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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Eighteen - The Running of the Red Rams



18 til I die - gonna be 18 til I die
Ya it sure feels good to be alive
Someday I'll be 18 goin' on 55!

      - Bryan Adams

I can't believe that my teen years are almost over!

Well, okay, they aren't really.  I haven't been a teenager in quite a number of years now.  Though sometimes I feel as though I have the energy of a teenager.  And the sarcastic and acerbic wit that teenagers seem to possess 24/7.

But in this month long retrospective of tales from the crypt (a.k.a. my 10,000,000 GB memory that I call my brain), the teen years are almost a wrap.



Today is the day that I tell you the story from when I legally became an adult.  Age eighteen.  And despite the fact that I contracted pneumonia that year - in the summer, no less! - eighteen ended up being a great year. 

Oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.  Let's back up this train for a bit before we derail somewhere around the Y2K portion of the year.

So, would you like to see a picture of me back then?  It's quite...hideous.



Okay, yearbook committee.  What the hell did I do to you for you to choose this monstrosity as my final yearbook picture?  This was my worst shot!  Oh, and keep an eye on my little blurb there.  Yes, my nickname was "Turkey" (which I hated), yes, I did mention the locker fires (which I did on purpose to leave a blemish on my "perfect" high school - bwahahahaha!!!), and one of the pop culture references will make more sense as you take a look at the hottest music, movies, and television shows for 1999!

(And, no, it's not RollerJam.  I am ashamed to admit that I actually watched it back in the day...)



#1 SONG THE WEEK OF 5/18/1999
"Livin' La Vida Loca" - RICKY MARTIN

Certainly 1999 was a year in which Latino music thrived.  Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, Enrique Iglesias, and Carlos Santana all had hits during this year.  But I would say that the true leader of the Latino wave was Ricky Martin, whose self-titled English debut topped the charts that year.  Talk about shaking your bon bon to success!



#1 AT THE BOX OFFICE THE WEEK OF 5/18/1999
"The Mummy"

Which fell off the top pretty quickly once "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace hit the box office!



#1 TELEVISION SHOW OF THE 1999/2000 SEASON
"Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"

This one shocked me!  I have to tell you.  The show only aired a handful of episodes during the whole year, and it still was the most watched program of the year!  Then again, I did mention the show in my graduation blurb.  And I did try to become a contestant on the Canadian version.  Alas, no luck.  I do find it ironic that our Canadian version was hosted by Pamela Wallin, who allegedly stole millions from Canadian taxpayers!



So, I have entitled this piece "The Running of The Red Rams".  And it's symbolic.  You know how in Spain, they have the Running of the Bulls?  Where you have a bunch of wild bulls running through city streets and you had to try everything to escape from them or face serious injury?  Well, our school mascot was the Red Ram...and as far as I was concerned, I felt like I was participating in a "Running of the Bulls" event my whole high school career...only with high school students.

But by the time I turned eighteen, I came to a conclusion.  I knew that I was never going to be friends with most of the people in my high school, so I simply stopped trying.  I stopped stressing out over trying to dress the right way, act the right way, pretending to be somebody that I wasn't.  Really, who needs that aggravation?  Ultimately, all that it did was cause me a lot of depression.  Depression that peaked...or is it ebbed...anyway, it came to a head right smack dab in the middle of my 16th year.  And I swore to myself that I would never allow myself to let people make me feel that way again.



My eighteenth year coincided with my OAC year of high school - which I suppose you could consider Grade 13.  Ontario did away with the Grade 13 year in the early 2000s.  But either way, the year signaled the end of high school.  And while I was nineteen when I graduated high school, most of the good stuff happened when I was still eighteen.

And what do I classify good stuff?

Well, right around my eighteenth birthday, I had finally found what I had been looking for my entire high school career.  I had found a group of friends who I felt comfortable to be myself around.  Now, David (who I told you about last entry) was a part of that group, and he had befriended another boy named Clement.  I didn't meet Clement until the beginning of my OAC year, but after David introduced us, we became friends almost instantly.  And at the same time, I met someone in my sociology class named Erik (not the same Eric who was on our Montreal scavenger hunt team), and we worked on quite a few assignments together and became friends.  I introduced Erik to David and Clement, and I think from that moment on, the four of us became extremely close. 

I never really had a group of friends that I had bonded with so closely before that, and you know...I don't know if I ever told any of them this, but they were the main reason why OAC year was so much fun.  They kind of gave me the courage to try new things, to live life, and to not be afraid to be myself.  I don't even know how I can repay those guys for their kindness, so that's why I made a special mention here in this blog so that there will always be a permanent reminder of the sincere friendship they gave me.

Now, that's not to say that David, Clement, and Erik were my only friends in high school (even though in a way, they were).  I also want to take the time to thank a few other people who were there for me during that last year of high school.

I want to start by mentioning a trio of Grade 12 girls who sat with me in sociology class during the first part of the semester.  Even though they only sat down at my table because it was the only one available at the time, they got to know me and I got to know them, and they liked me for me, and I liked them for them.  So, Dana, Melissa, and Wendy, thanks for sitting at my table.  And thanks for signing my yearbook too! 

I also want to throw a thank you to a girl named Laurel, who I met in my American History class.  She was such a sweetheart, and she eventually started hanging around David, Clement, Erik, and I.  She was in Grade 12, so I don't know what happened to her after graduation, but wherever you are, I hope that you're happy.

