Oh Memories!

It was long overdue, but I FINALLY brought back some of my childhood things from my parent's house this past weekend. Among the endless boxes of teeny bopper magazines (New Kids on the Block rule! Jordan was SOOO my flavor of the week!) and other nostalgia from my past, I found a box of letters that I've kept from as far back as 8th grade. It's so interesting to go back, read and remember pieces of my past, and to look back on things that seemed so important and pressing to a teenager's life, only to realize now that most of those things weren't all that big, and our reactions just somewhat dramatic. LOL Such fond memories and you know, it's all we knew back in the day! I had no bills, no health problems, and my only cares in the world were my friends & family, boys, boys, school, boys, what my celebrity faves were up to, what my wedding would be like to them, and what my friends and I were doing on the weekends. Who knew that years later I'd be married to my wonderful husband and have 2 beautiful kids. It's such a mindtrip though, because I hardly remember that girl that I used to be. Not that I've completely changed over the years, but a lot has happened since 8th grade and my 30th birthday that has all shaped me into the person that I am today. I haven't finished reading through all of the letters and notes, but some of them have already made me smile, laugh and have even shocked me. I've even found phone numbers and letters from guys that I met (some of those which I wound up dating for a whopping week!) I even have letters written in GREEK! You see, there was a big note/letter passing crackdown at my school and people had started getting careless...losing them only to have them found by teachers and turned into the principal. So we thought that we would write letters in greek so they wouldn't know what it said. The only stink of it though, was that you had to have the greek alphabet code with you when you read it or else you wouldn't know what the hell it said. I also found letters written in pig latin (which looking at it now, it's so obvious to see what it says) and shorthand! LOL Passing notes may not sound like a big deal because who didn't pass notes? I went to a very strict Christian school though and the things written in those letters weren't so Christian by Hanalani's rules, not to mention that note passing was 10 demerits. We used to call it the Institution, or HCF--Hanalani Correctional Facility. LOL I mean come on, they gave out demerits for girls and boys sitting less than 6 inches closer to each other. Before they switched over to uniforms, our skirts had to touch the floor when we kneeled and the slit was to be no more than 2 inches long and believe me, they checked! I used to think that their strict hard-ass rules were so untolerable and almost cruel, but looking back it wasn't so bad. We all found ways to work around it and make the best of our school days. ;) We were all like family because the school was so small--about 150 students from grades 7 through 12th on the same campus. It was the students--my friends who were like family, that made me want to be there, so much so that when I went to Hawaii on vacation the summer before my senior year, I wound up staying and going back there for my senior year of high school. I guess life at that school wasn't all that bad like we all thought when we felt trapped there and I'd like to think that I came out of the whole experience as a pretty good person. Oh the memories! Good times!