Close your eyes. You're 17. Where are you?
 

Where are you in your mind? In your dreams? Do you have a special place you recall?

I'm back on the beach in Santa Monica. Will Rogers State Beach, life guard tower 17. It's about 5:00 p.m. and most of the people have gone home. The sun is starting to set over the water, but I can still feel its warmth on my skin as I lie on my stomach on my towel. I can smell the Bain de Soleil orange gelee on my skin and I think I hear Rick Dees on the radio. The red hot sand from earlier in the day has cooled and I can feel it running through my toes as I dig my feet into the sand.

Better pack up and start walking home. Dinner will be ready soon!

high school band room.

yeah, i was a band geek.. but it was a blast.

Im sitting around a campfire in Andresonville GA with the 7th Ga Calvary (my reenacting unit) drinking wine coolers (new invention back then lol) out of a tin cup wearing my b/f's frock coat and watching him burn marshmallows for me, listening to a group of the guys that had just come back from the cemetary tell us how a couple driving their car had run off the road because they thought they were seeing ghosts (the guys were still in their confederate uniforms) and when they went to help the people in the car they got out running and screaming because they thought the "ghosts" were coming to get them lol

ahhh thanks lindalove, thats one of my favorite memories from when I was 17

Umm.. I'm pretty sure it involves vodka, bleachers and a couple girls

When I turned 17 I was in my last year of high school. Judging by that time frame, I was probably training or sleeping.

1997, Junior year going into senior year, hanging out with my ex-wife (then girlfriend) before going to bad movie and making out in the back row. Times change, but I still like going to the movies and making out in the back row, I haven't done it in YEARS... sadly.

In my freshman dorm room, hazy with cigarette smoke. Reading. I'm on the chair by the window, lurkette is asleep on my bed.

Ummm, "borrowing" my friend's dad's Porsche and seeing how fast we could get it, and how fast we could do 0-60 on a then abandoned street, which is lined with houses now (160 mph max speed, and 0-60 in under 4 seconds by the way). Going into the woods or mountains and getting busy with my girl at the time on a blanket. Soaking Abercombie & Fitch and Tommy Hilfiger clothes in gasoline, and lighting them on fire in the front lawn of my school to make a statement. Being your standard wreckless teenager.

At 17...
I was an awkward girl in love with a stoner thinking I could never get him because I was not a pothead yet. Which leads to my memory of sitting on a quiet, counrty road at night with some wine coolers, cigarettes, and my best friend. We drank and smoked so much that night and talked about sex and where we would be after high school. Aww, well I'm glad I didn't end up where I thought I would be...I'm much happier here. Although I did get the stoner and then it was all a haze for about 3 years. :lol:

Seventeen years ago TODAY (3rd Thursday of October) was the City Cross Country Championship, and I was bouncing around in class all day. I even got reprimanded in my Modern European History class for figdetting. I ran a 16:21 for 3 miles on a course with a 1250' vertical change, which was the 2nd fastest time of the year on that course and the 3rd fastest ever. Unfortunately, the fastest time ever was 10 seconds ahead of me, but I still qualified for State with no problem.

It's scary that I still remember these details. If anyone wants to know the weather that day, that's still stored up there too along with the weather for in Nashville 10 days later. Jeez, gotta learn to use that power for good rather than evil...

I'm on my long summer vacation lying on a beach with my best friend getting a tan and not worrying about ANYTHING. Good times...

17 years old...back in high school.

If it were right now, at this time, I would be in choir class, more than likely practicing for the fall concert, which would probably be sometime within the next week. We would be finishing and polishing our pieces. I was a mezzo soprano, probably one of the hardest parts to sing, but I loved it.

Choir pretty much says everything about high school for me. I spent all of my free time senior year in and around the choir room, band room, and auditorium, between doing the fall play, concerts for choir, doing the spring musical, and hanging out with all of my friends in choir, band, and drama.

My mothere was shaking her head at me because I would spend all my money on books and spend all my time reading them.

Seeing kids today shes nodding her head vigorously that shes now happy I did. :lol:

I'm exchanging sexy emails with a congressman.


Actually, I'm sober and done with high school.

1) That's an absolutely adorable image.
2) Smoking in a dorm room? I'd kill for it...

---

17? 17 sucked. I spent all my time for a year with a girl who, in retrospect, didn't really seem to care for me that much.

