The One Insult I Have Never Suffered

Tor: Do you ever wonder why nobody cool wants to hang out with you?

Buffy: Just thankful.

~ "The Pack"


Setting: Class in eighth grade that will go unnamed to protect the bitchy. We had assigned seats in unsaid class, but luckily I sat right in front of Krysi, so we could talk and pass notes much more easily.

To my right sat a girl whom I will call Sheila. Sheila was in the popular crowd. Yes, even in a school of -3, we had a popular crowd and I was not in it. Thank God. Because it seemed that every other day, Sheila arrived to class, which was right after our lunch period, with tears in her eyes, crying about some new way her "friends" had found to torture her that day at lunch.

Krysi and I just didn't get it. Sheila was so nice, and we always had her back and cheered her up. We had tons of stuff in common, and despite the fact that Sheila's group shunned us, as we were not "popular," we didn't shun Sheila. In fact, one day, in a moment that has haunted me ever since, Krysi just laid it out for Sheila.

"Why don't you stop hanging out with them? They're not nice to you, and you are a beautiful, great person. You shouldn't have to cry every day, not over people who are supposed to be your friends. You can hang out with us if you want." By this, she meant our group. Our school was very small, and God bless her, in seventh grade this girl Adenike rounded up all the strays, aka the people not crowned with the "popular" title, and started a club. We ended up becoming the best of friends, and we loved each other. We would have loved Sheila, too. Well we already did, but there was a bit of Capulet/Montague stuff going on in the way of junior high politics. But Krysi decided to encourage Sheila to switch her alliances and join the non-nasty tribe.

Sheila's response?

"No. I can't. Being popular is too important to me."

...

...

"Being popular is too important to me."


Now, I'm not saying that we were so awesome (though we were, of course) and my pride suffered a major blow that day by being called, by default, unpopular. Because I figured out from a very early age that popularity was a lot of bullshit ™Lucio.


I was popular in first grade. I was friends with Jenny and Marisa. They were the pretty girls, and the ones everyone wanted to be friends with. They were fun and nice to me, and I was new, so I stuck with them. Every morning we chased a boy named Bobby around the room and tried to kiss him. He ran away in a "girls are gross!" kind of way, but the bottom line was that chasing the cute boy around was my right as a popular girl.

In second grade, classes got switched up and though I still liked Jenny and Marisa, they were split up into different classes and as it goes, different popular heads of state gathered their masses and began to devolve into mean girls. And mean boys. There was this day that I will also never forget. Everyone was making fun of this kid who was fat. And this was before the country got all "Shaq's Big Challenge"-d out. This kid stood out as a fat kid.

Everyone was just making fun of him. Throwing things at him, not like cabbage heads and garbage, but straw wrappers. Empty little milk cartons that if you stop and remember their smell, you might be able to hear that background rumble lunchrooms seemed to always have had when you were a kid.

The only reason they were making fun of him was that he was fat.

The only reason they made fun of this one other dude was that he was poor and had to wear hand-me-downs.

The only reason they made fun of another girl was that she was shy and not traditionally pretty.

So I called bullshit on the whole thing at a pretty young age. Even at six years old, I knew that safety in numbers meant nothing if you had to be a mean person to have those numbers. Basically, I chose not to be popular. Which sounds conceited until you realize that popularity? Means nothing.

Seriously, what good is it to be considered popular, if all it means is that you get to be a sheep, because it's rare that the shepherd isn't a stark raving bitch. So you get to walk around in a herd. You get to go ice skating on the weekends with actual boys, and you get to have one of the lower-ranking "popular" boys go out with you because he can't get any of your superiors, so you'll do.

Being popular, by such standards, is nothing more than a chisel at your spirit, your individuality, your person. If you have to laugh at someone because he's fat, or at another girl because she is Native American. If you have no more creative way of choosing how to spend your time than to do what everyone else does. Nod your head, trip Rick, bring Ben the body of your dead father.

It's all the same.

Choosing to spend your life as a sycophant means relinquishing your life to the power of others. "For what does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?" Some people are more comfortable being followers, and that's cool. But choose your shepherds wisely.

Sheila sat there that day and decided that she'd rather follow around girls who set her up on a date with the boy she'd liked for years -- as a joke. Because she needed that Pink Ladies jacket, no matter what the price. Her choice.

Everyone's choice. Sheep, hyenas...Personally, I'd rather be a human being with a mind of my own. YMMV.












©2008