Cliches

On October 16th 2005, I boarded the plane in Montreal, said an emotional goodbye to Fred and his mom and made my way through the gate. I was leaving for Calgary, then onto Korea, but it still didn't feel real. It still hadn't clicked that I would spend the next twelve months in a country where I knew nothing of the culture or the language. And I would be doing it alone.

My stop in Calgary felt the same as always- Andrea and my mom met me at the airport and we went for lunch. Over the next few days I tried to squeeze in as many people as I cared to see. Diana and Jared were getting married, so I was sure to see all the old IMAX crowd there. I saw Andrea, Carrie and Clay, but as always not enough of them to last me the year before we would meet again. I spent alot of time with my mom this trip, and it was good. As always, I saw Rob without intending to, although this time I had an easy out as I was driving down 17th Ave or 'The Red Mile', at the time.

I realized it had been years since I stopped by Bishop Carroll (my high school) to say hi to my old drama teacher, Mr Doyle. I had seen him at Andrea's wedding briefly, but that whole day seemed so unreal to me and we barely spoke. So the day before I left Calgary, I made the trek out to my old school and swung the car into 'visitor parking'. I laughed as I tried to head in the side door by the drama room and found it locked- which it never was in my days there. I guess this was to prevent students from easily sneaking back into the school after they'd spent the day at the mall, or ironically hanging out at the college across the street. I stepped through the front door, and held back laughter as I realized every student in the halls were wearing ID tags with their name and Teacher Advisor. They had tried that with us, and failed. I was on my way to the drama room- fully intent on playing stupid if asked why I didn't have a visitor's pass, when I saw Mr Doyle in the front office. His face broke into an odd toothy smile when he saw me- an unexpected visit from a student he knew lived far away.

We finally made it down to his office in the drama room and caught up. He had heard of Tyler's passing, I had heard his wife had quit her job and was doing really well teaching art independantly. Mrs Doyle was the first person to break through to me about my tomboy routine. All through high school, I wore baggy clothes and scoffed at anything girly. Mrs Doyle walked in on a costume fitting when I was in grade twelve and she was shocked. Not only was I in a dress, but, she told me, had a body I should be showing off and not hiding under piles of clothes. Everything in Mr Doyle's office was exactly as it had been seven years before, except there was now a computer on his desk that I'm sure was in truth no more than a paper weight. I was the only one I knew who got hand written report cards in high school. As it always had been, the door to his office was open and there were students wandering in and out of the room. Two girls came in crying, telling him that they had to drop drama because they just didn't have time. He shot me a look and gave them the same lecture I had heard him give a hundred times when I was a student. "Do you love it? Why did you register for it? Why are you dropping it? Who told you that you had to? No, I won't let you drop it for those reasons. I can help you make it work." The two girls left and another student entered, tentatively. She wanted an extension on a paper that was due. As check- out time came and Mr Doyle distributed the familiar 'green slips' (how you got your marks at this strange school), I felt fifteen years old again. We wished each other luck, promised to stay in touch, and he ran off to deal with two students who had gotten so drunk at school that they were sick all over the bathroom. High school kids are all the same. Everything about high school is so cliches, especially those who try so hard to live outside the cliches. You're so self-centered and so dramatic at that age that it can't be any other way. Nobody can understand you. Your love, your pain, your frustration, your stress- everything is yours and no one else's.

Bishop Carroll was a weird school. Without regular classes and the trusting system that allowed you to finish your work when you felt like it, we were short on cliques. If you asked me who the popular kids were, I couldn't have been sure. The student council was run entirely by Drama students, but I definitely wouldn't say any of us were popular. At least not in the way it means to be popular at other schools. We had stoners, but in reality that was most of the school population. We had jocks, but they weren't labelled that way, they just were.

In the wake of this shooting at Dawson College, the subject of cliches come to mind. It's a familiar theme. The misfit takes revenge. We can all somewhat understand the anger and frustration that must be felt by kids that become the butt of all jokes, that are constantly picked on and excluded in school. Or at least I hope we can. Maybe I had it easy but somehow the pieces of this puzzle just don't fit to me.

