Skip to content

Places Made of People: Thoughts from My Old High School

2017-10-20 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:40 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Everyday life (also: Personal life) · mode: Personal essay · tags: recurring series, on location

Revisiting Winter Park High School after 20 years, Hank describes a broad flood of memories and argues that some places are not their walls but the people who fill them; he wishes he had understood that and been a better steward of the place instead of being jaded.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Back at Winter Park High School; his old lunch spot

  • ★★ This week (week of 16 October 2017) Hank went back to Winter Park High School, a place of good times and bad times but mostly just times, an experience that doesn't fit well into his brain. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Some of Hank's old haunts are gone under new buildings, but his lunch spot remains, now covered in John Green tote bags, where he sat with geek friends doing math homework, glad to be beneath other groups' notice. — 00:00:13 · John Green

00:00:29 — Many feelings at once: memories and the size of the school

  • ★★ Going back was deeply weird: not one intense feeling but many at once, broad rather than deep, each place recalling things he hadn't thought of in years. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Hank's memories include a soda machine someone filled with salt water so it spat out free Mountain Dews, and sitting with a girl he had a crush on while she carved a peace sign into her ankle with an X-Acto knife. — 00:00:50
  • ★★ Hank says the school is massive: in his day three grades and 2,000 people, now over 4,000, with labyrinthine hallways and no distinguishing features. — 00:01:06
  • ★ No wonder Hank still has nightmares about wandering the campus unable to find his classroom; his head never made the school big enough for all those people. (playful) — 00:01:17

00:01:35 — The walkway his reading uses as a setting; the empty school as an insect husk

  • ★★ When reading books Hank puts real places into the books' settings, and this parking lot and walkway down to the school is where that happens most for him. — 00:01:35
  • ★★ Finding a door ajar, Hank finds the empty school uncanny, like the husk of an enormous insect that dies every night and is refilled with life every weekday at 7 a.m. — 00:01:50

00:02:09 — Places made of people; Hank wishes he had been a better steward

  • ★★★ Hank says the life that fills the school is what the place really is, not the empty shell. — 00:02:09
  • ★★★ Hank wishes he had brought more to the school: he did okay, but defined himself by what he hated rather than what he liked, thinking it cooler to be jaded than careful with other people. (hedged) — 00:02:17

  • ★★★ Some places are not themselves but the people they are filled with, unlike the rundown park by his house, more a place for floodwaters than people, which remains itself. — 00:02:35

    “Some places are not themselves. They are the people that they're filled with.”

  • ★★★ Winter Park High School is made of the people who inhabit it, so it becomes an entirely new place every three years or so. (hedged) — 00:02:50

  • ★★★ Maybe if Hank had understood that the place was its people, not its walls, he would have been a better steward of it; maybe that is true of all the places we inhabit. (hedged) — 00:03:04

00:03:07 — Sign-off and outtakes with the yearbook and a former band member

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Winter Park High School

Also: cynicism · Mountain Dew

Only in the description or credits: Thoughts from Places

← Previous: Look at Tiny Baby Hank · Next → Tour Bus Bus Tour