I hate most things formal and Menlo-related but there’s special depth in the bowels of my hatred for homecoming. I’m pretty sure no one outside of student council or the most archaic faculty members actually enjoy when Homecoming roles around.
It’s usually a bad sign when you have to do research to figure out exactly what homecoming is celebrating. It feels like literally any other week had a “Homecoming” label slapped on it and some authority figure was like “let this week now be exciting!”. Well that’s kind of like smearing make up on a pig, homecoming is just any other week of school except with a lot more hollow fanfare but admittedly pretty dope spirit days. Homecoming is the whole return of the alumni thing so why is there so much unneeded extra stuff thrown at the students? Congratulations the alumni are back; lets have a bunch of stuff happen that literally has nothing to do with them! Spirit days they don’t see, class themes that will displayed on a float in-front of them for five minutes, a most likely forgettable football game, and a pep rally that no one should watch. The only overlap with alumni and students on homecoming is at the homecoming football game and even at that there’s no interaction, merely alumni remembering why Division four Football was so amazingly average to watch in the first place.
The pep rally singularly makes me want to slowly gouge out my eyeballs with rusty spoons. Shoving unenthusiastic students into as large a crowd as possible and then blaring a terrible fight song at them is the way to start a riot, not a pep rally. Realistically Menlo possess very little school spirit and the pep rally always ends up being a depressing representation of that. The same enthusiasm that the Sea of Gold embodies is completely absent in the pep rally because of a widespread “too cool to cheer” mentality that absolutely drenches these sort of events. Also, everyone knows we aren’t exactly a sports powerhouse so all the “go Menlo” and “Menlo rocks” cheers fall a little flat when you remember that the only sport we have to be proud of is boys tennis. Every time we get busloads of people to “Moccer” and no one shows up to one of the most dominant high school tennis teams the nation has ever seen I die a little bit inside.
The homecoming dance has typically been spectacularly average and the archetype of a Menlo dance in itself demands an entire opinion piece full of ranting so I’ll keep it short here. Our dances always boil down to ten square feet of people enjoying themselves and everyone else in a giant conglomerate blob standing around, trying to navigate the web of awkward sexual tension that defines high school dances. No one I know leaves a Menlo dance thinking, “wow I feel really emotionally fulfilled and unconfused as a result of these festivities!” I’d wager that we’d actually see a lot of people saying close to the exact opposite. Thanks Homecoming dance!
Homecoming should just be celebrations for just the returning alumni and it’s kind of sad that Menlo feels the need to make excuses for the student body to appear happier in an attempt to please the alumni. You’d think that a typical week at Menlo would remind them of their times here in a way that would be pleasing enough. Homecoming has become an overblown spectacle that gives student council something to organize. The alumni doesn’t care about half of it and the student body likes very little about it, why hasn’t it been scaled down yet? Between the painstakingly awful pep rally, the irrelevant football game, the ear-bleeding fight song, and the dance borne of satanic depths its a small miracle that people attend homecoming at all.
-Wes Miller
