Head Tale

Yesterday, the Indian Head Broncs football team won the Provincial Football Championship.  I played for the team in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s.  The program died out a few years later but was resurrected about three years ago (and has already had more success than any of the years I played!) 😉

Then tonight, I had one of my best friends from high school over for supper.  She’s now in Vancouver but was back for the weekend.

These two high school-related events made me think of a few different things…

• Every single kid who won that Provincial title yesterday wasn’t even born when I played for the Broncs.  In fact, many of them are the kids of people I went to school with.  I am old.
• I haven’t researched this but my instinct is that most people form their lifelong personalities and traits by the time they’re five or six. So if you’re nice to other kids in kindergarten, you’ll probably be nice to other people when you’re 30.  If you’re a selfish jerk when you’re a kid, you’ll probably be like when you’re 30 (and 40 and 50 and so on.)
• That last point is also why I’m so impressed with Pace so far.  In Kindergarten, they had a visit from a policeman.  At the end of his presentation, the teacher had to pick one kid who got to be handcuffed and out of the whole class, she picked Pace because he was the “best listener in class”.  Then, last week, Dr. Hanna had a Remembrance Day assembly and again, Pace was chosen by the teacher to be one of two kids in his class to carry in a wreath on behalf of the grade ones because he was a “model citizen” in the classroom.
• Our personalities might be set young but I think the most *formative* experiences of our lives happen when we’re teenagers – we make our best lifetime friendships; movies and music and books are more impactful; experiences resonate more deeply.
• Those are the kind of things that come to mind when I think of playing with the Broncs, hanging out with my high school friends and really anything else that happened back then.  Those were some of the most enjoyable times of my life before “real world” intruded – mortgages, jobs, four weeks of holidays per year instead of entire summers off, etc.
• Having turned 40 this year, I’m pretty happy with my life so far.  But there are times I step back and think “how did that happen?”  I never really had a master plan and a lot of it feels like dumb luck – how I fell into book publishing after finishing my undergrad degree, how I ended up meeting Shea, how I found work in Alberta (literally the person who sent me the job with the Writers Guild of Alberta thought it was an Edmonton-based job but that it would be something I’d consider moving for.  Turned out it was in Calgary after all!)  How I went back to library school at what felt like a really good time and even how my latest job change at RPL also feels like it’s happened at a great point in my life.  (Hmmm, I bet that five year old Jason Hammond was a pretty optimistic, glass half-full kind of kid now that I think about it!) 😉
• As always happens when you see a friend after a long time has passed, we compared notes on various people we have in common – who’s married, who’s divorced, who turned out better than we expected, who turned out worse. One person who I disliked for (what I felt was) her fakeness and attempts to be “alternative” (there’s a 90’s word for you!) is apparently someone I’d now have a lot in common with.  Another person we both weren’t super friendly with is, at least based on her Facebook updates, someone who we’d love to hang out with and get to know better now.  Funny how the world turns, eh?
• We compared notes on books and reading and all agreed that our reading of full-length books has dropped due to the impact of our link-driven “read this cool article” sharing culture and that this is a shame.
• Also compare notes on, uhm, “grey market” downloading and it’s interesting to think how common this truly is among people of our generation.  Ironically, my $10/month subscription to Rdio.com has all but stopped my downloading of torrented music and I wish other cultural industries (movies, books) would find a similar model (NetFlix is close for movies but the selection is terrible compared to all big name releases coming up on Rdio every Tuesday; Oyster or Scribd may or may not turn out to be the solution for e-books.)