It goes without saying that a lot of these stories have blurred together as time has carried on. Maybe some of these events happened earlier while others later. However, I feel like they make most sense when paired in this particular section. For me, the seventh grade symbolizes the first time that St. Cornelius fully clicked. I had gotten through that induction and was now part of the gang. If nothing else could be said, we had gone through a year together and were now ready to make our way to the finish line. At the time I didn’t know where high school would take me. As a child going into 2002, it was a time to feel aimless.
During this time, we also had my ideal birthday parties. As the years have gone on, there’s been fewer of them, but when you’re a preteen with nothing to do, you go to the movies. Because of convenience, we all gathered at the Lakewood Mall to have pizza and hop over to see a movie. Ironically, they tended to be sequels that were somehow underwhelming continuations of Vin Diesel stories. One year it was 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and another was the even more forgettable The Chronicles of Riddick (2004). It was thrilling to be that age and not beingjudgmental about what art was. We’d go to Adam Sandler’s latest. To some extent, there was a relief how little of those birthdays were about me while also providing a memory of thinking, “I’m going to be okay.”
Another reason that I struggle to pin everything down is because 2002 was the summer I also visited The British Isles. While I had my birthday stateside, it wouldn’t be long until I hopped on a plane to visit England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. It would take too many words to properly convey my journey. Despite my counselors saying my diaries were bad because they were more introspection, it’s something that brings me joy anytime I come across it in my rummaging. It reveals who I was at 13, including someone who wasn’t all that worried about the direction George W. Bush took the country. Maybe it’s naivety. Maybe it came from having parents who leaned more conservative or that I was a child with binary thinking, but sometimes my early thoughts intrigue me but also shock me.
During the trip, I met a great guy named Alex. I stayed with his family and spent evenings watching Britain's MTV equivalent Kerrang! It's where I discovered Bowling For Soup a good five months before “Girls All the Bad Guys Want” became a hit stateside. We played a bowling video game where the end screen was a Mexican man holding two voluptuous women while saying “Holy guacamole.” We laughed every time. Even in seeing four countries worth of sights, doing nothing with Alex was my favorite part. He will come back up later. For now, just know that he has withstood over 20 years of experiences. I can’t say the same for the Irish family I stayed with, which may in part be because the two “age equivalent” figures were younger than me and were at best antagonistic in brotherly ways.
Seventh grade had probably my favorite of the three St. Cornelius home room teachers. Vice was first and foremost an English teacher. Her daughter was in our class and I thought she was very nice. I’ll admit that I’m not sure if she came to like me because I, regrettably, wrote some dumb things online about her years later that caused her to yell at me. With all of that said, I was the rambunctious seventh grader who was going through all of those typical changes. I rebelled to stand out and needed to have everyone laughing. Sometimes that came at the expense of gross-out humor or sabotaging my grades, but there is still the sense that Vice thought I was a good student.
I want to believe I was. Towards the end of sixth grade, I won her literary award “The Hemingway Award.” The idea was that every student in her class had to submit x amount of stories per grade year in order to receive credit. Because I was eager to write, I often had to restrain myself to not go over the count. I managed to win the monthly challenge at least once between sixth and eighth grade, and in sixth won the top award for the year. Everyone knew me as a writer, and it felt good to be encouraged. To walk in on winner announcement day and see your name on the board was such a great honor. In my first two years, I essentially did something akin to “world building” where I built ongoing narratives about characters in bands. I think by eighth grade I went more experimental, but overall it was one of my favorite parts of the year.
I’ll admit that it was a formative time for being an English student. While I had been an avid reader going back to the very early days, it was one of those moments where I got to see a public reading my work and providing feedback. I should say I wasn’t a very good editor and probably only read those stories through once. I was also good at spelling, which you were often rewarded with by getting to take a break later in the week while everyone retook the test.
However, I think that there are some things about English as a profession that I have awkwardly managed to not learn all that well. If you had to tell me to define a participle, I can’t. Odd terms like that never concerned me and I was always more engaged with how the prose sounded in my head. If I needed an extra comma, I would. Academia means a lot to me, but oddly enough I’m not precious about form. So long as ideas are being communicated, we’re doing fine.
It was a point where we expanded our subject matter. I remember a book called “Jacob Have I Loved” where we discussed the hormonal changes of the lead as they fell in love with a supporting character. I want to say it’s where I discovered “Nory Ryan’s Song” and found a lifelong fascination with the Irish potato famine. We also read “Tuck Everlasting” the same year the film was released. In another story that I haven’t been able to pin down its title, we discussed an Asian family who overcame tyranny. During one scene that has stuck with me, the young protagonist finds their grandparent taking a shoe off to reveal they didn’t have any toenails. It’s not necessarily a vulgar scene by description, but something about it was so vivid. We also did book reports on different stories, and some of mine included Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man” and J.K. Rowling’s “The Order of the Phoenix.” There were many more, but the point was that we were engaged with literature in a way that encouraged you to discover something that spoke to you. I’ve greatly admired that as I’ve gotten older even if both aforementioned texts aren’t formative in the slightest.
