MadMup.com

Years: 1988-89
Teachers: Mr. Braughler, Mrs. Carlson, Mr. Flaming, Mrs. Jackson, Mr. Weniger

(It’s at this point that I’ll go ahead and warn you that there’s a lot of sports stuff coming up. Even though I’m not a “sports guy,” it seems like I did a lot of sports things my Junior year. Sorry about that. If I’d known then that I would be blogging now, I might have tried to do more exciting things.)

My Junior year was a big year for me, a year of changes. For one, my brother was no longer at the same school as me, having graduated and gone off to college in South Carolina. Though I would still occasionally get called “Mike” by a teacher, to anyone coming to the school from this point on I would be how they knew the family name.

The school also got a new principal my Junior year. We’d had Mr. Akins up to that point, and he was also the football coach. Though I don’t believe it ever happened to me, I’ve heard from fellow students/players that they occasionally received more leniency in punishment during football season because they were needed on-field. And after having typed that, I now realize why it never happened to me: I was never needed on the field.

Football was even a change for me this year. I went from playing random line positions (both defense and offense) to stating that I wanted to try tight end, a sort-of line position that had me running downfield for passes, too. My timing couldn’t have been worse, as my Junior year was also the year the team started breaking in a new quarterback. I’ve explained it to people this way: “The year I decided to try being a receiver was the year we had predominately a running game.” On top of that, I was an every-other-play guy, as coach used me and the other tight end to run plays into the new QB. We had a game mid-season against our rivals Ethan Allen where coach finally had me in every play, though. Somewhere mid-game he took me out and had Chris Z. (the other guy) go in for the rest of the game. I think he (Coach) was testing to see how the two of us would do in an “every play” situation. The very next play Chris was in, the QB threw him a pass in the endzone. Touchdown, just like that. It was kind of funny, really.

Still, I ended up with impressive stats at the end of my Junior year of football: I caught 100% of the passes thrown my way and had an average of seven yards gained. This is because I was thrown exactly one pass and I caught it. I was tackled immediately thereafter, largely because I wasn’t exactly sure what to do once I caught a pass in a game, as I had never done it before. The play was “Quickie to the Left End,” where I would sprint off the line and look for the ball immediately, a play designed to catch the defense off guard. I remember catching the ball and turning to see three defenders on approach vectors… and that’s it. The story was told later that I caught the ball and then didn’t do anything – “froze” I think was the word they used – and I took some ribbing over that one for quite some time.

This was the same game where a weird penalty was called (something like “team members pushing the running back forward” or somesuch) and I was on the sideline and was asking people around me what the deal was. Coach Flaming, in the midst of being mad at the refs, overheard me and yelled, “If you’d quit wasting your time playing videogames and learn more about football, maybe you’d know what was going on!” While the penalty called was obscure enough that I doubt he was right, I find it somewhat amusing that once I started playing football videogames in college, I learned way more about the way the game is played than I ever did in high school. And I have yet to see that particular penalty called in any football videogame I’ve ever played.

If I don’t point it out he will, so I better go ahead and mention that one touchdown my friend Dave (a runningback) got was due in some small part to what he calls “a fantastic block” on my part. When tight ends aren’t running downfield on a pass pattern, they’re blocking. On this one play, Dave was coming right around my end of the line. This was apparently the one time I was able to contain the defender and Dave was able to get past and go on his way to the endzone. I only remember this because he pointed it out when the team was watching the game tape the next week in practice. So there’s that.

Our class got a new English teacher this year, Mrs. Carlson. She was… hmm. I’m not exactly sure how to describe her. After a year of running roughshod over Miss Swank, I think we probably needed a teacher like Mrs. Carlson. Talking in class was punished by push-ups. Late assignments might have you skipping around the classroom singing “A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket.” Using the word “ain’t” would get you a nose-tweaking (a Mrs. Carlson practice not limited to the classroom, as she would tweak noses of visiting chapel speakers or whoever else happened to be around her). I never had to sing in class, but I do believe I led the class in push-ups by the end of the year.

