when i grow up

in my second last year of high school, i counted down the days until school would be over.

in detail.

i remember actually making the effort to count the exact number of days left, besides holidays.

in history class, where paying no attention wasn't really noticed, since we only copied down transparencies anyway.

i imagine i numbered the days using my A5 diary, a book that received infinitely more of my attention than any teacher did, judging by the drawings on every page, and the meticulously recorded details of my daily activities.

which were often coloured in with milky pen, or fitted in next to haphazardly glued-in pictures from magazines.

i think the number of days came to about just less than three hundred, about two hundred and eighty.

just less than a year of my life.

looking back it seems sad, not that i was bored in high school, because i definitely wasn't the only one, but because i actually thought that leaving school would be the ultimate high point of my life.

i didn't even give a second thought to the fact that going away to university, moving to another city, having to actually make an effort to get a degree, would be a challenge of its own.

and never mind the time after that, when life wouldn't have discernible end-points, no break-up days or last day of exams.

to some extent, i think it's because i watched so many movies and series about high school experiences, the kind portrayed in so many "coming-of-age" movies that i watched, obliviously.

and because i listened intently to pop punk anthems about getting out of town, moving on to better things, and escaping four years of entrenched social hierarchy.

i remember even reading an interview with the bassist of blink 182 at the time, and feeling relieved when he said something like "life gets better after high school".

and it did, in many ways, but it scares me that i internalized this idea of escape, and related it to my own life, even though i grew up very far away from football games, cheerleaders and small town america.

so now, when i watch series like freaks and geeks, which unknowingly aired on NBC during my first year of high school, i wish that i'd been able to watch it instead.

even though i find it almost painful to see, the more honest and genuine depiction of "high school life", with all the excessive boredom, angst and trying to fit in, somewhere.

i think it would have given me a different perspective, and not the constructed and hyperreal view of life that i'm trying to disregard now that i think i know better.

which i don't think i actually do, especially because, three years after being capped in front of a hall full of people on a stage by a black-caped man i'll never recognise, i still don't have it all figured out.

at least my music taste has expanded to include more complex rhythms than three-chord guitar though, and i'm listening to solo projects like fever ray.

and her take on growing up.

the one life end-point i don't know if i'll ever get to.