Boats Against The Current

      Last week, my grandmother asked me what normal high schoolers do on Friday nights.  As a person of very little social intelligence (what I lack in knowledge, I make up in awkwardness), I soon realized that I had no response.  This worried me.  How could I, a senior in high school, not have any idea what people do on Friday nights? Desperate to prove my social stability to my grandmother, though, I pathetically replied with "football."  High school kids go to football games, right? I paused to consider my friends' typical Friday nights, which consist primarily of debate, band, or taking six-hour naps.  Then I paused to consider my last Friday night, which consisted of a six-hour long trip with a rather interesting group of kids to a very sketchy Wal-Mart near the Pennsylvania border with $1,300 (in cash) to spend for a community service project.  After our rather eventful trip, we ended up back in Middlefield, sitting on top of a nearly three-story-high silo, surrounded only by stars and buggies full of rebellious Amish teenagers somehow blasting classical music as their buggies inched past us on the dirt road.  As the stars grew brighter and the night grew later, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped drastically.  Instead of going inside, though, we continued to talk.  And, as the socially competent teenagers that we are, we naturally touched on the subject of great American literature, and of course I brought up The Great Gatsby. Surprisingly, as soon as I mentioned it, my friend's eyes lit up as she excitedly announced that her class had just finished the book on the same day that we had.  And, standing outside in the cold, we began an hour-long discussion and thorough analyzation of the book, particularly of the book's last sentence, which apparently had left its mark on us as we had both memorized it.  As we discussed Gatsby and his mysterious and entrancing state of being, we each reached our own realizations.  I came to terms with the fact that, no, I had no idea what a normal teenager would be doing that Friday night, but I felt fairly certain that it would not be sitting on top of a silo discussing The Great Gatsby at midnight in the middle of what we had not-so-affectionately dubbed Amish Land.  I felt just as certain that it would not come in the form of carrying a borderline-dangerous amount of cash to a Wal-Mart so far from home.  I realized that we acted as manifestations of these boats against the current, going against the flow, ignoring the flow, and overpowering the flow. Instead of floating back to the past, though, we push ourselves toward the future, forcing ourselves beyond those who let the flow carry them backward.  We bring nothing with us but memories of the past, an awareness of the present, and a vision for the future.