Wake me up when highschool ends.

I remember as a child listening to a song by some Indonesian singer entitled Kisah Kasih di Sekolah (A Love Story at School). It was about how beautiful highschool life is, where teenagers can experience such wonderful moments filled with love and joy and feel the luminous splendors of getting through puberty with carefree, happy-go-lucky steps. I, being a 6th grader back then, really wanted to just skip a few years forward and excite myself in the sparkling world of highschool. Now, I wish I knew better.

I gotta say, it’s not exactly what you would call fun and games. In fact, it’s far from fun and games. It’s all about survival and how far you can manage to survive. Even worse, the obstacles that you have to overcome are unpredictable, sometimes they’re right there before your eyes and other times you have to go beyond man’s wits and speculation to make it all crystal clear and solvable. Some of them are:

- The definition of success: The smarter you are at school, the more successful you will be.
- The peer pressure dilemma: Following your friends in order to fit in vs. ignoring all the peer pressures around in order to find your utmost true self.
- The uncertainty of the future: It is believed that highschool opens the door to your future. The question is, which door you will choose? Once you go in, it’s gonna be hard to go back.
- Highschool puberty: Puberty is annoying enough as it is, that mixing it with our highschool life is simply obnoxious. How are we supposed to grow up when pressures and more pressures just keep coming to weigh us down? (Problems lead us to maturity; pressures lead us to severe insanity)
- The power of memory: Highschool literally translates to youth. Once you’re in your 50s, obviously you wouldn’t want to look back to find that your youthful highschool life was a vague blur and most of your friends and teachers had already forgotten you anyway. Teenagers want to make the best out of their youth, meaning that there’s an invisible demand to make our highschool moments unforgettable, whichever way possible.

There is one key pass up highschool in triumph: Endurance. Remain calm, do what you ought to do, do what needs to be done, have fun, fly with your eyes half-closed, use friends to remain sane, don’t let peer pressures or any other pressures get to you, gossip or be gossip-ed about like you don’t give a damn, love those who love you, love those who hate you, study well AND lick your teachers ass to get good grades (at least good enough to help you realize your dreams), don’t complain too much, don’t try too hard to be happy, and all will be easy-breezy fine. Just get it over with. Of course, this means that you will miss approximately three years of your life being a completely silent, lifeless, immobile stone.

But then again, life begins when highschool ends. And that’s the sort of principle I’m hanging on to right this moment. I’m asleep, and it is on June 2010 that I may finally wake up.

Hopefully :)