High School Daze.

"Just because you're sixteen or seventeen years old, that doesn't mean you're any less experienced or less serious than anyone else."-Judd Nelson


I remember a lot of my time in High School. I'm barley out of my High School days but as these times in my life come to a close, I'm left here at the midnight hour in this cold winter recalling my times in Lehman High School and my recent days at Cuny Prep.

I have to admit that while there were some good spots within my times in both High Schools, that particular era in my life was actually the most trying, depressing, confusing, hard and sorrowful time of my life so far. As I look back, I can smile in accomplishment for some of the things that I've done and I can only frown at the many things I'm not too proud of.

At the end of the day, my days in High School taught me the one thing that I know painfully clear now: I'm as human as the rest of the people in the world. Still, I've grown and matured into the person I am today and a big part of it stems from my time finding myself and examining myself from my teenage years.

The questions that I'm left to answer are:

A) How did High School effect me internally?


B) What were the experiences in High School that molded me into who I am today?


and lastly....


C) What was my life in High School like?



"Where did it all begin?" would be the first question I'd have to ask myself I guess. I remember the day clearly. I was fourteen and my first day in High School was a day filled with a opposing mixture of optimism and dred.

September 7, 2005 marked the first time I'd ever stepped into the hallways of Herbert H. Lehman High School as a student. My grandfather had brought me to the school for orientation and I remember immediatley falling into my usual state of stoic silence that morning.

The scent of Lehman High was one of coffee, perfume and baked pastries (since they were always having a Bake Sale in the lobby). I recall Lehman as being one of those places where a person could immediatley become overwhelmed by the chaotic noise of it's multitudes of students talking all at once and furiously-but-subtly competing with each other for status and popularity. I guess you could call the place a typical High School with typical teenagers and typical staff and typical....everything.

That first day at orientation brought a weird, eerie feeling atop of me as if I'd already known what the end result of my time there was going to be. The first thing that I remember happening to me after I entered the school was my buddy Rafael walking up to me and starting a conversation.

I'd known Rafael for a while before we entered Lehman High School together; we met at our previous school, M.S.127, in the sixth grade where (as I'm ashamed to admit) I wasn't above teasing him and picking on him, but what can I say? Eleven-year-olds aren't as mature as the world would like, I suppose.

After a short while on the line of new students, the two of us finally entered the school's auditorium where the then-principal, Mr. Leder, proceeded to talk for about four hours about how great he thought his school was and how much fun all of the past students had at his school and blah blah blah. I remember in those first instances, I was as turned off as a person could possibly be.

The next thing they did was take us on the routine tour of the school where a middle-aged foreign language teacher showed us all of the "perks" of the large (and I mean LARGE) High School from floor-to-floor. By the end of that first day, I remember being tired and frustrated. I didn't like the fact that everything a student did in the school would end up in some penalization of some sort.

At the end of that first day, one perk did find it's way into my life: My father's parents (who my mom forbidded me from seeing) lived right across the street from the school which gave me the opportunity to see them whenever I wanted to, unbeknownst to my mother. Eventually, my Dad (who'd seperated my mom and moved away from us when I was nine and my brother was twelve) would come to visit me there at his parents' home for a few hours after school and before he'd have to be at work.

The days would roll by during that freshman year to become a routine of daily frustration of getting up early to go to school, visit my dad's parents and return home just to my mother's demands of chores for me to do or my brother's need to complain about his days at work or his latest sex-fueled tales of girls he'd met.

September 13th brought my life an unexpected treat in the midst of my new life in High School and my adaption to the changes I was going through during that fall. Supernatural premiered that night and I was immediatley hooked into the storyline of the show. After weeks of watching the series, it'd become a constant in my life and I would gradually go on to never miss an episode even to this day.

Like most other fourteen year old boys, I was interested in the opposite sex. I was still recovering from the massive blow to my self-confdence that Marlene had handed me the summer prior to my start at Lehman High School (Marlene was the first girl to ever reject me when I asked her out) but somewhere within myself, I found it in me to ask this pretty girl from my computer tech class out. Her name was Courtney and like Marlene before her, she shot me down too.

In January of 2006, I'd met a fairly sweet girl named Jackie over the now-exstinct website, Sconex.com, where all teens were able to ineract with each other through email and comments much like a low-tech version of Myspace. For about a week straight, we spoke over the phone for hours at a time and after I finally met her, BAM-she severed all contact with me from that point on.

Back at school, my grades were continuously declining for that second semester as they had been since the first marking period of that school-year. No thanks to my teachers for marking me down absent continuously even though I was there for most of the school days anyway which contributed to my forced repeation of about four or five classes.

