As I entered high school in 2012, I was wearing Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts with newly popular skinny jeans and twisting my hair back or “poofing” my hair up with bobby pins/headbands. The lunch conversations were trained on having weird girl/boy parties and using our new docks for our 3rd generation iPhones to play the hottest music such as Climax by Usher or Ayy Ladies by Travis Porter (great songs by the way). There was no way I was thinking about grinding on another boy, simply because during freshman year the only way I could deem that mildly acceptable was when I went to homecoming. Homecoming in itself is a sad story considering my dress looked like there was toilet paper wrapped around it. Short shorts? No way, bermuda shorts were IT. Buckle jeans were totally the way to prove you had style, of which I definitely didn't have, because I stuck to wearing soccer shorts down to my knees. Oh, and the thought of makeup? Blue eyeshadow up to my unwaxed eyebrows was what I thought that meant.
Fast forward four years and obviously trends have drastically changed. Now, my eyebrows are finally waxed, I wear high waisted jeans/shorts and the occasional crop top. I’m a little bit more styled than I was freshman year. However, what I was wearing then was cool at the time, I swear! Looking back, I regret it a little bit and cringe a tad more because that’s what you do. You look back and laugh at the past and move forward.
My brother is three and a half years younger than me, translating to four years younger in school, which means that he is starting high school this upcoming August. There have been several nights this summer that I have picked him up from friends' houses at midnight, which is something I would have never been able to do (thanks mom!!!). It’s not the time of night that concerns me when I’m picking him up though. It’s the outfits of the girls when I pick him up and the conversations taking place in my backseat after we leave.
First to tackle, the outfits. Am I jealous because most of these girls are better looking than I am and I’m four years older? Possibly. But I’m more than shocked at what these girls are wearing as well. However, I can’t blame anyone but myself and the social spectrum for ingraining this into these girls heads via Instagram and Twitter. How am I to blame a little girl for wearing high waisted shorts when I do the same thing? Maybe it shocks me because at their age, the last thing I was thinking about was trying to expose my butt/boobs, but that’s the culture these days. Nicki Minaj literally made a song about big butts (Anaconda). I guess it is something that most parents don’t view to be bad, and I probably wouldn’t in their perspective either. I style my younger brother to look exactly like the models in the American Eagle advertisements and what I see on Instagram that I think is attractive, and I’m sure if roles were reversed and I was the younger one, it would be the same way.
Secondly, the conversation of the young boys that I pick up. Wow. Now, I know that girls conversations and boys conversations are completely different so I cannot put the same experience into the four-year transformation for this subject. However, they talk about dancing with girls at parties and sneaking out; all things I was scared to do as an eighth grader. Now, I was a tad introverted and I could have been considered a goody-two-shoes, but this is still shocking because they talk about sexual innuendos that I didn't even understand until last year.
My brother’s high school experience will be completely different than mine was, not in a bad way, just absolutely different. This is because the media and even the local teenagers have accelerated the rate at which young kids learn about subjects that can be considered “Rated R”, to the point where they are fully aware at age 14. Is anyone to blame for this? No, but I can tell you from experience that most of the teachers I had were appalled at my class of students for the knowledge that we held. Well, here is a heads up for the teachers of Noblesville High School… you are in for one RUDE awakening.