Among the funnier things that we did was form groups to create performative skits. It came along with the territory of reading plays and trying to appreciate the greater potential of language. At one point, we watched A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) in class. When it arrived at a scene featuring nude women, Vice held up a piece of paper to censor the few seconds of “scandal” that we’d be exposed to. We liked to joke that she’d go to movie houses and do the same thing to general audiences.
The odd thing about being encouraged to write your own bits was that it revealed a lot about how tweens saw the world. They aren’t exactly processing things with nuance or deeper empathy. What they’re doing is looking at facts and finding ways to make them funny.
I think the most prominent one was an interview segment. Following the most infamous Super Bowl halftime show of the time, we had a student act as a news anchor interviewing Justin Timberlake while being like, “Is that what you meant when you said you’d have her naked by the end of this song?” There were a lot of fun bits like that. Every year, we’d get a chance to recreate a Shakespeare work. Leading up to pre-production, Vice had shared a story about how her friend killed themselves by drinking laundry detergent. I don’t remember it coming across as traumatic, but in hindsight the end of this story is weirdly dark. I remember watching a group act out Hamlet and having the narrator end by saying, “Well, I guess I’ll die too” before pretending to drink detergent as the grand finale.
The early 2000s were an odd time because dark subject matter was still taken lightly in some circles. I think it took me awhile to understand where the real lines of decency were because nobody told me. I was more willing to act out and say things if it meant somebody laughed. I think the moment that really changed things was when the class began sharing their AIM accounts and I got talking to random students. At one point I joked about somebody’s dead dad and they told me it wasn’t funny. I think pairing this with the previous summer is pertinent. On bus rides, I remember struggling to get a group’s attention that I wanted to be friends with, I insulted them until the girl next to me suggested that I try being kinder.
It would be years before I latched onto that mentality. I think because of my attitude and demeanor, I had a divisive reputation among students. They either thought I was funny or gross depending on their sensibilities. In fairness, hygiene was regrettably not one of my focuses, so I’m sure that I was far more unpleasant than memory suggests. The boys tended to like me. They welcomed me to play basketball and roughhouse in their odd ways. With that said, I realized quickly that I was sort of doomed because I had no stamina when it came to P.E., so I’d end up having to walk laps while everyone else finished minutes earlier.
I suppose there’s endless regret about being 13 and experiencing puberty. Certain boys were obsessed with sex and joked about everything under the sun. It was the time everyone got boners in class and joking about their changing bodies. It’s definitely was uncomfortable. My father probably did what he thought was right by getting me some FHM and Maxim Magazines and celebrating the ogling of women. In the long run, it went from being cute to ultimately leaving me questioning why we thought it was okay and how it’s made some things difficult around perceptions of femininity. It didn't help that at some point I remember reading an interview with Tera Patrick and being intrigued by how candidly she talked about her career. There was also Joanna Angel in Spin Magazine giving write-in sex advice that made the whole thing seem more mechanical. In some way, it informed my interest in people more for their minds than their bodies... which even then, cute people are cute.
Despite this, they weren't worst group of students. They were mostly tepid and inoffensive. We were all together for three years just finding ways to kill time. Some people found it by cracking jokes while others were quieter and stuck to the academics. We liked to joke that the math teacher was harming our education by reprimanding us while we were drawing some classic piece of art. I never drew anything worthwhile. It was mostly my interpretation of band logos based on stickers that I found in the back of Spin Magazine. Music was an immediate passion. I wrote an essay about Dave Grohl because I thought he was cool. This was around the time he was in Queens of the Stone Age, and I loved his drum work on “Songs for the Deaf.” The real drummer in the class, Diego, was obsessed with Travis Barker and given that this was in the time period between “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket” and “Blink-182,” we all shared that love of music, notably pop-punk.
I think seventh grade was when I shifted my interest in genre music. There was something loud and obnoxious about punk music that I gravitated towards, and it may have just been the independence and freedom in the style. It was the ability to be shocking and say things that were taboo. It was everything that a Catholic School wasn’t, and the idea of pushing boundaries just sounded fun at the time. At one point I even wore a Dead Kennedys shirt to school less because I knew their catalog, but because a teacher had that surname and it seemed amusing.
I was also sitting in class with a spare notebook just writing songs or poems. A lot of them were parodies of popular songs with the most annoying rebellious subjects possible. When you have nothing to fight against, you make up things and my work was needlessly angry. Everyone was happy while I was just trying to find ways to make these poems sound cool. Nobody has seen most of them. At the time of this publication, I threw a bunch out years ago less because they were bad but partially shame. For reasons that I’ll get into later, I have insecurities around privacy that has caused me to feel shame around holding more vulnerable documents around.
