650 Words

Vanessa Otero graduated from high school way back in the last century (1999). She was in my first-period AP Language and Composition class where she stood out for her sense of humor, levelheadedness, and analytical insight. Her post is about “adulting” and one of the things she talks about is taking advice from the right people. My first thought here is that Vanessa would be a really good person from whom to take advice. Why? Because in twenty year’s time Vanessa has chalked up a lot of life experience. Vanessa graduated from UCLA, where she earned a degree in English. Since then she has changed direction a number of times. Early on she thought she wanted to go to med school, but instead jumped into the world of sales (pharmaceuticals, real estate seminars) where she worked for several years. She then started taking law school classes at night (University of Denver) and eventually pulled off something that few have the temerity to do: a complete career switch. She is now a

Jeremy Kahan graduated in the class of 2014. I didn’t have him in my English class, but he was part of an epic Nature, Writing, and Solitude class. The photo below was taken in the San Jacinto wilderness, moments after we aborted a mission to summit Tahquitz Peak because it was too icy. Well, most of us turned back. Jeremy (on the right with the headband) and a few others made it to the top. We were about a half mile away from the summit when all of a sudden the trail was unbelievably icy. We were completely exposed, over an enormous dropoff at 8000 feet, and very quickly the situation had turned dangerous. Mr. Aiston and I started helping people retrace their steps. One kid wearing Vans (Jimmy Thompson) grabbed a tree and wouldn’t let go. We came to find that two or three of the faster hikers had separated and were out of yelling range, so Aiston went after them while I helped the rest of the crew shuffle-step back to safer ground. Jeremy summitted that day. He reached the

Grayson Lang graduated from high school in 2015. He was a strong student and a good class citizen, but the thing I remember most about him was the depth of his love for nature. When he was in my interim class (“Nature, Writing, and Solitude”), he ran the trails like a deer and yawped for all the world to hear on the top of Garnet Peak. When he was a student in my Honors English 12 class, he completed a capstone project about the role of nature in the contemporary world that included dozens of hours of video of his beloved Laguna Mountains. Grayson has not written a piece about nature here -- but, in a way, he has. The way I read it, he is writing about embracing your natural self. Transcendentalism 101. He has written the post in verse (a first for the blog), so the message is up for interpretation, but one thing that ties it to some previous entries, and indeed the entire 650 project, is the emancipation that comes with freeing yourself from the expectations of others.