Class of '75

Whew. I was just fussing around with a rather bizarre application called Turn Your Name Into A Face. I really didn't like mine, either for my formal name or my nickname. I was trying to figure how they did it, and I guessed they did a Google picture search on my name and then pixelated it.

So I went to Google, typed in my name - and up came my senior year yearbook. The title: missing persons. Okay, there are more than a handful of missing persons here. I nosed around the site, memories of this horrible time at this horrible school with these horrible people coming back. The only places I felt accepted - weird girl that I was, interested in Math and Physics and English and German - were computer class (right, we punched cards, sent them away, and got them back 2 days later) and German club. I took calculus and political science at a local college to get college credit and avoid the jerks in my senior year.

I mean, you could choose surfing as a course - this was San Diego, after all. The school was 1/3 Chicana, 1/3 black, 1/3 white, and 99% football. I got into a fight with my mom (and lost). I wanted to take physics, she insisted I learn to type. ASDF JKL; ASDF JKL; for an hour a day, 5 days a week, for half a year. That killed some brain cells, but I can type pretty much as fast as I can think, so I suppose it is of some use.

Gym - arrrrrrgh! Except for one unit on folk dancing, I hated every single hour spent there. I couldn't get into the clubs, as I moved in during the junior year - from Georgia. So I read instead. Devoured the city library. And discovered the German American Society. Dancing, music, beer if you worked it right (order an apple juice, and get a guy who is 21 to order a pitcher of beer. If you dance with him, you get some beer).

I refused to go to the prom - certain that no one would ask me to go. One guy did - the math whiz and chess champion. I was honored, but he was not the guy of my dreams. And I had already booked a flight to Germany for the summer. I missed the prom, I missed graduation, the whole works. They sent me my cap and diploma in the mail. I never regretted it.

I looked down the list of names - I don't remember any of these except the guy from computer science. We spent the first year in college together, discovering this wierd thing called Arpanet. Late at night, in the cellar, you could use the teletype to log onto a computer in Stanford. If you could guess the password. We tried, but didn't succeed. But the "PASSWORD INCORRECT" was coming from Stanford, that was cool

What the heck. I'll get over it. I'll send in my current address. I made it. But ooh, some of the others: under obituaries (really scary, all these people my age already dead) is a real zinger:

David was put to death by lethal injection for the 1986
murder of three members of a Billings, MT family.
He never revealed his motivation for the killings.

I suppose there is one in every megaschool.

Even though it is late late late I get down the yearbook (extra points for finding it in under 10 minutes). I leaf through - oh my. Those were such painful years. I only have one person who signed my yearbook - a quick Google search turns someone up who looks a lot like she did. I'll send her an email, might be her.

I would just as soon forget these two years completely. But still, they are a part of me, and so I send off the email: "Hi, I'm on your missing persons list". Who knows why.