Currently Playing Straylight Run By Straylight Run see related

- "Existentialism on Prom Night"

http://newsuburb.tripod.com/picofweek/

Check out this "week's" picture. The other day I was looking at the little sheet our lovely yearbook staff hands out to people who want to buy an ad and I noticed that the school's address read "Silver Springs, Maryland." As Mr. Town Pride himself, I was perhaps a little disturbed to find the extra 'S' tacked onto the address when, after all, there was only one Silver Spring. At least in Maryland. I asked one of our lovely yearbook staff members about it and she was like "really, Daniel, it doesn't matter." I'm sorry, but have you read our school's yearbook? Spelling errors everywhere! Awkward grammar! Poor layouts! (There was even a girl a couple of years ago whose yearbook picture had a giant drawn-on mustache, and nobody caught it before it went to print.) I do not shell out $80 a year to feed my hunger for nostalgia with misspelled words! But, then again, they can't spell the name of our town - who can expect them to spell much more difficult words like "the"?

But let me stop ranting. It is the week before Valentine's Day, and watching the people crowding around the little Love Muffin sales table at lunch I am reminded of past loves. I remember the two days I spent with Melissa over last summer, and although I know she supposedly has a boyfriend . . . I won't get into it. The time back in June when Ashleigh Kumper asked me out, and I gleefully said yes, wondering what that coulda led to. And, two years ago, my big "sophomore fling." (Remember, Laura?)

Talking to most of my friends I've realized that there comes a time in the spring of our sophomore year - and sophomore year alone - of high school when the young lovebird hooks up with somebody and has their first real 'relationship.' I remember those days: just about everyone had a boyfriend or girlfriend that spring, and throughout the halls you could hear the smacking of underclassmen lips and the grunting of young, horny sophomore boys as they felt up their impressionable (but every bit as horny) sophomore girlfriends. I honestly can't remember feeling as happy as I did when I met Laura (and I hope you don't mind me mentioning this two years later, like I'm some creepy guy who all he can think about is lost love). But, of course, all things come and go, and by the end of tenth grade, just about everyone who had gotten together had broken up. Sometimes it was quiet, with no hard feelings and they could still be friends. Yet other times it could be difficult and messy, with ill will remaining to this day.

Ah, those times. I shall never forget them, that spring of love, that spring of 2003. Perhaps one day I'll experience something as exciting, as beautiful, as what I call the "sophomore fling."