Sophomore Year, 6th Period: Drama

I never expected there to be so much drama in Drama.

We learned a lot in the Drama class. We learned stage directions. We learned how to stay out of view of the audience. We learned how to project when we spoke our lines in the auditorium. We learned how to set up lights. We learned how to build and paint sets. We learned how to find good costumes. We learned how to improvise. The only thing we didn't learn how to do was act. We had been taught the mechanics of acting, but not the art. This is actually a problem with my education in general, particularly in regards to the creative side of the subjects. I only learned how to structure a sentence and spell the words, but no one was able to teach me how to really write.

We thought we knew how to act. People from the town who came to our productions appeared to enjoy them. However, when we went to the annual high school theatre festival at Eastern New Mexico University, it was quite clear that we were on the lower end of the believable performance scale. It seemed like the acting students from the larger schools knew how to gel during their productions and get their interactions perfect. We were lucky if we could get through a one-act play without somebody blowing their lines.

I realized years later that what was going on in places like Albuquerque was that the Drama teachers had attempted to become actors themselves when they were much younger. They took part in a number of acting classes and workshops and learned "method" acting, a term I never heard of until I got to college. I guess they gave up on trying to make a living off of their talent (probably because they weren't very good looking) and went back to school to learn how to teach. During their acting classes, they were able to impart some very valuable knowledge about achieving believability during a performance.

Now, this isn't to say that someone absolutely has to have a good actor as a teacher in order to become a good actor themselves. I have seen some who were able to reach amazing heights as a performer without the benefit of a gifted acting teacher. I remember one school production at a festival in which the lead actress was so amazing, but her supporting cast appeared to be completely inept, including one person who could only speak in monotone. It was apparent that the teacher was as competent as ours, only being able to get them to say their lines and go where they were supposed to be at any given time.

My not being able to fully grasp the art of acting caused a lot of problems later on in college, as I found myself way behind the other students. On top of that, they were people I had seen perform at the festivals, so I knew what I was up against. I will go into that much later when I get into my college years.

So, why do I say there was drama in Drama? It's because my first girlfriend was in this class. I will also get to that chapter in just a few days.

I should point out that for my junior and senior years, I had the same two classes for fifth and sixth periods: Chorus and Drama. This is just a means of explaining why I won't be going into detail about them during my junior and senior years when I recap my classes.

Sophomore Year, 5th Period: Chorus

You may remember my ups and downs with my Chorus teacher in the 9th grade. She decided not to teach the next year. The new choir teacher was someone who had taught elementary music before. She originally came to Artesia in 1974 and taught at Hermosa and Abo. She would have been my music teacher in the 5th grade if I hadn't been forced against my will to go to Central Elementary. At the time, she and her daughter lived in one of the apartments my father owned. I know she taught music in the elementary schools the next year, but sometime after that, she moved to Roswell.

I don't know what circumstances brought her back to Artesia three years later, but she had gotten re-married. Her arrival had an immediate impact. When she first met with school officials, they told her that it was going to be really rough to have a good choir as there were only two boys who signed up. (Remember, I was one of those two.) Even though none of the upper classmen had her in elementary school, she had a good enough reputation that several of the boys who hadn't signed up from the end of the previous year came back.

I should also take this opportunity to talk about the rivalry that took place between the choir and the school band. Everybody in choir really disliked how the band seemed to get all the accolades and travel all over to the football games. Even though there was one booster organization for the entire music department, most of the energy and funds were used on the band. The parents who ran the booster club mostly all had their children in the band.

This rivalry reached a fever pitch during my sophomore year. At the beginning of the year, there were no students who were both in band and chorus. (However, a few weeks into the year, one of our new choir members decided to switch to band after getting frustrated with being on the football team and not getting to play during the games.)

This wasn't the kind of rivalry in which we played pranks on each other. It was the kind in which chorus members would give band members dirty looks from time to time. It was all attitude. However, I don't think the band members ever noticed. At the end of the year banquet, one of the senior bandmembers gave a tearful speech. Everybody in the room gave her a standing ovation except for the upper classmen chorus members, but I don't think anybody really paid attention.

