Friday, December 05, 2003
The weirdness of searching
First, there's the Miserable Failure phenomenon, whereby a bunch of bloggers with a thorough understanding of GoogleJuice managed to voice their opinions through searches on Google. That went on all day today.
And now, as I'm looking for something to wear to an office party at a country club, I enter "country club" "saturday night" "what to wear" and I come up with this:
Edison High School Class of 1963 - Looking Back
The people who graduated from my alma mater 21 years before I did have put together a very nice site full of annoying music and charming pictures of high school life in the early 60s. Look through the slideshow. Enjoy all these cute kids with their stiff hair and dorky socks. I think they're wonderful. I wish I'd been in their class, back when the school would have been "the new school" (I think it was built in 1957, although honestly, it's been a long time since I celebrated Edison Week so I really don't remember) and the teachers were still fresh and young and idealistic... I have this image of all teachers in the 60s being kind of like the one in Up the Down Staircase, all "Hi Pupe!" and full of hope. I'm sure that wasn't really the case, but I'm betting that at least one of the embittered ready-to-retire veterans who filled my head with Latin or algebra or U.S. history was once a hip young teacher with an ear for the young (where does that come from, anyway? Doonesbury, I think... wasn't there once a Hip Young Priest with an Ear for the Young who had a coffeeshop? Back in the days when Mike--another Tulsa native, BTW--used to shed hayseeds when he walked around campus).
Oh yeah, I'm in stream of consciousness mode tonight. Kudos on the web site, Class of '63. Hope your 40th was good. Hope my 20th is. I don't know if I'll be there; it's a three-day drive from here. Seems like a long way to go to stand around chatting with people I haven't seen in 20 years while "99 Red Balloons" blares overhead.
On the reunion site at Classmates.com someone wants to know if anyone has a copy of our "senior jam." My inclination is to ask what the hell a senior jam is, so I'm guessing I don't have a copy of it. It sounds very 80s, doesn't it? Senior jam. My husband thinks it's a video. I thought it might be some kind of slam book or something. If it's a video, I hope it wasn't that assembly where they showed slides of all the socs (if you ever read S.E. Hinton you've seen that word. Just in case you couldn't figure it out--and who could, really, from the spelling--it's pronounced so-shez. The socs at Edison in the 80s were very mild, by soc standards. They didn't drive around in Mustangs; they drove BMWs or Volkswagen Rabbit convertibles or Jeeps or their parents' cars. They weren't mean, like the Memorial socs. The ones I knew were mostly very nice, smart, well-mannered kids. But there was still a social gap. Which is why I don't know what to wear to a country club on a Saturday night for an office party. And there we are back at the beginning.) at parties none of the rest of us went to and made up stuff about who dated whom each year.
Oh well, this maudlin reminiscing has gone on too long now, and I'm really kind of curious about that S.E. Hinton site, so I'm going to surf away now.
First, there's the Miserable Failure phenomenon, whereby a bunch of bloggers with a thorough understanding of GoogleJuice managed to voice their opinions through searches on Google. That went on all day today.
And now, as I'm looking for something to wear to an office party at a country club, I enter "country club" "saturday night" "what to wear" and I come up with this:
Edison High School Class of 1963 - Looking Back
The people who graduated from my alma mater 21 years before I did have put together a very nice site full of annoying music and charming pictures of high school life in the early 60s. Look through the slideshow. Enjoy all these cute kids with their stiff hair and dorky socks. I think they're wonderful. I wish I'd been in their class, back when the school would have been "the new school" (I think it was built in 1957, although honestly, it's been a long time since I celebrated Edison Week so I really don't remember) and the teachers were still fresh and young and idealistic... I have this image of all teachers in the 60s being kind of like the one in Up the Down Staircase, all "Hi Pupe!" and full of hope. I'm sure that wasn't really the case, but I'm betting that at least one of the embittered ready-to-retire veterans who filled my head with Latin or algebra or U.S. history was once a hip young teacher with an ear for the young (where does that come from, anyway? Doonesbury, I think... wasn't there once a Hip Young Priest with an Ear for the Young who had a coffeeshop? Back in the days when Mike--another Tulsa native, BTW--used to shed hayseeds when he walked around campus).
Oh yeah, I'm in stream of consciousness mode tonight. Kudos on the web site, Class of '63. Hope your 40th was good. Hope my 20th is. I don't know if I'll be there; it's a three-day drive from here. Seems like a long way to go to stand around chatting with people I haven't seen in 20 years while "99 Red Balloons" blares overhead.
On the reunion site at Classmates.com someone wants to know if anyone has a copy of our "senior jam." My inclination is to ask what the hell a senior jam is, so I'm guessing I don't have a copy of it. It sounds very 80s, doesn't it? Senior jam. My husband thinks it's a video. I thought it might be some kind of slam book or something. If it's a video, I hope it wasn't that assembly where they showed slides of all the socs (if you ever read S.E. Hinton you've seen that word. Just in case you couldn't figure it out--and who could, really, from the spelling--it's pronounced so-shez. The socs at Edison in the 80s were very mild, by soc standards. They didn't drive around in Mustangs; they drove BMWs or Volkswagen Rabbit convertibles or Jeeps or their parents' cars. They weren't mean, like the Memorial socs. The ones I knew were mostly very nice, smart, well-mannered kids. But there was still a social gap. Which is why I don't know what to wear to a country club on a Saturday night for an office party. And there we are back at the beginning.) at parties none of the rest of us went to and made up stuff about who dated whom each year.
Oh well, this maudlin reminiscing has gone on too long now, and I'm really kind of curious about that S.E. Hinton site, so I'm going to surf away now.
permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 11:03 PM 
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