And, Eileen, you've been my friend since sixth grade, and you were still my friend when we graduated high school.  Believe me, your friendship was very much appreciated.  Remember when we had a little reunion dinner at that restaurant with Clement five or six years ago?  We need to do that again sometime!

While I'm thinking of it, I'll also show some gratitude towards Cary-Lynn, Becky, and Leah, who always seemed to work with me on school projects, and treated me kindly while we worked!

There were also a few people in my class who while we never really hung out together after school, they at least treated me with some respect.  I can't say I can remember all of your names, but I do remember your faces.  Believe me, I know who was kind to me and who wasn't. 

And, let's just say that when it came down to those who weren't, or who ignored me simply because I wasn't good enough...well, I don't really have anything to say to you because...well, I don't know you.  We had five years together at that school, and not once in those five years did any of you make an effort to get to know me even though I tried to get to know you.  But I suppose that life is like that sometimes.  You can't be friends with everybody.  Though, I wish that I could have gone through high school without feeling like such an outcast.

But then again, looking at it through their perspectives, maybe their lives weren't as perfect and carefree as I believed them to be.  Maybe they were going through issues that I never really knew.  Perhaps they were latchkey children who never had parents around to take interest in them.  Maybe they had to deal with a bitter divorce with custody battles and it made them angry.

And, maybe some of them were genuine jerks and got happiness through other people's pain.  But either way, by the time I got to my last year of high school, I was actually quite relieved that I would never have to see any of them ever again.  It was finally over.

I never had to see the four boys who made my life miserable in elementary school and followed me to high school.  Though, I will say that of the four boys, one of them and I patched things up during our last year of high school, and we left school on a good note.  Two of the four boys simply backed off and ignored me when they found their own group of friends.  The fourth one - the ringleader of the group - never really changed.  He was rotten from the inside out.  I hope that I never see him again.  He was trouble.

"Cory" and "Will" also reached out to me and apologized for their part in the bullying of me in eleventh grade, and well...I forgave them.  And at least when it came to "Will", he seemed genuinely sincere about it.  I wanted to say the same for "Cory", but he purposely kept the fact that "Sparks" had torched my stuff a secret for three years, and after that, I decided I couldn't trust him any longer.  I haven't seen those three since graduation, and honestly, I am fine with that.

But the ultimate epitaph of OAC and year eighteen?  I said goodbye to the meek and timid me, and embraced a more confident version.  Believe me, during the first four years of high school, I became less and less open with people to the point that I basically stopped living life and I became a soulless person who just took up space.  But befriending a group of people like David, Clement, Erik, Laurel, Dana, Melissa, Wendy, Eileen, and a couple of others...that gave me the courage to take back my life and cram the four years of fun that I should have had in high school into the final year.

I sang karaoke at the grad dinner.  I crawled through garbage and popped water balloons with my butt at Grad Goodbye Day 2000.  I put on an insanely creative independent study project in my English class (which David, Erik, and Clement helped me with), and I even had the courage to get up on stage and get hypnotized in front of the whole school.  The sixteen year old me would have NEVER done that.



I suppose that the only regret that I had about high school was the fact that I wish that I had the courage to be myself a lot earlier than my final year of high school.  But I wasn't exactly in the right frame of mind to be able to do that.  At my lowest point, Grade 11 (age 16) was the year in which I felt completely alone and isolated from everyone.  I trusted nobody, and I spent most of my time hiding in my bedroom as that was the place where I felt the safest.  How could anyone find the effort to change their lives when everyone in the world seemed to either be against them or chose not to care?

Fortunately, David, Erik, Clement, and all the others who were there for me during my last year of school...they made me see that the world wasn't as bad a place as I believed it to be.  They helped me come out of my shell a little bit more.  And they showed me what true friendship was during my teenage years.

I'll never forget that.  And that's what I will remember most about being eighteen.  I didn't care what they thought of me.  Instead I focused more on the people who I cared about.  That made the difference.  And because of that, I survived the Running of the Red Rams in one piece.


And as we look at the final year of my teen years, I'll tell you why nineteen was one of the greatest years of my whole life - well, so far anyway.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Year Seventeen - Perdu à Montréal

Well, after a brief break from the retrospective part of anniversary month, we are back with another story from another year.

And fortunately, today's year was a hell of a lot happier than the previous one.

Yeah, sixteen wasn't quite so sweet.  In fact, it was one Sour Patch Kid shy of being a completely bitter experience.  But thankfully, the experience, as horrible as it was, didn't leave me with bitterness at all.  I suppose that in a way I'm strangely glad I went through it.  It allowed me to be more cautious with people, and it made me realize that I didn't have to rely on toxic friendships just for the sake of having friendships in the first place.

Sixteen was a real soul searching year for me, and I remember spending lots of nights thinking about what happened to me while watching David Letterman on late night television - I still can't believe that tonight is his last show ever!  My, how time flies. 



But here we are at the edge of seventeen - a much better year indeed!

Seriously!  Seventeen was a year in which I completely stopped trying to impress people and just focused on those who I knew would have my back.  Let's face it - I had walked the same hallways that they had walked in for three years and they wanted nothing to do with me.  Why bother, right?