Another part was that the band would go to competitions and got the highest scores. Our choir was rather mediocre and always got the second best possible score. Of course, we'd had four different choir teachers in four years while the band got to maintain its teacher that whole time. Lack of consistency probably hurt the choir more than a lack of actual talent. (I was considered one of the best singers in the choir. That should tell you the level of talent in the pool.)

I stayed in the choir all three years. It was always during 5th period and we kept the same teacher. Things definitely improved over that time. My senior year, we got to a competition at Six Flags Over Texas and came in first place in our category.

However, to this day, I still wonder what it would have been like to be only one of two boys in the choir had Ms F from the 9th grade stuck around.

Sophomore Year, 3rd Period: Biology I and 4th Period: Geometry

I loved taking Math, but I always hated Science. I would always do real well at the beginning of the year and then I would lose interest and get lower grades toward the end. This would prove to be a sore spot for someone who's supposed to be a geek. For some reason, things were different during my sophomore and junior years when it came to fulfilling my science requirements.

I have to admit, first of all, that my Biology I teacher was not that good. He was also one of the athletics coaches. He started the school year with a broken leg he got skiing a few months earlier. It was a shock when we finally saw him without the cast.

I guess what I needed was for science not to be too challenging. Maybe that was the problem. If I don't care about a subject, I don't want it to be challenging. The Biology teacher was able make the subject matter fool-proof. However, there were still a lot of people getting F's in the class.

However, I do remember one challenging question on a test. He had one of those models of the human body with removable organs. For the test, he would hold up the organ and ask us to identify it. He pulled out the liver and said this was the organ you put your hand over when you did the Pledge of Allegiance. I was suprised at how many people actually wrote "heart," when it clearly was not the heart. (I got the answer right.)

As easy as Biology was in high school, I was expecting the same in college. Unfortunately, while my professor was very knowledgable about the subject, he really had no clue how to make it interesting. I got a D in that class.

As for my Math requirement, I took Geometry. Again, I had one of the coaches as a teacher. However, this one had a pretty good command of the subject matter.

At this point I was questioning the validity of having to take Math classes. Around the time I was taking the class, comedian Robert Wuhl had a bit about taking college prep courses in high school. He said something to the effect of "I sure am glad I took Geometry. Hardy a day goes by that I don't do a proof!" I laughed when I heard him say that. I completely got the joke. I realized years later how spot on he was in his assessment. Not only do I not do proofs anymore, I don't even remember why we were doing them in the first place.

I guess it was good that I took all those Math classes in high school. When I took the ACT, I got a high enough score on the Math section that I was given instant credit for all my Math requirements in college. I never had to do another proof after the 10th grade.

Sophomore Year, 2nd Period: English II S

At Artesia High School, all sophomore students were required to take English II, but they separated it into three different classes, labeled S, A and P. S stood for "Superior," A stood for "Average" and P stood for "Practical." Practical? Oh, come on! The P stood for "Poor" and everyone knew it.

My Mom taught the A class. She was somewhat disappointed that I qualified for the S class because she wanted me in her classroom. I don't think that she really wanted to teach me. I think she just wanted me to bring up the average grade of her class (as I have frequently accused the school district of keeping smart kids in age-related grade levels just so they could raise the standardized test averages).

There were two significant differences between the S class and the A class. The A class read "Lord of the Flies." The S class read "A Tale of Two Cities." The A class had to complete one research paper. The S class had to do two during the school year. Otherwise, the textbooks were the same. I don't know that the P students had to do a research paper.

If you took the S class and received an A, it counted 5 points toward your GPA. A B was 4 points, and so on. This differential created a problem when I graduated. My senior year, the guidance counselor told me my GPA was high enough to graduate with honors. In a newspaper article, I touted this. However, at graduation, I did not receive an honors recognition. The reason was that the 5 point A didn't count toward that. My GPA on my transcript even has an asterisk next to it to indicate that it was enhanced by an advanced class. So what was the point of having a 5 point A? It really didn't help things.

Also, it should be noted that at the time, English II was the only class that offered a 5-point A. After I graduated, the school introduced other advanced classes in Math and History in which students could earn 5-point A's. Again, I didn't see the point because the differential is very obvious on the transcript. It's probably even more obvious if you managed to get above a 4.0 average.

