2012 Was a Vibe
Reminiscing about high school and the origins of personality
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Call it nostalgia, aging, or the result of crisp autumn weather, but I’ve been thinking about high school. It’s not that I peaked in those years (well, who’s to judge, really), but there’s this feeling that somewhere in the fragments of good vibes, cliche experiences, and general self-consciousness of it all lay the roots of my personality and passions that I still carry today. I hope you’ll allow a trip down memory lane to 2011-2013 Utah.
The fact that my high school experience happened in Utah made it unique, in a few ways. There was an innocence about the whole thing that probably wasn’t replicated anywhere except small Mountain West towns. We were all Latter-day Saints, so drugs, alcohol, partying, sex, and other stereotypical vices weren’t in the picture, meaning we had to find our fun in more juvenile or otherwise wholesome pursuits.
Utah lagged behind the wider cultural zeitgeist. Take, for example, skinny jeans. I can recall exactly when these came into style in 2011. My older brother and his friends had just graduated, taking with them the horrible baggy, straight-leg pants, polos, and zip-up hoodies. When school came back in session a few weeks later for the start of my junior year, everyone showed up in skinny jeans and t-shirts.
I thought, at the time, that we were at the cutting edge of fashion, and that we were making a style unique to ourselves. We were young, after all. Who could do it better? However, in consulting Google Trends (a recurring gut-check throughout this article), its apparent we were only riding a wave that had crested years before on either coast.
What other trends were only beginning to reach us? Blogging, for one. After its explosion a few years earlier on the East Coast it reached its climax in the early 2010s in Utah. While never a major pastime, at least a dozen of my friends had blogs in high school, and none of us found this odd. We all wrote earnest, thinly-veiled and poorly edited notes about our crushes. I know I had to be one of the worst offenders, recalling even now a really desperate one about my forbidden feelings for the only Catholic girl at our school, and another about smooching my then-girlfriend on my parent’s porch swing.
It’s horrifying to think about those blogs now, and thankfully I had the foresight to expunge them from the internet entirely after I got home from New Zealand. Most embarrassing of all was when my father admitted he had found my blog and enjoyed reading it. Bury me in a hole.
Yet we blogged and wore skinny jeans because we were hipsters, or at least we thought we were. A true hipster tends to reject the mainstream, but by the time it rolled around to us, hipster had become its own aesthetic, different enough to not be the norm around school, but a large enough pool to swim in without being unique.
There was always this sense of trying to stand out, even though the risks we took were calculated mimicry. My best friend Logan and I independently bought pea coats on what must have been the same weekend and showed up to school with them on the same day. We wore some of the ugliest shirts you’ve seen from the Deseret Industries, the local Latter-day Saint-run thrift store in town because Macklemore made a song about it. My friends hosted outdoor dinner parties with Pinterest-perfect aesthetics - drinking out of mason jars beneath dangling bulb lights with indie rock playing in the background.
Speaking of music, we were spoiled. Indie and alt-rock began to be readily available on the radio. I can’t say how many of my friends listened to the radio, but on account of the Farnsworth children getting to drive an old forest green Ford Ranger, I listened to the radio a lot, particularly 101.9 The End and X96, home of Radio from Hell in the Morning. Both started to play Mumford and Sons, and “The Cave” pricked our ears like the piper’s pipe.
When the band came to play the Great Saltair, Logan and I showed up four hours early to wait at the doors. My radio diet would pay off when who should walk down the row of concert-goers but Molly Norman (get it, like Molly Mormon?), one of the station hosts on 101.9. As she walked by, she asked, “Does anyone know my name?” “Molly Normon!” I shouted. “Grab a friend, you’re going to the sound check!”
Mumford and Sons were one of many bands that launched from obscurity to cultural darling. This was the era of big mainstream bands in the making, like Vampire Weekend and Imagine Dragons (back when they used to be good), but also smaller groups yet staple groups, like Fun., Florence + the Machine, Grouplove, MGMT, Foster the People, and of course, one-hit-wonders like Gotye.
We fancied ourselves rock stars in the making, starting years before noodling around in Logan’s basement before making it to the big leagues playing cover songs at the end-of-year battle of the bands, Capt. Lens BBQ Pit (where you kept all the tips plus 10% of sales), and even a corporate Christmas Party for Costa Vida.
And of course, there were the typical high school rituals, that while not unique to the time or the place, made for excellent memories. The football and basketball games and the post-game burger and ice cream at JCW’s; the school dances that somehow required elaborate ways of asking, long dates, and smelly gyms; the immature romances, flings, breakups, betrayals, Eskimo brothers, always texting, always making up scenarios and potentialities in your head; the bus rides with the soccer team and cuddling up with the JV guys to stay warm while we watched Varsity play in those freezing early-March matches; the friendships developed with teachers who were just being nice but whose attention and approval you craved; the summers when you kind of worked, but mostly played ping-pong, pickup-basketball, or watched Psyche re-runs.
Remembering the good old times need not be perceived as wishing you had those times back. I don’t miss the insecurity, the constant fear of judgment. I don’t miss Coach Lowe screaming at us that we were playing like a bunch of 7th-grade girls or that distinct feeling like I was going to puke every February morning at pre-season conditioning sessions. I sure don’t miss mandatory math and science classes.
I like to think I’ve grown since high school. Still, in the fragmented memories of those rose-colored years, the self in the making comes through in perfect clarity. How much of my personality and passions uncovered in high school are with me now? A love for books, big ideas, blogging, alt-rock, wanting to be a little different yet always playing it a bit safe. I’m that same kid. Wasn’t 2012 a vibe?
5 Photos from the Last Month
Wow what a post. Brings it all back! Thanks for this feel-good-er on a very adult Tuesday morning!