Ode to my Catholic High School & Other Tragedies

Step One: Uniforms & Name-tag Games

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Dear Friend,

If you have taken it upon yourself to open this, I applaud you. You will never be able to undo what you have just done, so beware. Now you will find out the truth about those snotty, prep-school kids you hear about every so often. Just you wait and see. Read this completely through before you judge. Then tell me if I have successfully debunked your perception.

Yours truly,

xoxo

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Uniforms. Urban Dictionary defines it as "clothing that makes you free of judgements based on clothing by being constricting, uncomfortable, and generally ugly." I agree with all parts of their definition.

The word makes me shudder uncomfortably. I mean, my high school doesn't have the worst uniforms in the word, but nonetheless they're too strict for my liking. I will try to break it down for all of you clueless people out there. It's simple, really. Lands' End. All uniform clothing must be ordered through Lands' End. It's slightly annoying because if you order the wrong size, then you have to send it back through the mail and wait another couple weeks.

What's Allowed:

Girls: Khaki pants or gray or navy box pleat skirts must be 21 inches long or to the knee. (I had to get measured and get special dispensation to wear 19 inch skirts because I'm pretty short.)

Boys: Khaki pants.

Girls and Boys: Any color polo, button-up, fleece jacket, or sweatshirt from Lands' End.

Okay, not the end of the world. But get this, every piece of clothing must have either a "M" embroidered on it, or "Mary" for our high school. And no tennis shoes. Only dressy shoes like Sperry's and Birkenstock's.

What's Not Allowed, But Happens Anyway:

Girls roll their skirts so they are shorter. Depending on the amount of rolling, this can usually tell you a little bit about what type of girl you are dealing with.

Boys sag their pants, too, but I don't really know what effect that has on anything since shirts still have to be tucked in.

More often girls than boys, some students buy khaki pants from American Eagle or other stores. But, the prowling deans tend to be all over that sort of thing. I'm not sure why, since they look relatively similar. They only way the deans would be able to tell the pants are different is that tiny little eagle stitched on the butt pockets.

So it's a reasonable conclusion to make that the deans spend too much time staring at students' butts.

Well then.

Name-tags.

This was another daunting thing to me my freshman year. We have to wear these metal, magnetic name-tags that we clip onto our shirts everyday? What?

I felt two ways about this.

Firstly, wary. I thought that I would forget to clip on my name-tag every day before school. And if you were caught during school hours without a name-tag, then you'd have to serve an hour-long detention. That hasn't happened to me yet, and I'm 7 semesters in (that means I'm a second semester senior and almost out of this world of high school). Although I have gone through days making it several classes in before I realized I wasn't wearing it.

Secondly, it was nice. I was a freshman who didn't know anyone so this cheat way of knowing everyone's names was indeed a very helpful occurrence. Still is, when you forget names. Plus it always brings a smile to your face to notice your spastic teachers wearing their name-tags upside-down.

What I didn't foresee was the Name-tag Games.

It's a tragic thing really. Here's how it worked:

Your rectangular name-tag had two separate parts. The shiny side, engraved with your first and last name, and the backing which was a piece of magnetic metal strong enough to demagnetize a credit card. (Don't try it, from personal experience.) So the backing went in the inside of your shirt and held the shiny name part above the "Mary" embroidered below your left shoulder.

So, two parts. 

A student would walk up to another and grab the shiny half of the name-tag. This would cause the other part of the nametag to fall down the inside of the victim's shirt and into their pants since the shirts were tucked in. This was called "tagging." Mainly this was boys, but there were enough girls that I also had to be cautious. So freshies walked around with hands  covering their name-tags because if you lost yours, you had to buy a new one from the bookstore for 5 bucks. And that's no fun.

Now, this game was actually very entertaining. People wiggling in their clothes, trying to find out how far the name-tag had fallen inside their uniform. However, those scary deans were always on the look out for kids to give detention slips to, especially the taggers of the Name-tag Game.

After freshman year, the Name-tag Games abruptly stopped. Probably because us maturing kids realized that it really wasn't worth the hassle of an hour-long detention for getting caught.

I still tag my boyfriend sometimes, but he just rolls his eyes. I laugh though.