By february of that year, I dropped a few classes due mostly in part to the overwhelming stress that I had coming from both the insults spewed at me from my teachers every single day and the numerous truancy "phantom absence" letters that were sent home resulting in my mother screaming at the top of her lungs at me as often as the notes made their way into our mailbox.

Still, every week, I found a small glimmer of joy by watching Supernatural and Smallville. For one weekend out of the month of february 2006, I went to my first  large mainstream comic book convention, which was the first annual New York Comic-Con where I met tons of my favorite creators for the very first time. As a fourteen year old, that's the type of event where you'll never really get the same feeling of excitement again.

Even with that experience under my belt, I still wasn't convinced enough to stay in my classes for more than a week in which I would begin to hang out with my old friend, Joseph, for a entire week in Parkchester while I was supposed to be in school.


Joseph, like myself, was another M.S.127 alumni. We'd met in the seventh grade and instantly became friends. He's the type of guy who people generally don't come across everyday because his personality, views, styles and friendship are such rare things to come by. Joe is the loyal type of person who'd go out of his way to make a friend happy and he would come to only prove himself to be a leader and immovable force as our friendship grew and grew and grew through the years to come.


But although that decision of mine to skip school for a whole week might not have been the best or mature descision I could've made back then, I was smart enough to know that if I'd stayed in my classes every single day like I was expected to, I probably would've lost my mind.
(I still don't understand how others can expect a person at such a young age, especially, to complete so much work in such a short period of time, excell at all of their courses, prepare for harder and more demanding work, do the same thing every day while going through the chaotic motions of life at home and in their personal lives and expect those who are under that sort of pressure to be outstanding citizens.)

However, that week spent skipping classes with my best friend, Joe, had consequences. With the false absences that my teachers from the first semester piled on top of my absences from that week of school, my guidance counselor finally called me into her office upon my return to school and had me dropped from some of my classes until my mother would come into the school to have a meeting with my her in order to figure out how to get me to stay in school and "improve" my grades to her liking.

Even with my mother knowing that I wouldn't be able to obtain my classes without her coming in to have a meeting with my guidance counselor (who was extremley shitty at her job, by the way), she never went in to speak to the woman and the classes I was dropped from were never replaced on my schedule. I continued that year doing what I could to improve my credits but overall there was nothing I was able to do in order to meet the criteria I was supposed to meet by the end of my first school year.

Sometime during the spring of 2006, my grandmother and I took a trip to Philadelphia for the Wizard World Comic Book Convention. At that time, little did I know just how much that trip would play in my life in the long run. Not only did I get the chance to meet Erica Durance (who commented on my precious eyes, as she so elogantly put it) at that convention but by chance or fate (depending on which you believe in) I met my good friend, Jason, while I was on a line to meet my favorite comic book artist Jim Lee.

Jason was a cool guy from the start. He didn't like my favorite band, U2, at the time and he thought that Radiohead was better than Coldplay (still a big debate) but I remember we had a lot of the same interests;
Our love for Nine Inch Nails was one of the big similarites we shared. Some things happen for a reason, I feel. The strange thing is, sometimes we have to make mistakes in our lives to get to the fateful and good parts of our lives.

That summer was filled with anguish and stress as most of my days are. I wasn't getting along with my mom's new boyfriend so I chose to stay with my grandparents that summer and the high point came when my grandfather and I saw Superman Returns in the movies. I was waiting around that summer for yet another girl
I'd asked out during the last day of school to give me a call but unfortunatley, there was no luck there either.
Her name was Amanda and as usual....she shot me down also.

The next fall, things were looking up a bit. I had the chance to redeem my mistakes from the previous year (even the ones that weren't necessarily my fault) and my new teachers were alright type of people (or so I thought) and all was going good up until the end of the first semester when three of my five teachers failed me even though I passed all of their finals. Things at home had went rotten too, mostly due to the static between my mother and I over [in the simplest of terms] absolutley everything.

Fall soon became winter and the second semester began in February of 2007. I was only taking two classes in which I was supposed to be in and the rest were all classes I had to repeat. During this time, I was very depressed, even more so than I had been since the previous year. Nothing was going right in my life: My grades were beyond horrible, my teachers insulted me every chance they got (One teacher went out of her way to point me out to the class and read my grades off out loud which caused the class to laugh simultaneously), every girl that I asked out ended up rejecting me and all I was getting at home were complaints from my mother about my grades and my utter "laziness."

