Tag Archives: High School

I can’t stop playing this one game of chess

I never play chess, but apparently neither does my friend Bill, because we’ve been stuck playing this same game for like three hours now. I don’t even know where he found this chess set, probably on the street, it has a distinct yard sale look. It’s one of those crystal chess sets, or fake crystal, whatever, but you know, the kind popularized by the first X-Men movie, when Professor X is playing chess with Magneto, but because he controls metal, he’s in a plastic cell, and everything’s made out of clear plastic.

That was like the go-to Christmas present for everybody’s dad across the country that Christmas. “Look dad! I got you a present!” and the dad’s like, “Gee … thanks son … it’s a chess set. Thanks.” And the kid is so oblivious, so pumped about how cool it looks, he can’t tell his dad’s blatant lack of enthusiasm, “You want to play dad?” and what’s the dad going to say, no? It’s Christmas. “All right, set it up, let’s do it.”

One game of chess, one painfully slow game of chess, during course of which, I’m sure even junior realized his total lack of chess abilities, that just because you know what each piece does doesn’t mean you know how to play. Ten minutes later, the pieces are back in the box. Ten minutes after that, the set is lodged permanently underneath the coffee table, where it sat unused, for years, for over a decade, and that kid doesn’t even live here anymore, he never came back after he left for college.

“Let’s have a yard sale!” from the mom turns into, “Look what I got for only five bucks!” from my friend Bill, and he looked so happy, jeez, he’s not an unhappy guy or anything, but it’s rare to see him this happy, and so I’m scratching my head, “Sure man, set it up, let me know when you’re ready to go.”

And chess, Jesus, I’ve read articles about chess, how the pros spend so much time looking at previous games and mastering moves thought out seven turns ahead, that it’s not even about an individual piece, they’re playing patterns, brainwaves are working at a level that would take me probably the rest of my lifetime to dedicate just to learn how to think that way.

I remember one night while I was in Ecuador, the power went out and, for lack of anything else to do, I spent ten or fifteen minutes just staring at my Internet-less laptop screen, going through the hollow motions of pointing and clicking and opening up folders and there I found it, the built-in chess app. I said to myself, I know how to play chess, I was in the chess club.

Yes, I was in the chess club, but so was everybody else in my school. We had this rule, you had to belong to at least two extracurricular activities every year, and the two default clubs that required practically zero effort whatsoever were chess club and social studies club. Social studies club is a whole different page of crazy, but it more or less amounted to an extra social studies class once a week after school, sitting in a desk and listening to the crazy old social studies teacher get lost in tangents about when the UK and the USA were finally going to merge into the United States of the North Atlantic. Insane stuff.

But he made us sit there the whole time. At least the chess club moderator let us put our names on the sign up sheet before chess club started. So it was basically sign up, sit around and pretend to play chess for a while, and then leave. Chess club.

I wondered if Bill was in chess club also, and he confirmed it, not in anything he said, but by his opening move, he took the castle right from the back and jumped over the front row of pawns. Whatever, I really didn’t feel like prolonging the agony, so I let it slide. The game would have been cool if we at least had those timers, the cool things the pros slam down on when they’re done taking their turns, but we didn’t have anything.

And as we each started accumulated pieces, our attitudes turned surprisingly competitive. No, I don’t think either of us were exactly following the rules, I mean, I didn’t jump any pawns, but I did execute a very questionable castling maneuver, like I know it’s possible, but I just kept assuring Bill, “No, it’s totally legal. That’s exactly how it’s done,” and finally we got down to just two kings, his and mine, pointlessly circling each other around the board.

“What do you say Bill, call it a draw?” and he smiled, “Sure, if you want to forfeit, we can stop playing.”

Of course I wanted to stop playing, these were some of the most boring minutes I had spent all week. But forfeit? To Bill? I would have been hearing about it for years. This guy doesn’t let anything go, the most trivial successes have a way of echoing down the ages, I could see it now, he’d be over my house years from now visiting my family around Christmastime. He’d see the chess set my son bought for me, and he’d throw in, “You know, I used to beat your dad in chess all the time when we were roommates.”

Bullshit. “No way Bill, it’s either a draw, or we keep playing.”

And that’s been it. I feel like I’m being fair here, I’m not demanding Bill gives up. Why is he being so stubborn? Isn’t this boring for him too? How long are we going to keep this up?

