Of Course Heavy Medication Isn't Out Of The Question

I've mentioned in the past that I have what you might call an odd memory. I remember things that happened to me in my life, but I remember most of them the way other people remember something they read in a book once. I remember them factually, with no emotional connection to them. This leads to an almost total lack of nostalgia for damned near anything.

The reason I'm thinking about this now is that someone asked if I ever wished I was back in high school, and I answered honestly, "No". Well, it wasn't totally honestly, as my initial reaction was something along the lines of "Aw Hell no. I'd rather volunteer to be Rush Limbaugh's proctologist for a day that spend one minute as a teenager again". Still, when I think back to high school, it's like anything else in my life - there were a lot of things I liked about it and a lot of things that sucked about it. There wasn't anything particularly magical about that time of my life.

What's funny is that I think a lot of people tend to forget about some of the more rotten parts of high school, most of which involved being a teenager. Being a teenager has a lot of drawbacks. You think you know everything, but no one wants to listen to you. You're pumped full of enough hormones to make lawn furniture vaguely attractive. They make you sit in class all day and read the most depressing literature ever put to paper. As if it wasn't bad enough dealing with heartbreak, rejection and social pressures, I had to read The Jungle. The Jungle for God's sake!

That's just cruel.

Now there were a lot of cool things about being a teenager too (the ability to consume my own weight in Mancino's meatball subs and Mountain Dew comes to mind), but I'm careful not to glamorize them, especially now that I have kids. Some day, they're going to be teenagers, a thought that sends a chill down my spine. I don't want to be the parent who remembers that as being awesome and thus doesn't comprehend why the Princess is in tears over something someone else wore to school or why the Moose has taken to brooding and won't talk to me for a week. I need to remember what it was to go through that pain, those feelings of being alone and frustrated and knowing that no one will ever truly understand you.

I need to remember, because it's probably going to be the only way I can tolerate it without heavy medication.