I remember I was sitting at the Second Cup in Kensington (NW Calgary) with Stuart when we heard on the radio about the Columbine shooting. Over the next days, weeks, months, even years, information slowly leaked out. Movies were produced based on the incident- Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine tried to make sense of it. Teen angst, to the extreme. I remember in high school feeling so frustrated at points that it was impossible to see an end in sight. I remember feeling no one understood me. I remember being angry that I felt I had to put in my time at Bishop Carroll before I could move on to bigger and better things. I remember thinking high school was holding me back from doing all I wanted to do. I had friends though and I had passion- places to lose myself. I spent so much time in the theatre it shouldn't have been possible for me to graduate. I played soccer and basketball and I swam. Without these outlets, I may just have lost my mind. They kept me balanced in some ways. Sports gave me a place to work out my frustrations and gave me a rest from my constant stream of sad and angry thoughts. I was the cliche of the girl who tried too hard to do it all, who kept herself too busy so she never had to stop and think. Part of me could understand how people could snap under all the pressure of high school- without realizing that they are pressuring themselves, no one else particularly cares.

Grade twelve was a miserable year for me- I'd had enough. Everything suddenly felt so juvenile and I was ready to move on. It seemed so was everybody else. As the school year came to an end, I found myself thankful that I wasn't going straight to University the following year. I needed to break away from my high school group. The first thing you realize once you're out of high school is how much time you spent making a big deal about nothing. And you see yourself as an adult. Or most people do. You realize that the boxes that people put themselves in to make sense of themselves are nothing but limiting. You realize the grass is always greener. When Clay told me that his ex-girlfriend had been jealous when he and I became friends, I didn't understand. She always wanted to be part of the popular crowd, he had explained. I don't think I'd ever laughed so hard. I couldn't get over the fact that someone looked at the group of people I hung out with and were intimidated by us. Yearned to be friends with us. For god sakes, the guys in the group camped out for Star Wars tickets later that summer. There's nothing dorkier than that. Well, maybe Dungeons and Dragons.

The truly unfortunate thing about these high school cliches is how terribly normal everybody is. As hard as you might try to be different, there are always other people trying to be different in the same way. As I read the online updates from the Dawson shooting, my first assumption was that the young man must have been a student there. Even at that, the environment at Dawson is so drastically different from high school, it just didn't make sense. It's a college- cliques don't happen in college. School yard fights mostly end at snarky comments by that age. The pressures that one experiences in college have gone far beyond Mary talking behind your back. People are too frantic about getting work done to bother with such nonsense, not to mention that in a school of 10 000 people, no one stands out. Put all these factors together and then throw in the fact that Montreal is probably one of, if not the most diverse city in Canada. And it's difficult to be a misfit in a city that is so diverse, because everyone fits.

When the facts finally started coming out, I began to feel sick. At twenty-five years old and a resident of a burough of Laval, it seemed the shooter had no relationship whatsoever to the school. He lived with his parents. I assume it was their Sunfire that he hopped into to make the hour long drive to the school that day. A goth kid with a mohawk, the papers tooted. Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson blamed again. As I caught sight of the pictures on the website, the first thing I noticed was the complete absence of a mohawk. Maybe he stylized his hair differently for his day at Dawson. He may have been dressed head to toe in black, but he was no more goth than I am. A black polo shirt does not a goth make. The quotes off the web and the pictures with the guns revealed pieces of his identity. Far from being crazy, he in fact seemed normal to the extreme. Perhaps disgruntled more by the fact that he was still cast in the role that he created for himself in high school than by anything else. It's a lonely life if you refuse to grow from the identity you made for yourself at fifteen. Based strictly on the exerts I've caught from the paper, and knowing nothing about him as a person except for his final dramatic goodbye, it seems to me that's all he was after. A dramatic goodbye. Someone who was just so painfully normal and couldn't find any other way to set himself apart. He never attended Dawson college- didn't even live in Montreal. He didn't have a message like the Columbine shooters, or Mark Lepine from the infamous Polytechnic school shooting. He was just a painfully normal kid with no outlet for his angst.