But don't you think that this was a defeatist attitude.  Far from it.  And, I'll explain what I mean in today's tale from the teen years.

First things first, a picture of my big, bad 17-year-old self.



Now, this photo came from my yearbook, and I have to say that I really liked the layout of our class photos that year.  Instead of having our photos in the traditional rows, they were placed in little Polaroid picture frames with our names written on the bottom of them.  Props to the yearbook staff who actually spelled my last name correctly!  You wouldn't believe how it's been butchered over the years.

And, what was happening in pop culture the week I turned 17?  Have a look!



#1 SONG THE WEEK OF 5/18/1998
"Too Close" - NEXT

Aside from their 2000 single "Wifey", does anyone else know what other songs they had out?  I'm stumped.  But after a quick search on Google, they apparently released a new single on iTunes in late 2014.  I should check it out.



#1 AT THE BOX OFFICE THE WEEK OF 5/18/1998
"Deep Impact"

There were two films about space junk potentially destroying the entire world as we know it - "Armageddon" and this one.  Unfortunately, I liked "Armageddon" better. 



#1 TELEVISION SHOW FOR THE 1998/1999 SEASON
"ER"

Well, after a brief hiatus, "ER" comes back to being the #1 show of the year.  In this season, Kellie Martin ("Life Goes On") joins the cast and George Clooney takes his final bow as a main cast member, choosing to focus on a big screen career.  I don't think that decision hurt his career all that much.

So, what happened at seventeen?  Well, I became an uncle for a third time!  See, both my sisters were expecting the same year.  One nephew was born in May, and the other was born in August.  My family was becoming bigger, and that was always exciting to see - even though birthdays and Christmases were beginning to leave me broke all the time.  And my ceiling in my bedroom was patched up.

But I think the most defining moment of my seventeenth year was the time that I went on a field trip, got lost in the city, and held the bus that brought us there up for nearly an hour behind schedule! 



Hey, the way I saw it, we did the rest of the class a favour.  They had a whole extra hour to see the sights of Montreal, Quebec!  Sure, the teachers didn't see it that way, but I still maintain that getting lost in Montreal was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.

Especially since I was sharing the experience with a couple of friends.

It was the tail end of eleventh grade - the year in high school that I gladly would have skipped if I had the chance to.  And approximately three weeks after I turned seventeen (which would make the date sometime between June 8-12, 1998), our French class was scheduled to take a class trip to Montreal to test our knowledge of the language and to experience some of the sights and culture of the city.  The trip was for students enrolled in the Grade 10 and Grade 11 classes (for some reason, my school never offered French in twelfth grade), which meant that three classes of students would be going on the trip.



Now, as part of the trip, we had to embark on a scavenger hunt throughout Old Montreal, where we had to answer questions based on historical landmarks and shops in the area (for instance, the question would be something like "Which church did Celine Dion get married in?", and we would have to write down our answers - in French, of course.  The team that answered the most questions correctly won a prize.

Now, had French been a part of my schedule for first semester, I would have had a really difficult time finding a team.  With all that was going on, I didn't trust anybody, and I avoided group assignments like the plague because of it.  It probably caused me to get dismal grades (my marks in Grade 11 were really poor due to all the stress that I was under), but let's face it.  My goal at that time was to survive high school no matter how badly I did in it.

But in second semester, I befriended a guy who had become a new student in September of 1997.  His name was David, and for some reason, we never shared any classes at all first semester!  But then again, I wasn't really paying attention to anyone in any of my classes, as again - trust issues.

But David was different.  He knew nothing about what I had gone through over those three years.  He was impartial.  And even if he heard some of the stories about me, he really didn't care.  All that he knew was that we got along great, and I think that by the time the Montreal trip came around, he had become one of my closest friends. 

(It actually makes me sad that I've lost touch with David since high school.  Wherever he is, I hope that he's doing well.)

Anyway, David and I shared English and French together, and he easily agreed to be on my scavenger hunt team.  To be honest, I wouldn't have chosen anybody else but David to be on my team.  With the exception of a couple of kids in the class, the majority of the students in my class were people who either never bothered with me, or who were completely against me.

(Remember the story I told you about "Cory", "Sparks" and "Will" in the Year 16 retrospective?  One of them was in my French class that semester.  Enough said.)

But our teachers insisted that all the scavenger hunt teams had to have at least four students.  Though that actually ended up being a good thing, as no rule was set that we had to pair up with kids from our own class.  As it so happened, one of the kids in the Grade 10 class was John, one of my roomies from the Toronto trip that I went on for eighth grade graduation, and he and his friend (I think his name was Eric) became the final two pieces of our team of quatre

So, we took a highway coach to Montreal on a four-hour trip, and it was probably a good thing that we had tinted windows because we pulled up in front of a bench where two people were making out with each other.  In the middle of Old Montreal.  In broad daylight.  I think some kids even took a picture!

Once we got off the bus though, the scavenger hunt was on.  We had two hours to go around Old Montreal, taking our sheets of paper and pens to find as many things as possible.  And from what we could tell, most of the teams gathered around the same areas and traveled in a huge blob - my guess is that they were all working together to try and win the prize.  But our group of four went off in the opposite direction, and we opted to take our time to see the sights and answer the questions slowly.  



