Welcome to a series of stories that basically make up my autobiography. It’s not entirely thorough, but I’ll do the best I can with the memories locked away inside my head. Could be therapeutic for me. Could be humorous for you. Either way, enjoy…

Previously on Life Story… I spent most of my senior English class playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon at the back of the classroom instead of paying attention. Still got an A.

One of those kind of awesome things about the senior year of high school was the opportunity to take psychology and sociology as electives. These classes did not inspire me to pick up that second major of Behavior Science in college. That inspiration wouldn’t come until much later, after I already had a first major in college. No, these classes were just a fun kind of thing that turned out to be easy A’s.

Each semester was taught by Mrs. Russell, who also taught some of the senior government classes. I didn’t have her for government, but I heard she was harder in that class than she was with her psych students. In fact, I think she may have been too easy on the psych students.

‘Cause mostly we watched movies. Well, we took notes, too. But they weren’t the kind of notes that you had to think about when you wrote them down. She threw a transparency film on the overhead projector (remember those?) and we just copied it verbatim. I have no memory of the tests in that class, but I’m pretty sure they came straight from the notes. We had no textbook.

So, yeah, mostly we watched movies. More so in the second semester when we entered into sociology. She showed us a lot of the 80’s Brat Pack movies. I guess they’re great examples of how people interact with one another. We may have actually watched The Breakfast Club twice.

We had an activity during psychology that I remember clearly. Mostly, I remember it because I was seated next to Tara, who could do a spot on impression of Mrs. Russell. The activity involved everyone sitting in a circle with eyes closed. Mrs. Russell passed out a lemon to each person. With our eyes closed, we were supposed to feel the lemon in our hands and were even encouraged to smell it. Then we had to “take the lemon and pass it to the right.” That quote sounds funnier in my head because I’m still hearing Mrs. Russell’s thick East Tennessee accent. And Tara’s mocking version of it. I think the object of her little experiment was to see if we could tell subtle differences in different lemons without the use of our vision.

As you can tell, I learned a lot in that class. They’re lessons I obviously carry with me to this day.