Social media brings the world together. If you want to know that the real estate agent on main street has some upcoming openings, you can find that out on Instagram, if you want to know that the Tobotronc of Naturlandia in Andorra is the world’s longest mountain roller coaster, you can find that out on Instagram. I casually look at school social media pages, only to see if I made the cut of any photos. Usually nothing is too astounding. 

Leonardtown High School on social media is not a usual place to me. 

Besides the official school pages, the regular club pages or the student/class engagement pages, the unofficial offerings of my old Charles County stomping grounds, Matthew Henson Middle School & Henry E. Lackey High School are pretty inoffensive and general unofficial social media pages that any middle school or high school’s students would eventually get around to making, like fight pages and gossip pages. Anything more untoward just kinda died, because the student running it got promoted to high school, and in the high school, equivalent pages don’t seem to exist. But good ol’ L-Town, it truly is something special. I can type in “leonardtown”, “ltown” or “lhs”  and be treated to a wall of unofficial Leonardtown High pages that even if not active, just conceptually seem to be the brainchildren of people into some serious stuff. 

At Leonardtown, in the social media rabbit hole, there exists a page for looking at fellow Raiders enjoying a nap; a page back when masks we’re required of people wearing them below the nose; a really funny parody “business advice” account that posts hilarious memes of the Shark Tank cast and Mr. Copsey around the generic motivational quotes and not-really-practical business advice that entrepreneurship influencers tell their followers to sell them overpriced internet courses on how to trade, “get rich quick” or “claw their way to the top”. And it keeps going, a page for people wearing cool shoes, a page for people wearing ugly shoes; a page that is a shrine to the character from Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Rodrick; a page for hair found lying around or people with bad haircuts; a page for the school lunches appearing rather unappetizing; a page for people who look like they listen to metal music or are just gothic; a page, rating out of 10, the hands of kids in school… yup; a page dedicated to the fictional characters students tell the page they have crushes on; the gross stuff in the bathrooms; a page for rating the outfits of students; a fan page to Mr. Barbato; a page that finds plastic forks in and around the school in the weirdest places like inside the latch mechanism for double doors; a page for people with bad cars; a page for people who park terribly; a page for weird items someone found; and even a page for people to send pictures of their mother to, to give them a hot mom rating. Which is just… what person would give themself that responsibility? If someone’s mom does not look hot, but they and their mom think they do, do you publicly rate someone’s mom low and make them hate you? Or do you refuse to post it “to spare their feelings” but most likely by doing that still make them think that their mom wasn’t hot enough to post around the hot moms? You are just stuck in that situation. 

But certainly, the pages that are the weirdest to me, post the wildest things, and the ones that don’t make any sense to me are the confessional, (real human) crush confessional, and secret sharing pages. People are keeping some stuff bottled up deep inside of them. 

Or not. Because they are submitting it into a Google Form, that they understand is going to be posted to a public page, where anyone in the school, or really world will see it. I know that I could not voluntarily do that. Thankfully, it also seems well known that a lot of people most likely were putting themselves into crush confessionals and are probably exaggerating or joking about the kind of “secrets” that they would have otherwise put into the Form. Raiders are Raider Scholarly, they know enough to not wittingly destroy their own reputation in the way that the things on those pages-if they were genuine-totally could have. I’m slowly getting the feeling though that this finisher is really starting to pile on somebody if they actually put real things into the confessionals, and I’m not a fighter, so anybody who’s not small could snap my spine, so I think this is a good place to leave things.