Tag: HCHS

Story: “It was a really bad day.”

This was the first story I wrote for my 11th grade creative writing elective; I was reminded of this by the play, it’s mostly Hunter-ish slice of life with a bit of odd imaginative departure from reality.

Martin Berger had a remarkably annoying Thursday. In the morning, he did poorly on a test in AP Chem. At lunch, Jennifer canceled their date, and informed him that she never wanted to see him again. He therefore had a very good excuse when he responded to his English teacher’s question about the Illiad with “The root is two-plus-five-i.” Of course, Mr. Travidia had no knowledge of Martin’s bad day, and assumed that Martin was just slacking.

Full story after the break. No warnings needed, but the Gulf War references (which were already pretty dated in the fall of 1992) are quite outdated may seem inappropriate of place to folks unfamiliar with the early 1990s.

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Another fragment of fiction – I started writing a play?

One of the weird things about getting to my age and having been a digital pack rat before such things were common, is that I occasionally find things I wrote in the distant past that I have almost no memory of.

To wit, at the start of ninth grade (Sept. 1990), I started writing a play, some sort of vaguely Walter Mitty-ish thing about a self-insert main character with an invisible friend. I definitely reused a lot of character names in later things, and it would not surprise me if this was the first appearance of several of them.

Here’s a sample above the break.

[Derek] Stands up, wearing dirty sweatpants and t-shirt. Goes towards bathroom.

George: Ahem… Aren’t you forgetting SOMETHING…

Derek: No.

George: Your CLOTHES, numbskull. You can’t go to school like THAT.

Derek: And why can’t I?

George:
[Aside] Why? He asks me why!
[To Derek] Because you’d be the object of public ridicule, that’s why!

Derek [Taking Clothes from drawer]: So? There’s nothing unusual about that.

Full text below the break. At some point I may put in some thoughts on repeated characters I used back then, and where this may have been going

Content warning: casual/gratuitous use of profanity

(Yes, I could edit out the f-bombs, but I’d like to remain true to my 14-year-old self no matter how idiotic I was back then.)

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What I was doing at age 18

I recently realized that a very important aspect of what I have done for the past year in my day job is echoing how I got started in my career. That is, I spent a bunch of time last year and this year justifying a large technical project — in writing for a less-technical audience — and then working with other people to get it organized and deployed. I’ve also recently in my work gone back to that project — documenting the project so that other folks could finish it, and a non-IT PM could manage it — so that I can get back to programming.

Realizing that, it inspired me to see if I still had the documents I’d written for that original project. It turns out, I did — both the original proposal, and a mid-year budget for the actual ordering once we got the project approved.

So, what was this project? Getting my high school computer lab on a LAN, and on the internet — the latter isn’t mentioned in the original proposal, so I guess it was scope creep, but it was awesome. The project lead to my first full-time summer job and my first full-time job when I took my break from Dartmouth (both doing Novell server admin work plus some desktop support) and I’m pretty sure the project itself — still underway — made a difference in my college applications.

A PDF reconstructing the original documents is here: Networking Computer Resources for Hunter College High School: A Modest Proposal Below the break, reminiscences and a text version of the document itself.

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