New job, old memories

Gotta get up early tomorrow. My brother is quitting his morning job (yes, that's right, my brother has two jobs, who would've thunk it? A man too lazy to make his own sandwiches!) and he wants me to take it over, since well, I'm unemployed at the moment. I have no problem with that, it's a pretty simple job - that is, it's not terribly anxiety-provoking, pays okay and doesn't involve taking anyone's life into my hands, so it's all good. Basically, I just proofread the news they read on the English-language radio stations and that's it. The only difficult part of it is that my shift starts at five in the morning and I have never been a morning person. Ugh. Getting up at dawn gives me unpleasant flashbacks to high school. Speaking of high school, I met up with some of my classmates from RIS yesterday at Yuppie Hell (aka Siam Paragon, described recently in a Time article as "Bangkok's glitziest mall"). I haven't seen Bob and Nat in years. Bob just graduated, but Nat's working - and go figure, he's an English teacher too! My brethren! Bob's pounding the pavement looking for a job. He seemed kinda frustrated by it all, but taking it in stride, just like he always has. You know, as a kid I always thought Bob had something of a temper, but now that I reflect on it, I was definitely a bigger hothead than he was. It was nice to see the lot of them, Andrew too, who I actually ran into a while back. The strange and crazy thing was I remembered random stuff about them, like Andrew was a really great artist and Nat was a big environmentalist and Bob was this intense guy who did a great impression of a lighter (you have to see it to get it), and you know what they remembered about me? That I was like one of two people who didn't skip on Senior Skip Day! Oh, God. Senior Skip Day was this stupid tradition back in high school when all the seniors would choose one day to ditch class and go do something completely inane as a grade, even though normally we barely ever made contact with anyone outside our narrow little cliques. Vaguely, I remember that year the teachers asked us not to do it because it was close to exams or whatnot, don't remember the details, but they I know they said to please not do it, it'd screw up the schedule. Of course, everyone was all, "We're gonna do it anyway", coz, I don't know, bucking the system is cool. So, I get it into my head to stand up in the middle of our town hall meeting (what we called our grade meetings) and pretty much tell everyone off. And I got booed. Literally. If they'd had tomatoes, I'd have looked like a bottle of ketchup. Seriously, that was the vibe. And that's what these guys remembered about me. Nat was like, "Well, you're only a high school senior once" to justify why everyone (except me and some other people who were going to be expelled if they missed any more school) skipped, and I was like, "Yeah, but you only get so many chances to stand up for what you believe in". Seriously.

Final thought: High school. Shudder.