At school, I spent my days in the school library to avoid going to class and dealing with my teachers and the classrooms full of kids who uttered under their breath whenever I walked into the class.

Yep. Unfortunatley, I had fallen into a very deep depression. I spoke very little at home or in public (and I was never a big speaker anyway), I stayed in my room at home writing in my journal or on this blog or just writing new scripts 24/7, I blew up at any and everyone for the smallest things and at some point there was absolutley nothing that pleased me or made my life any easier until February 16th when a really, really, really pretty girl who dressed punk and wasn't afraid to be herself commented on my U2-Vertigo Tour 2005 t-shirt as she walked into science class a little late. Her name was Mia Diaz.

Mia was something else; She had a sense of humor like nobody I'd ever known, she was more beautiful than any girl I'd ever seen, she was artistic and we had a lot in common. She listened to me and never judged me and most of all, she was my only friend for a while when I had nobody else.

When I met her, she was still with someone and that caused a lot of friction for a long time. By that summer, we had stopped talking to avoid any conflict between myself and her then-boyfriend, Michael, but it wasn't long before we were talking to each other every chance we got let it be over the internet or over the phone.
We were very close for a long time.

I was working that summer at a awning business which paid crap, especially for the work I was doing (heavy lifting, etc.) and out of nowhere while I was up one night (early morning) at 3 AM after a hard day of work while I was spending the night at my grandparents' house, oddly enough, the phone rang and when I picked it up, I got the news that my cousin, Carmello, had been shot and killed. The news was a real blow to me and it brought my depression back ten-fold.

I remember those weeks of summer being all a big blur where I didn't feel anything at all except for numbness. The depressing-but-relatable lyrics and sounds of Nine Inch Nails and Staind were the only sounds in my ears for about a month. In less than a month, my mother had fallen victim to a stroke and the darkness of my depression just got worse and worse and it dug deeper and deeper into my heart.

I remember those testing times of sorrow as being a time of endurance and animosity where my writing became a horror-fest and my attitide was a nonchalant and ruthless one. My brother, Jason, Joseph, Rafael and Mia were the few among others who did their best to see that I made it through those days although it took me a long time to recover from that ferocity and those ferociously dark days.

When fall came around once again in 2007, I didn't even attempt to try school again. I was still recovering from my cousin's death, my mother's stroke and my depression. All through that, the only thing that was really keeping me from loosing it [my mind] was my love for Mia. Unfortunatley for me, she was still with Michael and she only considered me a  friend. Even when I finally told her that I was in love with her and had been in love with her since I first met her, she kept me pigeon-holed as "just a friend".

Through all of that stuff, I was standing firm in my stance to not return to school for one single day and my days were filled with hanging out with Mia and Rafael (who were still enrolled at Lehman High) during their lunch breaks when we would sometimes sit around on the benches of Lehman High's Bleachers on the school's football field or at the benches at Westchester Square. Hell, if it was a monday, I would go downtown to the movies with Jason.

Really, it didn't matter to me what I did as long as I didn't step into a classroom at Lehman High School ever again for as long as I lived. I was like Trent Reznor and Lehman High School was like TVT Records; I was like Alan Moore and Lehman High School was the equivalent to DC Comics; I was like King Leonidas and Lehman High School was the equivalent to King Xerxes. Under no circumstances was I willing to ever go back to Lehman High or ever step into one of their classrooms....literally.
By that december, it became a big thing at Lehman High where the guidance counselors of the school got a hold of my small campaign not to step foot into one of their classrooms when a group of kids began to follow my lead and for about a week or so, a domino effect came into play which resulted in groups of kids not coming into school and it overall lead to them calling my grandfather and myself into school to have a face-to-face meeting with my guidance counselor.

At some point, my small and tiny rebellion paid off for me because when my grandfather and I went in for the meeting, not only did I stand my ground in front of the staff but I got them to sign me out right there on the spot (something they wouldn't normally do for someone under seventeen).

I remember the last thing I said in Lehman High School clearly because it was one of my proudest moments, seeing as how I'd fought and obtained what I set out to get that day: The guidance counselor at the meeting was telling me that there would be nothing in the world for me if I didn't go to college and get a college degree and because I ironically saw her degree on the wall in back of her, my reply was "You have a college degree and you're a guidance counselor at a high school...."

All proud moments come with a price though: My grandmother signed me up against my will at the G.E.D-oriented transitional High School, Cuny Prep, in less than two weeks from my victory at Lehman High School and I had begun counting down my days until I entered my next school.