I was also an artist at this time. As you can guess, I drew what interested me which seemed to be a mix of people I liked and the human body. At one point, my father was annoyed that he found a hefty bag full of crumpled up drawings and pulled one out. Luckily it was one with a character flashing a gang sign (in part because I needed to work on drawing more dynamic hands). It could’ve gone worse. For reasons that I hope makes sense to somebody else, I was also curious to draw naked people of both sexes. I was insecure at what others would think because I could be laughed at. Given that I was drawing naked men, I do wonder what that said about me.
Because the thing about being somebody in the early 2000s is that being gay wasn’t as celebrated as it is in 2024. We were still saying “that’s gay” in a derogatory manner. Nothing could deflate your ego more than being called a fag. It took even longer, but retard stuck around. I think often of how that era shaped my feelings around homosexuality because it wasn’t really discussed. The only real example that I had was t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” where two faux-lesbians dressed in school uniforms kissed each other in the rain. I would later see a similar performance on Mad TV where a cheering crowd supported this gimmick.
It's because of this time that I sometimes feel hesitant about public displays of affection. Madonna would kiss Britney Spears. When I opened the Los Angeles Times the next day, there was that picture. I think it was more accepted that women were kissing each other because it was hot, some concept of the male gaze not having to compete with another individual. Other times we had Super Bowl commercials where women wrestled each other in compromising positions that caused them to fall into fountains, revealing their underwear as if the suggestion of boobs was enough to sell Go Daddy or something. As I’ve said before, I was also reading FHM and Maxim magazines, which made it interesting that I became more intrigued by the articles than the bikini-clad people on the covers. Yes, that joke about Playboy does hold weight… even if I never owned or bought a copy of said publication.
It is difficult to assess how media didn’t shape my views of femininity during this time because it was very much challenged. I’m aware AFAB individuals were more strictly judged than AMAB’s, and sometimes I wish that I didn’t contribute to that behavior despite having a poor friend group that at times encouraged it. After all, the girl who grew big boobs first, despite being the quietest student in class, was considered the slutty stereotype. Nothing about this world made sense. Some students probably were just suffering from the malaise of being at that school for seven years. Others were impatiently waiting to get out and others… who knows.
All in all, I think it’s probably where the most guilt lies in me. Everybody who has had some experience with the Catholic Church can be accused of having “guilt.” We have a sacrament called Confession because we believe we are born with original sin. There is a need for constant atonement. Sure, it encouraged me to perform more good deeds and think more kindly to the world, but by eighth grade I was failing Religion class and being annoyed because it didn’t make sense. How could I fail what I believed?
But I do have a lot of guilt over how I treated others. Even if I am maybe kinder and more willing to listen than my mind allows me to think, I did fall victim to lashing out and being occasionally cruel. Not through physical violence, but through making others uncomfortable. I so desperately wish I could go back and be kinder to a lot of people and not give into my father’s objectification of women. Hell, there’s the reality that we were driven to school with TWO drivetime morning shows talking about women with that leering “yowza” quality. By the time I was in high school, grown men were obsessing over the day that Lindsay Lohan would become “legal.” This was considered socially acceptable. Before Jimmy Kimmel went on to be a big talk show host, he was on The Man Show celebrating male juvenilia, ending every episode with a big-boobed woman bouncing on a trampoline. If you must have any further context, renowned misogynist Adam Carolla was his co-star. Both were regulars on KROQ when I was in middle school.
I have guilt around this because it's something I’m forced to think about. Efforts to see women as more dynamic figures took a lot longer than I care to admit. While I could be friends and admire their achievements, there was something about being fed FHM and Maxim as a teenager and expecting not to think certain things. It’s things that could qualify as empathy, where they were more than a body part. I think it still bothers me because I notice my father is still that way sometimes while I am more willing to support women’s causes and listen to their stories. Even then, I live with guilt that I could never fully accept femininity because of how misguided earlier views were. There will be some pushback because they will know. Oh, they will know. It’s silly because even as I try to embrace tenderness and softness in my demeanor, I feel like something will contradict everything.
To quickly touch on the gay thing, California didn’t have a proper vote on gay marriage until 2008. I grew up in a time where it felt like they were second-class citizens and it was easier to make fun of them for being flamboyant and (in a sense) asexual. So long as they were inoffensive in that Will & Grace way, we would tolerate it. With that said, I came from a family who was so clueless that it came down to mundane details. My father didn’t understand why women should be allowed to have short haircuts, i.e. the butch kind. I had to explain it to him. Again, it was cool if two women kissed, but I think it led me to struggle to see queerness as something that wasn’t just performative, or for attention. In more recent years, I watched The Prom perform on The Tony Awards and felt awkward because the kiss felt exploitative instead of a natural piece of the show. I am not against it in context of the show, but it did feel like it didn’t add anything to that medley. With all this said, I have had an openly gay couple who lives in my neighborhood since I was a child. They’re really nice people and I think is a perfect counterbalance to all of the confusion and shame I’ve maybe felt about growing up in a society that kinda hated gay people.
