Girls On Film Collab #1: Sixteen Candles.

(Yes, it's really late, and there isn't going to be a road trip entry. You already know why. Unless you count last weekend's non-roadtrip as one...)

"I�ll forever be disappointed that high school, darn it, wasn�t all cool themed dances and variety shows and car washes, with everyone all active and involved, like how it was portrayed in these and other YA books!" -Dwanollah

I don't remember much about my sixteenth birthday, but it sure didn't have sixteen candles or boys involved. I was at a state conference in Sacramento and had to compete the next morning, and ended up with brownies and a relighting candle. While wearing an ugly-ass red polyester blazer, white blouse, navy skirt, and pantyhose the entire day because you weren't allowed to wear anything else. Gack. That was about my second most exciting birthday in high school, the first being my eighteenth when I got a flour baby in home ec. Which tells you something, doesn't it?

I was a nerd. A biiiiiig nerd. Suffice it to say, no Sweet Valley High experience. I'm still in shock that I managed to make it to three proms AND with a date, but that's about the highlight of my "popularity" there. But that wasn't when I was sixteen.

When you read these silly teen novels, they make it out that 16 is the end-all, be-all of teen existence. Well, hah, not in my case. Sixteen was just as much of a nothing year as most of the ones that had gone before it. I didn't manage to drive (see the future License To Drive entry for why), I was regarded as a major dog by most of my class, the guy I liked I never saw around campus unless I spied around, the only guy attracted to me was a friend that I didn't want to date and had no clue what to do about, and I was still just as nerdish as I'd been for the previous 15 years. I didn't even get a lavaliere- gee, am I not as cute as the Wakefield twins?

Not impressive, no. Though I did get groped on the ass by my great-aunt, does that count for anything?

No, the big high school year for me was when I turned 18 and asked a guy out for the first time to the prom, then went to his prom a few months later and went out with him off and on for over a year. It was the year I got second in state competition and inadvertently cast my first love spell (the only one that worked). That's about as impressive as I ever got, really. Was still a nerd, was still bored off my butt in school, but at least I had a psuedo-boyfriend to pine over that was away at school.

Yeah, high school wasn't much of an experience for me.

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