Something I Miss About Public School: A Confession

I hated attending public high school. That's one thing I want absolutely clear. I hated waking up early and tolerating people I didn't like and having tons of homework and having to be in all sorts of classes I neither enjoyed nor cared about. It was a miserable couple of years and I'm glad to be out of it.


That being said, there are some things I miss about public school.


I miss several of my teachers. I miss a couple of my fellow students. I miss the warm, fuzzy feeling that washed over me whenever I got a good grade or an essay covered with positive comments. I miss discussions. I miss watching movies I never would've watched otherwise and liking them way more than I thought I would.


And......


I miss Valentine's Day.


Yeah, I know. You're probably stunned. Especially if you knew me when I was in school and heard me complaining about it and rhetorically asking if it would be alright to just stay home on the 14th. I acted grossed out and sardonic and irritated, like Valentine's Day was the most uncomfortable, ill-advised idea ever conceived of by man.


I'm nerdy, antisocial, introverted, and unromantic; such attitudes are expected of me.


In truth, though, I always liked Valentine's Day. Because it was high school, Valentine's Day was our biggest holiday. Around Christmas, a couple people might be seen carrying gift bags or little trinkets, maybe - but on Valentine's Day, more than half the girls and at least a few boys had bouquets and stuffed animals and balloons. There were even little trinkets available for purchase from the school - cards and bears and roses and, most famously, serenades, which involved a group of students going around the school, finding the students who'd had serenades purchased for them, bringing them to the front of the class, and bestowing tuneless, a capella renditions of popular love songs upon them. I think the school might've even been decorated.


And it was all just so inexplicably nice.


Who can say why? Why, looking around at that sea of plastic and glitter and construction paper, witnessing awkward serenades and an even-greater-than-usual amount of PDA, knowing that more likely than not most of these couples would've broken up by the end of the semester, did I feel so... so light?


Because I did. I never received anything on Valentine's Day, of course (please refer back to the paragraph where I mention my antisocial, introverted, unromantic nerdiness), but in spite of that, and in spite of the sheer ridiculousness of everything about that day, there was something about it that I really enjoyed. Something that I miss now.


Now, I'm homeschooled, and my only real social interaction comes on Wednesdays, when I go to a homeschool group... thing. And in case you didn't already know this about homeschoolers, we don't really do Valentine's Day. The only people in that group currently involved in romantic relationships are the married teachers. I didn't even remember it was the Wednesday before Valentine's Day until my teacher brought out chocolates.


It's not as though I'm not commemorating the day at all. I have plans for the weekend; an outing with my family and a hangout with my best friend. And I've scheduled romantic books to read, one that I'm reading now and one that I'd intended to be reading now but will probably end up reading near the end of the month instead (but that's okay, because as far as I'm concerned Valentine-related activities can happen any time in February). But... it's not the same, somehow.


Ugh. Look, the reason this post is titled "a confession" is that that's what this feels like... a confession of something incredibly shameful. Because I don't know why I feel this way and because it doesn't make sense and because I can't help but wonder if I would actually enjoy Valentine's Day if I was still at school or if this is just some warped, bizarre nostalgia talking.


'Cause the thing is - and this is something I haven't really told anyone, not in just these words - I've been kind of miserable lately. Which is also embarrassing, because nothing absolutely horrible or life-altering has happened in my life to justify my feeling wretched. There've just been a couple of little things, small, insignificant occurrences that made me feel let down or hurt or angry or all of the above, which have all blurred together into a little cloud of sad which has taken up residence over my mood. And the worse I feel, the more annoyed with myself I get, because I tell myself there's no reason for me to be feeling like this, that none of this is a big deal and my reaction is beyond disproportional, that I need to just grow up and deal with it, blah blah blah, etc., etc., same song, second verse, welcome to my life.


So now I've gotten to the stage where I start thinking that if some specific thing changed or happened it would magically make everything better, because as long as I'm melodramatically telling myself that I'd feel better if only my circumstances changed I don't have to actually take any steps to improve my existence (it's the American way). If only this would happen, I say, then none of this other stuff would matter. If only Valentine's Day were like this, then I would be happy, really, really happy, if only for a few days. I don't know if it's true; the nice thing about such thinking is that Valentine's Day won't be like that, so I'll never have to deal with being proven wrong.


*Sigh*


Pretty much what I'm getting at here is that I expect everyone who reads this post to wish me a happy Valentine's Day and tell me how much they love me. In great detail.


(Just kidding. Things got a bit mopey there and I thought it would be better to end on a humorous note.)        


Happy Valentine's Day.


~Pearl Clayton


PS. Off topic, but I wanted to say a quick thing about comments. I know it usually takes me days and weeks to respond to comments, if I ever get around to responding to them at all. It's not that I'm not reading them; I read all the comments I get, often repeatedly, and I appreciate them more than I can say. In fact, that's why I have trouble responding - I can rarely think of any replies except "Thanks, I'm glad you liked it!" or "Thanks, that's nice of you to say" or something along those lines, and I feel like such replies are obvious and generic and quickly become repetitive and are insufficient to express my gratitude. So if you post a comment and I never reply to it, know that I've seen it and am enormously pleased to have gotten it, but maybe just can't think of anything that I feel is worth saying in response.


That's it. Bye now.