I watched Napoleon Dynamite with my wife again a couple of nights ago. It's hard to believe it's ten years old - and that that puts it at the halfway point between the present and my senior year of high school. I love the movie; I'm able to laugh at a character that clearly bears an uncomfortable resemblance to my own high-school self, at least in his emotional experiences, if not necessarily in other ways. I always wonder how my classmates experienced high school. Was it fun for them? Painful? Boring? I see my own experiences reflected in Napoleon: awkward, uncertain, socially inept, confused about the world, vaguely aware of social status but not really understanding how it worked, feeling threatened by bullies and desperately holding onto the friends I knew I could trust. The strongest memories are often the most ambiguous: emotionally charged but unresolved. Did I miss an opportunity there? Or did I successfully avoid making a horrible blunder? Did I stand my ground in self-respect? Or did my stubbornness make a bad situation worse? It's hard to say; my memories are incomplete recollections of situations I didn't really understand in the first place. Friday night sitcoms told me situations should be quickly resolved, with a lesson learned all around, but for me, situations were left in an open-ended limbo, sometimes for months or even years before they were revisited, and the only lesson was that of patient endurance until I could graduate and leave my past behind for a college where nobody knew me.