Peacebang imagines that if she and Sarah Palin had gone to high school together, they would have been best friends, but can't see herself hanging around with Hillary Clinton. I really think I get PB's and my differences on this issue now.
Because I was WAY less cool in high school than Peacebang was and I totally see Hillary and I as pals.
FWIW this is dorky young Hillary. She so would have fit in with my group of smartypants, yet terribly earnest friends.
Hill and I would have walked around the track in gym class, talking about European history as the popular kids raced past each other. We would have snuck off campus for lunch, thinking we were super daring for doing so, then gone home after school to study chemistry together. She'd be bummed about her B plusses and I'd be psyched to get a B, but I never was very good academically.
She would TOTALLY have gotten me cutting Latin class to work on an investigative peice for the school paper on coaches who use chewing tobacco in violation of county law, and she would have slipped me her notes after class. When a cute boy asked me to write a paper for him and I did, and this didn't cause him to fall in love and ask me to the homecoming dance, Hill would have been there with me to analyze the situation. We would have gone to lock-ins with one another's respective protestant church youth groups and I would have managed her campaign for student body president, though been super careful that my stories about the election in the school paper were fair to both sides. Because she and I would totally agree on how important journalistic ethics were.
Senior year, we would have driven out near the airport to drink cokes and watch the planes land, talking about how I was going to be a reporter and she was going to be an astronaut, but whatever we did, we were getting OUT of this crummy town. We would have heard the rumor that Sarah shoplifted some boots for Vicki and been completely shocked. Don't they know that shoplifting is WRONG? Besides, they could have gotten CAUGHT! Do they want to RUIN THEIR FUTURES? Some of us are GOING PLACES!
And I'm sure we would have been crazy with envy when all the cute guys wanted to date Sarah and Vicki. But that's ok. The prom was too close to AP tests for our comfort anyway. Though there was Robert, that guy from the math team. He's got a big nose and weird hair, but I hear he got into Brown. And doesn't he have an older brother at Swarthmore?
CC
who does NOT see this as a reason to vote for Hillary, but finds the contrast with PB interesting.
13 comments:
If work allows, I'm going to my high school reunion next month, but I always find these high school analyses of adult life kind of odd, I guess because I was such a spectator in high school. I definitely was geeky, but since I wasn't allowed to date and anyway lived 20 miles from school, I basically wasn't engaged with the social life of my high school. When I got dumped into a new school system, I latched onto the group of friends that a family friend had made but never became that close to them (as was apparent when we failed to keep in touch after graduation).
Anyway, I am one of those hardcore dorks for whom social life didn't start until college, though if I'd been better at recognizing the race that knows Joseph, it might have started in high school, as I eventually became good friends with some old classmates through AIM/ ICQ. So I can't write these "would I have liked Celebrity X in high school" posts.
I can imagine becoming friends with Hillary Clinton in college if she'd lived on my hall -- I would have edited her papers to use more active voice, and she would have tried to reform me into getting my work turned in on time, and we both would have talked about what a big difference we were going to make in the world after we graduated from law school, while everyone else looked at us and knew we'd end up in profit-oriented firms, at least for a while.
I can't imagine being real friends with Palin at any stage of life. Peacebang is right that she seems like the popular cheerleader type -- but I've always had perfectly polite relationships with those, even when they were more academically inclined than Palin seems to be. Give me the female athletes, literary magazine founders and budding architects instead.
Um PG. . .
Sarah Palin got her nickname 'Barracuda' as a result of her "aggressive style of play" on basketball courts. Don't you consider female basketball players to be female athletes?
I'm finding this discussion rather amusing....
I think I remember that guy Robert from the math team...
I don't think I would have liked Hillary or Sarah in H.S. But I was bitter and angry and obnoxious in H.S. for no real reason. I'm glad I'm not the person I was back then.
L,
That was the fascinating thing about our class reunion.
I went there knowing I was a lot cooler than I had been in school. What I hadn't realized was that everyone else had gotten a lot cooler, too. I think of myself as having been this huge dork, but the popular kids greeted me like we were old friends and everyone seemed to know me and be glad to see me. I assume that's just the way reunions are, but I was charmed.
Not everyone in our class was wildly successful, though there were some surprising people who were, but everybody seemed a lot nicer than they had been then, me included.
I based much of my assumptions on how things would have gone with Hillary on my friendship with Becca. Josh showed us a good place to watch planes land and the night she and I went out thereby ourselves and had that conversation is a vivid memory for me. (And yes, the irony of so wanting to get out of McLean, and then coming back seven years later and buying a house, is huge for me.)
You do seem cool now. I wish we'd hung out more before you ended up so far away.
CC
That's hilarious. In the interest of accuracy, I should clarify that I was one of the Theater Kids, so Sarah's and my friendship would have had the crossover Theater Geek/Cheerleader Popular Girl thing going on. You've just reminded me of something that I hadn't thought about in a long time: how easily and often I dated in high school. God, those were the days.
Yeah. I didn't "date" much, though I did have two longer-term boyfriends.
CC
Robin,
The whole point of my comment was that I don't do the high school fantasy well because I wasn't socially involved in high school, so the best I could do was imagine whether I'd be friends with the person in college. Palin didn't play college ball. (And for all I know, she was academically inclined in high school; attending a series of 3rd and 4th tier colleges, from Hawaii to Idaho to Alaska, indicates less of a focus in college.)
Well, if you could get a rise out of the UUA office, I'm looking forward to seeing what Hillary C. has to say about it all.
I might have been friends with Hillary, but she might have been a touch too geeky for me.
I could have never been confused as popular, though. I had a few hipster friends but in my high school, jocks, cheerleaders, and their wannabe's were the ones who ruled the roost.
I only went to high school for one year, and was way too low key, and hung out with other low key people (newspaper and library staff), so I suspect NEITHER of these women would have been in my little circle of people I hung out with.
I don't think I would have been friends with Sarah, but Hillary --- maybe. Much to my surprise, I ended up "popular" by the end of high school. I'm not sure I realized it at the time. Or maybe popular's not the right word: my best friend and myself ended up at the center of our social group, at least one of them. Maybe two groups.... At one of our reunions, the best known guy in the class introduced me to his trophy wife as one of the "class characters." I found that amusing.
People were indeed much nicer at the reunions.
It is odd. I don't remember having been popular in high school. (In fact, I used to go out of my way to avoid speaking to people I knew in high school.) but some people used to remember me as having been popular in high school.
Memory is a strange thing
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