Ghosts of Kristina past.

Well. I've had a strange few days.
(I feel like my blog starts with that sentence a lot.)

On Thursday I went to my CHID major focus group and we had a guest speaker and a two hour presentation about the benefits of studying abroad and the opportunities that the CHID program has to offer. Most people take this class as a Sophomore or a Junior, when they still kind of have a good portion of their college career ahead of them, so as a Senior it was a little bit hard being in this discussion knowing I don't reeeeally have time to study abroad again, or for a whole quarter, or in any of the cool ways my department likes to send people.
But man. They sure did a good job of planting the seed. We went around the circle and listed any of the places we've ever wanted to travel to, and I was fascinated by the places some people were interested in going. My personal list included Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Prague, India, Japan, and returns to Ireland and Scotland.

And it just figures that my program actually has trips in Spring and Summer quarter that go to at least half those places. It's really, really tempting to me to just throw caution to the wind and study abroad again, but with the amount of money it costs, mixed with not wanting to miss my last quarter at UW or have to be finishing school in the summer term.. I probably wont.

Anyway.

Friday I went back home to spend the evening with my mom. It was my brother's homecoming football game at my old high school, and since he's in the marching band, we went to see him play and do the halftime field show. Normally I wouldn't go, but my Dad is out of town and my Mom straight up told me she wouldn't go alone. So... I did my daughterly duty, gave up my Friday night, and drove back to my good old home town.
Going back to my high school is always a really weird experience. It's such a strange feeling (as I'm sure it is for everyone) - everything looks exactly the same. The parking lot, the tennis courts, the stadium, even the ASB posters on the walls, the cheerleading and band uniforms, the homecoming floats, the concessions stand… everything is exactly how I left it, except that I have been gone for three years so nearly everyone I knew has cycled out of the school and it's filled with complete strangers, as well as younger brothers and sisters of the people I grew up with.

The faculty is the same, just older. The songs the band is playing and the cheer team is performing to are just newer. Our school was still losing to Bellevue High School. They still managed to mess up the sound system, ruining the drill team's half time show (a running joke from my time there).

But then, mixed in the crowd, I started to see a disproportionate amount of people I did go to school with. There were at least fifteen kids from my particular graduating class milling about at the game, the types of people I went to school with for years and years but never knew well enough for me to actually go up and talk to them. We just did the sort of eyebrow-raise "I acknowledge your existence but please don't say hi" thing. The guy who played bari-sax. The girl with the annoying voice that ran for ASB president but no one voted for her because they didn't want to listen to her do the morning announcements every day. The kid who got expelled because he beat up a freshman for wearing girl pants right before "emo" became cool. The girl who was popular for no reason because she never spoke to anybody. The guy who choked another kid in third grade because he sat on his paper airplane. My exboyfriend's sister who never liked me.

It was so weird to keep seeing faces I have never cared about and had successfully forgotten over the last three years. It even took me a few minutes of thinking to remember a few people's names, which really made me feel old. It definitely gave me a "you've come home" sort of feeling, in a strange way.
Also, the other weird sensation was that I rarely went to the football games when I was in high school because I was shy and didn't know who to talk to, and as I walked around the stadium last night, I was trying to summon up the ghost of Kristina past and I couldn't find her. I'm so different than I was when I went to that school. I am so distanced and removed from that particular part of my life that it feels eerie to imagine actually being back, in any way other than "yeah, my brother still goes here".

It was only three and a half years ago when I used to walk around that place every day. It really puts time in perspective when you realize how long that actually is.


Highlights of the night:
1. Our school is crappy, and right when the game was supposed to start, they had a lighting issue that they needed to fix. Their solution to fixing this was turning off the stadium lights on the 500 or so people in attendance and making us wait another fifteen while they reset them and they warmed back up. Naturally, with as many high schoolers in attendance as there were, the blackout consisted of fifteen straight minutes of victory cries. "Patriot Power! *claps* "

2. My old marching band being amazing and in addition to the usual songs like "Louie Louie" and the school's fight song, the band director threw in his own versions of "Low" and "Single Ladies." There is nothing better than hearing tubas and saxophones play "Low" outside freezing on the bleachers. Sometimes I'm proud of my roots. Sometimes.

3. Sound system effing up again. There was this totally sweet moment when a football player stepped out to sing the national anthem (total Glee moment) and then, a few seconds of silence later, we realized he was singing already and the microphone wasn't on (or something). There was this collective "awwww" from the stands, and then everyone in that whole stadium started singing with him. I didn't know whether to feel badly that his moment was stolen from him, or to feel a bit heart warmed that everyone was backing him like that. My eyes honestly teared up a little out of the conflict.


My mom left her phone at home, and a bit into the game said "Text your Dad and tell him it's 7-1, LHS." I wasn't paying attention so I just copied the text into my phone verbatim. Almost immediately my dad sent a text back saying "There is no such thing as 1 in football. Dork." Sure enough, the scoreboard said 7-0 and my mom just made me look bad. Haha.
Needless to say, she and I left at halftime because neither of us care about football.


So, then my mom and I drove into Seattle to meet her coworkers at this Spanish bar (because the girl who invited us is Romanian and loves to Salsa dance?), and it was the most bizarre night ever. My mom's coworkers are actually closer to my age than they are to hers, but she also has the sort of "cool mom" thing going on, so going out to a club with her, while strange in theory, wasn't quite as awkward as I thought it would be in practice. We danced and saved each other from creepy clingy Spanish guys. I don't have much else to say about the experience, except that I don't particularly enjoy these kinds of meat-market style establishments, and also that it made me excited to dance around not-sleazy people at Wrockstock in two weeks.

Luke was texting me all night about this pirate dance party he was at in LA with everyone, and I was growing increasingly jealous because pirates > gross slimy Spanish men any day.

Experiences! Life is full of them.