And right until we found the church that Celine Dion tied the knot, all four of us stuck together.

But then somehow David and I got separated from John and Eric, and they went one direction and we went the other.  And somehow, David and I got completely lost in the middle of the streets of Montreal.

And we absolutely LOVED it!

Seriously, this was the opportunity that we both had waited for.  We had made the plan to ditch the rest of the class at the first chance we got and see Montreal our own way.  And David and I did exactly that.  Besides, we figured that John and Eric were doing their own thing as well (which they later confirmed was true), so we took full advantage.

We went into the various souvenir shops, trying our best to speak French and getting really nasty looks from the shopkeepers (believe me, in Old Montreal, they judge you for even using one word of English - at least that's how it was back in 1998, anyway).  Despite this, I brought home a set of pencils, a cat puzzle for my niece, and a stuffed turtle for my nephew (the other nephew hadn't been born yet).  We took a trip down every side alley in a half-assed attempt to complete the scavenger hunt, but really we only wanted to take in the ambience of the city and couldn't have cared less about the scavenger hunt.  And, admittedly, we spent the better part of twenty minutes hiding out inside of a Harvey's restaurant because we got caught in a torrential downpour during our adventure.  And I imagine that this rainstorm must have happened towards the end of our Montreal adventures because when I checked my watch, we were a good 30 minutes past the time we were supposed to meet up with the rest of the class to continue our tour of Montreal!

We both raced towards the highway coach where John and Eric had been waiting for us - along with sixty-six other cranky and angry students and teachers.  Our French teacher flat out told us that they were just about ready to call the police to look for us!  I don't know whether she was serious or not, but one thing was for sure...David and I were the last ones to arrive - with only a third of the answers completed on the scavenger hunt!

On top of all that, on our way to New Montreal, we got in traffic on our way, and it took us another half hour to get to our next destination (a shopping plaza).  So, essentially, David and I held up our bus for an hour if you take into account the crazy Montreal traffic.

Here's the thing.  It's not as if our failure to get to the bus on time destroyed our trip.  We still got to see everything that was planned on the trip.  We just got back home an hour later than we should have.  Besides, even though David and I ended up lost in Montreal, we still had a great time and made the best of it.  To this day, Montreal remains my favourite memory of high school.

The funny part?  David, John, Eric, and I ended up winning a prize anyway - for coming in DEAD LAST in the scavenger hunt.  



I didn't care though.  I ate every single one of those Smarties that day with pride!

So, that was year seventeen.  Coming up next - year eighteen - and in that year, I once again do some shout-outs as my high school career approached its final stages.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

May 19, 1996

It's time for the third scheduled break in the retrospective that I've had going on all month long.  It's another regularly scheduled Tuesday Timeline entry, and the only clue that I will give you is this...



Think you've figured it out yet?  Well, we'll get to that in a second.  In the meantime, today is the nineteenth of May, and I found that a lot of things happened on this date in history.  Have a look!

1499 - A marriage by proxy takes place when 13-year-old Catherine of Aragon marries the twelve-year-old Prince of Wales, Arthur

1536 - Anne Boleyn is beheaded for adultery, incest, and treason

1568 - Queen Elizabeth I orders the arrest of Mary, Queen of Scots

1743 - The centigrade temperature scale is developed by Jean-Pierre Christin

1780 - At 10:30 in the morning, heavy cloud cover and thick smoke causes complete darkness to fall over New England and Eastern Canada

1911 - Parks Canada is established as the Dominion Parks Branch under the Department of the Interior

1925 - American activist Malcolm X (d. 1965) is born in Omaha, Nebraska

1941 - Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron (d. 2012) is born in New York City

1951 - Singer-songwriter Joey Ramone (d. 2001) is born in Forest Hills, Queens, New York

1962 - Marilyn Monroe sings "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in New York

1963 - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is published in the New York Post Sunday Magazine

1984 - Michael Larsen appears on the game show "Press Your Luck", where he won over $110,000 in cash and prizes, thanks to his memorization of the light patterns on the game board

1986 - The Firearms Owners Protection Act is signed by President Ronald Reagan

1998 - Four months after his death, Sonny Bono is awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, along with his former wife, Cher.

2001 - Jazz singer Susannah McCorkle dies at the age of 55

I hope you're ready for a long list of celebrity birthdays too, because it seems as though a lot of them are celebrating May 19 birthdays today!  Happy birthday to David Hartman, James Fox, Bobby Burgess, Tania Mallet, Peter Mayhew, Pete Townshend, Grace Jones, Dusty Hill, Archie Manning, Jimmy Thackery, Victoria Wood, Phil Rudd, Steven Ford, Bill Laimbeer, Gregory Poirier, Sean Whalen, Maile Flanagan, Jodi Picoult, Polly Walker, Kyle Eastwood, Jason Gray-Stanford, Jenny Berggren, Dario Franchitti, Kim Zolciak, Jessica Fox, Eric Lloyd, and Sam Smith.

So, as I explained in the last couple of Tuesday Timeline entries, my idea was to have all the Tuesday Timelines in May and the first part of June fall between 1981 and 2015 - as those are the only years that I've been alive.



And, we're going to be going back in time one day after my fifteenth birthday.  The date?  May 19, 1996.

