Eleventh grade, the year everything sped up

If tenth grade was the year my life moved onto a message board, eleventh grade was the year the rest of it caught up and started moving fast. In a single year I started learning to be a software developer for real, got a job, got a permit and then a license and then a car, watched Steam and World of Warcraft arrive and reshape how I played, and kept running DragonSiblings through all of it. It is the hinge year. This is where the kid who turned it around in eighth grade started turning into the person I actually am.

Tech school

The biggest change was that, in the Wentzville district, juniors could spend half of each day at a technical school. They would load us onto a bus and drive us over to the St. Charles district’s Lewis and Clark Career Center, which ran real vocational programs: auto service, construction trades, health occupations, retail and business, and, the part I cared about, computers. There were two computer tracks, software and hardware, and I took software. By that point, between teaching myself web stuff since fourth grade and then running an entire forum, I already knew I wanted to build software for a living, and this was the first place that treated that like a real career instead of a hobby.

The setup had a wrinkle. You could take hardware then software, or software then hardware, or, if you wanted, software twice. I wanted software twice. The classes mixed juniors and seniors, and the second year just held the seniors to a higher bar, so signing up again meant a different curriculum, not a repeat. I will save the senior-year version for its own post, because senior year is when that class got good. Junior year, it was a circus.

The teacher that first year was a woman who told us she was ex-Navy, and I will leave it at this: she was not well suited to the job. She slept in class. She was not especially clean. And she spent most of her energy in a losing war against kids playing video games. Some students signed up for the class purely because they had heard it was easy and you could goof off when your work was done, and she kept clamping the computers down tighter and tighter so nobody could install or run anything. The thing is, the school shared that room between a morning group from one set of districts and our afternoon group, and somebody in the morning class found the crack. There was a dedicated computer at a round table running the laser printer as a shared print server, and its drive was wide open on the network. So people just installed all our favorite games onto the print server and ran them straight off the mounted drive, because Windows did not care. She could not figure out how we were still playing, locked everything down again, and lost anyway. Eventually she more or less gave up, slept in the back, came in late, missed days, and by the end of junior year she had been fired. A brand-new teacher showed up for senior year, and that is a much better story for later.

A handful of us actually did the work the whole time, which made the class genuinely easy for me, since I was already deep into all of this from DragonSiblings. I even remember floating the idea to a computer teacher that I might want to be a database engineer someday, and getting told, flatly, not to, that the job was miserable and paid badly. Years later, at the grocery company’s corporate office, I watched the Oracle database people make a fortune, and thought about that advice every time. The early SQL I picked up keeping the forum alive turned out to be one of the most valuable things I ever learned.

A note I have to put somewhere

Tech school is also where I met people from all over St. Charles County, kids from schools I would never have crossed paths with otherwise. My friends Mandy and Erica were from that class. A guy named Keith sat next to me all year and I always wanted to be better friends with him than I managed to be. There was a strange little trio of two sort-of-goth guys and their very preppy friend in his Aeropostale. And there was Zach. More than a few of these tech-school friends, Mandy and Erica included, ended up on DragonSiblings too, which is how that little board kept absorbing every corner of my life.

Zach and I were the same age, both bound for the senior class too, and we talked about World of Warcraft constantly. The next year we became real project partners with a pile of funny stories I will get to. We stayed in touch for a little while after high school, over MSN and in the game, and then my life took off and his went wherever it went, and the threads we were connected by, the messenger, the game, all quietly went away, and we lost each other.

For Zach. I am breaking my own rule about full names here on purpose. Zach, if you are out there and you ever search your own name and land on this, please reach out. There has genuinely not been a year since tech school that I have not wondered how you are. I would love to know you are doing well, and I would love to play a game with you again sometime. The door is open.

The shrunken schedule

Because tech school ate the whole afternoon, a double block, my regular schedule shrank to almost nothing: just a few classes plus seminar. I actually still have the proof, because I posted my schedule on the forum that August. It was English III, Math 145, American History, seminar, and then the tech-school block. Having only two or three classes a day felt deeply weird at first. I wrote at the time that I would walk into math and think, wait, this is not real school, why am I being asked for the answer to number three.