Mrs. Carlson had a habit of dragging her teacher desk over the wooden floor – she would drag it out of the way and then drag it back – a couple of times per class. It made the most horrible scraping sound you can imagine. While I am not one for pranks, my friend Eric and I hit on an idea one day. We and some other people were using her classroom after school to make decorations and we decided to nail her table to the floor. It had little removable rubber caps in the bottoms of the hollow table legs, so we removed them and nailed them to the floor and then put the table back over them. The next morning we waited for the inevitable table-pull. Sure enough, she tried. And then, with a puzzled look, she tried again. She came around front to see who had their feet on the table impeding her progress, scowled, and tried again. By this time most of us were busting up, as news had spread of our attempts to thwart the awful noise. She finally noticed us and asked us what was going on. On finding out, she laughed and laughed – luckily for us! – and admitted she knew it was awful that she pulled the table so frequently. The nails were removed after class… and she went right back to her old ways the very next day. There’s no teaching teachers!

I had the opportunity to be in the Academy Singers my Junior and Senior years, a smaller-than-the-concert-choir singing group that had occasion to travel different places and sing. Some time in December we had the chance to be part of some Christmas celebrations by doing some singing on a street downtown on a Saturday. I distinctly remember Mr. Braughler saying “no coats!” I showed up wearing my suit coat and no winter coat… and froze to death for the next hour or so. He apparently meant “no suit coats under your winter coats” but hadn’t made that abundantly clear to the more thick-headed of his group members. There’s a picture in the yearbook of us singing downtown, everyone in nice heavy coats except one lone idiot who looks slightly blue, even though the picture is in black and white.

I joined the basketball team my Junior year… sorta. A good number of my friends were on the team and they always told great stories about going off to tournaments and stuff and I wanted to be a part of it. The team needed a stat-keeper, so that’s what I did. Somewhere along the line I wrote new lyrics to “Goober Peas” along the lines of “Stats, stats, stats, stats / Keeping ev’ry stat.” At the end of the season when Coach Flaming was being pressured (a little by me, but mostly by my friends) to let me letter in the sport because I’d been at every game and all that, he said, “If you sing your ‘Stats’ song at the pep rally, I’ll let you letter.” Done & done. I guess I’ve always been an entertainer at heart, even if those I’m trying to entertain aren’t very entertained. I think there were maybe three people entertained, but I got my letter for basketball!

One day in February I was running late for school – I needed to pick up Phil and Eric and get to Academy Singers practice – and as I was headed out my dad said, “Don’t go the back way today. The roads are bad this morning.” I think I said okay, but I needed to make up some time and the back roads were the best method. I wasn’t a mile from home before I spun around a couple of times and ended up in the ditch. I spent the walk-run across the fields to my house wondering how I was going to explain to Dad that I’d gone the back route. I’m sure he was mad, but what I remember more is that he got his tractor and went and pulled my car out of the ditch. The accident scared me, and I made some specific spiritual choices following it that I still think about to this day. Aside from that, there are two other things I remember about the accident:

1. My car never worked quite the same after that.
2. There was a Kenny G song on the radio when I went in the ditch. I only tolerated Kenny G at that time but have been annoyed by his music ever since.

I played baseball again in the spring, my second and last season doing so. We had a new coach who didn’t like me much, but he let me play second base and had someone else hit for me. I was a pretty decent second baseman, really. Not outstanding, but decent. But I couldn’t hit to save my life. Our pitchers would hit (and hit well, in some cases!), and coach would use a pinch hitter for me. Somewhere along the line he found that another player could play second okay but could also hit, and I spent the rest of the season on the bench. Meh. I was only there for fun anyway, so it didn’t matter too much (case in point: while on the bench, I wore a baseball cap that had Vulcan ears on it). I did have one shining moment before my early retirement, though. It was shining enough that Phil, who was our Mr. Sports (meaning he was really really good at any sport he played and was really really serious about playing – I’m not sure why he liked me, frankly), and also wrote the baseball blurb for the yearbook mentioned it. We were playing Ethan Allen and a fellow came up to bat, and there was a man on first. I remembered that on his last at-bat he had hit it straight up the line over the second base, so I moved over a bit closer to the base (second basemen are actually normally placed between first and second bases). Sure enough, he hit it almost exactly in the same place, so I was able to scoop it up, step on second and throw the ball to first for a double play. Double plays are rare enough in high school ball that it was pretty exciting – I think Phil just about fell over from shock. I don’t think it would have worked out so well if our first baseman, Josh, hadn’t been 6’3”. I seem to remember him having to stretch pretty much full-length to reel that one in. Still, it was the highlight of my baseball career and I was commemorated in the yearbook with these words: “Several things from the ’89 season will be remembered […], Mark’s spirited and ‘gnarly’ encouragements from the bench, as well as his double play at Ethan Allen.”

