In middle school, my parents enrolled me in first-year Japanese at the local high school. This class started at 7:00 or 7:30 am every morning for a year. It was horrific. I was a freshman at the high school the following year and would go on to complete second- and third-year Japanese. For some reason, during my junior year, I enrolled in first-semester Japanese at the local community college – this was before I learned that if you completed three years of a language in high school, you didn’t need to take a year of foreign language in college. Oh well.
There were three guys in the college class who, to this day, I can remember their faces, their heights relative to me, the way they walked, the way they dressed, very clearly, but I can’t remember anything about anyone else in the class, including the instructor. These guys were “older,” even though, now, I would call them “kids.”
One of the guys brought a guitar to every class.
In high school, we had rallies two or three times per year. Everyone who wanted to participate would head over to the gymnasium and sit on the bleachers and… – I never went, so I have no idea what they were doing. Those of us with less school spirit would sit on the lawn in the center of campus – the same spot where we ate lunch. The posers would bring guitars.