Another chapter in my life finally comes to a close. The end of the school year, although fun was pretty anti-climatic. AP tests turned out not to be that bad, and although there were quite a few senior projects, they were not as much of a drag as I expected and many were pretty much automatic As. Track season came to a pretty good close. Although I did not come anywhere near the coveted five minute mile, I ran a competitive 5:08 mile in the last regular meet of the year, finishing behind the first LS runner: a feat I never thought I would do. I guess LS is not the powerhouse they used to be in track, since I almost caught the LS runner but he out sprinted me in the end. Coach recognized my effort as I was awarded the Hal Barnett unsung hero award at the end of the year. Track, thanks for the good memories.

As I said before, the last week of school was pretty busy, but not stressful. My one regret is that I did not have more time to enjoy it. Even on the night before the last day of school I had to type up a physics project, making me miss all the action with the police at Justin Lee's party, but I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing. That night I slept over Dave Mauer's, and I use the term "slept over", loosely since I did not actually sleep that night but pulled an all-nighter, the second I have ever done in my lie and the only voluntary one. Unfortunately no one else wanted to pull an all-nighter, so I was forced to walk around town looking for stuff to do from 1:00 AM to 4:30 AM. Walking around in the middle of the night by myself, although dangerous and extremely stupid is actually a very fun thing to do. It may sound boring at first but there is something soothing about the darkness and quiet of the night, since there are no distractions and you can get lost in your own thoughts. That and you can get lost literally as I did since the street signs were next to impossible to read and I am not that familiar with Southeast Wayland. Also I was half asleep so sometimes I would totally forget where I was for a while, then suddenly realize I was miles from where I thought I was. For some reason I got a big kick out of this. Anyway that night I checked out the usual hotspots, the high school, the sand pits and New England sand and gravel. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately nothing was going on there and I am told that the police had arrived that an hour earlier to tell everyone to go home.

The only excitement of that night occurred at the high school. I walked to the high school by slipping behind the pool and walking near the woods so I would not be spotted. Although I wore a dark coat, I had very light colored pants, so I knew I would be caught in any search light. I came up on the back side of the commons and was contemplating climbing the Fine Arts building and perhaps sleeping there, when I saw the reflection of a police truck. I immediately abandoned this plan, back tracked and then ran up senior hill and behind a tree. I pulled my coat over my pants and waited here for about ten minutes since I knew in this position I couldn't be spotted. Then I heard and saw about eight people running across the campus to the football field. I waited a little while then followed them going along the backside of the ME building. They turn out to be a bunch of crew kids from a party across the street, and they were very drunk and very angry. One of them said, "Let's destroy shit!" and they start to pound away at the field goal in vain. Although the situation was quite comical, I started to get afraid I might get caught up in it and thought about leaving. The gang soon gave up on the field goal and started to leave, and walked out of my field of view. It is silent for about a minute. Then out of no where a police cruiser with its lights off, drove right in front of me about twenty feet away. Although I had my legs tucked under my black jacket, I was sitting under a light, and since I did not expect anything to come from that side, I was not hiding that well. None the less the police cruiser drove right by without stopping, either because the cop was blind or because he did not want to go through the trouble of stopping and he figured driving by would scare me off. If this was the case he was right, and I sprinted back to the trees. All was silent or about five minutes, and then there was a commotion of yelling, horns honking, and cars driving off. I then left the campus and all the excitement for the night. The only other thing worth nothing is it started to rain around 4:00 AM and since I got terribly lost I had to walk around in it for half an hour before getting back to Mauer's.

Since I pulled an all-nighter, the last day of school was a bit of a drag. Running down the hill was a lot fun and I enjoyed vaulting both of the fences but by the end of the day I was dead and slept though all of English class. Then I had to bike back to Mauer's house in a delirious state. Luckily the rain let up for a bit so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Unfortunately my bike pump fell off and got run over by a school bus, and since I was half asleep I got horribly lost and ended up biking around in circles for a while. Driving home after that was not safe, but I guess I survived, and collapsed on my bed.

The next week was pretty fun but it would be boring if I talked about all of it. Although e-board was incompetent as ever we still orchestrated the senior cruise, class night and six flag without a hitch. Even though I got bored on the cruse and fell asleep, class night was pretty fun, and I even managed to make few appearances on the dance floor, although my dancing hasn't improved any from senior show. I also managed to talk to quite a few people that I normally don't, partially by offering rides to many people I don't know that well. Jonathan jokes that I was a "soccer mom", but I guess its fun to be a soccer mom now and then. My only regret is that I am still to insecure to ask any girls to dance during the slow dances. I guess this puts my social skills at par with a six grader, but you can't have everything in life, and my strengths lie elsewhere.

Six Flags was a good time, and I even managed to go on a few roller coasters without throwing up. The bus ride was a bit long but the good thing is I passed around my yearbook and got virtually everyone on the bus to sign it. I am now up to forty signatures and climbing. Talking to people I don't know well is something I need to became comfortable with since this summer I am compiling a directory of everyone's, or at least as many as I can, college and mailing information so people can stay in touch. It will be a lot of work but I believe it will pay off in the end. I've gotten quite a bit of support from my classmates on the idea and hopefully they will be able to help me out with this. Thanks in advance to you all.

Although the weather for graduation itself sucked, the speeches were quite funny. It will be interesting to see what the Town Crier has to say about the speeches, since they seemed to be designed more for humor than actual message. I guess this is a good thing sine no one is actually going to take the advice of any speaker anyway. Before gradating I was able to tie up a few loose ends by ending the assassins game. I awarded one hundred dollars to Ben Ralen for having the most kills and the remaining eighty-four dollars were donated to the Mark Forti Leukemia fund. Some people complained that Ben Ralen did not deserve the money since he killed most of his people after everyone stopped playing, but I have to give him credit for being his own man and not giving up just because everyone else did. I still consider assassin a success and it gave me experience managing an activity, albeit a controversial one.

I guess the only thing left to mention is senior pranks. Originally I wanted to do something funny and non destructive like all the famous MIT pranks, but I could not come up with any good ideas and was too lazy to organize anything. The best I could come up with is to fly Soviet flags above the American flags, but this is not that funny and few people would even notice. Also with Ronald Reagan having just died, this would not be received to well. Because of this, basically I am not involved with any prank. Some of the pranks other people are doing are pretty funny; others are destructive and downright stupid. In fact yesterday, ten people in my grade were arrested for vandalizing the school and it was on the local news. Since this happens every year I'm not sure why it got so much media coverage, possibly since this was the first time people got caught. The vandalism actually wasn't that bad and the media exaggerated the story, but I don't necessarily feel sorry for the people involved since vandalizing your own school is down right stupid. I bet some of the people arrested didn't actually do anything but were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but they could have had enough sense to get out of there. Then again a similar thing could have happened to me a week earlier.

Well that ends my story. This summer is basically ten straight weeks of work but I guess I'll have lots of time on the weekends. For all those 2004er out there, congratulations and good luck in the future. If you want to help out on the directory, drop me a note, we'll probably begin work in August. Until then, goodbye, hopefully I'll see many of you around his summer.