By: JULIA SUDOL
Many of us Carmel High School students have lived in this small town of tourist shops, wine tasting and all-things Clint Eastwood for our whole lives, and throughout our years in high school, we have become accustomed to habits that we don’t realize are exclusive to our own campus.
First and foremost, some of you may have noticed (while most of you haven’t) that CHS has shifted from plastic water bottles to paper boxed water. Our school sells boxed water.
The first time I saw the white milk-carton-looking container with “BOXED WATER IS BETTER” labeled with bold black letters was while scrolling through Tumblr, where it was seen as environmentally chic. All of a sudden, Instagrammers would go into Whole Foods to get their hands on this overpriced compound of life in order to snap a photo and hope for likes and heart-eye emojis.
Now students casually buy it from the cafeteria and take it from one class to another. How much more boujee can our school get?
With the growing popularity of water, comes the battle of the bottles. Students walk around campus carrying their water bottles like accessories. Half of them swing around their Swell bottle, whether it be holographic or tropical, while the other half swing around their Hydro Flask in all different colors and sizes.
CHS students can afford spending over $30 on a water bottle, but believe it or not, most high school students simply keep a stainless steel—or God forbid—a plastic water bottle in their backpack without showing it off every second of every day.
After school, once students get their fix of whatever fancy-shmancy water they please, they resort to cramming into a car with their friends and driving down the all-too-famous Ocean Avenue in order to take another left onto Scenic Drive, spending the next 30 minutes shuffling through Spotify with all the windows down—aka beach drives.
Now, driving around blasting music is a common phenomenon for teenagers, but driving around the same road over and over again is not. The view is impeccable—there’s no doubt about that—but do yourself a favor and change up the route a bit. I guarantee the experience will be just that much better.
At the end of the week, Carmel teenagers double their beach drive time, and after hours of contemplating on what movie to see, aimlessly driving around with nothing to do and not much to say, the car ends up in the Safeway parking lot by 10 p.m.
At this point, CHS students have found a way to make this exciting, but to the teenager observer from Southern California, we must seem like losers.
