While high school is four long years of hard work and pulling your hair out, homecoming week is a nice break. It allows you to dress up like a fool with your friends for five days while also supporting your school and terrible football team. Although homecoming week seems like a lot of fun and games, it is also full of struggles. These struggles include:
1. Looking weird on your way to school.
Some spirit days require you to wear some really weird clothes (decades day, costume day, meme day), so you might get a couple stares on your way from your house to the school. But who cares, right?
2. Tie-dye on EVERYTHING.
A main part of spirit week is making your own shirts to show everyone just how much school spirit you actually have, but tie-dying shirts is hard work and no matter how many pairs of gloves you wear or how careful you are, you still end up getting it on everything.
3. Face paint!
Most schools have some kind of face paint tradition-- paw prints, letters, football numbers. And every morning there's a group of girls in the bathroom painting each other's faces.
4. Finding time to go to all the events and doing your work.
Homecoming week is full of activities, most of which are after school activities during the week. So, since most homecomings fall around the same time as SATs and college application deadlines, most seniors are fighting the clock to go have fun AND still get all their work done on time.
5. Telling every one of your friends that you'll vote for them (teehee!)
Having multiple friends running for homecoming court at the same time is practically torture. And you feel so bad for telling all of them that you'll vote for them that you end up just not voting.
6. The Instagram pictures.
We get it. You wore your PJ's to school. So did half of the other school. We do not need to see 10 different pictures of you in your sweatpants. Thank you.
7. Asking people to the dance!
When you see a boy with a nervous expression and a poster board, you know what's about to happen. Everyone knows what's about to happen.
8. The game!!!!
Most schools have either the best football team (or the worst), but either way, if you do go to the game, you better be dressed in head-to-toe colors and ready to chant along with the cheerleaders every time.
9. Finding a dress.
I swear, every person in charge of making homecoming dress codes has never gone shopping for a homecoming dress in 2017. There are no dresses that go to my knee that aren't full-length. There are no dresses with sleeves. Please let me dance in the gym with my friends.
10. Getting ready for the dance.
2 hours in your bathroom listening to pop music and burning your ear with the curling iron is all worth it in the end.
11. Getting picked up for the dance <3
An entire interview is conducted on the boy picking you up, even if you have been dating for months, and your dad always makes sure you are home by "11 sharp!" This is often followed by your mom saying "one more" twenty times before you're able to wiggle your way out of the front door.
12. The dance!!!
After a quick pit stop at McDonald's, you finally make it to the school. Every girl has a small panic attack thinking that their dress somehow violates dress code and they won't be let in. But, once you're in, it's all fun and dancing and yelling over the loud rap music.
So, after a week of running around and chanting some questionable things, you can finally take a break. And for a while, this whole week may seem sort of pointless, you are then hit by the realization that these are the memories you are going to look back on when you're 80 and be happy that you participated.
Also--to anyone who thinks they're too cool to participate--you're not, you're just being a party pooper. #sorrynotsorry #happyhomecoming!