Adventures in Self-Analysis (and Self-Promotion)

Some of you have read this already and have the opportunity to read it in a much different form but I present to you, my faithful and EXTREMELY demanding readership, one of the few things I am actually proud to have written and taken part in. Its not formatted in the way a usual post on this blahg is, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.
I know I complained about Owns Me a lot, I do still dislike it, but if it weren't for that Sisyphean shitstorm of student journalism, I never would have written this*:

Twenty-seven thousand feet over Michigan, on an American Airlines flight bound for Chicago-O’Hare International Airport, I read these words: “They were, after all, schoolchildren playing at being grownups.” Read in the twilight of my high-school career, this sentence at the bottom of page 104 of Gabriel García Marquez’s One-Hundred Years of Solitude summarizes how I feel about my experiences over these past four years.

The words resonated in my mind. Months of study and work, as well as the students and teachers who populated more school days than I can count, had led me to one of the most significant moments of my life. Suddenly, there was a second light bulb burning brightly over seat 22B as the realization finally came: I’m not as young as I used to be.

I peeled my eyes away from the page and thought, “There’s a stranger to my left and to my right. I’m flying to a city I’ve never been to, to go to another city I’ve never been to. I’m doing this by myself.” It was an independence day of sorts, except it was the finale of my own evolutionary war.

On the ground, beleaguered with a backpack and a duffel bag, coffee in one hand and cell phone in the other, I made a few calls back to New York as I waited for my flight to St. Louis. “No, I had to connect in Chicago. My flight gets into St. Louis at two,” I spoke with confidence.

“My flight.”

It sounded so adult.

“I could get used to this. I can do it. I am doing it,” I thought. This was my dry run. A practice round for what I would have to do many times in the next chapter of my life. If I were playing the role of an adult, then my Academy Award was pretty much a lock. The only problem was that I wasn’t playing. It was another stage in the evolution from high-school senior to college freshman– a process I’m not entirely comfortable with yet.

There had been many times before when I felt like one of the grownups I always wanted to be: my first sleepover, my first cell phone, and my first time driving solo. The youngest of my family, I wanted to be older my whole life. I had always tried to carry myself with the maturity of “the older kids.” But, standing outside Gate K7, among a sea of businessmen anxiously typing away on their Blackberrys, my sense of maturity had never felt so real.

I owe the overwhelming majority of this latent maturity to Chaminade High School, the institution that I felt the furthest from at Gate K7. Inside and outside the classroom, lessons came and went. Not every lesson manifested itself on a Scantron, but there certainly were tests. I realized the 14-year-old boy who walked into Room 219 in August, 2004 for his first day of 3-CWeek was an entirely different person than the 18 –year old man who will walk across the stage of the Tilles Center on June 1, 2008.

It was not until the spring, around the time of college decisions, that I felt I had earned the title of senior. My college applications (a process that requires its own amount of maturity) had been reviewed and finalized. “Next year” was talked of more frequently. It seemed the last paragraphs were in the final stages of proofreading, on their way to being printed.

When the college letters came in(some good, some bad), the next chapter, college, had never felt so close. I was faced with the biggest decision of my life up to this point. Coupled with the completion of the last two large-scale assignments of the year, the thought of high school nearing an end bounced around in my brain and off other people’s tongues more and more. On Facebook, friends joined countless numbers of “(Fill in the blank) University Class of 2012”student groups. Countdowns to the final day of school began.

“It’s almost over” turned into “Thirty days left.” Thirty became twenty; ten became five. Five more times I would park in the lot across Jericho Turnpike. I would have five more Chaminade lunches. High school was over. One more chapter completed. Gabriel García Marquez’s words only compounded my mix of emotions about my run at Chaminade being over. The past weeks had felt like a blur. Soon, I would no longer be playing at being a grownup. The adult I had always wanted to be is the person I am now.

*[Ed. note] WAAAAAAAH!