I remember my Junior year being a pretty good year, overall, and that’s in spite of the fact that I looked like this:

Me in 1988

Years: 1987-88
Teachers: Mr. Braughler, Mr. Flaming, Mrs. Jackson, Miss Swank

The word “sophomore” is apparently a combination from a couple of Greek words that translate into “wise” and “stupid.” There could be no better word than this to describe the experience of tenth grade. Sophomores are wiser for having lived through their freshman year but are still really, really… dumb. You’ve heard the word “sophomoric” applied to something stupid? It’s the perfect description of one’s behavior in this year of school.

Let me give you a perfect example. My friend Phil P., middle son of two faculty members at the college my high school was associated with, lived a few blocks from school. Many times after school while waiting for my brother to finish up with some after-school activity, Larry K., Phil, and I would walk to Phil’s house so he could drop off his schoolbooks and then we’d walk a few more blocks to Shopko, usually to play Shinobi, one of the best videogames of all time. One day that we did this, Larry had a Roman candle with him – you know, one of those fireworks that, when lighted, shoots out balls of different-colored sparks and a whole lot of smoke? – and was fooling around with it. We were in Phil’s upstairs room and Larry was taunting Phil by holding a lit lighter a few inches below the fuse. Phil was … wound a little tightly as a general rule, and Larry’s actions were garnering the exact sort of responses he was looking to get (Larry’s already-established reputation as a firebug certainly didn’t help). The teasing was going well … until the fuse lit. Apparently a couple of inches isn’t enough leeway to allow. So now there’s a lit Roman candle giving off sparks and smoke in Phil’s room, there’s me sorta laughing in disbelief, there’s Phil yelling, “Put it out! Put it out!” and there’s Larry blowing on the thing and smacking his other hand over the top of it in an attempt to put it out. I’ve never seen a person’s eyes go as large as Phil’s did right then. Somehow Larry was able to extinguish the candle, but the whole upper floor of the house was full of smoke. We opened windows and set up a fan to blow the smoke outside and somehow convinced Phil to continue on with us to Shopko. When he returned home afterwards (without us), there were apparently many questions asked and at least one edict handed down: “No more Larry in this house.” Frankly, that wasn’t a bad rule of thumb, and it was a rule that Larry’s own father had considered many a time, I’m sure. Larry and his family ended up moving away during the second semester of our sophomore year, and I’ve only seen him once since then.

Our school got a new math teacher this year and it was because of my experiences in math class my Sophomore and Junior years that I was planning to go to college to become a math teacher. (Taking pre-calculus my Senior year disabused me of those notions rather quickly.) Not only did she present math in an interesting and easy to understand (for me, anyway) way, she was also willing to listen to the common travails and thoughts of the common sophomore. There were more than a few classes devoted to discussion of some pressing topic other than math, as I recall. Geometry was the math for sophomores, and I took to it like ducks to white bread. Proofs, 3D graphing, trigonometry, the whole deal. I loved it. I remember helping my friend Malia (more on her in a bit) out one evening with 3D graphing. To help her visualize it, I grabbed a cassette case she had lying around and showed her the X, Y, and Z axes on it. It helped, but it also amused us to no end because the cover was for a Def Leppard album (Hysteria, I believe), exactly the sort of music that was verboten at our particular parochial school. It actually may have been that fact that helped her recall the facts when she needed them on the final test.

Malia lived in the same town I did, about 20 miles from the school. I don’t remember exactly when we started riding to school together, but I remember that my brother started driving him and me to school when I was in eighth grade. I’m sure proximity played some part in it, but Malia and I became fast friends. She was fun to be around, always quick to laugh or to listen. Over the next couple of years I would spend a lot of time at her house, as her family was as interesting and as willing to open their home.