But I was really starting to learn about sex, so maybe 17 wasn't horrible. :D

Sneaking into bars with my fake ID, drinking beer and riding the mechanical bull.....

They knew we were underage but I guess they thought it was better that we were where they could keep an eye on us than out on the street somewhere....

I was on TFProject hoping to not get caught :)

When I was 17, I was sneaking into the dorms on the local Air Force Base to be with my then boyfriend to have wild and crazy sex... yeah I was a rebel girl really into partying we would sometimes drive 90 miles to the state capital just for a coke on one of our dates just because we could (gas was only like 56 cents a gallon then) and then we would stop on the way home (in the mountains of course) and make out or have sex or whatever... it just depended on our mood and what time it was. Man he was the best boyfriend I ever had in high school... he taught me how to use my tongue in so many wicked ways!!! :D

17. Wow. I wanted to stay seventeen for the rest of my life. Old enough to get away with most things but not quite old enough to go to jail if you were caught. :)

I was standing outside the school hall on the morning of one of many matric exams, smoking one of my very first cigarettes. Camel Lights. Them were good days.

My best memory from when I was 17 was New Year's Eve. It was the millenium new year and we were out in the country at a party at a friend's place. When the time turned over, the girl I liked gave me a kiss on the cheek. She was my first love and we were together for almost 6 years.

-Tamerlain

17... it was '98 to early '99... I was a senior in high school, having a blast. I did so much behind-the-scenes tech stuff for the school that I barely went to classes and still got my good grades. I walked around campus all day, doing whatever needed to be done... plan/outline/table the school's morning news, prep it, do production for it, then either be in front of the camera with my friend as director, or vice-versa, more often he was one of the anchors. I worked on theater productions, school productions, graduation ceremony preparations (yeah, my own graduation- did everything but run the board on the night of, lol), major award show preparations... I was very busy, every day, but I loved doing it.

i had just turned 17 in matric. it's the day of my birthday. and the day two of my very best friends and i and three other friends of ours(not at our school), in fact, they were out of school already. we decide to bunk school with these three boys and we are on our way to the beach. we stop at Mcdonalds to get a bite to eat and proceed to the oceanarium where we break into the museum and the snake park. when one of the caretakers came to us and asked us what we were doing there, we said we were on an excursion. to our delight, the six of us got taken on a tour of the museum and snake park and a whole lesson in reptiles.

way way cool. those were the days.

Where are you?
High school

Where are you in your mind?
In a pleasant cottage in the English countryside, writing.

In your dreams?
Europe.

Do you have a special place you recall?
Lodged in my room's corner where I'd set up my humble library, reading.

I was a loud-mouthed

I was a loud-mouthed, straight edge, skateboarded with very few aspirations beyond expelling the least amount of energy possible. I had little concern for my future and applied myself only to things I was interested in - I skated all year round and openly ignored my english curriculum to read Crime and Punishment. I wanted my teachers to understand that it wasn't that I didn't understand the work enough to get good grades - their work was so beneath me that to devote enough of my time to get the worst passing grade was an honor that I extended to them.

I was just a kid without enough life-experience to know when to choose my battles.

I was also in love.

Mid-October and I'm 17...
It's Senior Yeah of HS, naturally, and I hate it. Except for a couple of classes, the only redeeming feature of High School is marching band, where I've been learning to drink, flirt, play pranks, and play Verdi on the Trombone.
Our Band's really good; consistant wins every year, but I'm worried because the idiotic Drummers can't seem to get their shit together. My Band friends are pretty much my life at this time of year; we're always either practicing or partying together. My non-Band friends are invited too, but they don't understand the jokes.

I'm worried about getting into college because, aside from a stellar showings in my History and French classes, HS has been a joke for me. I cruise through, bored to tears and sick to death of the BS. My grades relfect this, and I know it. Half the teachers in school love me, because I actually speak up. The other half hate me because of what I say when I -do- speak up. I wear a trenchcoat and it's just over a year after Columbine; I don't care. It keeps me warm, and I was wearing it long before Columbine. I'm used to the dirty looks; I was "the Nerd" for ten years, after all.

I work at a grocery store and hate it.

...balls deep in this whore's ass in Singapore...

Making out in the back alley of a sports card store where I would play geeky card games and play Dungeons and Dragons as I went from being a loner to a geek.

Man, that was 10 years ago. I feel old...

Cutting class to do as many drugs as I possibly could.