High school lunch

Probably the only thing that I liked about my time in high school was the cafeteria. As a student, I was aware that we it relatively good. I’d heard horror stories from friends about their cafeterias, about green meatballs and slimy cold-cut sandwiches. Our cafeteria had its problems, like it was too crowded, just barely big and efficient enough to feed us all. But in terms of food, it wasn’t a bad place to be forced to eat five times a week.

That is, like I’ve already alluded to, if I ever made it inside. When I say that it was crowded, picture sixteen hundred boys trying to buy lunch from a counter approximately the length of a school bus. It was like, the bell rang, and it was this insane dash to drop all of your stuff off at your locker and then race down to the basement to try and not be the very last person on that line that was already snaking out of the cafeteria and into the hallway.

Equally worse was that, because of the size of our student body, and the inverse size of the cafeteria, lunchtime was split amongst four periods. At my school, once you received your class schedule, it was cemented, that was it for the whole year. Which meant that, if you were fortunate enough to be assigned one of the two middle periods, you’d be eating somewhere around lunchtime.

Fortune had it that for two of my high school years, I was mandated to have a lunch break that started at ten-thirty in the morning. It was terrible. In addition to rushing downstairs, buying food, finding a spot to eat, and then eating it, I had to try and load up on enough snacks to hold me over for the rest of the day. Which was really just wishful thinking. By the time two o’clock rolled around, I’d be starving again, with still another two hours of boring classes to sit through before I could make my escape and go to Seven-Eleven for hotdogs and Slurpees.

I guess I shouldn’t complain. I never had to suffer the indignity of that last lunch period. I think it started around two in the afternoon. Which meant that the majority of your school day would be spent fantasizing about a lunch period that, when it finally happened, you’d get down and find a cafeteria ravaged by everybody else in school. Was there even any food left? I’d heard that it was mostly scraps, unwanted sandwiches and diet sodas.

Whatever the logistical problems, our cafeteria was pretty decent. The school published a monthly calendar, detailing exactly what would be on the menu every day. And it was always something different. We had pork rib heroes slathered in barbecue sauce, chili in a giant bread bowl, occasionally they’d even send out for White Castle hamburgers.

On top of the hot lunch option, there were also various deli sandwiches, Arizona iced teas, and, what I thought was the coolest, a soft-serve ice cream machine. I truly looked forward to lunch every day. For under ten dollars, I was able to buy basically whatever I wanted. Yeah, that’s a lot of money for a high school lunch, but I was eating like enough for three people, so it was money well spent.

The only time things got tricky was on Fridays during Lent. It was a Catholic school, so they refused to serve meat. The insult of it all, BLTs replaced with LTs. Disgusting. That’s not a sandwich. Frozen Ellio’s pizza. Gross. I’d eat cold pasta salad until I felt my hunger pangs subsiding somewhat, hopeful that it might be enough to last me until I could make it Taco Bell after school.

Sometime during my junior year, the school installed a Slush Puppy machine. If you’ve never had a Slush Puppy, it’s basically a poor man’s version of a Slurpee: the slushy ice was dispensed separately, mixed with your choice of flavor from these syrup dispensers. There were several options, cherry, grape, tropical, great, terrific, but the one at the end was a mystery. Shocker. That’s all it said, shocker.

So of course, you put way too many teenage boys in a cafeteria, you give them a flavor option with a ridiculous name like shocker, and it immediately became everybody’s default choice. The peer pressure to order shocker was enormous. Everyone was doing it, shocker, shocker, shocker, were you going to be the pansy that ordered raspberry? Even the teachers jumped on the shocker bandwagon. I remember one of the gym teachers, this crazy lacrosse coach, he came up to my table one time, we were all drinking Slush Puppies, all shocker, of course, and he was drinking one too, he goes, “You boys drinking shocker? Huh?” and he inspected all of our cups, making sure it was all colorless shocker, before going to the next table, his hand in the air with his ring finger tucked in his palm.

Of course, shocker was disgusting. It didn’t taste like anything. It was like a pure lemon but without any of the lemon flavor, only the incredibly sour sensation. Nobody enjoyed drinking shocker, but this mania had overtaken the entire student body. Who was going to be the first one to take a step back and say, all right guys, I don’t really like this, I think I’m going to try peach. It wasn’t going to be me.

