An Adult...sort of

Last month, I turned 18.
The big birthday that is supposed to separate you from being a juvenile to a full-fledged adult, 18 hit me like a slight breeze. I don't feel a month over 17 and yet I'm legally a totally different person. Theoretically, I am now a wise man who can make decisions about my country and my life without parental supervision. But when I called Mrs. C to let her know I'd be out with my family for a day, it didn't fly. My mother was called, the administration was notified and the whole debacle turned into a huge mess. I'll admit that I neglected to give Mrs. C a specific reason for my absence, but shouldn't my all-powerful 18 year old self be able to make those sort of calls about my own life? The first time I tried to flex my adult abilities, it blew up in my face. Sure I can buy porn and cigarettes and even vote, but I'm still bound by my childhood regulations. In the real world I can go to war and travel the globe. To the school though, I'm just a regular kid.
Mrs. C reminded me that freedom is not unversal. Rules will follow me everywhere I go. Frankly, being 18 doesn't give you more rights, it just gives harsher punishments for the rules already in place. I can still be tried for underage drinking, only now I could be thrown in jail and not recieve diversion. Is being able to buy nudie mags and butts really worth losing the barrier of childhood ignorance? If I make a bad desicion now, I'd be in a heap of trouble. 18 year olds aren't supposed to make bad desicions, but 17 year olds can do whatever they want. The only difference I've felt being 18 is that there's more pressure, more responsibility, and even then it's all passive. 18 should be fun and fancy free right? No one gave me a handbook telling me what being an adult should feel like, but authorities assume I know.
There was one triumphant day when I bought a cheap cigar for the hell of it, but afterwords, I didn't feel any sort of accomplishment. I don't smoke, and the guy at the register didn't even card me. I could have walked up and bought the cigar when I was 17. Either way, I still wouldn't have smoked it.

Student Council

Ever since I entered the high school I have been puzzled by the Student Council. I never really understood what purpose it served, and now as a senior I am equally confused. It seems that after being excused from class once every Friday and rearranging the library furniture, they just seem to talk about nothing. It is true that programs such as March Intensive have been passed by the council, but I fail to see why such a large group of students needed to be involved. My objection in short is simple: there are a great number of students on the Student Council that are there simply to put another item on their college transcript, and it seems to me that every decision council has made in my high school career could have been made by a panel of teachers and a group of invested students.

The student council elections are for the most part, a complete joke. There have been some in the past who have tried to tell me that it is not a popularity contest, but I cannot understand where they are coming from. I spoke with a council official about the subject, and he/she did not deny this, but told me it was then my responsibility, as a member of this democratic society, to move the student body away from the attitude of the popularity contest to a more of a democratic election. Something tells me my efforts would be in vain.

This issue is an illustration of the bigger picture of the student body that seems to escape some members of the student council. The fact is, the students do not care. Though the enormous number of posts on the opinion board beg to differ, it seems that students are just not involved and do not care to change that. I sincerely doubt that the average high school student can name something other than March Intensive that council has accomplished in the past four years. The system is clearly not democratic if only a handful of students actually care about the decisions that affect the school. With no real support from the student body, there seems to be no reason for the student council to remain as large or as powerful as it is.

I believe that Student Council should be reduced in size and authority, and that issues should be dealt with by teachers and students that actually care. I strongly feel that elections should be made by students but nominations should be made by faculty. It is too easy now for a cool enough kid who wants another thing to put on their transcript to get onto council and be totally detached from any meaningful issues at hand. That's not my ideal for a governing body.

I'm not actually from Vermont...

“The Second Vermont Republic is a nonviolent citizens' network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government, and committed to the return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly to the dissolution of the Union.”

Plans to secede were made over a friend’s dinner table one Friday night last summer. Obviously, something was seriously wrong with the United States, and the only remedy was to create a safe haven for, well, more people like us. California seemed like a good place to begin our revolution, until we decided that if the people there were crazy enough to ban smoking in bars, they weren’t to be trusted with their own sovereign nation. After toying briefly with the ideas of conquering Southern France (too French), Canada (too Canadian), and Hong Kong (too British), my friend and I set our sights on Vermont.