The funny thing is that if you managed to get an A in the P class, the A only counted 3 points toward your GPA. I have a feeling those students didn't get an asterisk on their transcripts. An English II P teacher said she had one student who she felt was too smart to be in her class and had him transferred to the A class. He got mad because that meant he was actually going to have to study.

There were only two S classes and they were taught by the same teacher during the 2nd and 5th periods. She gave out one really difficult test. Almost everyone in both classes got an 80% on it. (At this time, 80% was a C.) The 5th period class asked her to curve the grades. She said she couldn't because someone in 2nd period got 100% on the test. They asked who it was. "It was Fayd." Everybody just growled and was mad at me.

This would be the last official "English" class I would take in high school. I was required to get 3 credits in English in order to graduate. My 6th period Drama class counted as an English credit. My final English education would take place my junior year.

But I certainly didn't feel like it was a "superior" class.

Sophomore Year, 1st Period: Physical Education

"How many periods do you have a day?"

"Six."

"Don't you get tired of bleeding that much?"

Due to a lot of stuff happening in my current life, I've had to suspend some activity on this blog for the last couple of weeks. It was bad, because at one point, I was about four weeks ahead on my posts. That eventually dwindled down to the point that I literally did not even have time to write the posts one day ahead of time.

So as I start fresh with my high school years, I will start by examining the classes that I had to take and the impact they had on my life. This will constitute the content for today and the next few days. Once the general education is out of the way, I can get to the more juicy stuff.

So I get to start with the class that made me feel most like a loser: PE. The good thing was that I got the roughest part of the day out of the way first thing in the morning. When you're a sophomore, you are forced to take either PE or Athletics. However, you only have to take it for one year. I actually took it for only one semester because I got to take Tennis for the second semester to round out the PE requirement that way. Taking Tennis was my Mom's idea. I guess she knew how rough it was in PE. This would be one of the few nuggets of her wisdom for which I would be grateful during high school.

My PE teacher also happened to be the head coach of the high school's football team. He treated the class like some sort of joke unworthy of his abilities. He would start out teaching us some sport that we were able to do in the gym. Then, he would throw out the ball and go into his office for the rest of the hour.

Absolute mayhem took place at this point. Even though the students only needed to take PE during the sophomore year, there were a number of juniors and seniors who continued to take the class, presumedly for the easy "A." These boys were not the Alpha males who would play on the football team. These were the boys who would grow up to be the scary punks who worked at the refinery. The upperclassmen tormented the sophomores. I remember one boy who got hit in the back with a tennis ball so hard that the bruise literally displayed the area of impact.

I was also a frequent target of attacks, but I never got any visible injuries. The general advice is to stand up to bullies. I can tell you that doesn't work, especially when there is more than one person doing the bullying. Yeah, you can stand up to one, but stand up to 10 and you are quickly outnumbered.

The funny thing was that during "playtime," some of the upper classmen would go hang out with the coach in his office and talk about whatever. I never saw the logic in this. These were guys who couldn't play football. What good was chatting up the head coach going to do? He wasn't going to put them on the team. They were in the wrong class for that.

Years later, he stopped being the head coach and became the principal at the high school. A few years after that, he became the city school superintendent. I know teachers who worked harder than he did to educate students and I couldn't believe that he could just walk right into those positions. However, my Mom and Dad said he turned out to be pretty good principal and superintendent.

So that was the only time I had to deal with those shenanigans in high school. I considered myself lucky.

Ode to a backpack

Four years prior to high school, I used to ride my bike to school when I started the sixth grade. For the first couple of weeks, it was a breeze. However, the day came when I would have my first actual homework assignment for my Math class. I was not able to co-ordinate holding that thick book with one hand and steer with the other. I hit a wall about a block away from school and fell off my bike. When I looked up, my Math book was standing up on its end on the top of the wall. It's too bad no one videotaped that. It would have gone viral.

I came home and told Dad what happened. I was more mad that I had homework than I was at my inability to navigate my bicycle with one hand. We immediately went out to the store and bought me a backpack. It was bright orange and was designed to go hunting with so that other hunters could see you more clearly and know not to shoot at you.