And then months later the cafeteria workers put up these notices. Apparently nobody read the instructions, but shocker was supposed to be a sour additive for any of the other flavors. You’d get your cherry, and you’d add a squirt of shocker to make it sour. Orders came from high up in the school’s administration, no more solo-shocker Slush Puppies. And everybody let out a really dramatic, “Come on! That’s not fair!” but really we were all just relieved.

Now and then I’ll find myself in a rut with my adult lunches. Everything feels boring, sometimes I can’t muster up the motivation even to go out and buy a simple sandwich. I find myself thinking back to my high school lunch period, every day something to look forward to, a different meal, some stupid high school conversations. If we were lucky, somebody would drop their tray on the floor and, in unison, the whole student body would scream out, “Heeeeeey, dick!” before erupting into a wild laughter, the lunch moderators scrambling to hand out random detentions in a toothless effort to calm us all down. It’s crazy, the things that I look back on with fondness.

I have no idea how to use Microsoft Excel

I never learned how to use Microsoft Excel. I have a pretty good excuse, actually. But it’s a huge long story of an excuse and it starts a long time ago. When I was a little kid I remember when my family bought our first PC. I was in love with it. All I wanted to do was be on this computer. And this was before the Internet. I’m just thinking about how lame it must have been, but I was infatuated. I remember when PCs were just coming into the mainstream and how I wanted one so desperately, every day was just me trying to control my insatiable urge to have and use a computer, but because I was a little kid, with no job, no money, I couldn’t do anything about it. I’d just have to sit around and watch my little brothers and sisters watch Barney. I wasn’t allowed to play Nintendo on weekdays, so I couldn’t even play Zelda.

At my Catholic elementary school, we had a computer lab. It was run by this ninety-year-old nun named Sister Anthelia. She was so old she still wore the nun outfit. I don’t think she knew anything about computers. I think that whoever was in charge of the school was like, “Jesus, this lady is completely unfit to teach. But what do we do with her? She’s a nun.” And finally somebody else was like, “I don’t know, put her in charge of the library.” And that first person would reply, “I’ve already thought of that, but then where would we put Sr. Margaret? She’s even crazier.” Until eventually they’d decide, “Well, whatever, just make her the computer teacher. Those kids are only in there for like twenty minutes a week anyway. That’s got to be harmless enough.”

And it was torture, because I wanted to use those twenty minutes every week to actually use the computers. Like really badly. But Sister Anthelia would make us spend the first ten minutes memorizing and reciting back these ridiculous prayers that she wrote herself. It was agony. If we didn’t place the correct inflection on just the right word, she would make us start all over again, “And slower this time! Much slower!”

Finally we’d get to power on the Apple IIs, computers that were already obsolete, even in the technological dark ages of the early 1990s. The screens didn’t even have black and white, they had black and green, like in the Alien movies. They had giant B drives, floppy disks that were actually floppy. And nothing ever worked. The whole lab was all just a huge disguise, a lie perpetuated by the school, they’d parade the parents around on Open House Day, “Look parents! Check out our computer lab! We’re getting your kids prepared for the future!” and parents back then had no idea about computers, not the majority of them anyway. There was always that one kid whose mom or dad worked for IBM, but everybody hated that kid, because he was always bragging about how much he loved playing with his computer back home. “Oh you don’t have Oregon Trail? Too bad. It’s awesome!”

But finally my parents realized that we’d have to get a computer eventually, and one day there it was. Like I said, this was pre-Internet, so there wasn’t a ton of stuff to do on the computer. I could fool around with the MS-DOS prompt, make it say stupid stuff. I could play Oregon Trail, which, yeah it was kind of cool at first, but after a while you get tired of watching all of your family members die of dysentery or chlamydia. So after that got old I started fooling around with this other built-in program, Mavis Beacon’s Typing.

Basically, with this program, I taught myself how to type really early. I think I was only in the second grade. Although, I say early now, because that was early back then, but I have no idea how early kids today learn how to type. Maybe much earlier than second grade. Maybe my kids are going to read this story someday and think that I was some sort of cave man. But whatever, I could type really fast.