Now, you probably might have figured out that based on the "General Hospital" credits that I posted up above, you're thinking that the Tuesday Timeline is linked to that show.  And, certainly it is.  The show's been on the air for fifty-two years, was the show that had the number one watched wedding in television history, and it's also one of the few soap operas to film an episode completely live (as the show recently did for the May 15 and May 18, 2015 episodes). 

But, May 19 isn't the actual anniversary date for the show.  The show actually debuted on April Fools Day, 1963.  But May 19, 1996 was a very sad day for cast members who were on "General Hospital" at the time, as they had to bid a permanent farewell to one of the show's original characters, as well as the actor who played him.

Here.  I'll show you an updated version of the "General Hospital" credits - these ones aired between 1993 and 2004.



Now, I want to draw your attention to the very first cast portrait shown, as well as the scenes which show a doctor bringing a patient into the emergency room.  That man was John Beradino, who for thirty-three years played the role of Dr. Steve Hardy.



Dr. Hardy was one of the show's original characters, and during his time on "General Hospital" he saved countless lives on the program and experienced the same things that other standard soap opera characters did including romance, betrayal, secrets, and scandal.  He wasn't the longest serving character on "General Hospital" - his 33 year record has since been broken by Jackie Zeman, Leslie Charleson, and Rachel Ames.  However, during his tenure, he was nominated for three Daytime Emmy Awards, and appeared in approximately 4,300 of the show's episodes.  And, he was also one of the few soap actors to earn himself a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, receiving the honour in 1993.

But to simply dismiss John Beradino as a daytime soap star would only be scratching the surface.  And while he eventually carved out a permanent place in "General Hospital" history, he did much more than that.

Giovanni Beradino was born in Los Angeles, California on May 1, 1917, and graduated from Belmont High School.  And, one thing that Beradino was very interested in from an early age was sports.

In particular, baseball.

You see, John Beradino didn't start off as an actor.  He began his career as a baseball player.  Don't believe me?  Have a look at this!



I'm not exactly sure when this photo was taken (and yes, his name was spelled incorrectly - and reportedly was for several years!), but if this isn't proof of Beradino's baseball past, I'm not sure what is.  And to Beradino's credit, his baseball career lasted quite a long time.  Aside from a three year break between 1942-1945 (Beradino served in the United States Naval Reserve during World War II), he played as a major league baseball player between 1939 and 1952, and played shortstop and second base for such teams as the St. Louis Browns, the Cleveland Indians, and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

TRIVIA:  Believe it or not, Beradino was part of a team that won the World Series.  He was a part of the Cleveland Indians when they emerged the victors in 1948.  Now that would have been such a tale to tell!

Now, it was right around the time that the Indians won the World Series that Beradino began to take an interest in acting.  And he did appear in a couple of bit parts in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  But it wouldn't be until he had suffered an injury on the baseball field that he made the decision to act full time, as Pittsburgh had released him from their roster because of the injury.

Now, if you watch the films "Suddenly" and "North by Northwest" very closely, you might be able to spot Beradino.  He had cameo roles in both movies.  He also made guest appearances in various television shows and dozens of B-movies, but nothing really made him stand out.



At least, not until he landed the role of a lifetime.  Dr. Steve Hardy.

And, I imagine that during his time on the show, he made an impact, not just with his co-workers and crew members of "General Hospital", but with the fans who watched "General Hospital" every weekday afternoon.  And, well...sometimes videos say it best.  Here's the tribute that an awards show gave him the same year he passed away.


Monday, May 18, 2015

Unsweetened Sixteen

So, here we are at the point in the childhood flashbacks that I was dreading.  And when you consider that this post is timed perfectly with my actual birthday, I kind of cringed.  After all, birthdays are supposed to be happy occasions, and yet here we are at the year that I very much consider to be my rock bottom year.

I admit that I was quite conflicted even writing an entry about it at all and I even considered skipping it altogether and go ahead with the 17th year instead.

But then I thought to myself...no.  As painful as the memories associated with my sixteenth year were, and as horrible a time as I had, the story needs to be told.  It needs to be told because of two reasons.  One, because it proved just how strong I was back in those days, even if I didn't quite see it that way at the time.  And two, because if my story can inspire other people to stand up for themselves and not remain silent when things happen to them that they don't like, then I consider reliving these experiences a good thing.

So, here we go.



Tra la-la-la-la la-la-la-la
Happy birthday, sweet sixteen
     - Neil Sedaka



Only mine wasn't quite so sweet.  My sixteenth year was pretty miserable, actually.  And, I'll explain one of the main reasons why this was the case in a moment.

In the meantime, let's see what was happening in the world of pop culture around this time.  Oh, and, yes, I have a snapshot for you all to look at.



Yes, one new addition to my face was the fact that I needed to wear prescription lenses.  I tried contact lenses, but hated them.  And since I can't afford laser eye surgery, I still have my glasses today.  But somehow, I made them work.



#1 SONG THE WEEK OF 5/18/1997
"Hypnotize" - THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G.

This was definitely one of his biggest hits - as well as one of his last.  He was actually killed two months before this single hit the top of the charts.  It's actually not a bad song, to be honest. 



#1 AT THE BOX OFFICE THE WEEK OF 5/18/1997
"The Fifth Element"

Absolutely loved this movie when I first saw it, and it still remains a favourite today.  I even had to do a project on this movie for one of my film studies classes.  Talk about a homework assignment worth doing!



