"Fragile, like a bay-beeeee in your aaaaaaaaaarms"

Yes, I've been working at the microscope and listening to Depeche Mode again. They say scent is the sense most streongly linked to memory. It certainly can be an evoker of memories. Tea Rose perfume alwasy reminds me of my Gramma. A certain face powder of my mom. Manhattan has a smell. Certain colognes remind me of old boyfriends. But songs can also be strongly linked to memories, images, and emotions.

Listening to DM, my mind wandered from work, and images of high school began popping in my head. I started really listening to music in high school, so I have a lot of associations with music from that time. My high school had a diverse mix of race and class. I grew up in the Tri-State Area, about 70 miles away from NYC. Although many of the towns surrounding us were predominantly white and upper-middle to upper class, my town had a good mix of people. A couple of generations before mine, many Italian and Portuguese families settled there. In my generation and the one before mine, many refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos came to our area.

We had interesting cliques, although kids tended to stay together based on race and language. We had the preps - mostly white, blond-haired girls, and the boys from football and soccer. We had the band geeks. We had the burnouts. We had the skaters. We had the alternative/punk kids. They were the most interesting to me. I listened mostly to alternative music (DM, erasure, The Cure, The Smiths, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242) but wasn't hard-core enough to qualify truly alternative. As much as the real punks tried to disassociate from the preps, they were just as exclusive and snotty. A good bunch of them came from well-off families and wore really nice (although dark and gothy) clothes.

I never really fit into any clique. Several of my friends were in the band, so I hung around with a good number of band geeks. I also was friendly with some of the burnouts and alternatives. I was in mostly "smart" classes, so I knew a lot of the other smart kids but honestly felt intimidated by some of them.