, being as I was pretty psyched at the reaction to my previous post, I thought I would sit down and say a few things about my high school days. This came up, cause when I was going over to The Bar this week, I was recognized by this freshwoman.
She looked at me, and said... "Are you Dave Sobel? Did you go to Severn School?" I replied yes, since I am Dave Sobel, and I did go to Severn from 8th grade till I graduated. She said that she recognized me from when I was Student Body president.
Yes, I was Student Body President in High School.
So I was thinking about the old days, and my old friends. When I was in high school, I had two distinct groups of friends. One was those people I knew at Severn, but since Severn was small (64 in my graduating class), I had another group of friends at the local public high school.
I have two really good stories from those days about the relationships I had then, and I'm going to tell one of them now. The other I'll tell when I get up the guts to tell you the other really embarrassing thing about me from high school.
The summer after my senior year, I was struggling to balance these two distinct groups of friends. So, I gave up, and integrated the two. It was a struggle at first, but it eventually worked. We could all hang out together, and surprisingly, they all got along great.
Well, we all went off to college, and things went well at first. Over Christmas, we all got together, and then at the beginning of summer, we went back to the beach at Ocean City, MD. That was the beginning of disaster.
When we were in high school, we used to go dancing every weekend. I loved it... And I would designate drive for everyone since I didn't drink, and I so enjoyed going that I didn't mind.
At beach week, however, no one wanted to go dancing anymore. They just wanted to play drinking games and stuff, and I just got bored. I told them I wasn't happy with it, but they insisted it was just that it was beach week, nothing more.
Well, the summer continued like that. And I just ended up spending less and less time with them, and started going dancing by myself. I had a lot of fun, but we all started drifting apart.
One of my friends was at University of Delaware. She was dating this guy who I got along with really well. She had met him in college, so I was a little surprised that we were able to click as well as we did, but I wasn't going to argue with it.
We all went back to school, and over Christmas break that year, she ended up breaking up with him. He tried to keep the friendship going, and so I decided that I didn't mind that, and I did too.
She met a new guy, and started dating him the next semester. The first guy and I still E-Mailed every so often, and it ended up that I didn't like the new boyfriend.
The old boyfriend started playing her off her friends as a kind of revenge, and I'll admit that I fell into the trap as well. We ended up resolving it, and I didn't talk to him anymore.
I still didn't like her new boyfriend. And we started getting into fights about it, and she accused me of siding against her always. It was a long and drawn out E-Mail fight, and she ended up telling me to stay out of her life.
We stopped talking that summer.
Unfortunately, it put a lot of strain on the friendship group, and since I was starting to pull away naturally, i just didn't fight it.
They all still hang out a lot when they're all home. I keep up with one or two of them, but for the most part...
I don't see them but once or twice a year.
-- DJDave
P.S. Wanna hear why I didn't drink next, or the other story from high school?
dpsobe@cs.wm.edu
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