#1 TELEVISION SHOW OF THE 1997/1998 SEASON
"Seinfeld"

Makes sense.  This was the show's final season, so a lot of people tuned in to bid it farewell.  Although, the show's finale still causes arguments among fans today.

Finally, I should also add that while sixteen was a really horrible year for me, it wasn't completely bad.  My second sister got married in October 1997, and my first nephew was born just a few days before my seventeenth birthday.  If anything, those memories are the only fond ones that I have of my sixteenth year.

Other than that, it completely sucked.



Let's see...there was the massive event known as Ice Storm '98 that gave us several consecutive days of ice rain which lead to transformers blowing and power lines snapping, which lead to a blackout that lasted several days.  Certainly not a natural disaster that I want to relive, let us put it that way.

And there was the time in which we had some really nasty rainstorms that summer, and the ceiling in my bedroom actually caved in on me.  The only consolation was that none of my possessions were damaged, but it was still annoying to have a quarter of my bedroom completely unusable for several months.

But those things pale in comparison to what I had to endure in school - things that no other sixteen-year-old should ever have to go through.

I could forgive the fact that I had my belongings torched in my locker.  I could forgive the fact that there was a smear campaign launched against me.  And, well...I could even forgive the nasty note that was sent to me telling me that the school would be better if I killed myself which actually lead to me seriously considering exactly that.

Thank goodness that I never went that far with it.  Otherwise, I wouldn't be here typing this out.  But that's how broken I was when I was in the eleventh grade.

I had absolutely zero friends to lean on in eleventh grade.  Zero.  Oh, sure, I had acquaintances, but I didn't trust them enough to confide in them too much.  Even the friends that I had during that time had their own lives and I felt it best that I didn't interfere with them.  Truth be told, I had a lot of trust issues that year.  I didn't trust in others to be there for me, and I didn't even really trust myself a whole lot during my sixteenth year.  I pushed everyone away, including members of my own family because I didn't think that I deserved to have anybody on my side.

You see...if all of these incidents had happened completely at random, it still would have been inexcusable, don't get me wrong.  But at the very least, it would not have hurt me so much.

What really hurt was that all of these actions - the locker fires, the smear campaign, and the nasty e-mail - were all done by the same people.  And one of those people I considered to be a really good friend.

Now, for the sake of argument, I'll use fake names in this piece, to preserve their identities.  After all, I'm not the "eye for an eye" type, and really, this happened eighteen years ago.  No sense in trying to seek justification for outing them now.

I first met "Cory" in our ninth grade computer class.  He seemed quiet, but he seemed nice enough for me to sit near him for the whole semester.  We became friends by the end of the year, and when some of the kids in the school picked on me, I was stunned to see that he actually comforted me, and stood up for me.  I didn't really have a whole lot of that growing up.  Usually, kids just turned around and looked the other way, or they joined in to avoid being outcast.  "Cory" was different though, or so I thought.  And "Cory" soon introduced me to a couple of his other friends named "Will" and "Sparks", and I admit that I was friendly to them, though I didn't get as close to them as I had with "Cory".  "Will" had a locker fairly close to me during the first year of school, so I spoke to him quite a bit, and in ninth grade music class, "Sparks" was seated fairly close to where I was sitting, so I got to know him as well.  I remember "Sparks" being very quiet.  Never really spoke a word unless he was directly spoken to. 

But, that was ninth grade.  In eleventh grade, I noticed that something had changed.  Something that didn't make sense.

It was right around the time that the first locker fire took place (there were three separate instances altogether which also included vandalism).  I noticed that "Cory" wasn't exactly the supportive friend that I had known from two years ago.  To be honest, I thought he kind of acted nonchalantly to the fact that my locker had been torched.  I mean, I was freaking out about it.  Not only because the fire caused me personal and emotional damage, but because the fire could have burned down the whole school, possibly putting lives at risk.  He couldn't have been bothered by the whole thing, and instead he spent his free time hanging around "Sparks" and "Will". 

At that moment, I should have clued in to what was going on, but by that point, the second and third fires took place, and there were posters being circulated in the cafeteria that were spreading lies about me.  And, by that time, I really didn't care to know anybody who was a student at that school.  I had even considered dropping out of school to take my high school equivalency test instead, just to get away from that toxic environment, but I knew that my family would have never allowed that to happen. 

I think they probably would have let me do whatever it took to make sure that I did get an education without being bullied, but since I never really told them the impact of how much I was hurting from it, they never really knew how bad it had gotten.  They suspected something was up, but never pressed further because I refused to talk.  They just chalked it up to sixteen-year-old moodiness.

By the time that I had gotten the e-mail message, I had enough of it, and I begged the school administrators to do something about it, but unsurprisingly they really didn't do anything to help me.

No, it actually took the efforts of two wonderful teachers to help expose the ugliness of the bullying against me in eleventh grade - and Mr. McDonald and Mr. Pearson, you have no idea how much you really helped me out, so thank you, thank you, thank you!

It was Mr. Pearson who caught the poster maker in the act in the school cafeteria, and Mr. McDonald who managed to use his computer genius to trace the origin of the e-mail address that sent the nasty message to my student e-mail account.  And what they found really shook me to the core.

