TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#75 – To the Class of 1995

#75 - To the Class of 1995

It's amazing how long it's taken me to put this together. The real story behind it started about eleven years ago, sitting on a bench with Christy Milner. To those of you that remember, Christy was the student editor of the school paper. She believed in it, had a lot to say about Hell Night, etc. We had our own disagreements about my talents as a contributor of the school paper. I wanted a column, she disagreed. I submitted an album review, it was rejected. I sensed an impending clash of opinions and decided that I didn't need this level of conflict during my senior year of high school. I transferred in a month to be a TA and that's how I spent the last period of my last year in high school, screwing around in an empty classroom.

At the time, I wanted to put something in the school paper on the level of what I saw Cynthia Salaysay putting out. She had a writing style that was so far above what the other stuff getting published in the school paper. In terms of the movie reviews and other journalistic entries to the four editions the paper they published that year, it was stratospheric. I was intimidated, I was jealous and I was inspired. I wanted to write something that would affect other people the way Cynthia's stuff affected me.

This did not happen and all I really remember is simply transferring out over the mild objections of Mr. Lapiroff, the journalism teacher. I didn't write anything that affected anyone deeply. I didn't write anything for anyone – I've only started pounding out stuff in this fun place because writing is something I do because it's something I do. In quiet moments I used to think back over all the things that happened in the 12 years I spent as a guest of the California public school system. I wanted to really put something down on paper that I could go back to and say "There, that's what I wanted to say. That's how I really felt about the whole experience." That's not an easy thing to say, especially when the activity transports you back to how you were feeling back in. Dramas, vignettes come flooding back and you're reliving those days of where you were feeling new joys and fears, loves and hates, enemies and loyalties that you would never feel quite in the same way about ever again.

I'm guessing that the reunion isn't happening, if the lack of discussion at Classmates.com is any indication. Surprising, I thought. Isn't there some sort of booster committee held over from the last Spirit Week that was in charge of all this crap? Maybe not, maybe everyone's moved on to their own lives. If that's the case, then that's the best justification of public school I've ever seen. I'll explain why later on. I guess that means we won't be in some hotel meeting room wearing name tags and drinking wine in a box. That's not really a bad thing; it's actually a real time saver. So now what? Wanna know about me and the last 10 years? Wanna tell me about the last ten years for you? Taking notes for some tome that will be published as The Collective Memoirs of the John F. Kennedy High School Graduating Class of 1995? I guess I'll push this out as my slice of life…whether it actually accomplishes anything, who knows? At least I'll have it down and from there, feel free to move on to the next fifty years (I hope).

Like a lot of our class, I enrolled in Ohlone Community College. Charitably, we referred to it as "Tinkertoy Tech-on-the-Hill" (I think that nickname was bestowed by Mr. Neiman, but I'm not sure). I put the past 12 years of public school education behind me and just treated "college" as a blank slate. Turns out, I'm a decent student, once I know how. How to complete projects, take notes and turn in work on time. Three simple activities that the collective teachers of my time were unable to put across. Maybe there's a message there. Spent my time trying various things, mostly associated with Information Technology, but I also tried radio broadcasting and emergency first aid. Both interested me, but not enough to make a day job out of them. After four years of working part-time and going to school full-time, I graduated in 1999 with a two year degree in MIS/Computer Programming.

I've got a lot of outside interests from work. I read a lot of books watch a lot of movies and listen to a lot of music. My tastes run to a lot of different things. To quote Randall from Clerks, "I like to expand my horizons." I've got a jukebox of MP3's at work that holds about five and a half weeks of sound and although it's mostly rock I've got a bunch of hip-hop, classical, soul, blues and classical music. I've even got some Zydeco, but I get tired of having to explain what that is every time I mention it. Google it, if you must. As long as we're on the subject, anyone else getting tired of remixes? Just heard some remix of Karma Police by Radiohead…I had to dump it in favor of Dennis Leary screaming about Marv Albert. The jukebox doesn't encompass my entire music collection – I've still got about 250 albums that aren't ripped.

