In four years of high school I’ve done a lot. I’ve watched nearly 800 hours of Seinfelds, drank 13,904 ounces of nonfat vanilla lattes and spent $270 on dinners at the Mixx. The numbers in high school add up. Hours run out and activities I wish I tried go untouched. Minor everyday activities snowball into embarrassingly large numbers of time and money over four years. 4,320 texts. $900 in movie tickets. 72 lost/stolen/ “borrowed” mechanical pencils. 29 assigned reading books. 24 newspaper articles. 12 ounces of Purell. 11 concert ticket stubs collected. 8 math notebook spirals. 6 Princeton Review standardized test taking strategy books. And only 5 days left to accomplish the following checklist everyone at Shawnee Mission Wonderful tries to complete before graduation:

Learn how to twirl a pen around my hand.

I have tried to gracefully spin a writing utensil around the outside of my hand for four years. 1,500 hours. Four years, and I am not even close: the second the pencil touches my knuckles, all momentum is lost and it thumps back to the desktop.
Go on some exotic trip (this does not count if your parents come along):
Here at SME people go on these trips for three reasons: you are perceived as independent, you seem brave, and you can gain the reputation for being rebellious, all in one month’s time. The way you prove this new personality is by coming back with an enlightened attitude. This is rather broad but easy to point out from the wide range of seemingly trivial new habits that you quickly spot in a friend freshly returned from an international trip. They include suddenly being an expert on espresso or foreign beers, before every meal saying how ridiculously huge all portions in America are, plastic Perrier bottles replacing Quicktrip’s slushies in car cup holders, taking “siestas” during the hottest part of the day, or suddenly being opposed to wearing shorts or tennis shoes in public.

Be on a varsity sports team:

I never took track very seriously. I did it because my friends were there and it was a good excuse to go to TCBY at 5:00—we just ran three miles, we deserved some ice cream. I ran it for three years, never trying to be on varsity, just striving to not be the last person to finish the sprints. What I’ve just now realized is that I ran 540 miles. Maybe I should have tried to run a little faster if I’d known I’d be running the distance of Kansas City to Chicago anyway.

Get a 100% on Mr. Fast’s vocab tests.

This was inevitably an impossible task because I gave up studying for the review section around February. This section requires synonyms of any word from the whole year’s 360 word long list to be memorized and on the tip of my tongue so I can define a word I hadn’t studied in seven weeks. 1080 synonyms to master. Week after week it lowered my test grade at least 10%, making my goal unattainable.

Start writing a paper at 10:00 PM the night before it’s due:

Up until second semester senior year I was one of those annoying students who rarely procrastinated. I became aware that there was always that one kid in the class who could write a paper the night before it was due and get a better grade than me. Those lucky enough to be born with the procrastinating gene have a chance to be that kid! It is too late for me. 10 chances to procrastinate on a paper and the best I did was to write my senior paper’s rough draft the night before it was due. I never got the chance to answer the question: “Whoa you got a 95% on that? Didn’t you just start it last night at like 11:30?”

Underclassmen- start checking them off.

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