Lost Weekend

When I entered the blogosphere this morning and read my favorite blogstresses' weekend recaps, I was caused to think how semi lame-o was my weekend compared to some of the drama and glamour of others'. But then I thought what an improvement my weekend was compared to, say, ten years ago. Ten years ago, I was seventeen. Seventeen was the most bipolar year of my life.

Ten years ago, it was Halloween-ish time in Bay Village, OH (and around the rest of the globe, way to note that, myopic Kendra). It was the first semester of senior year. Here are the classes I remember that I was taking:

Pre-Calculus (algorithms), AP World Lit (Tolstoy, Hamlet, more Hamlet), AP U.S. History (ah, colonialism), Conscience (Catholic schools make sure you have one before they graduate you) Physics (I never understood one single lab that we did the entire year), and probably an elective like Drawing and Painting.

Friday night, ten years ago, I worked at Dairy Queen, and on my way to work, I heard the faint trumpets of the public school band ramping up for the football game.

When I arrived home from work, there would be no phone messages from friends, because all three of my high school friends knew that I worked at Dairy Queen and studied all weekend and never returned phone messages anyway.

Saturday morning, I went to take my SAT practice exam so that I could raise my score 200 points and get into Northwestern, which, as a firstborn '80s Me-Firster, was an opportunity I fully believed myself entitled. I brought home the results of my practice test and showed them to my mother and she praised my verbal scores and reminded me that I just needed to bring up my math score and I'd be good. And then I reminded her that I was working as hard as I could and why did she have to be so hard on me, and then she asked me rhetorically why I had to be such a bitch and walked away and I went and told my father what a wicked witch my mother was.

Sunday, I went to church by myself and asked God to help me to control my eating. I waited for my mother to pick me up from church and smelled the smoky, leafy smell of Bay Village, OH in the fall. I went home and ate nothing all day until the hunger pains plagued me around 4pm when I went downstairs to our basement where the computer was and scowled at my sister for having the audacity to be on the computer when I needed it. For dinner, my mother made us a soup and homemade bread and I scowled at her for handing me the butter for my bread. By 10pm, I had popped my Tori Amos cassette tape into my walkman and cried silent tears until midnight when I finally fell asleep, wondering if, even after the SATs were over, my weekends would ever get any better.