What were you like in high school?

I've been thinking a lot about high school lately. I guess it started at my department's recent potluck, when I was entertaining the other grad students with stories about how excessively weird I was in high school. I think it started with the statement, "Well, of course, when I was in high school, I had pictures of the Beatles and the Monkees up in my locker." And Chris chimed in something about I also had hair down to my waist and wore polyester '70s clothes at a point when it wasn't really cool to do so.

And that's gotten me trying to describe what I was even like back then. (Not that I've changed so drastically. Just ask Ky.) I have never been able to find an adequate equivalent to me in movies and TV shows about high school students. (Okay, maybe if you took the anger and the goth hair from Janis Ian on Mean Girls, and combined that with some of Damien from that same movie, then you'd be pretty close...)

Some facts about what I was like:

• Of course, you've already had the physical description: super-long hair and thrift shop clothes. My grad dress was an early-'70s bridesmaid dress that I found at Value Village. The one day when I wore jeans (borrowed from my sister) to school, it caused such a stir that my English class had a discussion about their feelings about it.
• I was heavily, heavily involved in non-sports or drama extra-curricular activities. One concert choir that had several hundred members and where we did choreography. A chamber choir, and several vocal jazz groups. And I played flute in the band. And I was assistant editor of the yearbook. And I was in advanced classes.
• By the end of grade 12, I had my own school keys.
• University was a relief, because I wasn't so busy.
• Somehow, I became known as a "writer," to the point that I won a Creative Writing award, which is odd because my writing was frightening at the time. So very flowery. Of course, I also spent several years only reading books by L.M. Montgomery, and I thought that writing ought to be constantly describing sunsets and trees. (Okay, I'd recovered from the floweriness largely by grade 12, when I won the award, but I was really melodramatic in my writing still.)
• I co-wrote a play that my English class performed at our Advanced Class Medieval Feast.
• I was known to sing songs from musicals, and perhaps dance to them as well, in the band hallway. While I essentially wore leisure suits to school. Popular girls of the sort that dated the school quarterback hated me.
• I wasn't actually unpopular. I clearly wasn't a social misfit at my school, neither did I sit in back corners with people who took too many computer classes and roleplay in maniacal voices. I had a really diverse group of friends, some of whom were popular (but more in the "nice people that everyone likes" sense, and not in the "I'm going to enforce my reign of terror on this school through the powers of my plaid short skirts and hairspray" sense). Even though it was a really big school, I knew nearly everyone's names by grade 12. (Thanks to yearbook.)
• I was known for my abilities to get along with a lot of people, which is why I was assistant editor of the yearbook (I could be the liason to the other members of the club, and smooth over hurt feelings when the editor got too intense). I also ended up as the liason to our photographers, who were known to be high maintenance.
• Traditionally popular people disliked me, because I ignored their whole class system. But they avoided me, because they were afraid (in a respectful sense) of the ringleader of my group of friends, who told them all to leave me alone. I didn't know this until I was well into University. But it makes sense now why Barbie (head Mean Girl) and her quarterback boyfriend always seemed to be making out on my locker.
• Okay, so I would only refer to the Head Mean Girl as "Barbie," and openly discouraged my friends from running for SRC, "Because it's all a rigged popularity contest, and you don't want to even try to become like Them."
• In addition to all that, I saw myself as "outdoorsy." I was a Girl Guide until I turned 18, and asked for stuff like camp stoves for Christmas.
• Also, I got really high grades in maths and sciences. But also in English and Social Studies, of course.
• And, when I was grade 11, there were a few Grade 12 boys in my Geo-Trig class. The teacher put one of them, Giant Rugby Player, beside me because he kept talking to people in class. The teacher assumed that I was so shy and serious that I would be the person to sit next to Chatty Giant Rugby Player. Which is how I ended up being friends with him. We'd work together on assignments, and turn the diagrams for the assignments into crazy pictures involving spies.
• And my locker featured pictures of the Beatles, the Monkees, and the cast of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And a clothing tag that read "Je suis lavable."
• When we played a World War I simulation in grade 11 Social Studies (we were all assigned the roles of different countries involved in the Great War, and had to negotiate to try to avoid war), my Social Studies teacher was really, really excited to cast me as Kaiser Wilhelm II. (I lead the world in a war against Russia.) Also, when we did a mock inquiry into the fate of a National Park, they cast me as the head of a logging company. Somehow, my Social Studies teachers loved best to put me in the "evil" roles. "Because we like to watch you fight your way out of a corner," one of them said.

Who were you in high school? Would we have recognised you, back then?