Category Archives: high school

Who are the parents of these kids?

“Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Lay down your life for your brother” get thrown out the window with any variety of projectiles—balloons, eggs, donuts, festive gourds, even biscuit dough.

How I lost my curfew

My goal was always to be as quiet as possible. They needed to remember in the morning that I had satisfied the requirements of our arrangement, but I wanted drowsiness to prevent them from focusing too much on the exact time of my arrival.

Sweet, Necessary Craziness (Part II)

Men and women need one another’s craziness to stay sane

The Pannus

Most of my friends are at least in their mid-twenties. All of us are at the crux. We must decide either to embrace healthy dietary and exercise habits or capitulate to the slow and debilitating onslaught of the Pannus. Many of you may not know what the Pannus is and what it represents. Like you, […]

The Toast

My dating history is a mashup of triumphs and failures. My longest relationship to date was a nine-month soiree with a lovely young woman named Lindsay. I remember the very first time I saw her. She was walking through the rows of cardio equipment at the Maryland Farms YMCA. I was running on a treadmill […]

Piercings and Bill Leftfoot

I celebrated my graduation from high school by doing things of which my parents would disapprove. Rebellion is nothing unique to me. We see the light at the end of the tunnel—freedom! No more rules, no more curfew. No more questions about where we’re going, who will be there, or when we’ll be home. No […]

¿Cuantos anos tienes tu?

I took my first trip out of the country the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. My three best friends and I went to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with our youth group from Hillsboro Church of Christ. At this point, I had two years of Latin under my belt and spoke not a […]

Tape Ball to the Face

One of the crowning achievements up to that point in my life was knocking a squirrel out of a tree with a rock. It fell off the branch, hit the ground, popped up without the slightest trace of embarassement, and ran right back up the tree.  Throwing one object at another seems to be hardwired […]

Shame on me

In honor of April Fool’s Day, I’d like to list some of the pranks and mischief that I’ve orchestrated in years past: High School 1) Stealing the ball from Coach Tillman’s mouse so that it wouldn’t work. Once he discovered what was happening, he asked for a backup from Phil Sanders, the IT guy at […]

Roll-through stop

Let me make a suggestion. If you are fifteen and learning how to drive, angst-ridden for no good reason and straining to distance yourself from your parents who “just don’t understand you,” you need to remember that everything you say can and will be used against you. Your intellectual parry-and-thrust is less impressive than you […]