Speaking of ripped – I get to the gym as much as I can. I think when I left high school, I was benching 135…150. Now I'm up in the 255-275 range. I can leg press 540, too. Not bad for the scrawny little kid in Sabsay's Yosemite pictures. I miss that guy, would have liked to come back and compare notes with him as an adult. Speaking of MIA people – anyone know what happened to Mrs. Trombopulous? I just Googled her, she's working at Stanford now. I called her to say hello and thanks for getting me on the track where I am now. The Internet has let me find a lot of people, including a pen pal in New Zealand that I lost track of for about fifteen years. It's funny how many ex-classmates I have run into while working out at the gym.

Like I said, I worked the entire time I was in school, except for about three months in 1996 when I was between phone support jobs. I stayed with IT and MIS because it was an easy buck for me. A variety of small places that make up the bread and butter of Sili Valley. Some of them were interesting, some of them gave me contacts that I maintain to this day (Mostly because I got them jobs where I'm at now). Currently, I'm working at Hitachi Data Systems and have been for the past four-and-a-half years. I started in Desktop Support, moved over to System Administration for about a year and then finally for Data Center Operations for going on two years. Got my MCSE and then I got a PMP – neither of which mean much if you don't know what the acronyms are but then, I like to make you think a little bit. Do I enjoy my job? It's a job, what's to enjoy, I always say. As better and smarter writers have said, if it was that great you wouldn't be paying me to show up. I've learned to appreciate the quiet moments that I think help make the day livable. Those moments that make you look up and go, "You know…life's not that bad". They're out there; you just need to learn to recognize them. That sounds really Zen; the truth is I rarely get to do it. Being calm is not easy for a Type A personality.

Yeah, I finally came to terms with that. For years I railed against people who would say I was one way or another. Try to pigeon-hole me and I'll come up with 14 reasons why I'm not the way you think I am. I do think they've got me pegged with the Type-A thing, though. I'm an action junkie; I get depressed when nothing's going on. I like being around people even though the feeling's not mutual sometimes. I'm too honest, my sister says. She'll give me some crap for saying it, but how else would I prove it, tell you about the time I set fire to the lawn of that guy across the street? That didn't really happen, by the way. I was told by someone at a professional development seminar (Read "two days away from the office") that I'm willing to push myself outside my comfort zone. This she discovered from an exercise involving writing with your other hand so take it with as many grains of salt as you need.

So, enough with the me-me-look-at-me stuff. Time for some opinions and reflections. Is anyone else really pissed and annoyed that we came out of the Port-a-Potty of Fremont high schools? I sense an impending uproar, so let me qualify a few statements to let you know that I'm trying to be fair about all of this. Ever visit your friends at MSJ, Irvington or Washington? Talk with the kids you went to ROP with? In a place where there wasn't much in the way of school pride anyway, we were attending The Worst Campus in Fremont. In a town where most civic buildings tend to have futuristic look or at the very least, dignified, Kennedy had this aura of Sixties/Surplus Materials/Dying Farm Town High School. The kind of place that gets torn down in favor of a housing tract, a la Marina High School in San Leandro. The campus hadn't been updated structurally for 30 years and cheap building materials don't look better with age. The landscape done under the heading "CalTrans Onramp Chic" with the dusty iceplant, the grubby trees in the front. Skip to the dented lockers painted with many layers of institutional brown, the Quad, the Round Room with the lap tables we used to eat the homeless-shelter-grade pizza off of. The whole place screamed Low Budget.

