Day 3: a piture of yourself as a...teenager.

14-year old Andrew and me in Florida freshman year

So, this is the oldest photo I currently have of myself digitally. I'll work on getting another one of me actually as a child - but hey, I do think we look kind of like babies here! This photo has a lot of good memories for me. It was my first school trip during my first year of public school - it was a very exciting time for me. Out of all my high school experience, freshman year was pretty much the best, which is kind of the opposite of what most people say. By my senior year, I was a constant whirl of stress; I was literally president of 5 different clubs, as well as playing in the orchestra and being the editor of our very competitive newspaper. It just wasn't as fun any more; everything I did was focused on getting those scholarships, and I'd already been more than a little jaded by high school "love." However, freshman year I was carefree. School was easy and I excelled in my classes; I was new and therefore automatically held a certain degree of popularity; I made good friends easily was excited by each new crush. I loved being in orchestra with all of my new-found friends, and I had never been to Florida before this trip to Orlando. This is also the first picture I have with Andrew, who at that point was just a good friend. He claims that he had a crush on me, but I was completely oblivious to this - although looking at the picture now, I do see it a little :) But no, our story wouldn't start for a few more years. We didn't even go to the same theme park on the second day of that trip - he went to Universal and I went to Islands of Adventure. And I had a crush on this guy:

Mike Trew, freshman Dara, and Charlene Siza after getting drenched on a water ride. Check out that swimsuit, circa 2001!

HE was a sophomore, and also he wore spiky bracelets and had spiky hair. This made him very cool. Unfortunately, I also had a new boyfriend at home at the time. Oh, the agony of school trips! Remembering those times always puts a smile on my face - everything was so deliciously complicated. That's also the trip where I got sun poisoning - we decided it was a good idea to go to Cocoa beach at noon and stay splashing around for a few hours. I had disturbing purple blotches spreading all across my shoulders by the time we stopped for dinner at McDonald's on our way home. And then their was the bus ride - I'm pretty sure that as long as I live, I will never forget the pain of that bus ride. Due to a lack of funds, we had taken a school bus all the way to Florida (every trip after that in HS we always took a charter bus) and there was no way possible to sit without sticking tortuously to the brown vinyl seats. It was agony.

I'm behind the goofy guy, pre-sunpoisoned. By the way, the goofy guy is now my cousin-in-law.

Reflecting on my freshman makes me nostalgic for all the good parts of high school. Of course there were some pretty nasty times as well, but those magical parts of the teenage years still stand out when I think of high school. I remember all my different style changes as I tried to figure out which group I fit into, sitting at lunch in a booth with my group of girl friends every day until our group grew big enough to expand to a long table, meeting up to goof off in the library before school started, hanging out in the orchestra room after school, crazy shenanigans during forensics team practices and trips, singing karaoke in downtown Paducah with my newspaper friends...so many fun memories. Now, I'm not trying to say that high school was the golden era of my life or anything like that, because hands down I'd rather be where I am now than back there. I do think though, that if you make it your focus, you can always remember the good times. It's so easy to let the crappy things that happen in life overshadow entire time periods in your memory. As one of my favorite authors, Aldous Huxley, once said,

"Every man's memory is his own private literature."

However, I believe that whether our own personal literature reads like a tragedy or an adventure depends on our perspective.