If you smoked it, please don't post it
What you do on the weekend is entirely your choice, but is it really necessary to pollute my newsfeed with selfies of you smoking a bong, popping open a beer or worst of all — posting a poorly photoshopped picture of yourself with not-really-questionable items hidden beneath those oh-so-classy kittens? It’s no secret that yes, our fellow peers have a high propensity for alcohol and marijuana, but it’s still illegal. And my fellow students’ gravitation towards the substances is fine by me. It’s just the incessant updates on their new endeavors with drugs that are irritating.Without even owning an Apple product that allows access to Instagram or having my own Twitter account, the amount of pictures I’ve seen would make anyone question Samo as a school and even our generation as a whole. Just through Facebook or the sly during-class share of a particularly scandalous post, I’ve managed to see countless pictures of our student body lighting up, passed out or just completely wasted.There’s already the assumption that teenagers are nothing more than sex-crazed druggies — why back up this theory with real tangible proof? By all means, go ahead and fulfill that stereotype on your own time, just don’t share it with the rest of the Internet — it’s a big place.Of all the people to show your pictures to, why choose the entire world? By posting them online, people who post these kinds of pictures of themselves are simply begging to be caught by the authorities, or worse — college admissions officers.Getting caught by college admissions could screw up your only chance at your college of choice. No matter how quickly you post and delete just to brag about your amazing, beyond-cool life as a doped up teenager, those pictures will always be online somewhere; it only takes a second for someone to screenshot an indecent picture. Colleges are just waiting to dig up that kind of dirt on kids — it makes their job a lot easier.“Admissions officers do check [students’] Facebook pages,” college counselor Julie Honda said. “If you’re a good kid and you get straight As and what not, why would you post pictures of yourself drinking and smoking? The same thing applies to a job, so can it affect you? Absolutely.”Posting these pictures really is just a mechanism to brag about what you do outside of school. To show everyone how above it all you are by escaping the woes of high school life. You may as well be shouting, “I drink alcohol and smoke weed!” from rooftops and expecting people to see you as accomplished, rather than as a nuisance.Bragging about a crazy weekend you may not even remember is pointless, when you think about it. If you don’t remember what you did last night, odds are, I don’t want to be privy to that information.So by now some of you are probably wondering why I don’t just unfollow or de-friend these reckless classmates of mine and carry on with my life? The reason is that I care more about your intentions and the bigger-picture repercussions of posting the pictures than my annoyance at viewing them. This is about more than a single student’s irritation, it’s about what the acts could reflect about a whole generation.The fact that high school students experiment with alcohol and drugs is widely known, and I’ll be the first one to openly embrace that truth. But Samo, while we may not be above the influence, we can definitely be above putting pictures up online that show just how influenced we really are.(schetty@thesamohi.com)