I didn't think anything of it at the time. A couple of years after I graduated however, I went to work for a back-alley place in San Jose doing work on all of the Apple IIe and Mac computers that were owned by the sixty-odd school districts of San Jose. After viewing a number of school campuses for all grade groups, I came to the overwhelming conclusion that, as a public school student, I was cheated. I had to go to community college to get the kind of accommodations that kids in San Jose were offered for free. Take a walk around the Oak Grove or Silver Creek High School campuses in San Jose sometime…you'll see what I mean. As a disinterested adult, I drive around Fremont and see the structural improvements being done to Centerville and Washington High School. Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy still rivals the local DMV office for Most Boring Institutional Building in Town. Ten years after I left, I think they finally have air conditioning although the kids have those portable-somehow-becoming-permanent units on either side of the school now.

A lot of the problems of school, and I outline this by saying "I don't have any answers…I'm just talking about me", seemed to begin and end with the lack of interest on the part of staff to provide us with the best education experience possible. I'm sure they could provide a more-than-substantial argument about lack of pay, lack of resources, and general hostility from students, teachers, the district and the public. Yeah, it's tough…what can you do? I'm not debating the topic, as I said; I'm just talking about me. Draw from it what you will.

There was just such a high level of unreality to that place. Teachers were either burned-out or so inured to the problems of their task that trying to have an adult conversation with them later on after I left bordered on impossible. Mark Twain said something once: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." I learned the truth of that statement in Kennedy High. It wasn't a great place or even a great moment in my life. It provided the necessary lesson that you will not always enjoy the places you spend your time in, or the people with which you spend it. Persons assigned to teachers through the vagaries of the FUSD class scheduling program don't equal lifetime mentors. A remake of "Stand and Deliver", JFK was not. A few teachers taught me some lessons and I'll mention them here:

Roger Berman – The six-foot-three substitute teacher that took over my 9th grade algebra class after Mrs. Woodruff died of cancer. He didn't do much but I think we understood each other and in a place where very few people took the time to do that, it meant something.

"Gypsy" Hogan – He's not with us anymore but that old man was a class act. Not a great teacher but always tried to leave us all with a positive message regarding gangs. He also talked like the voice of "The Teeny Little Superhero Guy" on Sesame Street. Also the first person to offer to buy me a beer. I miss him.

John Kriege – A decent guy, a stand-up Joe. We didn’t see eye to eye on everything but who does? Went to his house a couple of times, he gave my grandparents the best watchdog they could have ever asked for.

Pete "Coach Mike" Michaeletos – Loves us all, loves what he does and it always showed. You started me on the path to pumping iron. Thanks, Boss.

Helen Trombopulous / Haywood Daruseau / Rich Grotegut – The three most influential people in terms of what I do for work now. Thank you for your patience and direction.

Mr. Masuda – Another stand-up guy. His job didn't take well to stand-up guys and that was probably why he didn’t stay. Still, I keep seeing him and that classic Ford Falcon around town and it's a great connection to everything else that makes up my life in this town. Never bring food to his class.

And that's about it. If I didn't mention a name, it was for two reasons:

1. You didn't do anything that affected my life that really is worth 10 years after the fact. Not to be taken personally, whether you teach me something that really makes a difference in my life is kind of a crap shoot. I know it, you know it – don't make a big deal about it.

2. You did make a difference in my life but it was because you had such a negative effect on my experience as a student that I'd rather not think about you. I'm also not going to spend time now pointing out what you did/how you did something wrong. It was 10 years ago…time to move on.

Part of the ten years has been a consistent progression in terms of learning what was real and what was illusion. Beliefs and belief systems go through the fire of reality once you are out of the playpen. Illusions don't break, they shatter. When you learned about Vince Petersen. When you read about that other teacher who was charged with a sex relationship a few months ago (what was her name?). When you learn that one of the teachers you regarded as one of the few people who were passionate about what they taught and sold you on some really new ideas was dating a student while he was married; fed her booze at the El Burro at 16 and probably a lot more, too – she just wouldn't say. I'm not narrowing it down any more for you – I know both people and don't see any point in bringing up something that happened 20 years ago. It just shatters illusions for you. You have a nice, safe little world in high school where, for just a few years, you can believe that people are actually as nice/real/honest/decent as they tell you they are. None of this prepares you for the harsh reality of the outside world. None of this prepares you for how you feel after finding out the reality and you're left with all of this extra angst to think about and absorb.

