When I was 17, it was a beautiful year....

[icarus]

lauramcewan gave me "17."

When I was 17, I was in 11th grade.

That year I went to Germany as an exchange student for two and a half months, danced with a soldier in a German disco to the pop song "One Night In Bangkok", and "Shout" was every third song on the radio, yes, even in Germany.

I'd just met my mom's spiritual teacher, Jetsunma ... and developed a crush on her son, Christopher (never Chris). I had mom waking my brother and I up for five am meditation that we both slept through (teenagers + five am + zero meditation experience = are you kidding??). Then I witnessed the inception of the temple's 24-hour prayer vigil that just celebrated its 28th year today (well, now yesterday) at the temple I'm currently painting.

I tutored unsanitary clarinet classes, played piano two to four hours a day (sometimes waking everyone at one am with a rollicking "House of the Rising Sun," oops), and my German teacher sighed in regret that--when I was late every day--that her class followed my art class. My sculpture, I took so long, I had to finish over the summer. Mom still has it. I was forever behind on my homework and unrepentantly bad at math.

In English we were studying Chaucer and Dante's Inferno. When my classmates and I took our SATs, the guys filled out false demographic information to mess up their statistics (there were a remarkable number of American Indians for a class that had none whatsoever). I was nervous, quiet, and mousy with all but my closest friends, mercilessly picked on by a guy my classmates thought had an unrequited crush (I thought he was gay and hated women).

None of this is covered in the questions.

I lived... in Union Lake, Michigan, also known as paradise. We lived 50 feet from the water and wore bathing suits all summer. My brother and I drove an hour, each way, to attend the Waldorf school in downtown Detroit.

I drove... nothing. My parents wanted me to get my license so they could be spared the two hour per day drive in rush hour traffic. I refused. My brother did get his license, and thought I'd relent and share the driving. I slept on the way instead.

I was in a relationship with... Oh, who was it then? I had a secret fling with Judd, the class "nice guy" who was desperate to be anything but, then later Lars, a German exchange student who didn't speak English but liked to climb. He was vulnerable, unhappy, and had a beautiful chest. (I had priorities.)

I feared... the cool kids who picked on me, and Ian, he of the crush-or-maybe-he-was-a-gay-misogynist. High school sucks.

I worked... at, oh God, other than tutoring clarinet, I think I worked at McDonald's over the summer, and then as a cashier at a drugstore.

I wanted to be... in New York city with a apartment that had nothing but wood floors (for the acoustics) and a piano, working quietly in an art museum. My art teacher thought I had a good shot at a scholarship at the all-scholarship school, Pratt.