Friday Five:

1. What was/is your favorite subject in school? Why?
Depends. I’d probably say English or Drama, because they came easiest to me and I always liked readin’ the books and watchin’ the plays. Math and Science were harder for me, yet (truth be told) I think I got more out of them. It’s hard to say since I went to such a small school. There weren’t enough resources to cater to everybody, so they took sorta a “lowest common denominator” approach. At the high end of the bell curve, I often found myself bored and frustrated.

2. Who was your favorite teacher? Why?
Mr. “Mont” Arnold, my AP Calculus teacher, was pretty cool. He was always trying to find new ways to interest us in a subject that (both we and he knew) most of us would never use again. He recommended sci-fi books to me and gave me extra credit for programming my TI-85. He was funny and he never talked down to any of us. We voted him to be our Commencement Speaker and he confounded all of our parents with a 15-minute speech on chaos theory. Pretty cool.

3. What is your favorite memory of school?
Pretty much all of my senior year of high school. I was the valedictorian, the #1 tennis player, the female lead in the musical; I went to the State Speech Meet and won third place in my event. I got into Notre Dame. I dumped junior year’s alterna-teen boyfriend in favor of someone a bit more fun and normal. (Granted, a bit of a doof, but no regrets there.) That was a charmed year.

4. What was your favorite recess game?
Up until about fifth grade, I was one of those girls who jumped rope every single recess. We had these great long jumpropes with purple and white plastic beads. Our most frequent game was “School”, where for each grade you had to do a certain stunt to progress. “Kindergarten” you just had to run through; “1st grade” was one jump; “2nd grade” was two jumps on one foot or something… That was fun. When I got a little bit older is wasn’t cool to jump rope anymore. You were supposed to do dangerous things. The fad was for someone to swing really high while another person ran under them from one side of the swingset to the other. You had to time your run just right and follow them as they came down past you. I gave up on that one on the fateful day Charity Martin miscalculated and buried her thick skull full speed into the middle of the swinger’s (i.e. my) lower back. I couldn’t breathe for fully a minute. After that, I think I mainly stood around with my friends and tried to act above recess.

5. What did you hate most about school?
Ugh. Lots. First of all, I absolutely hated riding the bus. It seems statistically impossible, but every bus route I ever had was filled with the county’s worst mouth-breathers and social deviants. The day I got my license was like being released from bondage. I also hated gym. I wasn’t terribly unfit; in fact I was sorta towards the high end of the normal, non-super-athlete girls. But I was uncoordinated and self-conscious which made it torture. I won’t even begin to describe the horrors of seventh grade gym with its units on gymnastics and square dancing. *repress, repress*