Weird confluence of some random events put me in a very nostalgic frame of mind. I dug The Nineties out of my nightstand last night. I bought it back in March and kind of forgot about it. I started reading it last night. My entire high school and college experience are contained in The Nineties. Big things happened in that decade. My senior football season still resonates strongly almost 30 years later. One of my teammates posted an edited version of a playoff game against a rival to YouTube. I watched that tonight. We were good. I'm pretty sure that we would have won the region if the field hadn't been a muddy mess. Football highlights were a big part of the video yearbook that the same guy has on YouTube. I'm in that a couple of times. A random joke in a weight training class is the only time I show up without wearing football equipment.
The game was played in November of 1993. I was 17. I turned 46 last week. I'm far enough away from that experience that I can appreciate how special those few months were without feeling too pathetic for harkening back to my high school glory days. The Washington Post story about that game notes that we were the only team to score against that other team. I had the chance to be part of something special. Plenty of people never have that chance. That season is certainly the highlight of my time in high school. I didn't have a girlfriend. All the excitement that comes from that experience came when I was in college. I had a mediocre social life. I was obsessed with getting to college. I wasn't very complex (not that many high schoolers are particularly complex).
It's startling how quickly my mindset reverts when I reenter that time of my life. I wonder what all those people I went to school with would judge the life I've built. These are people that I brushed life with for a couple of years. I only went to that high school for two years. The opinion those people have of me have absolutely no bearing on my life, but I wonder how my achievements would stand up to the other people in my class. Wny is this where my thinking automatically goes when I mentally go back to that time of my life? We're all out here trying to do the best we can. I know the outcomes of a few people from that football team. One is a pilot for Southwest after being in the Navy. Another is a teacher and coach at a high school not far from my Virginia house. I was the right tackle. The left tackle passed away several years ago. The guy who played guard next to me recently retired from the Army. He was a green beret. Our quarterback was a coach for a while. I think he's an administrator now. He got divorced and has remarried.
I guess that shift to the old comparison mindset is about the fantasies I had about my future back in those days. I just wanted to be impressive. I didn't think much of myself so I was looking to add ornaments to make myself look better. That's why I played football. Being on the football team carried a social load that I would have struggled with had I just been another face in the crowd. I was looking forward to other things that would have added to my prestige. I stepped out of the prestige game to live in a pleasant climate. That's assuming I was in the prestige game to begin with. The truth that a high school student fails to see is that most people don't give two shits about prestige games. Once you're out of the fish bowl of a 1990s era high school, prestigious accomplishments have limited meaning outside of a subset of people playing the same game. Tell another chemist that you have a paper is JACS, they may have an idea of what that means. Tell somebody about that at a high school reunion, you'll get a blank stare.
So unless you're famous, most people won't be impressed by what you're doing unless they're in the same game. We don't have games under the lights on Friday nights where people can see you out there doing your thing. Even then they're probably just watching Damon Boone cut through the defense. Nobody gives a shit about what you're doing unless it helps them feel better about their life. Eventually it just becomes a question of who is still around to attend the reunion. Eventually, nobody can show up.
