Visiting UHS was lovely and painful at the same time. I don't know what it is about that place. I'm so in love with it. I'm so in love with it and yet I hurt to see how much it has changed and how much faded glory it is trying to retain. Arts York is getting diluted. Going back there was a big reminder of that. I had forgotten, not facing it, not confronting it, because with all the pain this was too much to take.
But it's gone. Or going. Or getting there. Some of the teachers are still the same. J, for example, is still J. I find myself wishing that I was less of me and more of someone else with him though. I feel like a radio frequency...sometimes we hit in sync and there's perfect synergy and other times...I just miss the boat. It is tiring sounding like a broken record. I have about 4 or 5 emails sitting in my inbox that I haven't sent but written to him anyway that I've meant to sent but never quite could hit that send button. One of them even has the lines, "In the offchance that I hit the button and finally send this and you finally get this..." Sad. Indeed.
Slade. Slade is still Slade and my god, watching him and J go back and forth is pure entertainment, the likes of which even good money couldn't buy. Or bad money, in that case.
But god, this time was the first time I've ever felt pain going back. There has always been a sense of pride, of nostalgia, of misty, foggy-eyed comfort. But never this pain. The hallways, those hallways that we walked. I expected to see something at every turn. I expected to see them kissing, to see them holding hands. That yearbook office, I remembered the tie and the guitar and Parachutes and how hard he tried to impress her and how she completely turned a blind eye. The library, the library, full of its books, the study rooms, the bio, the exams, the shitty laptop, the linux system, the way he fixed her laptop. The way he said he felt like Sid in DHC when he was painting that painting for the woman he loved.
I found out that one of my teachers died the sunday before the monday that I visited UHS. She retired a year earlier (which I also didn't know) and on all my visits to UHS, I hadn't once thought about going back to see her. And then, when I hit the humanities office, they tell me, go away, J is in history. I say, I'm not here to see J, where is Ms. Brigham. And it all comes out. She died from cancer the very day I remembered her. I was absolutely heartbroken.
Alot of things in that place are leaving, dying. The Arts York program, for example, is being completely effing butchered because some crapass other schools are bitching about the unfair advantage we have. Well fuck you, because other countries have international schools and other forms and rungs of entrance exams. We have arts york. We pool talent and the program is invaluable. Its not a question of whether the druggie school, Alex Mack deserves this or not. It is that UHS doesn't deserve this; they don't deserve to have their resources spread thin and their talent diluted. They don't deserve to have their program watered down and taken away from them. These kids deserve this experience of a school that was a legend in itself, an incubator for greatness from all walks of life. Another heartache.
Slade will be gone by the end of the year and so will Salina because she is finally graduating, bless her lovely soul. I am really excited for her. Gawsh, she is going to be uber-amazing. More so than that, actually. Well, she already is but now she will rock the spheres of everyone pretentious idiot at OCAD or Sheridan or wherever she chooses to go. So Slade is gone and Salina is gone and Wozniak used me as a speech for Waterloo to his data class, so he's as good as dead for me. J's left but his amusing tidings and testy stints with admin leaves me sure that it's not for long. I hope it is though...that place needs some lost lustre retention and, imho, J is the only one that retains the flavour of old, spunky, outside of the box, new thinkers, art nouveau, experience extraordinaire UHS.
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