So how many people in your graduating class did you keep in touch with? Are you like me? Did you post your stuff on Classmates.com (not linked because they suck) and wait for the replies to roll in? I think I've had my stuff up there for five years…one single mail reply. For this, I shell out $30 a year? I cancelled it; I'll save the money for a magazine subscription. I think it's safe to say that of the people I went to high school with, I still keep in touch with maybe three or four people. So is there a mystical relevance of your high school graduating class? Did anything the valedictorian said really come true? Are we all these superstar human beings? Is it true that we are damned to be the same flawed animals that passed through the arch and became a yellowing picture in the hallway of a place we don't visit anymore?

It's a bleak prospect, to know that despite all efforts you haven't achieved escape velocity from Fremont. It's become something like Uncle Marty's rumpus room couch. Faintly, it smells mildewed from being in a damp room for 35 years. It's stained with decades of soda, beer and ranch dip so that the original fabric pattern is impossible to discern. And yet, as ugly as it is, as nasty as it smells, you find yourself sinking into it to kill 5 hours watching bad movies and eating junk food. Fremont is the same way for me – I drive down Walnut or Mowry and it's all I can do to keep from getting out at the Fremont/Mowry intersection and performing some self-immolating suicide ritual. The same people, the same prejudices and fears that you found pointless at 18 and you really find stupid now. But where would you go, where would you run to?

You start to find beauty and acceptance in the dry, golden hills and the dusty trails that lead to the top of Mission Peak. You smell the dry, warm air in early October and know that fall has come around again. Smell the white jasmine in someone's back yard on a Saturday evening in March and now that spring is upon you. The way that Ray Bradbury described the summer of 1928 in Dandelion Wine begins to make sense to you, even if you find it a bit dry and starchy. The seasons have their own smells and they come back to you like mental comfort food. Summer smells like concrete wet with chlorinated pool water drying in the sun. It also smells like hot asphalt, the kind that items dropped at the Berryessa Flea Market just sink into like dinosaurs in a tar pit. Fall smells like warm air blowing up from the south and dry, cool air blowing from the north. Winter smells like cold wet air and mud. Spring smells like flowers, newly turned potting soil and all the new green things that are growing under your feet.

Suddenly, without realizing it, ten years are gone. The place you were running to, running away from home to find, is right where you left it…back where you started. You can forgive yourself for not being everything you hoped you could be because you understand a little better how high you had set the bar. To forgive yourself and yet not to, because a little idealism can be a good thing. To see that life is about contradiction and goals are often intertwined and multi-faceted. Take small bits of wisdom out of strange places or strange people.

The truth is that JFK wasn't a touchstone for any of us; it was just a pit stop on our way to something else. The fact that we aren't coming back together 10 years after isn't a bad thing, it's a good thing. It's the best thing. They wanted to teach us to stand on our own. They succeeded and only because they made the idea of hanging around a place like John F. Kennedy High so unattractive that if you had an IQ above 68 you knew you needed to get the heck out. They thought they were teaching us one thing, we learned the lesson even better than they could hope but it wasn't what they planned. So we can come back together ten years after and say "Thank you…sort of." You can kind of admire and pity them at the same time because they're like the first attack wave at Salerno. They run and they fall and it's not that they themselves will succeed, it'll be the ones who leap over their corpses to storm the beachhead. I'm being too allegorical, I know…

I wrote this one a little long, I know. I think I understand now, I wasn't writing it for any of you. I was writing it for me. If you stuck around this long, thanks.

- Tim Woolery, 03/15/2005 (The Ides of March – Thanks Mr. Hakola)