Seanna Sousa:
CLASS OF 1984
Lake Mary High SchoolClass of 1984
Lake mary, FL
Seanna's Story
Update in 2022: Damn, I rambled on whenever I did this first essay. 2009 or so? Well, we still live in Tennessee, but in Knoxville now. I am still married. To the same person. I still have the same three children. They are all grown up and doing well. I got a graduate degree and a new career and I could not love it more. Sometimes I'm sad it's Saturday and it would be weird for me to go to the office. We now live in a 100+ year-old house in a historic neighborhood near downtown Knoxville and I love it. Best place I have lived as an adult, hands down. Although I am still a huge introvert, I know lots of my neighbors and we get into all sorts of trouble. It makes the papers a lot. As a neighborhood collective, we can be feisty.
I uploaded a photo from 2021. We threw caution to the wind and flew to the UK at the height of the pandemic. I was a huge Genesis fan in high school, to make it somewhat topical and audience-specific, and we saw them in concert just a few days before Mike Rutherford (the guitarist) caught COVID and they had to cancel the rest of their UK tour until just a few months ago. That photo was taken by my husband at the Gladstone Library in Wales, where we stayed because we are huge nerds. Well, my daughters and I are. My husband is not really a nerd. Two daughters joined us for that concert, one traveling with us from Knox and one flying in from Japan. That daughter is a Lieutenant in the Navy. She was stationed in Japan at that time but now is stationed in San Diego, which is excellent for me because I love California and now I have a place to stay. I'm sure it's great for her, too :). Then a couple months after that trip we saw Genesis again in...Pittsburgh. Hey, Pittsburgh is awesome. So was Genesis x2. We don't usually do stuff like that but it felt like the pandemic was daring us to, so we did, and lived to tell the tale. We now have a Great Pyrenees. His name is Jed Barklet. We have some cats, too. My husband used to work outside the house in an office and I worked from home and was a hermit for at least a couple decades, but now the tables have turned and he is mostly home-based and I am at an office. I still am a huge nerd (I see I described that below) and I consider my office an auxiliary stationery and office supplies storage depot. I guess that's enough of an update for now. Except that I find it hilarious to see the yearbooks that I was very involved in creating being hawked on this site. Hilarious and weird.
Let's see, what to say to people who last knew me when I was about 17 years old. Hmmm. I've been married for a lonnnnnnnnnnnng time. Since 1984, actually. We have three daughters, an almost-20-year-old and twins who will be seniors this year. We live in Middle Tennessee, not too far from Nashville. I am pretty much just about as boring now as I probably was in high school. I work at home, have since forever. We lived in FL, then DE, which I loved, then TN for a short while, then TX (where the twins were born), and then back to FL until late 2005, when I finally got my wish and we moved to TN, I think having sold out near the height of the real estate bubble/boom. We lived in De Leon Springs, FL and now we live in a pretty small college town of about 25,000 people (I think). I love it here. The leaves turn a riot of colors and because (apparently) Tennesseans are afraid of snow, we have like 15 snow days per year, and maybe 8 inches total of snow to go along with it. We live in a big 1970s unpretentious house at the top of a hill, and you can't see the house from the street most of the year. We have a dog and some cats, and just got a new kitten (July 2009). We hosted an exchange student for about 5 months this past winter/spring and are getting another one at the Nashville airport in a few days. The last one was Austrian; this one is German.
We like to do home improvement/decorating type stuff, like to travel (coming up is the Brady Bunch Grand Canyon Tour in October 2009 so we can show The German some of the sights, with the reason for the trip being that one of the girls is a candidate for the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs), and I like to putter around when I am not working. We have a houseful of people almost all the time, including the children, boyfriends, my mom, soon The German, and right now, my husband's brother, who is a drummer for two country bands. I still read all the time and am not that interested in TV except for maybe West Wing reruns and some of the MDK (Murder Death Kill) shows. Our animals are mostly named after WW characters: Leo, Sam and now Charlie (new kitten). We are getting ready for life after (minor) children, which will start next year. I expect they will still be around quite a bit, though. We have lots of fun together and they are great girls. Except when they are rotten girls, which fortunately is not too often.