In the second semester of our sophomore year, Malia was one of the first in our class to get her driver’s license (I still remember that her birthday was March 31, mostly because Phil’s was April 1 and we always joked that their birthdays had been switched). My brother was a Senior, as was my friend Josh’s brother. Josh’s family lived about a half hour from school, too, albeit in a different direction, and he and I were both going to have difficulty getting to school for the week our older brothers were going to be gone on their Senior Trip. It worked out that Malia got her license and a plan was made for Josh to spend the week at my house and for Malia to take us to school, a perfect solution – except for the fact that we were sophomores. One day (I think it was Tuesday, but I don’t know why I think that) we talked new driver Malia into driving from our town (20 miles south of school) to Josh’s town (20 miles east of school) and then finally to school, very late, of course. To this day I’m not sure why we did it, other than to celebrate the freedom that having a similarly-aged driver brought. By the way: this little story is only now being confessed to. We made up some story about car trouble back then. Any parents, former teachers, or administrators reading this should consider this a plea for forgiveness.

This year was also the first year for Eric N. at our school. He’d been homeschooled up to this point, if I remember correctly, and his parents wanted him to be able to have the high school experience. He and I hit it off pretty quickly, and became good friends for years, and, in fact, we still correspond every so often. Eric was – how shall I say? – wilder than I, and hanging out with him brought out crazy tendencies, but mostly of a non-destructive nature. We never blew up cars or anything, but we did go out “bird hunting” at least once. It was the one and only time I’ve ever shot at another living being (on purpose).

I went out for football again this year, and still didn’t really have a “place.” I played a little more, mostly on defensive positions where Coach Akins felt I couldn’t cause too much trouble.

I also went out for wrestling this year, and I was in the 145 lb. weight class. (I, in fact, weighed 145 lbs. my whole high school career, and at least one year into college. Alas, those days are behind me. Sigh.) The problem with wrestling in the 145 lb. weight class that year was that there were two other wrestlers in that class: one of our top wrestlers (Paul Z.) and my brother. I didn’t wrestle much that year. There was one tournament, though, where my brother and I were able to enter a tournament as “alternates.” I pinned my first guy (my one and only pin and my one and only victory in my wrestling career), and ended up wrestling Paul for my second match. He made short work of me, of course, and I actually ended up wrestling my brother. The ref must have thought we were crazy, since we talked during the whole match – Michael giving me suggestions on how to “work that arm” and whatnot, me mostly kind of laughing at the silliness of having to wrestle my brother. He ended up beating me on points (I was difficult to pin) and I think that was probably for the best.

It was a busy year for me, sports-wise, as I also went out for baseball. Again, I didn’t play much, but the week that the seniors were gone on their trip we younger members got to play. I don’t think we did very well, and I very specifically remember an actual occurrence of a hit ball going through my legs. I guess that’s a cliché for a reason, eh? I made up for it my Junior year, but I won’t ruin that for you right now.

The remaining big memory I have from my sophomore year is our English teacher, Miss Swank. For some reason, we ran roughshod over her. To this day I’m not sure how or why, but we constantly were talking and playing jokes on her throughout almost every class. On one particular day, someone brought a water gun into class. It was Jeremy V. that had it in his possession when she demanded it, and for some reason, he pulled the trigger when she was standing in front of him. His story after the fact was that he knew the gun didn’t shoot straight and he was sure it would miss her. Unfortunately for him it didn’t miss her enough and the few drops in her hair spelled his doom. I think that was Jeremy’s one and only dismissal from any class ever.

What really amuses me is that a few years later, my friend Eric – who had been as much a prankster in Miss Swank’s class as anyone – met and eventually married Miss Swank’s younger sister. I’d like to have been around at those first few family gatherings…

Here, for the curious, is how I looked as a Sophomore in high school:

Me in 1987

This was my first year of wearing contacts, and my first year of having a crewcut. It’s actually grown out in this picture – at its worst my brother said I looked like a war criminal. So there’s that.

Next up: Junior year. The only preview I’ll give you is there’s a car accident in it.

Years: 1986-87
Teachers: Mr. Braughler, Mr. Flaming, Mrs. Litke,

—–
I almost hesitate to dive back into this series, my school memories posts tend to not garner many comments, so it’s easy to think that no one’s enjoying them. But I intended to finish it, so I shall – consider it a character-building exercise, I guess. I have actual documentation from my high school years (yearbooks and friends who actually went through it with me), so there’s the danger these entries could be longer. I also have actual pictures of me from these sources, and it remains to be seen if I’ll include them with these posts.
—–

It’s easy to look back at the beginning of my high school days and see that big changes were afoot, but I don’t think I noticed while I was living them. I wonder if anyone ever does…

Our high school was small, really small. Our class was one of the biggest they’d seen, and I count 27 of us in the yearbook. There were less than 100 students in the whole high school. Considering I now work at a high school that has over 1,500 students and I know of even larger ones, well, I guess ours was smaller than small. Tiny, maybe.