This was before backpacks started becoming common carriers for school supplies. There were not a lot of other students who had them. We appeared to be starting a trend.

I had that backpack for four years. I continued to use it through the seventh, eighth and ninth grades. My family also used it when we went on camping trips. It was very rugged. I took good care of it all four years.

One thing I haven't mentioned about Loyd up to this point is that Dad always said that he had the exact opposite of the Midas Touch in which everything he touched turned to ****. Almost anything he got his hands on, whether it was toys, books, crayons, pens, pencils, etc., wound up getting broken or lost. Much later, this would apply to cars.

Since I was going to be driving a car to school soon and would be keeping my schoolbooks in my car, I didn't need the backpack. I decided to go ahead and let Loyd use the backpack when he was in the seventh grade. Like I said, I had that backpack for four years and used it in sunshine, wind, rain and snow.

Loyd came home from the second day of school and the backpack was torn beyond what could be considered useful. I don't know how he did it. I was really angry. Even though I had given it to him, I still felt like it was my backpack and that he didn't care about everything I went through when I was wearing it.

Dad took him out and got another backpack. I don't know what was so special about that backpack, but he somehow managed to continue using it without tearing it up. Years later, I wonder if he didn't tear mine up on purpose. I have previously explained that Loyd did not like being younger than me. This meant he had to wear my hand-me-downs more often than he got new clothes. I wonder if he was really sick of getting stuff that I had cast off and this was his way of taking out his frustration.

However, I should point out that he didn't have a problem with taking my Solo and Ensemble medals that I had gotten in Choir. He pinned them to his band jacket and claimed that he had won them. He wound up losing those, too.

First day of high school

It was late August 1979. I had just completed the last summer of the 70's. It was time to go back to school. I knew that there was so much in front of me and it looked like it would take so long to reach the goal of being a senior and be able to graduate from high school. It was three long years and it felt like it.

As I mentioned previously, I didn't have my driver's license when I started the school year. Even though my Dad had already bought me a car, I couldn't drive it. That first day, the mile-long walk seemed to take a long time. So many thoughts entered my head about what to expect from high school. I didn't know what to expect from the teachers or the upper classmen.

Once I arrived at the school, I found some guys in my class and hung out with them in a kind of protective huddle before the first class started. These were not guys I was very friendly with, but I guess we were all a little scared of taking on high school.

The time came that we had to report to our homeroom classes. Homeroom was a lot different in high school. It wasn't part of a class we were actually taking. Under normal circumstances, you would retain the same homeroom class all three years of high school. For the first day of school, we spent most of the morning in homeroom. At one point, all the members of the sophomore class went to the gymnasium for an assembly welcoming us to school. During the assembly, I saw a few other people that I was able to refer to as friends.

Then it was time for lunch. I hung out with one of my friends. We spent the time walking around on the front lawn of the school. Then we saw something that stopped us dead in our tracks: It was a pregnant girl! We were stunned. We had never seen a pregnant girl in school before. So many thoughts ran through my mind: This girl was pregnant! This girl was going to have a baby! This girl could go into labor at any minute! This girl had sex! This girl may point at any guy and claim he's the father!

After a few seconds of awkward silence, my friend laughed and said, "Don't look at me!"

The rest of the day was a quick run through of our classes. We showed up to each of our classes, got our textbooks, the teacher would talk a little bit, and then we would leave and go to the next class. I wished all the classes were that short, but no luck. At least we didn't have any homework on the first day. My schedule went like this: 1st period, PE. 2nd period, English. 3rd period, Biology. 4th period, Math, 5th period, Choir. 6th period, Drama.

Drama class was actually a solid credit class. That's because it counted as an English class By comparison, PE and Choir were activity credits. However, they still carried the same amount of weight toward your GPA.

It was in Drama class that I met someone who would be my best friend for most of the school year. His name was Rad and he had moved to Artesia over the summer from New Orleans. I will write about him more in a future post, but I will say that we remain somewhat in contact with each other to this day.

After Drama class, I went home with my bag completely full with books. I knew the walk to school would be much harder for the next two weeks. I also knew that in the future, I would have many days in which homework would be included with those books.

So I survived the first day of high school. There would be many more days of survival ahead.

I was ready to date!