The days rolled by and Christmas passed as well as the New Year where 2008 rang in. January 4th, 2008 was a bigger day in my life than that New Year's was. I hadn't seen my best friend, Joe, in a long while and he came over to my grandparents house to hang out for a while before we eventually found ourselves travelling to Lehman High to see who was around (because the enrolled kids were back in school by this point) and I recall having this distinct gut feeling that we would run into Mia and then it happened....we actually did see her.


She was all hugged up with some other guy who turned out to be one of her ex-boyfriends, someone she assured me she'd severed all ties with. My heart sunk the furthest when she kissed him right in front of me and Joe as if we weren't there at all. This was the same girl who told me she loved me time and time and time again and even had told me that she loved me the night prior to the day I caught her with him.

The rest of that whole day was filled with sadness and sorrow and anger and embarassment. I felt like crying and dying at the same time for weeks. I refer to those weeks as the "twenty weeks of hurt." For some reason which I can't remember, I wanted to mark those times in weeks rather than months; My guess is because I figured weeks sounded more hurtful. That's the way I thought back then....I was thinking crazy. Real crazy. I don't like to read my blogs from back then because it makes me feel as if I made an ass out of myself bitching and moaning and crying and drinking over a girl who never really loved me in the first place but lead me to believe that she did.

A few days later, I was officially enrolled at Cuny Prep. Once again....I was seriously (and I'm talking seriously) depressed. I didn't say a word for days at a time either in school or out and my scripts and stories were once again a horror-fest as they were during the period when my cousin was killed and my mother had a stroke. But this time, I would be able to add Mia's betrayal onto my list of things that hurt me the most in my life.

Cuny Prep seemed to be a preachy and fake type of place where they promised one thing and didn't deliver....kinda like George W. Bush. The first time around, I seemed to be justified because the teachers were uncomprimising, the principal was over-zealous and the kids there were all either juvies or hopeless cases. I hated it and I was ready to drop out of that school within a week until I met my writing teacher at that time, Mr. Haff.

He was a Canadian guy and he loved literature as much as I did. He had a respect for the comic book writing form as I did and he was into my scripts more than anyone I could've named back then. I liked the guy's attitude toward his students and I shared his philosophies on life and politics. His classes were the only high-point of my days and he was the only teacher for a long time who didn't fail me for every little thing most teachers would fail their students for. He was flexible in his standards and he taught his subject better than anyone I'd ever know so I stayed on for a little while longer.

In the meantime, I had developed a interest in a girl named Yvette. She was friendly and she was always nice enough to say hi to me in the mornings when everyone else just passed by and left me un-noticed. I wrote her an annonymos letter describing her beauty and grace but although I liked her alot, I was unwilling to approach her because of my depression and I felt as if I'd been put through enough for such a short period of time so I left it at what it was (an aquaintance) and never approached her.

Not long after, Mr. Haff left the school for being unable to work as liberally as he wanted to in such a conservative environment as Cuny Prep was at that time. It wasn't long after until I dropped out of that school altogether due to the stress I had to deal with at home and at school while I battled my depression away.

I left Cuny Prep the first time for a good reason though. They wouldn't let me take the G.E.D test until I was seventeen and at the time, I was only sixteen so I figured I would take the rest of the year off to clear my head and I would return that fall when I would be eligible to finally take the G.E.D exam and get out of school all-together a few months earlier than my friends who were still enrolled in traditional High School.

It took a few months to clear my head of all the things that late 2007 and early 2008 had put me through but that summer spelled out a couple of months of good experiences. I saw both Coldplay and Nine Inch Nails live and I was able to give school a try once again that fall as I had planned when I left the first time.
Withing the first few months, I made a new friend in my teacher, Mr. Mendoza who shared my political and anti-religionistic views. Another guy, Jash, has beome a close friend of mine since I re-started at Cuny Prep and I finally took my G.E.D test but I'm still waiting on the results. Ironically, Mia joined the school and apologized to me for what she did and we came to a truce to end out fighting and move on with our lives. Most of all, these past few months saw me finally win the first-place prize for a writing contest at Supernaturalfanwiki.wetpaint.com.

Yeah, High School sucked for me and I'm glad that this chapter in my life is nearly done with. I can say this though: I've grown, matured and learned more in these past four years than any other time in my life and I think that I'm turning out to be an alright type of person despite my flaws and shortcomings.
I don't know what the future holds for me or if it's going to be as bright as I'd like it to be. I don't know if I'll accomplish the goals that I set out for myself and live the dreams that I've dreamed for years but I know that if anything is true, it's that life for me only gets even more interesting from here. This is only the beginning....