I remember my older cousins used to pay me ten bucks to type out their papers for high school. That was the best. Although, I remember the first time I had ten dollars, I really wanted this Mr. Fantastic action figure, you know from the Fantastic Four, right? It was on display at the comic book store, and I just imagined it stretching out and doing all sorts of cool stretching stuff. But when I finally bought it, this piece of shit action figure, its limbs just clicked out of their hinges a bit, lengthening oh so slightly. This was the worst approximation of stretching powers, a total let down. Like I could see when it was fully extended where the plastic limbs were held together by the thin plastic joints. Even worse, one time when the arms were fully extended its right forearm snapped off, meaning the only way to fix it was with Krazy Glue, meaning after that it couldn’t extend at all. So it was terrible. But I had wanted it so bad that I lied to myself for years, telling myself that it was a cool toy, that I liked it. But what are you really supposed to do with action figures anyway? They’re cool to look at for a minute, but I wasn’t one of those kids who held them in his hands and made up adventures, making weird noises and making them fight with other action figures. I’d have much rather tormented one of my siblings, driving them to tears to the point where my mom would actually yell at them for making too much noise crying and screaming.

But what am I talking about here? Computers, right? So I taught myself how to type really fast, so fast that when I got to high school, and we’re barely out of the 1990s here, there were still a sizeable number of students who didn’t know how to type. To correct this deficiency, there was a typing class freshman year. But if you passed the typing assessment on day one, they didn’t make you sit through the class. I just got an extra study hall. I thought it was great, but I didn’t realize that during this class they not only taught you had to type but also how to use Microsoft Word and Excel.

So I never learned how to use Excel. And you don’t really need Excel in high school, or in college either. I had to take one physics class in college and we needed to do one task for one project in Excel, so the professor made everyone come in on a Saturday to learn the basics of Excel. But it was a Saturday class so everybody just kind of hung out in the classroom pretending to already know everything that the professor was talking about, not asking any questions, nobody raising their hands, so that way he’d think that maybe calling this Saturday class was a little unnecessary, and OK fine, class dismissed.

And for that one assignment, I just did all the work by hand and then I went into Microsoft Word and created a table that, when printed out, looked like it had been something that was created on Excel. And it worked, but only for that one assignment. The thing about Excel is, and I’m guessing here, because I really don’t know how to use it, you put all of the information or numbers into certain spots and then run certain functions and the program does all of the work for you, even laying it out at the end. So instead of just paying attention during that class, I made all of this extra work for myself, doing all of the calculations by hand, and then formatting it in a grid.

But that was just one time during sophomore year of college. I didn’t have to think about Excel, not even once during the rest of my higher education. I don’t even think my computer had Excel, just Word. But then I graduated and became an adult. And I put on my resume that I knew everything about Microsoft Office. I had this one job as a paralegal, and I was hired specifically to keep this one lawyer’s Excel spreadsheets organized and up to date. It’s a good thing that this lawyer didn’t know anything about Excel either, because she probably just looked at them and was like, “Whatever, these spreadsheets are stupid and unnecessary anyway and I might as well just enter the data in myself, randomly, wherever I feel like it.”

So I didn’t learn anything. That’s not to say I didn’t try. I remember one time I was like, “You know what? I’m going to figure out Excel. I’m going to do it.” And I looked online at some tutorial for how to do some function. And I followed it step by step and I think it worked. It did something cool with numbers. And I was like, “OK, I learned it.” But then maybe a month or two later a situation finally arose where I could have used those skills that I thought I had taught myself. But too much time had passed and I’d forgotten everything. And I tried to go online to find that tutorial again, but you know how Google is, right? Like what did I type in that time two months ago that led me to that tutorial? I had no idea. By the time I found it, I had spent maybe twenty minutes. And then I started the tutorial and got overwhelmingly frustrated and even depressed as I remembered how long the tutorial took the first time, and the idea of doing it again was just something that I couldn’t bear to put myself through. So I quit that job and started waiting tables.