My absolutely first memory from high school was my friend Jamie M. seeing me on the first day of school and saying, “Mark! You grew!” In eighth grade, as is the norm, most of the girls were taller than most of the guys. I did some growing in the summer, I guess. That’s another thing you don’t necessarily notice while it’s happening.

I made a few life-changing decisions early on in my high school career:

1. Stop bringing my lunch in a lunch box. “The Fall Guy” might have been cool in elementary school, but it will get you laughed at in high school. Brown paper bag lunches became the norm pretty quickly – most likely the first week of school.
2. Get new friends. More specifically, “get out of old friendships.” High school seemed so much bigger and so different, but I still had a small circle of friends whose idea of being friends was to hit each other and snicker. I remember thinking it seemed so childish, which is funny to think about now. I somehow got into a different group that included Josh, Phil, and Malia (pronounced mah-LEE-uh), and that shaped my next four years and beyond.
3. Get rid of my quick temper. I got into a couple of actual fights with Paul Z. early on in my Freshman year, mostly because he was a jerk and I had an instant temper. One day in PE he was tripping me from behind while we ran laps, and when we got to the end, I laid into him. Coach Terrill pulled me off him and kneeled on my chest (he was heavy and it hurt!) and yelled at me (he hadn’t seen the tripping, of course – not that it made my actions right). I’d like to say that’s what caused me to make my decision, but it was really because I figured out somehow that girls wouldn’t like me if I had a bad temper. So. I decided to not have one any more, and I didn’t. Sure, I’ve my temper since then, but never so instantly. As a side note, this decision is what sticks out to me when I have trouble doing any other life alterations: if I can just decide to not have a temper and then not have one, I should be able to decide and do all the other stuff. When it doesn’t work, I blame myself for being weak.
4. Go out for football. There were two reasons I did this:
   -It was sort of expected. All the freshman guys were doing it and my brother had played for two years already.
   – To get out of piano practice. I’d had lessons for four years, and I hated practicing. Going out for football meant my after-school time was taken up and I couldn’t take lessons anymore. Looking back, I think this is one of my biggest regrets. While I enjoyed football to a certain extent and have some good memories from my years of playing, I wish that I could play the piano now.

Playing football is actually why you’re at MadMup.com today, actually. One day I walked into the locker room for practice and Todd T., a senior, said, “Hey, Muppet.” Someone else asked, “What’d you call him?” “Muppet.” “Why?” “Because he looks like one.” And there it was: my new nickname. It morphed into “Mup” over time, and when I started playing games online years later, I morphed it into “MadMup” in an attempt to give it an ironic, pseudo-tough edge. I think I was supposed to be embarrassed about looking like a Muppet, but truth be told I liked having a recognizable identity. I was a weird-looking odd kid, so anything helped. People that might not ever have talked to me before would say “Hey, Muppet” in the halls occasionally now. My brother still calls me “Mup” to this day, and there’ve been at least two occasions when he’s referred to me that way in Sunday dinner prayers.

My first three classes every day my Freshman year were taught by the same teacher: Mr. Flaming (pronounced like “flamming,” not like “flaming”). History, Science, and Bible (or maybe Science, History, and Bible, I’m not sure). Mr. Flaming was not the most exciting teacher in the world, and having a first-hour class with him would have been bad enough. Three in a row was killer. He never really liked me that much, which I can appreciate – I wasn’t the easiest student to have in class – and one day for science class he had me come up to the front for a demonstration. He put the science textbook on my head and then hit the book with a hammer. I think he was trying to show “transference of energy” or some such, but the upshot is that he got to hit me in the head with a hammer and call it “teaching.”

I was sitting in the front row of English class one day holding a finger to my lips and puffing my cheeks out (for what reason, I do not know – perhaps to see how far out they’d go) when Mr. Braughler stopped talking mid-sentence, looked at me with incredulous eyes, proclaimed, “Rubberface!” and went back to teaching. It was a little surreal. To this day, though, I still make faces while I’m doing other things. People often think I’m younger than I actually am, and I wonder if it’s because making faces is like a face workout or something. Of course, nobody wants to look this young:

Me in 1986

My Freshman year seems like a transition year in retrospect. My Sophomore year was more like the beginning of high school in my memory.