look at this photograph. every time i do it makes me laugh.

i've been useless at everything this summer, and that includes blogging. so i'm going to ignore the fact that i only wrote nine posts this month (a few of which shouldn't really even count) and expand a formspring question's answer into a post. okay? okay. so anonymous asked me to write about something serious that seems funny when i look back on it. i'm just going to go with the first thing that popped into my head. if you were with me in high school, especially in my AP History class, then you can probably just skip this post and hope that i write something else in the next day or two.

we started out junior year with Dr. Donald Senese as our AP History teacher. he was a really awesome, totally over-qualified man. google him and see for yourself. (or just be a lazy bum and click here.) anyway, sometime during october i think, we were supposed to have a chapter test. we get to class and wait for him to show up, which he doesn't. a substitute comes in, acting really weird. i don't remember exactly, but i think she passed out the test before she told us anything. anyway, a little into the period, we are told that our teacher had a heart attack while driving the night before and had died before he got to the hospital. there's a moment of shock and then we all start crying. for the rest of the day, the five of us from the class would barely talk to anyone, we would get into arguments with other teachers who weren't as upset over his death as we felt they should be, we would slam lockers, shed tears, and a bunch of other things to show how deeply mournful we were over this man who we had known for a little over a month's death. we went to his wake a few days later and met his family. we then decided that we should do something for his wife and somehow came up with the idea of making her a build-a-bear of senese. don't ask me how or why. anyway, we never actually got around to making her the bear, but the idea stayed in our head.

after his death and before they could find a replacement for him, we had a temporary teacher, Mr. Kern. we loved him... he was an amazing teacher. he stayed with us for about a month before leaving us to Mr. Rodgers (who needs an entire series of posts to himself if i were to attempt to do justice to the hilarious memories i have of this man. suffice it to say that the week before the AP exam we were coloring buffaloes in class). anyway, after kern left us to continue his job as vice principal of the boys' school or something, we made him the mr. senese bear and gave it to him. one of my friends even wrote "help us!" on the box to properly convey how much we missed having him teach us. he left us a note thanking us for the bear and saying it sat on his mantle, but i think we scared him with our obsessiveness. i'm pretty sure he avoided all of us after that.

anyway, going through that whole ordeal seemed dramatic at the time, but whenever i think back on it i can't help but laugh at all of us.

(and i had a better title for this thing but i cant for the life of me remember the song and google isn't helping.)

*Photograph - Nickelback