The posters were being distributed by "Will", the guy whose locker was close to mine.  And, it was he who I initially suspected was behind the locker fires as well, as he had really close proximity to mine.  I ended up being wrong in that accusation, but that will come later.

But what really hurt the most was that the person who sent me the e-mail was "Cory".  "Cory", the one friend that I made in grade nine computers who actually defended me against some of the nasty kids in the school.  It was "Cory" who typed the words "why don't you kill yourself and make the school a better place".



This was worse than betrayal.  This was almost the equivalent of him taking a steak knife and stabbing me right through the heart with it.  He was one of the last people that I would have suspected that would hurt me like this, and yet there was the proof right there.

It made me sick to my stomach.  In fact, I think I did throw up the afternoon that I found out.  I put so much trust in him and "Will", and they completely ambushed me and treated me horribly.

"Cory" and "Will" ended up getting a week-long suspension, which to me was one of those cases in which I felt that the punishment did not fit the crime at all.  Had this happened in 2007 and not 1997, I believe that both of them could have been kicked out of school permanently.  They got off extremely lucky as far as I was concerned.  "Cory" did try to make amends and apologized for what he had done, but as far as I was concerned, he made his choice that day, and the friendship between us was pretty much over.  He went his own way, and I went mine.  And, well...let's just say that eleventh grade ended up being a very lonely year. 

I reckon that if I had enough black clothing, I would have done the whole goth phase during the rest of the year, as I really didn't have any school spirit, nor did I have any spirit towards any of the student body of my high school.  I just stopped caring.

I am relieved that I didn't go through with the plan that I had to end it all that year.  It would have devastated my loved ones, and besides...I wasn't about to give "Cory", "Will", and "Sparks" the satisfaction of knowing that they had completely broken me. 

And, yes...I include "Sparks" in this piece.  I come to find out that "Sparks" was the firebug that torched my locker, and that "Cory" had known the entire time and never told me who it was until high school commencement, which as far as I was concerned permanently killed any hope of continuing a friendship with him.  A real class act, wasn't he? 

I guess what I learned from this was that I needed to do a better job of choosing friends.  I became a lot more guarded after that experience, and while it was a necessary thing for a little while, I let that event turn me into someone who was cold and unfeeling - two adjectives that I never want to be described as.

I also learned that I can't let one horrible year define who I am as a person.  I was victimized in eleventh grade, and for the life of me, I never did get any sort of explanation as to why they went after me with such hate.  I may never get that answer.  But life did get better after my sixteenth year, and that's what I need to focus on now.

But you know what else I learned?  I learned that despite the toughness of my sixteenth year, I became tougher and stronger, and I swore to myself that I would never let anyone hurt me like that again.  "Cory", "Will", and "Sparks" were toxic people and they only wanted to hurt me.  Who needs people like that in your life?

Fortunately, by the time I turned seventeen, I started to make friends with a new crowd, as well as rekindled a bond with an old friend...and we needed to keep that bond strong as we found ourselves lost in Montreal.



But you'll have to wait until Wednesday, May 20 for that tale.  In the meantime, I think that I've written enough.  I wonder if there's any more cake?

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Year Fifteen - Oh My Nose!



'Cause when you're fifteen and
Somebody tells you they love you
You're gonna believe them
And when you're fifteen
Feeling like there's nothing to figure out
But count to ten, take it in
This is life before you know who you're gonna be
Fifteen
       - Taylor Swift

Ah, yes.  Taylor Swift's song "Fifteen" certainly sounds like a song that could describe how I felt at fifteen myself - well, aside from the someone telling me that they loved me.  I was the dateless wonder of high school.

Not that there was anything wrong with that, of course.



Of course, when I was fifteen years old, Taylor Swift was probably still in grade school figuring out what colour you get when you mix red and blue.  This of course, makes me feel super old now, but hey.  Birthdays have a way of doing that to you.

And, as the anniversary of the blog is fast approaching, we're heading into the year 1996, where admittedly a lot happened.  And as I post this snapshot of me from my fifteenth year of life, I'll tell you one of the three stories that I plan to tell in this piece.



Okay, so this photo is black and white because it was a part of my tenth grade yearbook.  I don't have a whole lot of photos from high school for some reason.  Anyway, my hair in this picture looks really good now, but I experimented a lot with my hair in '96.  I wore a bowl cut, I grew it out, I shaved it mostly off (a mistake that I will NEVER do again), and I put in all sorts of hair styling products to try and get it under control.  I now realize that with my hair thinning that I probably should have just left it alone.  However, I will say this.  I found that hair gel works best for me.  I think I probably used a hundred bottles of Dippity-Do between the ages of fifteen and nineteen!

In pop culture news around my fifteenth birthday...



#1 SONG THE WEEK OF 5/18/1996
"Tha Crossroads" - BONE THUGS-N-HARMONY

Oh, dear lord, I dislike this song.  I really, really dislike this song.  But I don't outrightly hate it.  There are worse songs that charted in later years.  Wait until the day I talk about turning 28.  That's all I will say about that.