I never have to use Excel. Every once in a while I’d be trying to open Word but I’d accidentally click on Excel and the icon would bounce up and down as the program loaded, and it took forever, creating a new blank spreadsheet, making the whole computer come to a halt as it opened up this bulky Microsoft program, only so I could close it out immediately, “Are you sure you want to close Spreadsheet1 without saving? All data will be lost.” And I’m just like, “Yes! Close! This was all a huge mistake!” So finally I just removed the icon from my home screen. I think it’s in the application folder somewhere, but I’ll never use it. Like Power Point. I think it’s right next to Power Point. I have no idea how to use Power Point. But for real, those presentations, even the good ones, even the ones with animations and stuff, they’re all so boring. Just a bunch of boring information spiced up with a couple of generic clip-arts here and there, a generic slideshow. Nobody likes slideshows. Nobody likes spreadsheets. Right?

I used to be really sick at math

Man, I used to be so good at math. Like really good at math. When I was in grammar school, math was always my best subject, easily. I’d always get ridiculously good grades on all of my tests. I went to a K-8 school, and when graduation came around, they did this award ceremony where they gave out medals to all of the kids who did the best in each subject. There was this one girl who was a total genius and won the award for every single subject. Except for math. That was all mine.

It didn’t stop there. When I went to high school, they bumped me up a year, so I was taking sophomore math as a freshman. That year was geometry. What a total joke. I remember one time I got an 80 on one of my tests, but it was only because I finished the test early, like I always did, and by this point in the year, I was already acing like every one of my geometry tests, so while I used to finish up the test early and then go back and recheck everything to make sure I had it all right, I stopped rechecking, because I always wound up getting everything right on the first try anyway. But this test I flew through even faster than usual, but whatever, I handed it in and put my head on my desk and waited for the bell to ring. And I got it back the next day, and it was an 80. And I’m just, “What the fuck?” And I started frantically leafing through the test and I saw that, while I was taking the test, I must have flipped two pages instead of one, like they must have been fresh out of the Xerox machine, and they were just clung together, and I missed a whole page of the test. Just blank. And I went immediately to the teacher and I was like, “Come on! I obviously didn’t see this page! It’s not fair! I get a 100 on every single test!” And he’s just like, “Well, sorry. You have to double check.” That asshole. I’ll never forget it. One day I’m going to run into him on the street and I’ll tell him … no wait, even better, one day I’m going to get a job somewhere and it’s going to be a leadership position and I’ll find out that I’m this guy’s boss now, and everything that he does, I’m going to give him a grade for it. And you know what that grade’s going to be? 80. And then I’m going to fire him.

Sophomore year I took trigonometry. Whereas the geometry teacher was a total stiff, lacking any semblance of a personality, the trig teacher was almost exactly the same, but he fancied himself a comedian, and so he spiced up the class with these lame jokes, like this thing he called the “touchdown rule.” Basically, every class, the last kid to sit down automatically got detention. And he would hold up his hands like a football ref and say in his dry monotone, “touchdooooown.” And that kid would get detention, for real. Everyday. I guess it was a way to make sure everybody was sitting down right away, but yeah, kind of a dick move if you think about it. Still, it was more entertaining than my 80% geometry teacher. I’ll never forgive that hack.

Junior year was the best. Calculus. They made us buy this ridiculous calculator, the TI-89, like it cost two hundred bucks. It was almost like having an iPhone, but iPhone’s didn’t exist yet. This thing had a big screen. It ran applications, you know, what we used to call apps before the iPhone came around. You could play games on it. And it did all of this crazy calculus stuff. I felt like I was a NASA engineer in this class. Seriously, it’s like I’m picturing myself sitting in this class, and there’s a thought balloon over my head, and all you see are crazy equations and Greek letters and I’m just writing and typing shit into my TI-89 in this completely alien language of numbers and symbols. That teacher was awesome. He loved technology. He told us that the calculator out of the box may have cost two hundred bucks, but it was worthless unless we knew how to use it. He would tell us every time he taught us a new function or a new trick, he would say, “I just added ten dollars to the value of that calculator.” And he would keep a running tally, like every time he would say that, he’d write the number down somewhere, so that halfway through the year, he’d teach us something, and he’d say, “And that brings the current value of this calculator for you guys to … two thousand and twenty dollars. Not bad seeing as how you bought it for only two hundred.” And it was true. You could do so much with this TI-89.

