So, high school

So, high school was a pretty good time of life for me, I guess. The move was hard, as I said, but once I was settled in and had friends, things were okay.

I had some of the typical drama of high school years, although not that much. When I was around 16 I started dating Chuck J, one of the kids in the church group. From the beginning I felt like it wasn't going to lead to marriage and Mom encouraged that thinking. Periodically she would ask, "You're just having fun, right?" and would remind me about going to college and that if I got married, they wouldn't be paying for my college any more. But even without that from Mom, I felt like I wanted to experience college and be older and that I didn't think I'd want to marry Chuck. However, in the summer after my first year at college when he was dating someone else, I did feel pretty bad about it and I did miss him. But I worked through that and I hoped he'd be happy.

At school I hung out with Pati Z and there was one other girl from church who went to Apollo, Beth H. We were good friends, too, and roomed together when we both went to Calvin, although she only went for 1 semester. Looking back now I wonder why I didn't encourage Pati to be with me with the church group. But I kept those 2 parts of my life separate - church and school.

Our group did some drinking and nearly everyone in the group started smoking. I'm thankful that we never had any accidents or anything from the drinking because there were times we were stupid. Most of the time, though, we'd be at someone's house and stay there. And we didn't talk about designated drivers back then but I did often drive because I didn't usually drink very much. I never liked the taste of the hard liquor they bought and I always thought it was stupid to get so drunk that you'd fall asleep. Couldn't see the fun in that.

As far as smoking I could never fool myself that I'd be able to quit later. That's what the others who started would say. But I knew how often I'd tried to quit biting my fingernails and failed (I still bite them) and I thought if I couldn't stop that, and fingernails have no addictive substances, I couldn't fool myself that I'd be able to quit smoking.