Vermont, whose original constitution had been drafted and ratified in a tavern over a period of four days, had been an autonomous republic from 1777 to 1791, and had already developed its own secessionist movement: The Second Republic of Vermont. Confident that the combined forces of two seventeen-year-old boys were sufficient to bring the laid-back Vermonters to heel, we drew up our plans for governance of our new Empire.

While chartering our new nation’s economic policy, we realized that without a coastal harbor to receive shipments of Subarus, our fledgling empire would crumble. After first planning to take over Massachusetts, mainly because “P-town is sweet,” it was decided that our newly-formed Vermont militia wouldn’t be able to effectively combat the Red Sox Nation if Boston were threatened.

New Hampshire, on the other hand, was a far more benign target, had our desperately-needed access to coastal waters, a world-class medical facility, and controlled the other bank of the Connecticut River, which would become a vital artery in our maple syrup, cheddar cheese, and marijuana trades. Bringing New Hampshire into The Empire would also make our new nation the only country outside the United States with an Ivy League college. Most importantly, New Hampshire/Vermont made a nearly perfect rectangle on a map, which would attract the world’s more geographically aware obsessive-compulsives to pursue citizenship.

Of course, the Department of Homeland Security’s belief that out recent machinations in Vermont are actually the product of Quebec’s own secessionist movement is evident by the DOHS’s plans to make the I-95 checkpoint a permanent installation. Obviously, both us and Al Qaeda will have to delay our plans to reestablish the fur trade.

iBlag

Blog for Bourne

This weekend I watched one of my childhood idols crumble. A friend and I, our decision making process obviously impaired by the stuffy air of her basement, chose to watch “The Return of the Jedi.” Bad idea; never revisit childhood memories expecting the same experience, and “The Empire Strikes Back” is a superior film anyway.

I fondly watched Anthony Daniels (C3PO) pantomime his way through Jabba the Hutt’s dank pad soaking in small details I had missed when I’d watched the same scene at age ten: principally the apparent absence of lighting apparatus, and a green hookah.

Things went downhill when Mark Hamill (Luke) walked in to become conveniently captured. For my Ten-year-old mind, Luke Skywalker had always been a golden god. Anybody who cut people in half with a light saber was worth idolizing. But I had never really given Mark Hamill a good long look before, conveniently distracted by his glowing death-beam. Mark Hamill seems incredibly ugly on screen.

I can’t speak for his private life, and there may be a more rational explanation for his appearance than divine punishment, but the bottom line is that I can barely look at him ture the original trio of Star Wars movies. The fact that these movies, outside of a few B-movies and hundreds of gimmicky TV appearances as “himself,” are the only way that Mark Hamill has been immortalized in cinema makes his image even more tarnished.

But there are more portrayals of Hamill: posters, action figures, and other memorabilia meant to be encased in glass an imprisoned in a moldy basement. I couldn’t actually ask a real fan to show to show me evidence of Mark Hamill’s sex appeal for the simple reason that I didn’t have eight hours to sit trough some sanctimonious sermon. Opting for a slightly saner atmosphere, I journeyed over to Newbury Comics.

After a brief love affair with a pair of Wolverine gloves, I stumbled through a forest of comic racks to the wall reserved for action figures. Before I go any further, I would like to say that it is entirely possible to create an attractive action figure: Harrison Ford’s (Han Solo’s) doppelganger is nearly as attractive as the actor himself. But, my hopes were crushed to find that a plastic representation of Mark Hamill was uglier that the original. I hopelessly picked through the comic racks, trying to lift my spirits, before exiting, dejected, one of my childhood idols now completely shattered.

The lesson? In a nutshell: don’t revisit a positive childhood memory expecting the same experience you had nearly a decade ago. People change, tastes differ, little boys develop a more discriminating eye when examining their male peers. Most importantly, Mark Hamill may have been reduced in status, but Harrison Ford, People Magazine’s sexiest man alive in 1998, at age 56, is still on a high pedestal.