subprocess

I left off my “life story in short little blurbs” around the start of my sophomore year of High School.

1995-1997

This is the year I met my good friend Mike Hodgman. We met at band camp and well… I can’t really remember the details. We just became instant best friends. It is also the first year I met my other good friend Christina Barberi. I remember seeing her at marching band practices and thinking “who is that cute girl?”

Now… choosing memories from High School is really difficult. I had so many strange things happen, at times I felt like I was in a sitcom. So this is be no means comprehensive. Plus, it’s hard remembering which year everything happened. Four years seems way too short of a time for all that went on.

A few months in to my job at Oakland Schools, I got a raise. It was awesome. I showed up to work and my boss called me in to her office. Technically, I worked for the student co-op. So she asked me, “Would it be OK if I asked for a raise for you?” Uhh… yeah. “Good, because I did. And it was a $3.00 raise.” I believe I was speechless here. This was about a 55% raise. “And…” More!? “… I had them make it retroactive to the day you started.” Wait, retroactive? “So for all the hours you worked here, you will be paid the additional $3.00 for those hours. And going forward it will be at your new rate.” She says it was because I “knew more than they were led to believe” when I was hired. Which… wasn’t really true. I picked up most of what I needed on the job, I’m just a quick learner. I will never forget that conversation though, or that awesome pay check! I miss 100% disposable income.

At one point in the middle of High School I joined a rock band. Ha! We called ourselves Latin Surprise Party, or LSP for short. Patrick was the drummer, Brook Pridemore was the lead guitarist/singer, Paul Phipps played bass and I was the backup guitarist. I remember Brook organizing it all… and it didn’t matter that I had no idea how to play guitar. I got private lessons though, and ended up joining jazz band at school.

So LSP’s early days were filled with music written by Brook. I really only remember one. Fascist Lifeguard. It consisted of 5 chords and a lot of strumming. The lyrics went something like: “Fascist lifeguard has got you now! In his pool of gelatinous drool!” We did a few cover songs too, like Weezer’s The Sweater Song (Sorry Rivers! We were just kids…). I think Patrick’s mom still has our one and only album. She could use it for blackmail, fortunately she’s pretty nice.

We actually ended up kicking Brook and Paul out of the band, and Mike Hodgman came in as guitarist/singer. Maybe they weren’t kicked out… I’m not sure, my memory is fuzzy. But the band became a strictly cover band with just Me, Mike and Patrick. Then it died.

I had another girl show interest in me during my rock star time too. Jenny, another friend from band. Again, I was way new to this dating thing. I knew she liked me, she knew I liked her. It was different from my first girlfriend… and well, I went weird and didn’t know what to do. In the end we just stayed friends and I have no regrets about that. Jenny was a great friend all throughout high school. I have great memories of drinking slurpees with her outside 7-11 after band practice. And she’s the one who introduced me to Smashing Pumpkin’s album Gish, particularly the kick ass song “Girl Named Sandoz.”

So then another girl showed interest in me, Sarah, and she was way more aggressive than the other girls. I had a lot of fun with Sarah. She was my first real girlfriend, in that she was my first real kiss. Lots of make out sessions. When she broke up with me it seriously broke my heart. My first ever true girlfriend and my first ever true breakup. I very clearly remember feeling like I had a huge part of me missing. Nothing to fill the big hole. WAY over reacted. But I learned a lot and experienced even more.

Continuing the theme of girls now, I must bring up Melody Joy Alexander! Being a big fan of Christian rock band Starflyer 59 and exploring this new Internet thing that Al Gore invented… I stumbled upon a Starflyer fan page with a big guestbook to sign (haha! Remember those guestbook cgi apps?). So I, of course, signed it. Then I scrolled through the many many many other signatures. And there was one that jumped out, her name was “Melody Joy Alexander”, and I just thought “what an awesome name!”. So I clicked on her email and told her. I think it was something like, “Starflyer ROCKS \m/, your name ROCKS \m/! Sorry- I’m kinda weird and dorky- Ryan.” And she emailed me back. And I emailed her back. And so on and so on… And I ended up making friends with one of the awesomest people ever. We emailed constantly throughout the rest of high school and most of college.

So after meeting Melody and being fully recovered from my first heartbreak ever, I did some serious thinking about dating. See… I’m quite the hopeless romantic. I thought about love all the time. I think I was in love with love. I realized that what I wanted to find wasn’t something I could search for. I decided that if you go out in search of love that you’ll find it in spots where it’s not. You’ll stretch things and twist things to try and take something that isn’t love and make it love. So I decided that I was done with dating. Yes, one real girlfriend and I was over it. I wasn’t going to look for love, I was going to look for friendship and if love found me I would know it.

So back to Christina. We ended up hitting it off really well. We were always on the phone chatting about things. Hanging out and watching movies. High school stuff. We became really good friends. In fact, we went to home coming together. Our friendship started to turn in to something more than friendship. I was nervous though… It was weird going from just friends to dating. I wasn’t really sure how fast to move. And… then there was that whole “I’m done with dating” thing. We held hands a bit and that was about it. Then we went back to just being friends. I still had feelings for her for quite a while after that. I don’t think I ever stopped until sophomore year of college. It was all really confusing and Melody probably got an email about every second of it. The only thing I regret is not taking her to Senior Prom. It was obvious she wanted me to ask her… But I didn’t want to go as just friends. I was stupid to not ask her, we would have had fun and it would have been some great memories. I still have lots of great memories with her though, definitely no shortage. For some reason the strongest memory I have of her is from going to watch the marching band at a competition. It was pouring rain and we had one umbrella. So there we were huddled together under one small umbrella, just chatting and having a fun time watching the competition.

Well that covers a lot of high school, especially the girls part. I guess I need a part 3, things get crazy after high school though. I start hanging out with Ryan Hunt and Jason Caroland. And my world gets turned upside down.

Posted on April 17th, 2009 under Journal • Tags: Journal. • RSS 2.0 feed • You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed