people disappoint me, 2001 volume

two memories from colleyville heritage high school, 2001:

1.  before super-target was finished on glade road and highway 121, the developers put a big tarp over this mound of dirt.  when my friends and i passed it one night, we noticed someone had spraypainted, "hates fags" underneath a "class of 2001" banner.  later, michael took it down.  (ah, i remember too, that vivian had written a unrelated, but brave and controversial letter to the school paper about things we say that seem harmless but are not. think, "that's gay!")  needless to say, i grew up with rampant homophobia.

i remember how profoundly disappointed and ashamed i felt.  we are intolerant, ignorant, hateful.  it pained me to see a sign that read "class of 2001 hates fags"; from my experiences at school, it seemed true.  and i felt implicated for not doing my part to stop stuff like that.  at graduation, i wanted to center my speech around the incident.  instead, i watered into a characteristically carol talk about open-mindedness and tolerance. there was some part of my seventeen year-old self that believed that moving to california would make things better.  but, people are the same everywhere.  :)

2. back then, i cheated.  a lot.  not because i needed to.  i would still go over the problems on my own eventually.  my rationale had something to do with being disillusioned with school and showing disrespect to the institution.  what was i so upset about?  standardized testing, grades:  it was all a game to collect numbers, not actually to learn.  and that was profoundly disappointing.  people should be motivated to study because they are intellectually curious, not because they think they will get something out of it. 

i thought that people would be more motivated in a college setting, and to some extent they were.  but, inevitably, there were still the people who fish for "easy classes" and the easy a's instead of exploring things that were interesting or challenging to them.  sadly, there's too much at stake regarding the kinds of grades we make and what we study.


i don't know what the moral of those stories were except that i used to be pretty idealistic and disappointed.  i think i've lowered my expectations substantially in the past six years.  i have no energy for angry disappointment, just resigned disappointment.  also, i just smile at people's absurdities and try to understand.