14 years ago I sat in the second to back row, beside the filing cabinet, in Ms. Pollard's Global Studies 9 class on the first week of school. We did this introduction exercise where we had to learn three things about one of our classmates. I turned around and got to know the kid behind me, Joel, whose middle name was Tobin, from Goochland County, who had gone to a Christian camp the summer before. I guess you could say that's how it all began.
Freshman year we had all of our morning classes together, and pretty soon that led us to get into all sorts of trouble. We started off doing smart things, like racing teachers to class when we had spent just a few too many minutes walking the 3rd floor of TJ and chatting before school. Somehow we ended up in all sorts of project groups together, and being the clever g-schoolers we were we decided the best way to collaborate the night before a project was due was by fax. Imagine our surprise when our parents informed us that all those faxes we sent back and forth were actually long distance. What was even better, though, was when our parents realized that the expense associated with our faxing habit wasn't enough to make us stop procrastinating so we wouldn't have to collaborate that way. Needless to say, phone plans were changed, and by the third month of freshman year faxing eachother was no longer long distance.
We didn't just write papers, though. One day Joel and Chris Ko came over to work on a project on the status of women in China. Deciding it would be best to do some first hand research, they came into the room where I was working, tickled me relentlessly until I opened my mouth, shoved a fun-sized snickers in so I couldn't scream, grabbed my foot, and tried to bind it with a bandana they had found in my room. All in all it was a good year.
Sophomore year we had global studies together again, but this time we took our projects to a whole new level. Our projects were so awesome that only fools couldn't see them. We turned them in, we promise.
Junior year was all about French 4 with Mme. McLees. We did this awesome sock puppet project with Kelly that was set to some French rap song we couldn't understand but sounded pretty cool. For some reason the day we presented our project Dr. McLees could not stop laughing. Eventually we figured out that our rap song was a horrifically violent number about a guy who killed his girlfriend for being the town prostitute. We just thought it was a good background for our sock puppet grammar lesson.
Junior year was also the year Joel and I discovered photography as a class. Georgianne Stinnette had an absolutely captive audience in us. We had matching SLRs and would run around town taking pictures...sometimes even during school. Our photo obsessions took us well through senior year, when we went to our first First Fridays to see Ms. Stinnett's work at 1708. David Prestosa came with us, and the three of us became the infamous Joel And Lila, the dynamic trio who was brave enough to hang out in the middle of Monroe Park late at night.
Senior year we actually didn't hang out that much at school, not just with eachother, but in general. Somehow classes and assemblies became optional. We would always manage to meet in the darkroom, though, even if it was with the lights on to finish up some homework due next period. We graduated and ended up in college together. College shenanigans were on a whole new level...the kind of level where you don't talk about them with people who weren't there. So this year, I'll leave off our story here.
Happy Birthday Joel! I hope this year brings you an incredible amount of happiness. I'm honored to have been your friend for this long, and I can't wait to see what we get into next!
Love you always!
Lady Botswana