#1 AT THE BOX OFFICE THE WEEK OF 5/18/1996
"Twister"

True story.  I saw this movie on my fifteenth birthday at the movie theatre and loved the whole thing.  Okay, sure, so the science presented in the film was far from accurate.  It's still an entertaining film.  Come to think of it, 1996 was an awesome year for movies.  Much more interesting than the music on the radio anyway.  I mean, the Macarena being a #1 hit for a quarter of the year?  What the hell?



#1 TELEVISION SHOW FOR THE 1996/1997 SEASON
"ER"

I guess that "ER" must have been one popular show when it first came on.  Once again, the show was number one.  And my confession is that I have only seen a handful of episodes.  The theme song still kicks butt though.

Okay, so what happened when I turned fifteen?  Lots of things.

Did you know that at the age of fifteen, I became an uncle for the first time?  My one and only niece was born in September 1996, and I have to say, I think I was the only kid in my whole class to be an uncle that young.  But, hey, look at it this way.  If my sister and brother-in-law hypothetically got pregnant the week after they got married, I would have been an uncle at nine!  And, actually, I have an aunt that is two years YOUNGER than my eldest sister.

Ah, age differences.  You gotta love 'em.  I can't believe that my niece is now eighteen years old!  Again, remembering birthdays does that to you.

And in 1996, I also was one of four people who scored high on a national mathematics contest (which I don't know how that happened, given that I nearly flunked math just a year and a half later - long story there), and had my name put on the main billboard of the school and had a huge picture in the yearbook.  Have a look!



But I can tell you that in addition to wearing a T-shirt that did NOT FLATTER ME AT ALL, I was also sporting something else.  If you look closely, you may see that I had a bit of a black eye.  Yes, there's a story behind that one.

We're going back to the tail end of ninth grade for this tale, just a couple of weeks after I turned fifteen.  My classes that semester were French, Science, Mathematics, and Phys Ed.  And, since the school year was winding down and the weather was getting warmer, our gym classes were held outside.  Now, the way that my school was, it was landlocked in a residential neighbourhood, so we didn't have our own track field or football field.  Instead, the field and baseball diamonds were built at the closest elementary school - which happened to be the school that I attended between 1987 and 1995!  So, whenever we had gym class in June, we walked to the school and played football (ugh), baseball (a little better) or volleyball (my favourite - see Year 13 to see why). 

For what it was worth, I never really liked gym class very much when I was in elementary school.  The kids teased me on my lack of athletic ability, and I always had low self-esteem whenever I had to take part in gym.  Though, part of it could have been because I didn't have great gym teachers.  Most of them were grouchy old coots who would rather have been drinking spiked coffee in the teacher's lounge than teaching us about good health and physical activity.

Mr. Corney was different.  He was my gym teacher for ninth grade, and he was anything but corny (pardon the pun).  You see, unlike any of the other teachers that I had in gym, he actually graded you based on how much effort you put in class, and how much you paid attention in the health education portion of the class.  High school gym classes devoted six weeks to in class learning, and admittedly, most of the jocks in the class slept through the class and became huge class clowns.  But I paid attention in class, and ended up getting a higher mark in gym than some of the more athletic people in the class.  I'm like, hell yeah!  Finally a gym teacher who cared and understood!

Oh, and one more thing.  He almost broke my nose.

Well, not intentionally, of course.  In fact, I remember him being freaked out at first until I reassured him that I was okay! 



How it happened?  Well, remember how I said that in gym class we had classes outside when the weather warmed up?  One day in June, the class played baseball, and I have to admit that it wasn't my best sport.  I didn't do too badly in the infield, but when it came time to hitting, I was definitely the strike out king.

It was my turn at bat, and Mr. Corney was the pitcher.  And what was good about his style was that he made sure that we were comfortable with the way he pitched the ball before he threw it.  It helped us get more comfortable with how to hold the bat, but also instilled good communication with our teammates - another reason why I liked having him as a gym teacher.

And by all accounts, the pitch should have gone well.  I was admittedly the weakest hitter in the whole class, and I had communicated with the teacher to throw it slowly so I had a better chance to hit it.  Again, it should have been an easy hit.

Unfortunately, in what seemed like a freak display of physics, the ball ended up bouncing upward when it hit the bat and smacked me right in the schnozz!

And blood.  Boy was there blood.  It's lucky that I wasn't a hemophiliac or else I'd have really been in trouble.  I was convinced that my nose was broken and it hurt like hell.

I'm really amazed that I didn't cry outright.  Yes, my eyes were filled with tears, but that could have been because the ball hit me on the side of my nose which caused a little bit of a black eye to show.  And, again, Mr. Corney was there to help me through it, stopping the bleeding, taking me off the diamond, finding me a place to sit the rest of the period.  He could not have been more kind. 

And you know what?  I'll give my classmates a lot of credit.  None of them laughed when I got hit.  In fact, I think some of them sympathized with me.  That also helped a lot, and it didn't make me feel like a complete idiot.  Not that I had any reason to feel that way anyway.  It was a freak accident.

And, after a quick trip to the emergency room of the hospital, it turned out that my nose wasn't broken.  Bruised, but not broken.  I just had to put some ice on it that night and the next morning it was fine.

So, yeah...fifteen was a year that brought some physical pain, but it healed.  But as fifteen became sixteen...well...let's just say that it wasn't a sweet year.

It was actually pretty sour.  You'll read one reason why in tomorrow's entry, as well as what I learned from that event.