But to shift a little more, I want to focus on one student who meant a lot to me and will fit into the next five or so years of my life. She didn’t in sixth grade, and there was a good reason. During one of the fiesta nights, I joined a random student in collecting inflatable hammers from the game prizes. We found a girl named Alex (not related) who we annoyed by chasing her around. We eventually cornered her in the bathroom. I don’t want to say we actually hit her, but the feeling of “hunting” her down was enough for us.
Still, it’s a moment that shifted the remainder of our time together greatly. At the end, she’d claim that I ruined my chance for her to develop any greater feelings towards me. I always think it’s because those early months were very rocky and found us starting as enemies.
My father was driving by a bus stop one day. When we saw her, we gave her a ride home. It would become our new normal of picking her up and dropping her off. She’d come to like me as a friend, but that was after sanding down the edges. We’d hang out at each other’s house, watching movies after midnight on the weekends. It was a wonderful time and I am grateful to have those experiences. She has had a conflicting life since we stopped talking. Given that her e-mail address alluded to a Johnny Knoxville reference, she was into the reckless Jackass style. The other Alex, who dated her shortly, said that her mother called him once asking for help on getting her to calm down. I got the sense that they loved each other, at least in that young person way.
Again, I feel like having my father as a mentor probably didn’t help matters. He was not exactly the chillest parent. He liked to joke by driving his truck onto the sidewalk as if he was pretending to run us over. He encouraged me to climb up her brick wall to get her attention. These things are mundane in theory, but there weren’t any sense of boundaries to an extent. In one move that I’m sure didn’t serve me any favors, I ended up grabbing her bra through her shirt. It’s difficult to say why I did it, but my father was very much into roughhousing. When Alex (U.K.) would be out years later, we played games of “purple nurple” and on certain cases even pantsed each other. Alex (girl) had to once tell my dad to stop doing it because my sister was uncomfortable and on her period. Thankfully, that behavior stopped… with the girls anyway.
It gets difficult to really assess how I feel about these moments because the reality is that it was common and I maybe participated. With that said, the shock and discomfort with being touched has lead me to wonder if it qualifies as harassment. While I do think of that term as referring to something often more violating, there’s a shame I have towards myself because of “purple nurples” and pantsing on top of any other comment that has been made. There’s guilt around how I treated women and maybe my hesitation stems from not wanting to contribute to that cycle even accidentally. Alex deserved so much better. Even if we liked each other enough to waste away nights with movies we rented from Blockbuster, I think I should’ve been more respectful.
I realize these are the complaints of a young person who is informed by their environment. It gets tough to look back at the bad side of things because you do realize how different life would be if you were nicer. It’s not just the sense of being more altruistic, but maybe you’d have better advantages and people would trust you more. It would take away the lessons, but imagine what else you could learn. If you’re allowed to be more vulnerable with someone, maybe you discover the happiness that is missing earlier and get to have more days of peace in your life. Maybe if I treated women better, I could feel less guilt around them now.
I’m not saying that I was ever “the worst,” but as I’m well aware now, every small action has a major consequence on how somebody sees the world. It happened to me in 2000, and I hate that I even did that on a minor scale years later. It was all for a joke that I didn’t even think was funny, and it was because media said it was. Men could be reckless and it would be cute. Women were trophy prizes. How do you grow up watching Family Guy and not recognize the difference between a joke and misbehavior? Maybe it’s because I always felt at distance from my peers on some level, but there wasn’t a good moderator to tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing.
Then again, how much of this is in my head? I’ve talked to people from middle school who still think I’m a good person. Maybe I’m judging myself harshly as I try to start the next phase of my life. I’m trying to think about what it takes to be a good person, and I’m grateful that by high school I was changing for the better. Still, how do you break free of Catholic Guilt? How do you realize you are not your father in terms of some behavior patterns? In seventh grade, and more specifically puberty, it’s a time where you’re finding your own identity. It comes at embarrassing costs sometimes, but I like to think I’ve become a better person since.
But yeah. Seventh grade was an interesting time for sure. A lot went down that could rank as one of the most carefree years of my life. Otherwise, it was hell to think that there was still one more year to go at this school. Oh, how I wanted to be free of Catholic School already. If I could get that diploma already, then I’d be able to run away and never look back. But first…. I needed to get through 2003.
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