There are a number of reasons to write about Radnor High School. One of these is that I was looking through other noders' bios and came across several who had referenced self-created nodes about their schools, and I felt that mine was left out.

But that's neither here nor there. Radnor High School is located in a well-to-do suburb outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. When I graduated, it was ranked in the Top Ten High Schools or something like that in either the East Coast or the entire USA, but it's irrelevant because you'll find that I'm quite disillusioned about the whole deal.

Lots of people are disillusioned about lots of things, and school, particularly high school, is a traditional favorite thing about which to be disillusoined. (Still with me? Even through my intentionally obtuse wording? Neat.) So why listen to my disillusionment?

Rrrr, good question. I like those. I also like having conversations with imagined respondants who don't, technically, exist at the time of writing.

Well, to cut to the chase, it's because I realized something that people who have okay to middling-well childhoods and are reasonably accepted socially at various times during their high schooling (and viciously intense nerds during the other times of that schooling) all realize, or at least goes my current theory:

Once you graduate, you spend the rest of your life trying to get back what you lose when you leave home.

My father's an alcoholic and my parents are permanently separated but not divorced, and I hated much of my childhood, so the situation is not nearly as idyllic or happy-valley as the single statement above may appear to be. (end grain of salt)

But seriously--growing up, you have a home, a stable income (allowance), a hopefully reasonably accepting and maybe even comforting home life, various activities, and every single holiday revolves around you and the other children in the house. You get more days off than you ever will again--ever. (Dotcom IPO-er's during the early parts of last year need not read that last sentence, of course.)

Maybe that's the reason lots of people have children themselves--they want to give that feeling of serenity and security to somebody else, because they can't ever feel that way again.

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