Let's see. This is our third...Expand for more
house, and it's the third one we've remodeled to make a space for my mom. We have it down to a science now, I think. Last summer we finished renovating the attic, which is now a bedroom and a sort of Teen Cave for their video games and stuff. I'm sure I've done something interesting in the past 25 years, but at the moment not that much comes to mind. I have managed not to get arrested so far.
I'm supposed to be talking about how great my life is, right? And how we have shiny plastic lives? Like characters on the Disney Channel? Yeah, well no. That's all a bunch of crap anyway. Why do I want to impress a bunch of people I haven't seen in 25 years? I suppose I could tell you all sorts of neat things about my life, and some would even be true, but basically we are happy, the children are healthy (and we are VERY proud of them) and productive, and I like to make sure I always have gum, but I don't really like to chew it because I'm still just as uncoordinated as I was in high school, and that even extends to the function of my mandible. Sam The Cat is passed out on the floor next to me, and I am procrastinating before starting my part-time gig, which is something that fell in my lap but which I am afraid to turn down lest the flow of money dry up and we find ourselves on the stimulus poverty breadline or whatever they've been spending all that on. My middle child (by one minute) is in the next room on the computer finishing her summer Economics class, which she had to take because her academic schedule next year was too full to fit this required-to-graduate class. She is in the IB program. So was the almost-20-year-old. She actually got the diploma, one of 4 who managed it the year she graduated (out of 7, so don't get too excited). She is actually at the doctor right now because the shot of antibiotics they gave her last week seems not to have done the trick. Does it make me a bad mother that I sent her by herself? Come on, she is almost 20. She needs to get with it at some point, right? The youngest (by one minute, although I also like to gross them out and horrify them by saying they are technically the same age since they were conceived at the exact same time hahaha sorry) is at running camp. She actually wanted to go. Don't know about that. She will be on the varsity Cross Country team this year, I think.
Yah, this is a pretty good way to procrastinate. I should have thought of it a long time ago. Let's see, what else? I told you I've been married forever, right? I have been working at my current job for almost 3 years. I do regular boring job stuff mostly but I also train the new people and fill in for the boss when she is out. I kind of don't like that because those are the days I have to go to the office, but they compensate me well for it, so I suppose I should not complain. It's a very nice company, I have no complaints. It won't set the world on fire but at this point in the history of the US economy I'm feeling pretty good about just keeping a little fire fairly well stoked. Plus, the cost of living here is fairly miniscule, so it's all relative, right?
Gosh, the last 25 years, summed up in one text box with 13117 characters remaining. Well, I like Christmas a lot. We always set up at least two trees and I collect Radko ornaments but only at the rate of one or two a year because I can't be one of those hoarder people and believe me, I have those tendencies. I also try to collect a deck of cards from wherever we visit. I just bought a car off Ebay recently and we drove to Long Island and back to little Middle Tennessee in exactly 48 hours. I found a deck of cards that said "I love Intercourse (PA)" so those came home with me. I have a whole bowl full of them but really, the idea of playing cards makes me want to blow my brains out because my old-fart relatives used to play cards all night long when we would visit Massachusetts (another concept that makes me want to end it all) over Labor Day weekend. Between the cards and the Jerry Lewis telethon, bad memories. But good mementos. Now that I think about it, what the hell am I doing with the card collecting? My husband says I'm "complex," which I think is probably a pretty bad insult that he thinks he is getting away with.
OH and I have a thing about scrapbooks. I make them, I collect old ones, I collect scrapbook supply crap and other paper crafting supplies. I have a whole room for the stuff. Yup, I'm one of those people. You don't know what you're missing, that's all I can say. I have a few really neat old ones and am always looking for more. I guess that sorta relates to how I was in high school with the whole yearbook gig, huh? Oh and Kathy Johnson, again, I am so sorry that your name got omitted from the colophon of the 1984 yearbook. I still feel bad about that and I know I apologized at the time and maybe even at UCF later on but it's worth apologizing again.
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