And then senior year rolled around and it was time for Calc-2. But this teacher sucked. He told us right away that he hated calculators, and that we’d be learning to do stuff the old-fashioned way, like Archimedes did, or whoever invented calculus. (There’s no way I’m stopping to look it up.) Not only that, but he had this stupid rule in class called the “one-hand rule.” Basically, if he saw anybody using two hands on the calculator at the same time, that person got detention. Why? Well, you needed two hands to play games on it, and so now I couldn’t even blow off some steam mid-class to play a few rounds of Galaga when I got bored. Plus, and this isn’t even really a jab at the teacher, but he suffered from severe migraines, which I’m completely understanding of. I mean, the guy’s sick. Fine. But he missed at least two classes a week. So we really didn’t learn anything new. In fact, I felt like I learned more in Calc-1 than I did in Calc-2. But whatever.

Math. I was so f’n good at it. I could do equations for everything. I went to college, I had no idea what I’d be majoring in, but I knew at least that I’d do great in math. But I registered for classes that summer, and there was a huge problem. I went to this stupid all-boys Catholic high school that prided themselves on being better than every other high school in the galaxy. We didn’t have free periods. We didn’t have senior cut days or a senior parking lot. We didn’t have girls. No, just learning. Stupid, boring, learning. Anyway, the school thought it was above everything. Even above the government. We didn’t take New York State tests, we took our own tests, “harder tests,” they told us, “even harder than the hardest state test in any state in the country.” I did great on those math tests. The problem is, they weren’t recognized by the state. So when I tried to register for Calculus 3 in college, the college registrar was like, “well Rob, there’s absolutely no state record of your having done anything past algebra way back in eighth grade.” And I’m like, “Seriously? Isn’t there something you can do?” And they said, “Yes. We are serious. And no, there isn’t anything we can do.”

And freshman year of college I had to take two consecutive semesters of math. And they put me in this stupid class called “Finite Mathematics 1.” It was such a comedown. Such a fall from grace. Such a cruel twisted joke. I brought my TI-89 to the first class and the professor was passing out these stupid baby calculators, ones that didn’t do anything special, ones that had a little solar strip so they didn’t even work right unless you were either outside or directly under a lamp. Come on. I get calculators like that for free just by opening a checking account.

It was a total joke. It wasn’t even up to the level of 8^th grade math. I skipped like every single class, took Finite Math 2, skipped all of those classes too, finished up with my math requirements, and then kicked off the dust from my sandals and said goodbye to math forever. What a shame. I remember my high school junior math teacher, that awesome thousand dollar calculator teacher, he would always tell us, “Listen up boys, I know this stuff because I teach it every year. But if you stop, you’re going to lose it all. Real fast. Use it, or lose it.”

And I never really thought about that, because I was so f’n good at math. I was like fluent at this stuff. But then I remember being maybe a junior or a senior in college, and one of my good college buddies, this guy Dan C., he was a math major. And one time he was working on some problem and I said to him, “Hey Big-C, you mind if I take a crack at it?” And he just laughed, slammed down his TI-105 or whatever model they were up to that year and said, “Go ahead, be my guest.”

And this guy was way past Calc-2. And I just looked at this page of numbers and it all meant absolutely nothing to me. Nothing. So I started asking him about it. And through my questions and his answers, I realized that not only was I not up to his level in math, clearly, but I wasn’t even up to my old level in math. I couldn’t even remember the terms I would use to begin to describe what my level once was. I stared at him in a panic. “Dan! You have to believe me! I used to be so f’n sick at math! I swear!” It was true. I used to take entire math tests consisting of one question. And it would take like an hour to do it. And even if you got it wrong, which was rarely the case for me, the teacher could still go back and check out your work, check out how you got the answer, and see where you were going, and give you a good grade. It was like painting. It was like playing the guitar. I know math is yes or no, numbers and numbers and right and wrong, but this was art. This was something really cool. And I totally lost all of it. I didn’t use it, so I losed it.

It’s crazy because, the whole point of this blog post was supposed to be about how I just got back from a week long vacation, and how I really didn’t get too much writing done while I was away, and I sat down here today for my first day back home, and I got all freaked out, just like the math, what if, because I didn’t use it, my writing, I’d somehow lost it. I was going to make all of these jokes about how since I lost my math, that I never use math now, as a rule, ever. And that would have been a pretty wacky blog post I guess. But man, now I’m all serious, and I’m rarely serious, and it’s all because I wish that I stuck with math, because it was pretty f’n sick.