High School Blows

So I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy last night on DVD (Pegs forced me to watch it at knifepoint, I swear), and in the show George the Goofy but Lovable Intern attends to this really awkward teenage girl who's miserable because she never seems to fit in. It turns out that she's really a hermaphrodite, which went a long way to explain both her hormonal angst and why she sounded like Tom Waits.

Although I'm sure that having both boy bits and girl bits would do a lot to make one feel awkward and uncomfortable, I wasn't entirely convinced that the biggest source of her/his/its problems wasn't simply that she/he/it was in high school. At the end of the show, the Pegster and I got to talking about our respective high school experiences and how much we agreed with George that the main goal for anyone between 14 and 18 is to make it through those four years and move on to the real world. It doesn't matter if you're a workaholic Greek girl in a backwoods South Carolina town of 6,000 people or a bespectacled doughy midget who got his football varsity ring for being the team's fake kicker, high school is bound to suck.

Towards the end of our conversation, we realized that neither one of us could think of anyone who had actually enjoyed high school. I mean, everyone must have at least one good memory or two: that first kiss, the time that you rolled the principal's house, or going to the Senior Prom. However, those individual moments hardly make up for four years of hell that most of us couldn't wait to be over.

Are there people out there who really loved high school? Who would literally want to relive the whole experience all over again? You know that the jocks, bullies and cheerleaders all had it pretty sweet; they must look back fondly on those years and perhaps even think of them as the best of their lives. I wonder if they do. I'd be curious to ask them, but usually when I fill up the tank or order a cheeseburger I'm too busy to make small talk with the cashier.