That list, and the resulting discussion that’s popped up about high school made me feel like reflecting for a moment.

I have no love for my high school. I largely hated my high school experience. College, I’m somewhat ambivalent about. But we’ll get to that later.

The defining quality of my high school is that it’s a relatively small school in an incredibly affluent neighborhood. Half the town of Piedmont is spectacularly wealthy, the other half is firmly ensconsed in upper-middle-class. The school feeds in from a middle school, which is in turn fed by three elementary schools. If you started one of those three elementary schools, there’s a very good chance that 80+% of your class made it all the way to senior year of high school with you.

So, once an X, always an X. Did something ridiculous in 3rd grade? People still remember. Maybe they don’t remember the exact event, but it doesn’t matter. If you’re in the in-crowd, you’re in. If you’re not, you’re not, and it doesn’t change. That’s not to say that I did something idiotic in 1st grade that I regretted in 12th.

I have great friends – better than I could ever hope for, that came from my experience throughout that school system. Hell, one of my current housemates, I met in kindergarten. We’ve known each other *forever*. A fistful of my other friends I met along the way. Some when the elementary schools merged in middle school, and some I even became friends with after it was all over, just because of peripheral connections that remained.

That said, the group of people I’m close with now aren’t, by and large, the group that I was close to in high school. Why? I wasn’t really close to that many people. Pete, Sean, and a couple others, but in high school, I didn’t really hang out with anyone except the swim team, and even then, I always felt like a bit of an outsider.

In part, that was because I did a *lot* of extracurricular stuff. I was in the band/orchestra, so I’d perform in the pit during the high school musicals. I swam, and played water polo, I played tennis (you know, I totally forgot about that) for a good part of middle school – not on a team, just took private lessons with my mom’s instructor. I took piano, saxophone, and clarinet lessons, and basically was always doing something or another. It was immensely educational, but it meant that I never really “stuck” with a single group, and never formed really tight friendships with a large group.

The track team, where most of my current highschool-era friends hung out, was really tight. The swim team was close, but aside from Sean, and a few people to a much lesser extent, I don’t have any friendships that have lasted beyond that. Which is fine – I burned a couple bridges pretty severely at the very end of senior year. Not something I’m really all that proud of, but I can’t say I’d do it differently, even now. The stupidity of the righteous, I guess.

I also took some classes at Berkeley, which I went to with Patrick and Pete. Pete was a really good friend of mine. One of my best, if not the best friend I had in high school, and someone I still consider one of my very best friends, though I see him quite rarely. That was another source of discontinuity, I suppose.

Bleah.

Still – I can’t really complain. Like I said, I did have a couple really good friends, which are friendships that have lasted to this day. But I despised most of my high school. The whole social atmosphere was incredibly cliquish and oppressive.

College was different. There were vast swaths of it I genuinely loved. The place I lived was awesome, and there were some incredibly, wildly creative and intelligent people, the likes of which I’ll never experience in that sort of density ever again. The problem, for me, was that essentially because we all lived together, the 30 people I knew formed a very… incestuous group of friends. By that, I mean that though each of my 30 friends had 30 friends, it was the same 30 people. Over and over.

MIT has a really interesting dichotomy – or it used to, at least. East Campus had the super-liberal, experimental, weird, creative crowd. West Campus generally housed the more conservative types. Each side looked down their nose at the other. Thing was, by senior year, I was kind of fed up with the East Campus-style scene. It just drove me bonkers. I was sick of the “HEY! LOOK HOW WEIRD I AM! ISN’T IT AWESOME!?!?!?” attitude that pervaded a lot of that scene, and frankly, I’m not *that* weird. When it gets right down to it, I’m generally relatively reserved, and staid, in my social life, and as a result, I really was looking for something less… loud.

So, senior year, I started hanging out with some friends from West Campus, and wondered why there was such a fucked up dichotomy to it all. But those worlds didn’t blend well, and I found myself sort of split in two, again. No, I’m not saying this is an experience unique to me. God, no. But it breaks the *time* that you spend with a group in two, and things suffer, as a result.

I also had a relationship that dragged me to Harvard for a good portion of my time for two years of my school experience, then had a huge crush on someone who was unavailable, before meeting the love of my life. Relationships, undoubtedly, colored a lot of my experience at MIT, because when you’re hosed on a bunch of problem sets, and trying to juggle your time to split it between MIT and Harvard, everything gets a little bonkers. Again, it’s all a matter of breaking up your time into chunks that are too small, and trying to spread them too thin.

Maybe that’s why these days, I so enjoy spending huge chunks of time at home, relaxing – doing nothing, hanging out. Not heading off to this party or that one, or frantically squeezing in as many people as possible.

At this point, I think I have a good group of friends. Some of them have known me for 20+ years, some of them I’ve met only in the last six or seven. I wish, as always, that I had more time to spend with some of them, and some friends go for far too long without contact. I know it’s my fault, as much as anyone else’s, but I’m enjoying the quiet times.