I showed up to my first day of high school knowing exactly two other incoming students. They had been in classes with me years before, but I had no close friends there. I am someone who is able to operate independent of those around me, and pretty much did for the first few months. The hardest times to get through were the unstructured times between classes and at lunch. I had nothing to do and didn't really know anyone. I used to be pretty quick at learning people's names and such, so I figure I knew everyone in each of my six classes by name within two or three days. But I didn't really "know" anyone, and the only people who knew me were the staff members. My mom had been working there since before I was born, so most of the teachers remembered me from when I was a baby, even though I didn't know them at all.
My advisor (or homeroom teacher) was also my Spanish teacher. Since everyone in Spanish class was assigned Spanish names, mine was Miguel. Within a week, he started calling me that in my homeroom class as well, and since no one really knew me, many people thought that was my actual name for most of my freshman year. It got to the point where I responded to it reflexively anyway, and I didn't really care, but it is funny to look back on that now. That is just one of a variety of names I have gone by over the years.
Somehow, I got talked into joining the ski team that year, by some family friends of ours. I had only gone skiing a couple of times in my life at that point and primarily focused on not falling. I was in no way qualified to be "racing," by any measure. But every Saturday I went up to Boreal to "practice" with the team. I was the guy crashing into the coach, running over everyone's skis, and falling all over the place. We started on black diamonds as a minimum, and I know that I have fallen a quarter mile down the slope before. It is a miracle that I never got seriously injured trying to keep up with them in places I should never have even been. I am sure I was the coaches' worst nightmare, and I am confident that I still hold the league records for longest time on some of those race courses. Ironically, after taking a year or two off at the close of that season, I am an extremely good skier now, but definitely not then.
Between skiing, and having it on the ground at school for weeks at a time, I saw a lot of snow that winter. I lived farther down the hill, where it only snowed once every few years, but I eventually realized that some of my classmates who lived farther up the highway would go out racing their snow-mobiles after school. Talk about living in different worlds, and going to the same school. That is an extreme example, but I didn't really feel like I had much in common with anyone there. As someone who didn't really care about music, fashion, or sports, I was kind of on my own.
My second semester I was moved from the regular "computers" class to help develop the school's website. (Ironically this led to me never formally learning the features of Word and Excel, but I have survived.) I had technically never even used the internet when I was sent home with information to learn HTML coding. That 4th period time slot ended up being the only positive thing that really happened freshman year. It was a fairly self directed project, working with one other student a few years older. He was a popular player on the school football team, and to this day I have no idea how he ended up being the other student on that project. We had occasional oversight from one of the teachers, but were granted an enormous degree of freedom. The specific experiences in that "class" were unremarkable, but it put me on the technological track that I am still riding today.
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