High School and stuff

MY SON ASKED IF HE COULD BORROW MY CAMERA.

He wanted to take pictures of one of his female friends -- one of his best bud's girlfriends -- playing soccer, or as the other-worlders call it in the great beyond, football.

Of course I said yes.

But as the pictures he and his friends took below suggest, and this is absolutely no surprise to me, 15-year-old boys may think they're turning into men but they're still boys, no matter how you look at it.

If they ever become men, it probably won't be until they're 30, if they're lucky.

Sure, he hooked up with his first "high-school" girlfriend in the first week.

She was a cute little thing, but I think far more than his tiny male brain, which probably contains about eight cells, could handle, control or otherwise with all those hormones hogging the spotlight.

They split after two days, I think, a record even in my books and estimation, because she was kind of playing him against one of his best friends, it appears. His head, as is often the case, exploded.

Friend or girl? Friend or girl?

I'm glad and proud of him that he chose friend. He has school to adjust to, and that's one thing. A girl that's going to drive him crazy? Uh-uh.

When he first told me about her, it was like, "Dad, I've never felt this way before about a girl. She's beautiful."

"Slow down," I told him before I drove them to their first movie together. "Things may not be what they seem to be."

Two days later, I would find out after the fact, they were history. He's single again, at least last time I heard.

Anyway, he seems fine now, back with his buds, and isn't that right for the Hill of Hormones that he is? So he took my camera. And this is what he and some of his friends saw and captured.

It doesn't surprise me one bit that the guys ended up on the swings and monkey bars and all that while the game wore on...

One final note to his first couple of weeks of high school.

The school is just a 5-minute walk from my apartment.

Well guess who hasn't been showing up here and eating me out of house and home while I'm at work and he's on a spare. And with at least one of his friends in tow.

They eat and eat and eat. Then they eat some more.

I've been filling up on goopy microwave fast food thingies like pizza and pasta, you know, those pre-packaged things that cost about $3 or $4 each.

Two apiece, they've been having. That's $12-$14 a day. And they've been eating my cold-cuts and anything else that's edible, if they can figure out how to cook it or slice it and dice it.

I love that he's coming here, despite the mess he leaves.

But I think I'M the one who's cooked.