Joss Whedon was onto something...

...when he decided to set Buffy the Vampire Slayer in high school, because it had so much "horror" potential.

So here, swiped from Cara is a sampling of my own personal reflections on the senior year of high school:

1. Who was your best friend? I had a number of good friends, but my best friend senior year was probably an exchange student from Spain named Laura Gomez Garcia. We lost touch long ago, and as you might imagine, trying to Google her hasn't been helpful, but I would love to find out what she's been up to since she went back home.

2. What sports did you play? All the ones they told me I would flunk gym class if I didn't. Otherwise? Forget it.

3. What kind of car did you drive? A 1977 Chevy Impala wagon. I named him Sherman, on account of his almost Army-ish green paintjob. The prevailing theory was that Sherman had started his life as a tank, and then some enterprising fellow stripped the guns off of him and slapped on a Chevy label and somehow passed him off as a sta-wag.

4. It's Friday night, where were you at? If you were to ask my mom, she would say I was bowling. Again. In truth, I was probably hanging out at a park after dark with some friends, eating candy, drinking soda and being dorkly. And in winter, we were at Kellie's house hurling mini-Reese's at each other.

5. Were you a party animal? Not in the vaguest, slightest, most generous sense of the word. Not one little bit. Practically all of my friends were either in DARE (and took it kinda seriously), or were Girl Scouts.

6. Were you considered a flirt? Not hardly.

7. Ever skip school? Yes, once. On "Senior Skip Day". And my mom called me in sick. (See? Total dweeb.)

8. Ever smoke? Not until college.

9. Were you a nerd? I wrote fanfic before I knew what fanfic was. I read sci-fi/fantasy novels in just about every class. I was working on writing a couple sci-fi/fantasy novels, come to think of it. Oh yeah, I was a nerd.

10. Did you get suspended/expelled? No, but I was a regular in detention. My struggles with punctuality began at a young age, sadly.

11. Can you sing the Alma Mater? Sure. "On ye Lions! On ye Lions! Blah blah blah blah blaaaah! Blah de blahblah, Blah de blahblah. Blahde blahblah blah blah blaaaah! Blahblahblah On ye Lions! On ye Lions! Blah de blahblahblaaaaah! Gooooooo, Lions, fight fight fight to win, this game!" See?

12. Who was your favorite teacher? Mrs. Fiore. The irony here is that I don't think she actually liked me very much. And meanwhile, there was another teacher who seemed to think very highly of me, but uh... he gave me the mega-wiggins. *shudder!*

13. Favorite class? Interpersonal Communication and Film as Literature. Great classes. Also, Creative Writing was good too.

14. What was your school's full name? Lisle Senior High School.

15. School mascot? Lion

16. Did you go to Prom? Nope. There wasn't anyone I wanted to go with, so instead Laura and I took the money we would have spent on Prom and did a 3-day whirlwind of complete and utter teenaged abandon. One night at the video arcade/pizza parlor place spending quarters like mad. The next day we went downtown to the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the day after that to Great America with all our friends who /did/ go to Prom. It was AWESOME. We had just the best time.

17. If you could go back and do it over, would you? If you paid me a couple million dollars and promised I wouldn't have to live with my parents for it... no, even then I still wouldn't. (However, if I had no choice of whether I was repeating high school or not, senior year is absolutely the one I would prefer to repeat.)

18. What do you remember most about graduation? Sweltering.

19. Favorite memory of your senior year? Probably that "Prom" weekend. Though there are many. Senior year was, to be fair, probably the best year I'd had since I was like, 11. I did a lot of making up for lost time.

20. Were you ever posted up on the senior wall? Like Cara, I don’t know what this means either.

21. Did you have a job your senior year? I actually didn't. My parents refused to let me work that year, even though I had worked from the time I was 11 - first babysitting, then at the local library once I turned 16. I hated not having my own money that year, but I did get to do a lot more dorking around and having fun.

22. Who did you date? Um, for the first few months of senior year, I "dated" a guy named Ryan via the US Postal Service. We'd met the summer before senior year, but lived several hours apart. Nowadays we would just have IM'd all the time, but back then? Snail mail and cassette tapes, baby. I used to drive ol' Sherman around and talk into my tape player to him.

23. Where did you go most often for lunch? Toxic Hell, that haven of super-cheap, mostly edible food.

24. Have you gained weight since then? Yar.

25. What did you do after graduation? Went straight up to Girl Scout camp to work for the summer. Pre-camp had already started, so since I'd missed the bus, my dad and my godfather drove me up there.

26. When did you graduate? 1991.

There you have it, folks. My old yearbooks are still, um... in a box somewhere. So I can't find a picture for you (nor do I have a scanner, come to think of it). But imagine, if you will, a chunky girl with a lopsided-bowl haircut and big ol' Jodie Watley hoop earrings.

I've got some actual knitting content built up (and some thoughts about changing the direction of this blog a bit, but more on that later), and we're nearing the end of this "Month O' Deadlines" we've been in for Caz's writing projects, so hopefully I'll be able to be on the computer when I've actually got some mental juice to apply to things like blogging more often.