1992? Hmmmm, I would probably be sleeping late or on my way to work. I had two classes my senior year in high school. If I hadn't peaked early, I would have graduated in May of that year. Instead I was enduring my last year stuck with people that I hated and had to try not to hurt on an almost hourly basis. I was never so happy to have reasons not to go to school in my life.

Veritas et Lux!
Jimmy The Hutt

Sitting on a sofa with a rapidly expanding burn mark, fucked out of my head on ecstacy with my eyes open and in a completly different universe.

Basically just that for a year. Interesting times if nothing else.

Edit: That sounded a lot more positive than it meant to. Still don't have an immune system, stable mental processes or the boat loads of money i spent:|

That was so long ago... 1985/86. I was a dorky highschooler. I was smitten with a tall redhead who was very bad for me (there was lot's of sex involved so I couldn't really help myself as that sort of thing goes).

I worked at the hospital making more money than a 17-year-old has a right to make while still in school.

I was a year away from Univeristy and the eye-opening change that was about to bring... and a year away from meeting my wife.

I was a few months away from the murder suicide of my best friend.

It marked the definitive end of my childhood.

Before September I was working 60+ hours a week at a combo of several different jobs (including See's Candy girl) to desparately save up enough money to be admitted into college for as long as possible. I had already graduated HS at age 15.5 (contingent on 2 jr. college courses), and had no friends, so working was fine by me. I was desparate to get out of the house and away from my father, yet in an "acceptable" way.

Fortunately it worked, and once I got to college, my life started. I carried full-time credits, a part-time job, started living in the dorms, making friends, and enjoying my life for the first time ever.

I'm most likely sitting in the passenger seat of my friend's 87 Cutlass listening to either raggae or WuTang Clan and smoking a blunt. We don't have anywhere in particular to go, but we can't smoke that shit in our parent's houses so we're stuck using his car. The good thing about this is that gas is incredibly cheap, so wasting it doesn't bother him that much.

I was traveling the word skiing and smoking weed for a bit....then did some more skiing since I cheated my way out of high school early. I also didnt think I could get a girl (I used to have glasses and braces) and 1 yr later I couldnt get the girlies off of me

Wow, the best times were working at the golf course, and playing lots of golf! At night, we'd all meet at the mud flats, and drink and 4x4 till we passed out. Then off to work again. We made a lot of money, played a lot of golf, and drank too much beer!

17 huh?

Well...it's 1979, going into 1980, and it is my senior year in high school. I'm working at McDonald's and making my own money. There was no real fast food "stigma", at that time. Then, any job was a good job. We're about to roll out a new product. The Happy Meal. The very first theme would be Star Trek The Motion Picture. I'm drinking Iron City, Genesee, and Rolling Rock Beer, usually procured 20 miles away, across the Maryland border, where the drinking age is 18. I'm driving a pristine 1968 Mercury Monterey. On the 8-track can usually be heard either Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell, or Boston's Don't Look Back.
Due to a new found confidence, I'm receiving attention from girls that, before now, had barely acknowleged my existence. I'll soon be signing the papers enlisting me into the US Air Force, though I won't be leaving until well into my 18th birthday. I am dating Kathy, a very attractive, though slightly psychotic, redhead from another school. We taught each other a few things in the back seat of that Monterey.

Ahh...memories...

First fall quarter of college. Probably today, my music theory instructor would wander in late at 8:15AM from a weekend of playing gigs. His hair would be cowlicked straight up, and he'd have a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. No teaching materials except what was in his genius head. He'd stare at us and then growl, "What time is it, gang?" We'd chirpily respond, "It's 8:15, Bob." He'd think a bit and then respond back, "Well, that's just too damn early for music theory. What say we head over to the Krystal for some breakfast?"

And we would. I learned more about music from that man than from any ten other professors combined.

Sitting in the cafeteria with the high school group, talking about video games, or band, or something. Perhaps in the band room, or on a trip to some performance. Maybe with one of my girlfriends (I had three in a row at that age). Getting dumped. Meeting LPM. etc.

At 17, I was dating nwlinkvxd- it was the year I lost my virginity. It was the year I went to my first and only high school dance. It was a pretty damn good year. And then 18 hit. :(

I was still in high school. My senior year. I was pergnant with a child that I didn't know I wanted so bad, until I lost it, and dating a guy that I didn't know I loved so much, until I lost him. It was the year I learned that life isn't always simple. And the year that I learned that things can change in the blink of an eye.