Rusty's Blog

My senior year of high school, close to the time I turned 18, my classmates and I filled out a survey. A lot of it was the sort of thing people fill out in MySpace surveys now: favorite bands, favorite animal, favorite activity. Some of it was about The Future.

There were people who took the survey very seriously and put in an effort to sound cheerful and as hopeful about The Future as possible. After all, their children and their children’s children would read this record of their thoughts, frozen in place for posterity.

Others used the questionnaire as an outlet for their hostility toward the high school experience, packing as much cynicism and sarcasm into their answers as possible. The Future as these folks imagined it was a bleak place, even at its best full of black humor where they were the center of the jokes.

The answers were ultimately printed in the yearbook in little sidebars, typically with the contrasting attitudes juxtaposed next to each other. You can probably guess which approach I took when I filled out my survey. I made frequent appearances in the ‘cynical/sarcastic/pessimistic/bitter’ column.

One such sidebar was titled “Happily Ever After,” where answers to the question “what are your goals in life?” or something similar were printed. The answers were as follows:

Cheerful, hopeful person: “Major in biology, go to med school, and have a career in ER.”

Bitter, cynical me: “Live to 30.”

That answer carried extra resonance because there were people I went to school with who genuinely believed I wouldn’t live to 30.

By my junior year or so, I had picked up a reputation as someone who drank heavily. While I certainly got drunk from time-to-time, this reputation was largely an exaggeration. For whatever reason, I never tried to dispell that myth, and even perpetuated it a few times.

There were also people who thought I wasn’t right in the head. I was a weird, insecure, often angry kid and there were a lot of things I did then that I still can’t logically explain. The committee in charge of a senior awards ceremony wanted to name me “Most Likely to Appear on America’s Most Wanted,” but I asked them not to. So I can’t argue much there.

While I always believed there was mostly no truth to the “Live to 30″ answer, my older, slightly less cynical self knows that tempting fate just for the sake of doing it isn’t always a great idea. I’m agnostic, but I also think if there was a God, He or She would have to enjoy gallows humor, and would pick people like me off just for saying things like that.

So, I’m breathing a little sigh of relief to have outlived my cynical high school survey answer today. And I’m pleasantly surprised to report that if I were filling out a similar survey about The Future now, that at least some of the time I’d be the dorky kid who wrote cheerful things for posterity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 11:02 am. It was tagged birthday, birthdays, high school, The Future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.