High School

I love film and television set in high school. I’m currently hooked on Friday Night Lights, I’m a recovering Glee addict, and I heartily enjoy the guilty pleasure teen romcom genre (ie. Mean Girls, 10 Things I Hate About You, etc.). I found, 21 Jump Street’s contribution to the genre through young adult characters to be brilliant! I’ve also spent time writing my own high school fiction. I’ve finally stopped to ask, ‘Why?’

One, I think high school is very easily dramatized. Teenagers are very interesting as they begin to assert themselves but with very little wisdom and experience. Teen angst and idealism allows for extreme dramatic shifts within a character. And the arc of high school is very satisfying: beginning as “children,” becoming “adult”, climaxing in Prom. But I think my own experience has a lot to do with it.

My move from Chicago to suburban Los Angeles before my junior year of high school split my high school experience in two, and I’m unable to take ownership of either half. Throughout my first two years, my best friends were those that I had made in elementary school, but we began to scatter and my sense of belonging to any social circles waned (the main factor in my willingness to move to a new school). Then in California, I endured a year of near-juvenile exile before my classmates were courteous enough to include me regularly. These descriptions make my experiences sound overly depressing, but actually many of my most vivid memories of happiness are from high school; I just didn’t feel like I belonged.

So I think I consume high school media, attempting to fill a void that I feel in my own experience. But I also think I am fascinated by it because I have observed it so closely. Unlike teachers—who are outsiders looking in—I studied high schoolers as one of their own, an infiltrator pleasantly drifting in and out of circles but never becoming part of one, feeling and succumbing to the same seduction of pursuing popularity (so I wasn't totally disconnected). Coupling my observations with my two very different high school experiences, I consider myself a sort of expert on high school: like an scholarly astronomer who has studied the cosmos thoroughly, but never experienced outer space firsthand.

What kind of astronaut would I have been?