I Do Things The Hard Way or Only a Slim Minority of the People With Which You Went to High School All Went to High School With Each Other

I used to know this guy named Michael who is an albino. You may not know this, but folks who have albinism can't usually see well. They tend to have a variety of things about their eyes that aren't how you'd want them. The parts of the eye that focus the light and pass it to the optic nerve, etc. tend to be shaped irregularly, and their optic nerves are often not that great either. So while albinism is a damn sight better than being blind, you don't see that many albino sharpshooters. This has consequences for the person. For example, I'll tell you about the time Michael almost died while the rest of us watched and didn't say anything.

The four of us took a trip to the Washington coast. It was me, Diana, Michael and that one gal whose name I can't remember. Her and Michael were a couple. Diana and I were too. It's not really relevant to the story. What's-her-name had this mildewed old Volvo, tan and rusty, and she drove us out there. We wandered around on the beach and were drawn, as people are, to these enormous boulders that were strewn here and there in the sand.

The boulders were about 30 feet or so in height, and being the only things on the beach that weren't sand or water, you couldn't help but climb them, which is what we did. Diana, ol' Bess or whatever the hell she was called and I went up first, and Michael was a bit behind us, having been distracted by something that looked neat to him. So it was that the three of us looked down, crouched at the top of the rock while Michael, with a look of calm confidence, did something crazy: he scaled the cliff face of the boulder. The way started out fairly easy and got gradually more difficult until the very top, where there was a bulge that overhung the cliff. We all watched him climb up to this point with dismay growing in our faces, because there were pointy rocks below him, and he was free-climbing a 5:10 face in a plaid shirt, Converse and jeans. When he neared the top and was clinging to this bulge with his arms outstretched and one of his feet level with his head, we all held our breath and hoped for the best. Once he got into grabbing distance, we hauled his skinny ass up off the rock.

Beatrice was the one who said something, finally. It was along the lines of “watching that was terrifying.” Michael asked why, and we pointed to the way we had come up, just a few feet to the side, where a little gully made for an easy ascent. He only realized then that we hadn't done what he'd just done, and I think he had some pretty complex feelings about the whole deal.

Michael was actually in a movie you might have seen called Me, Myself & Irene, where he played an albino.I don't know him anymore, but he seems to have turned out alright.

Anyhow, Michael, because he couldn't see, and because he didn't know better, is a pretty spry fellow. My brain is like that. Here's what I mean.

It sort of seemed to me as I was laying in bed that you go to high school with a lot of people that didn't go to high school together. You actually occupy a pretty unique position in the history of the school, but it seemed like too complex of an idea to just “get,” so I had to work it out.

I built it up from the simple case. If you imagine a school with only one person in it for every graduating class, and furthermore imagine that nobody ever drops out of high school, and also that high school is only one year long, then you are the only person you went to high school with. As a result of this, 100% of the people you went to school with went to school with each other. But if you imagine that high school lasts two years, then it gets more complex, because now you went to high school with three people, yourself included. There was one person who was older than you, and they hazed you and taught you how to smoke cigarettes or whatever, and then there was the kid below you that you stuffed into a locker that one time. The thing is, these two didn't go to school with each other. The oldest third of your classmates didn't go to school with the youngest third. Each of them went to school with only 2/3 of your classmates, which is to say, themselves and you.

Now that you have that situation, throw on another year. High school lasts three years. Your yearbooks collectively have a grand total of five kids in them: two older than you, two younger than you, and, of course, yourself. Well, the oldest kid doesn't know the youngest two, the youngest doesn't know the oldest two, for starters. Also, the second oldest doesn't know the youngest, and the second youngest doesn't know the oldest. You're actually the only one that went to school with all five kids, but it's complex because the two kids closest in age to you knew each other and they each knew the one other kid, so the majority of the kids at your school know the majority of the kids at your school, but each of the five kids has a differently overlapping set of your classmates that are also theirs. As it happens, everybody went to school with most of the people you went to school with: two of them went to school with 3/5 of your classmates and the other two went to school with 4/5. Again, only 1/5 went to school with everybody.

Now the four-year of high school is easy to figure out. You had a total of 7 classmates including yourself, the oldest didn't get to beat up anybody younger than you and the youngest has no scars which he can attribute to anyone older than you. The oldest and youngest, in other words, know 4/7 of the students you do, the second youngest and second oldest each know 5/7, the kids on either side of you know 6/7 of the same students you do, and you're the only 1/7 that knows all 7.

A couple of things might occur to you at this point. The first might be something like “Wow, Owen! you're really boring!” or “That's a really stupid thing to think about when you ought to be out doing drugs or something.” But you might also see the simple fact that your graduating class is the only class that knows all the graduating classes that you do. I didn't see that. It was pretty much the last thing I realized, actually. I had to take the limit of the minimum number of students another student would know as the number of graduating classes approaches infinity (½) before I realized that glaringly obvious fact.

That is why when people ask me why I think so much, I tell them that it is because I am so stupid. And it also happens to be why old people tend to think that young people are less intelligent than the old people were when they were young: the older people had more time to think, and these young whippersnappers just have to come right out with the first thought that comes to them, because they're texting it to their friend while driving. That's another story, though.

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