In seventh grade, I had an addiction. Many afternoons, I stayed after school to work on the yearbook and the newspaper. Our staff worked simultaneously on both and each month, our newspaper (a packet of regular paper stapled in the top left corner) was handed out in the hallways during lunch. We were each charged […]
Read more "My Strange Addiction"In eighth grade, something in me broke that would affect me for years. Two somethings actually: my tibia and my spirit. A weekend before Thanksgiving, I was running an obstacle course on the primary-colored playground of the local elementary school with my dad and my brother. We’d wandered there together with the intention of spending […]
Read more "When the Leg Breaks"No one wants to go back to middle school. Not a single person, with the possible exception of Billy Gilman, wants to revisit that period of our lives. Nothing went right, everything was unfair and we feel trapped inside our moody, horny, sprouty selves. We kick off adolescence excited we’re no longer in elementary school […]
Read more "What’s in a Name?"“I learned about Y2K in my middle school history class.” My friend works at a large university and she sometimes texts me things she hears students say in passing. She and I graduated within a year of each other so our reference points are similar and it’s always entertaining to hear how people a generation […]
Read more "Eighth Grade"Clack-clack-clack-clack. The chorus of clacking rang out in the small computer lab as tiny fingers pressed down on the brand new keys of Macintosh keyboards. Like a forest of chatty insects, the clacking filled the room of elementary school children. We were new to this—this “typing” thing—and the foreign and measured coordination required to […]
Read more "The Ballad of an Eighth Grade Gladiator"