Math, as ever, was its own saga. By junior year I had fallen far enough behind from my early math disasters that I was working through it well below where a “normal” track would put me, and I could feel the social weight of that. The district even had an off-ramp, a remedial business-math path for the kids who had kept failing, easy stuff with no real algebra, and I did not take it. I kept doing the real thing. The one mercy that year was a genuinely kind math teacher, a man, the first male math teacher I ever had, which after the teacher who would not give me a single point felt like sunlight. It is worth knowing, too, that my high school banned calculators almost completely. The only time you touched one was to learn graphing, never to actually compute. So I learned to do all of it in my head, by sheer necessity, and I can still do math in my head faster than people expect.

American History was secretly a politics class, all about how the modern American system actually works, and it gave me one of my favorite small memories. There was a school tax levy in the air, the kind of vote that decides whether a district gets more funding, and somebody wanted to make it harder for districts to pass them. A forum friend named Christina and I, both firmly in favor of our school getting money for better classrooms and better computers, built a deliberately, absurdly over-named campaign against the proposal, a banning against the banning of school tax levies, an acronym so tangled we said it out loud as one ridiculous word. We made a poster for it. And we misspelled a painfully simple word right on the front, on purpose, so that when we presented it and the whole class pointed out the typo, we could say: exactly, this is why we cannot cut school funding, there are kids like us out here who need it. We thought we were hilarious. I maintain that we were.

A license and a paycheck

This is the year I got mobile and got paid, which together changed everything about what I was allowed to do.

The permit came first. I passed the test on September 21, 2004, with an 88, which I announced to the forum with appropriate dignity (“I GOT MY PERMIT FINIALLY”). I got my actual license around my seventeenth birthday the next spring, and that April I got my first car, a Chevrolet Corsica that I loved unreasonably despite it being, by any honest measure, a wreck. Manual windows, manual seats, no CD player, just an empty rectangle where one used to be, and at one point an actual missing window. It was glorious. It gets its own post someday.

The job came at the same time. I had started at Schnucks that summer, bagging groceries, and for the first time in my life I had my own money. That detail matters more than it sounds. My parents were never, ever going to pay for an online game subscription, and now they did not have to, and could not complain about it either, because it was my money to spend. The grocery store is a whole arc of its own, bagger to bakery to, eventually, a corporate web-developer internship, and each piece deserves its own telling. But this is where it starts.

Steam, Half-Life, and Warcraft

The wider world of games cracked open this year too. In November 2004, Valve released Half-Life 2, the first game ever that you could not play without an account on a new service called Steam. I had somehow never played a Half-Life game, so I had no nostalgia, just the hype, and when I finally downloaded Steam and then the game, I fell completely in love. I have played all of them since, Portal included, and I am still sitting here in 2026 drumming my fingers for a real ending to either series.

Steam itself felt like science fiction. You could just buy and download a game, legally, right now, from your room. Before that, finding games meant a trip to a big-box store to buy a box with no reviews on it and hope. I will be honest that, as a kid with no money, I had done my share of pirating, music in middle school, then software in high school, especially expensive Adobe tools I genuinely needed to learn for where I was going, back before student discounts and free trials were a thing. Steam was part of what pulled me toward doing it the legitimate way, and the new paycheck was the other part.

The soundtrack

I got my first iPod that year, one of the little Shuffles, which held maybe a dozen songs and let you do nothing but shuffle them. I would clip it on, put in the white earbuds everyone had, and sleep through the bus ride to tech school and back, those twenty-minute power naps I lived for.

What was on it is the part I am proudest of, because it made no sense at all. That fall, Diana and I went deep on Malice Mizer, this dramatic Japanese band, and I would blast their remixes for whole mornings. By spring, thanks to my friend Mike, I was all in on Green Day’s “American Idiot,” enough to chase down tickets and make it to the concert that June with My Chemical Romance opening. In between there was Yellowcard, Incubus, KoRn, Eiffel 65, and a steady undercurrent of Italian dance music I was using to teach myself the language. A kid in the middle of Missouri listening to Italian europop and Japanese rock back to back. People tend to lock into one kind of music and stay there, country people or rock people, and I just never did. I love europop and trance and happy hardcore and punk and rock and Enya and ABBA and, eventually, Lady Gaga, and even Yanni, my dad’s favorite. Junior year is around when I stopped being embarrassed about that and started being glad.

Junior year was the accelerator. Tech school pointed me at the career I still have. The job and the car and the license made me, for the first time, a little bit independent. Steam and Warcraft set the shape of how I would play for years. And underneath all of it, every night after the bus dropped me off and I changed and drove to work and came home, DragonSiblings was still there, still mine, still home.