Now that I had gotten a car to go to high school, I was looking forward to setting my sights on perhaps the most important part of teen life: Getting a girlfriend.

I honestly had no idea what to expect or how to go about getting a girlfriend. As I mentioned before, my father was no help in this area. One of the things I knew for certain: None of the girls in my grade wanted to have anything to do with me. This meant that I had to either find someone new to the school or try to date a junior or senior. I was aware that the chances of the latter happening were very slim.

What I was looking for in a girlfriend was someone who was very smart. I wanted to spend time with someone who could also be a "study buddy." The looks weren't that important to me. (However, I should qualify that by saying that I was not attracted to girls who were very overweight. There was one who was really smart, but I had a hard time getting past her size. Many years later, that issue would cease to be a problem.)

I also was not looking for sex. I was brought up in an environment in which sex was considered wrong, and specifically, wrong for me. So, I was not in the mindset that I needed to get laid as soon as possible. Honestly, actual intercourse was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to get to the hand-holding and kissing that I had seen on TV and movies for years.

And that was the thing. I was completely unaware of this, but I was in high school about the time that the American attitude toward sex was changing. People were starting to become aware that they did not need to get married first to have sex with someone they desired. I guess the girls at school somehow had it in their heads that if they were dating someone, that meant they had to have sex with him. So, if they were going to have to have sex with whomever they were dating, they wanted to make certain it was someone they really wanted to have sex with. Thus, the Alpha males and the seniors got most of the attention, even from the girls I considered my "league."

This means that girls who might have been willing to go out with me on friendly little dates or study sessions were not interested because they thought I was going to try to have sex with them. They were so wrong, but even if I knew that this was what was going through their minds, there wouldn't have been a whole lot I could have done about it. I couldn't just go up to a girl and say, "Hey, do you want to go out with me? I swear I don't want to have sex with you!"

I have no idea how much sex was actually taking place among my classmates. I would hear guys talk about certain girls, but those girls were always the stupid ones I had no interest in. And I would hear several different guys talking about their sexual encounters and they were always with the same girl. Even if I was desperate enough to hook up with one of those girls, they still had no interest in me.

There was also the issue of there not being anything worth doing in Artesia on a date besides going to the movies and going to eat. By the time I had gotten to high school, they had closed the miniature golf course and the roller rink. The arcade was full of the scary punks from the refinery. (I remember one student commenting in the school paper that he enjoyed taking a girl out to Hope to watch the grass grow.)

All of these elements combined to make my teen years very frustrating (and of course, I am talking emotionally, not sexually.) But I did find someone who was willing to go out with me. You will read more about her in a future post.

New Year's Resolutions

I've never had much use for making major changes in my life at the beginning of a New Year. My resolutions happen to come in small doses throughout the calendar. I try to get through school, work and relationships.

If I decide I'm going to lose weight, I will do it when it feels right, not when January 1st rolls around. I'd hate to be the person who makes a resolution to lose weight for the New Year on January 2nd. That means I would wind up gaining a lot of weight before I even begin to try to lose it. That's not a good habit to get into, especially if you go ahead and give up in the first few weeks of the year.

I mostly make resolutions when I find myself in difficult situations. When I was unemployed, I would resolve to find another job within four weeks. When I was forced to find a new apartment, I would do everything possible to make sure I had a roof over my head. When I wound up being unemployed for three months, I swore I would not go back to living with my parents. For the most part, I was able to accomplish all of these goals with a lot of determination. Sometimes, I wouldn't meet my deadlines, but I always accomplished the issues that were important to keeping myself alive.

That's not to say that I've met every goal I ever set for myself. There are just some you have to give up on and others that you have to wait a long time for. In my case, that would be marriage. When I was a teenager, I resolved to be married by the time I was 25. I almost did that. (You'll read about it later.) I just didn't realize that it would take me an extra 17 years to actually get to the altar.

As for goals that I've given up on, I thought that I would eventually be rich and famous. I know that's never going to happen. Nobody wants to know me or give me money.

Happy New Year! Let's start with a video!

The New Year doesn't just present a problem in having to write "2014" instead of "2013."



Oddly enough, my birthday, September 1st, happened to come right after the beginning of the school year.