You can graduate from high school, or drop out, or opt to earn your GED, but some miserable part of you never leaves that period in life, and this week, that sad fraction of all of us has been called back, as if to some obnoxious assembly, by the ghosts of other lives.
I hated high school — not for one reason in particular but for dozens of reasons just barely out of focus. The smell of soft dissolving sandwich bread, of sneakers and industrial bleach. The institutional setting: I always accepted I had to be there; I can handle blunt submission to power, but the pep rallies and the school spirit days and the dances and ceremonies — you didn’t just have to be there; you had to like it, which is a more hateful kind of oppression.