Treacherous Desire
I wanted to yell YOU GOT POOOOONED
But, uh, school rivalry.
And their tennis player boys were looking particularily burly.
It amused me to say the least.
Their coach LOL'd. Ah, school rivalry. That glorious hive mentality, spearheaded by people who's exuberance trespasses on the realm of
obscenity.
I went to Timberline High School, so naturally, our mascot was the proud and majestic timber wolf. The only other high school in town was Carihi, which chose the somewhat less majestic Tyee Salmon as its patron animal. Naturally, the implication was that the cunning and noble wolf was superior to the dull witted fish. And, of course, they were right. I'd have loved to see a Carihi pep rally. What traits does a fish possess to be rallied around? It's deliciousness? It's difficulty to properly catch? Perhaps it shall throw itself in our path, and we shall slip on it as it dies of asphyxiation, but I digress.
Our pep rallies almost always consisted of the same things. We were first divided by our graduation year, something that in my last years I came to appreciate, as the 'Grade 12's were allowed to leave first. We were then forced to scream our chant (whatever it was) at the top of our lungs in unison, thus ensuring that the remainder of our day would be spent
deaf.
There were games and activities that usually had nothing to do with the Timberline/Carihi rivalry whatsoever. I recall only participating in two.
The first was during my first high school pep rally; the one they have at the beginning of the school year. I joined up with a small group from my bench, and we were forced to reach into a paper bag and eat whatever we pulled out. I pulled out a quarter of a white onion, which I could not finish.
Every revoltingly smelly breath that escaped me that day carried with it what remained of my 'school spirit', and from that day forward viewed all pep rallies with bitter contempt.
The second one I participated in was in my last year, which involved people throwing Goldfish into other peoples mouths. I only participated because of my crippling hunger. Sadly, I was not chosen to receive the Goldfish, thus deepening my hatred for pep rallies.
In addition to these exercises in sadism, there was the standard parade of our sports teams; the fine young men and women representing our school. This was the only enjoyable aspect because it almost always featured the girls volleyball team doing some sort of dance off to the latest hip-popular song.
And, lastly, there was the media project. For three years, the same thing happened in every video. Someone takes a camera and a dead fish, and finds creative ways to maul it on camera. Creativity, however, is limited to throwing it and stepping on it before ultimately throwing it in the nearest trash can.
Every single year. Let me put this into some sort of perspective.
My media group made its name around campus by attempting to recreate video games with whatever we had access to. We had some successes; a stop motion Mario Kart with chairs, an Unreal Tournament using tripods as weapons, and a rather successful Hitman video featuring dental floss and a few sticks. Our most hilariously bad
failure was a Pacman video. The Pacman was not yellow. The pills (source: box of tiny mints) were laid on the ground and manually picked up by our non-yellow Pacman. The ghost was simply a man in a white bed sheet (sans eyeholes), and instead of being disintegrated by Pacman after eating the big pill, he was merely chased out of the room after Pacman ate a blue Smartie.
This was our, in our opinion, worst project. And it still beat the sugar coated s**t out 3 two minute videos of people mauling a dead fish.
TL;DR: There are no two words that spawn such feelings of hatred in me than 'school spirit'.
EDIT: Oh dear. I appear to have gone of on a tangent and ignored school rivalries.
Fortunately, I have no real comment on the subject. I was not an active participant on any sports team or club, due the fact that this meant participating in pep rallies. Besides that, the only two sports I was ever any good at was Dodgeball and Badminton.
But, as I can see, they're good for a few lulz. Nicely done, Treach.
Now excuse me. That tirade involved digging up my Big Box of Hate; I must bury it again.
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