High school Tardiff

Funny how things always seem to come back into your life after long enough. I'm sitting at my laptop on Thanksgiving night, no TV on, no music, just me and my asymptotic-towards-atrophy body. I've been trying to think up ideas for the 2012 scavenger hunt me and all my friends from home are gonna do over the summer (we had an epic one in 2010 and I'm hoping SH'12 will be even more epic), so I went back into the archives of my life to find the document containing the list known as "The Ultimate Super Greatest Scavenger Hunt in the History of Forever and All-Time," or better yet, "TUSGSHITHOFAAT." Catchy, right? Anyway, I looked into some more documents in the stuff from my computer from high school, and I came across an email to Ms. T (literally the hero of Watertown High School) where I told her about all the awesome things that the spring of my senior year held. In that email, I said, "rarely this spring have I not known what to do – that’s just because everything seems to have been falling in to place this year." This immediately brought me to a chuckle, thinking about the post I had where a misconception of me is that I know the right thing to do a lot of the time - obviously contradicted in the first part of that sentence. Upon further review, the latter part of the sentence got me thinking some more - after one year of college, I ultimately, at one instant, decided that I didn't have all the answers, that I didn't always know the right thing to do. Does that mean that not everything had fallen into place after one year? Probably not, actually. Sure, I had a seamless transition at Stonehill, but that was from being an awesome, kick-ass, devilishly handsome high school senior to a pretty awesome, run-of-the-mill, devilishly handsome college freshman. And that's not gonna happen until 2014 rolls around.

So I read the rest of my email, tried to put myself in the mindset of "Hey, your last day of high school is tomorrow," and think about the meaning behind the words I typed onto the Word document. On the day before our last day, I was talking with my friend Timm in Physics about the story our Psych teacher told us the period before. The moral of the story was that us, being in the position we were in, were very lucky to have led these lives so far, and to make sure we don't lose sight of where we're headed. Sure, everyone has something to deal with in their lives, but for a lot of people, they can say they truly are happy. In the grand scheme of things, when we go to sleep at night, we don't wish we had entirely different lives. There are people out in this world who are way the fuck worse off than we are, and we don't even see that half the time. And what sucks is that I can't truly understand that being worse off unless I live through it myself. Which isn't something I'm willing to readily accept at any point in my life soon. Catch-22. We can't understand how lucky we are until we live in unluckiness.

The end of senior year of high school was a very high-impact time on my life, as I'm sure it's been for anyone going through that process. As I'm sure graduating college is, and getting married, and having kids, or whatever is super important to you in this life. I still get bugged about what happens when there is no life, but I can't conceive of that. What I can conceive of is my conscious living, and that's something all of us can do. My advice is this. Cherish the fuck out of what you'll remember for a very long time. If you can foresee that it's something you'll take with you as long as you live, well then make damn well sure it counts. Maybe it won't mean anything to us once we're gone, but it will sure as hell mean something while we're still here. And that's good enough for now.

Life is about memories. Surround yourself with the right people, strive for the right goals, believe in the right words, and you will give yourself many opportunities to create memories that you'll have forever.

It's times like these we learn to live again...Class of 2010