[UPDATED 10/19 2:25 AM] – All right, I can say now with conviction that NNHS has the cheapest (in a bad way) Homecomings ever! Not only is there no elaboration of the theme (beyond flimsy the freshmen and key club creations), there are no safe storage places, no projector showing cool stuff (WWS had a decent one), cheap decorations, crappy ventilation, and OVERPRICED tickets. Big time overpriced ($30 at North vs. $20 almost everywhere else). WWS had all the things I listed… including amazing decorations–relatively, and then towards the end of the dance, there was a special song dedicated to seniors for their last homecoming where they all gathered in a circle facing inwards. It was really cool, even though I wasn’t part of the class, I could see that this was one of those special moments when all experiences, the good and the bad, are treasured experiences, the class that grew up together now in their last few months. I am a definite sucker for these “last time” things–last first day, last dance, last winter break…etc–I just like to see these things accentuated officially like this. And then all the decorations came down–I mean literally. Oh AND they had the national anthem as their benediction song, it sounded really good and I thought that was awesome.

I remember what happened at the end of our dance… after the last dance (which btw was still awesome), the music stopped, the lights turned on, and then everyone just walked out. So meaningless as if… it was nothing. If Naperville North had what WWS had at the end… I would have seriously been in a jovial ecstasy.

That said… the atmosphere of the NNHS homecoming was far more engaging that at WWS–at South, a lot of people just stood around, moseying, standing, chatting in little groups, and otherwise not dancing. Maybe the music wasn’t loud enough, but you could always hear the constant buzz of chatter (except when one of the massively catchy songs are on–i.e. Get Low)–got kind of annoying, but it was okay, made everything seem to be in the background, so that self-conscious us could do whatever we wanted. At one point, I grabbed a huge cluster of balloons and I tried to dance with them sandwiched between me and Tiff–didn’t work too well, so I just threw it into the crowd–they loved it and it bounced around above everyone’s heads for the remainder of the dance! Oh and the balloons were the COOLEST that I’ve ever seen at a dance. Too many variations to explain, they were just awesome, and fit very well into the theme “We’re in Heaven”–with the theme song being “Heaven” (yes the one sung by DJ Sammy). Oh but the DJ wasn’t that great–the song selection was… kind of out there, and the speakers were wimpy. A lot of the songs had a heavy beat, virtually all of them were technoized–and being an all-white school, no one had glow sticks, and those that did had NO idea what to do with them. If only I had the raving skills… I would have SO liked to show them how it’s done–set the image of Asians right. Which brings me to another topic–Asians in WWS.

I‘ve found out that Asians just seem to have a bad social image. They are either known as study slaves, or just… the pathetic underclass–either way, heavily stereotyped and unbalanced. Even worse, the Asians there seemed very condescending of their Asian-ness, this one girl even went so far as to say that she would never date an Asian guy, because “all Asian guys were retards”. The root of this problem is the lack of Asians at WWS. There just aren’t enough to make an wide identity for themselves, so they become unbalanced in personality, and end up doing a lot of injustice to their race by creating stereotypes. The Asians seemed to be polarized to one of two extremes–the ‘traitor of race’ type, who may go as far as to berate Asians to fit in with the dominating white majority, and the ‘freak’ types, those that just act really weird, probably stemming from a need to express themselves; both of which corroborates the stereotypes of conformity and/or inferiority. Not their fault… but still a huge minus to the image of Asians. At least I can still be myself and know that my identity is secure. Sometimes we don’t realize how being Asian at NNHS shapes who we become–I would probably be a totally different person if my high school career was at WWS. Few things match up to a diverse student population in creating well-balanced kids.

To sum everything up… it was great, and if I could somehow swap all the people, and the DJ, our NNHS HC would have been so much better! I didn’t get any pictures… really really disappointed about that. Still, a great end to the Homecomings of 2003–well worth it all.