Chris Paludi seems incredibly tense. Every movement the 17-year-old makes while sitting in the plush chairs of Catalina Coffee Company, from leaning forward to taking a drink from his Nalgene water bottle, seems to take a great deal of conscious effort.
“Yeah…I’m pretty high strung,” he said.
Paludi is a senior at Redondo Union High School and likely one of the busiest students both on and off campus. He’s the student member of Redondo Unified School District’s Board of Education, for the second year in a row; he’s the opinion editor for Redondo Union’s award-winning High Tide student newspaper; he’s taking a full load of Advanced Placement classes; he’s active with the school’s Student Body; he participates in Model UN; and he is constantly thinking.
It makes sense that his favorite author is David Foster Wallace, the celebrated writer who gained fame on the back of his thousand-page-plus tome “Infinite Jest,” and held onto it as a writer of thoughtful, funny, soul-aching prose. As with Wallace, Paludi is incredibly self-aware — and just a bit intense.
“I do a fair amount with my time, and I’m taking more things on in my senior year, which is burning me out,” he said. Paludi said that most people think of their high school experience in one of two ways: that it is its own experience that has to be lived through for its own sake; or that it is a means to an end that has to be packed with as much extracurricular experience as possible in order to get into college.
“The people who think that aren’t wrong — that’s the way it’s set up,” he said. “In that sense, I definitely hindered myself going forward with those first two years of high school; I could’ve had an entirely different experience.”
Those first two years were marred by introversion and depression. Though help was offered to him, he said he maneuvered around it. “I think that when someone experiences that intensity of emotion, that intense sadness, introspection is inevitable — the approach to me was to think about it, rather than through rebellion, or taking up punk music, or any of the cliches of raging against the world,” he said.
So, he delved inward and, to an extent, that began to work for him. He identified what he felt was holding him back, tried to find answers to his issues.
He also cites Wallace’s “This Is Water” commencement speech, given to Kenyon College’s 2005 graduating class, as a major influence on his worldview — so much so that he’s written it, over and over again, on his arm…in Latin.
The address focuses on the themes of community empathy and conscious awareness of the world, which struck a chord with Paludi, who said he was affected by those sentiments more than anything he’d previously read, other than Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.”
“I appreciate the value of being conscious and realizing that everyone around me is an individual with their own life, doing the best they can to achieve happiness — that the world isn’t mine and that it doesn’t exist to serve me, but that we’re all trying to do the best for ourselves,” he said.
Here, he pauses, introspection taking over again, worrying that he’s coming off as “holier than thou.”
“I have to admit that I’m a little pretentious — but I think I’m allowed to have a few character flaws,” he said.
The turning point of his high school career came when he began joining student clubs, getting involved with campus organizations and creating relationships. “That’s when Redondo became a home for me. I was proud to be a Sea Hawk, whereas freshman year, I wished I was anywhere else,” he said.
Now, he believes that the level of involvement a student has on campus has a direct relation to their quality of life in school and that a student with roots will find his or her place.
Redondo Beach, he’s found through his work in the school and the community, is good grounds for those roots. Though he’s not without concerns for the area’s future.
“This city is a tremendous place for people to live and kids to grow, but I think that enrollment at the high school might be an issue if we continue to be a destination district — which we will be… “We have to take a hard look at our future and plan ahead a little bit. Voters have been tremendously generous with voting in bonds and we need to repay that trust by making sure there’s a future for our kids where everyone has a seat and everyone has the same level of care and attention that they have now.”
It should be no surprise that Paludi has considered a future in politics. He’s taken numerous trips to the State Capitol with local organizations and he’s worked with State Senator Ben Allen’s office as an intern. He’s also watches White House Press Sessions on C-SPAN.
“But I don’t know if I could be a representative — so many elected officials seem like they’re unhappy, or not themselves. They seem forced…I know that I will never run for office as anyone other than myself,” he said. “I would rather lose an election as myself than win it as some of my advisors tell me to be.”
But that’s in the far distance. Before that comes college. His primary concern is finding a school that that is affordable.
“My family is by no means wealthy, so I want to leave them in a position where they can send my brother (Colin, a freshman at RUHS) to college as well. Even if I get into fantastic schools, I don’t want to preclude him from any opportunities,” he said. Once there, he’s considering English language and literature, journalism, or public policy.
Right now, he’s concerned about making sure his relationships hold together, even with the glut of work on his plate.
“I’m worried that I can’t give 100 percent to everything I’m committed to,” Paludi admitted. “I’ve been through hell, and I’m still here, which means that burning out, at worst, means I’m not getting a lot of sleep.”
But if a lack of sleep is all he has to deal with, he’s fine with that.
“I take every day reasonably seriously — simultaneously whimsically, but also seriously. I want to enjoy what I’m doing,” he said. “Days are finite, and there is a day where there will be no more days. I don’t believe in wasting time and I believe that, whether I’m doing nothing, or a lot of something, I should try to make sure that I’m doing my best to make sure it’s time well spent.”
