High School Drama

Dear Readers. This post serves as a plea to share, comment and post to those who need to read this.
I'm seven years out of high school and it's one place/time I would not like to repeat. Even with all my learnings high school was tough, but no matter how dramatic I became as I cried, "my life is over"  - I still woke up in the morning. Unfortunately, for three Chardon, Ohio students this is not the case. My thoughts and prayers go out to the Chardon families - it's an unimaginable tragedy, that for me as well hit really close to home.
For some perspective, I grew up about 45 minutes away from Chardon, but my parents now live about 5 minutes away -- they grocery shop, run errands, walk our dog in the same county. My brother was one year and one township away from attending Chardon, he could've been there...
There have been so many things in the news this last few weeks about teens acting out (the racist YouTube girls from Florida, for example), or even the last few years (school bullying) and it's amazing to me how different "high school" has become - it's really turning into a place you need to survive.
In my day (there goes my old soul) I did become an outcast and subject of ridicule for a good three months of my high school career, where in my most dramatic way I literally thought I would die of embarrassment. Here's the story.
Eleventh grade - I was going through a period of rebellion, hanging out with the a new crowd that I absolutely didn't fit in with. Picture a darker Hilary from Fresh Prince attempting to hang out with a female version of Bone Thugs 'n' Harmony ... Yea, that was bound to work out.
Anyway, if you made one of these girls mad they were all mad and I should've know then their value of friendship, but I digress... Inevitably as you can guess I made one of these girls mad and that's when the drama started. I was shunned at school, literally had to eat lunch by myself or skip it altogether and go home to eat, I was nervous to be in the hallway by myself, it got pretty bad. The biggest worry I had was that these girls would do something to damage or impact my future or mess with my early acceptance into college.
So I get it. I get what it's like to be bullied, picked on, and intimidated. One thing I never forgot was to stay motivated and that no matter what I was going to graduate, succeed and pursue any and all dreams that I had. So this message is two-fold, if you are bullying, it's not worth it - when you get to the workplace, there are bigger bullies that actually have leverage, or as bullies typically wind up: your high school wanna be thug life image will soon be merged with your real life, and while everyone around you is changing, you become static.

If you are being bullied, I can promise you, your insecurities don't run as deep as whoever is trying to stand in your way. I can't remember the last time I thought about that memory of feeling so alone and isolated and that's because I did so much more to never sink and stay persistent with my goals. I'm not perfect, no one is, but one thing I've learned is that "strength comes from an indomitable will" (Ghandi) and that is something you have to believe to make it through.
 High school is 6 parts a painful and 4 parts fun, you make mistakes, some people hang out with bone thug wannabes, but you grow up and you move on. Thank goodness because I do not look good in corn-rolls!

Dear Ol' UVA...

I needed some time to compile my thoughts and comments from my recent Homecoming visit to UVa - so for those of you who were looking for it. Here it is.
Homecoming weekend at Uva... Driving down I-95 onto Alderman, guided by the giant V and two sabers inked into the road we entered a place we called home for four years. It felt as though we entered a bubble. It was a cultural capsule where it seemed nothing had changed and yet coming from out of town, there was a solemn cloud that followed us, a gentle reminder that this wasn't the real world. It's clear after being in the workplace for two years, UVa was a utopia. You don't really have to deal with adult issues, all of the rent/utilities/billing were spoon fed to you, none of your interactions were multi-level (i.e. work relationships), people can wear cowboy boots and dresses and it's more of a dress code than a fashion faux-pas; oh and singing the Good Ol' Song made everyone feel like one happy community. No wonder we feel duped...I'm not the only person that looked blankly at a fax machine or another esoteric office tool and thought: why didn't I take a class for this? That's what we need a "Real Life 101" that teaches you how to: deal with taxes, office politics, weird roommates, missing landlords, rental agreements, real crime that can't be solved with the honor code... and the list goes on.
I can't decide if the shielding of the real world from the current Wahoos is just an extension of their childhood or the set up for the first of many rude awakenings they will experience in adulthood. For example: at UVa you can feasibly, work, party, study, eat healthy, stay fit, and get enough sleep to do it all again the next day. Guess what? In the real world the routine is sacrificed for things that are considered survival tactics - eating whatever you can find, sleeping when you can, and working for food and shelter. When we were on the Range before the football game, you could still see the flicker of innocence in the eyes of the undergrads, an age of believing and where ignorance is bliss.
It was a great weekend, but returning to grounds and looking at versions of myself pre-real world, was bittersweet. On one hand UVa is now a place we can never go back to without bringing in bias, on the other hand it was a nice reset button to know that in a world that is constantly changing there are some consistencies.