Photoshop Friday! With High School!

(In honor of Renee, who is the original Photoshop Friday-er.)

Some of you may have heard that Kiersten and I visited our old high school yesterday. It was MAGICAL, guys. You can go read Kierst's thoughtful post about the duality of high school life. I'm gonna try and be the funny one today.

Let me introduce you to the wonder that is Lone Peak:

*cue angelic music* Oh Lone Pear, uh, Peak.

Truth be told, my high school experience wasn't all that bad. Sure, there were tough times, angst, and many a night spent alone, but I genuinely liked myself and knew who I was. I didn't care what people thought (most of the time). And when I did, it was more "What's wrong with THEM?" and not "What's wrong with ME?"

I might have been a tad over-confident.

The problem with that was not everyone knows/likes themselves in high school, and I think I freaked people out with my self-confidence. So I was a rather content loner/nerd/artist/techie teen.

I found high school fairly amusing. I felt like an observer more than a participant. Most of my observations were sarcastic/snarky.

Like the Sword in the Stone:

Or on The Commons:

And then there were the inspirational sayings, which constantly filled me with motivation and drive:


These weren't here when I was in school, but man would I have made fun of these flags! They were everywhere! As if we couldn't tell it was the "Cafeteria" or the "Copy Center or the "Main Office." How pretentious are those babies?

You know that Kiersten and I went to high school together, but I have this feeling that you guys have a very different picture of what that actually entailed.

We had A CLASS together—like, a whole year-long class. It was AP Art, and this is kind of how it went:

Then there was this:

That's not to say I didn't have zero interaction with Kiersten. If you've read her blog today, you'll see she mentioned making fun of Prom.

I was on Prom Committee that year, and she made my best friend cry (who was in charge). That said—Prom utterly and completely DESERVED to be made fun of. We had to have it at school, thanks to some hooligans who got our school banned from every party venue for a few years. Let me recreate this for you.

First, we wanted to make it "not look like school." We had this brilliant idea to cover the lockers in black butcher paper:

Originally, we planed to lower the gym ceiling with chiffon and lights to mimic a night sky. But the chick in charge of that decided to buy a discount, 200 ft wide, Army PARACHUTE instead.

She bought it without the committee seeing it. It was not even close to as dark as she claimed ("It'll look black in the dark!"). It was non-returnable. We hung it on our gym ceiling, dying inside of embarrassment:

But it all turned out for the best. If I'm being honest, I'm not sure Kiersten and I could have been friends in high school. We might have even been nemeses, since I was horribly intimidated by smart, pretty, opinionated people back then. (Now I'm just mildly intimidated.)

Besides, if we'd been friends in high school, our lives would have been perfect and then we'd have no horrible/funny/sweet experiences to inspire our books. That would have been a crying shame.

See how we're not hugging? That's cuz Kiersten gets my bubble issues. True friends.