Lastly was my sixth grade experience; new school, new city, new state. I knew absolutely no one, but I managed to make some friends. There was one friend, however, that I never really got to make; that of course being a certain girl in class that for some reason caught my eye...the poor dastard. In order to become more acquainted, I in my infantile reasoning concluded that, "I need to become popular; then I'll have the acceptance I need to be friends with "Sarah." Again, I don't really remember her name; is that bad of me? Probably. Let's just move on. "What," I thought, "is the best way to show that I belong at the top of the mountain with all of these Paragons of Yale Elementary's 6th Grade class? Beat someone up, of course! Plus, then that girl will notice me." Ugh; yeah, I was an idiot, I know.
In my class was a kid named "Kevin;" and yeah, I forgot his name too. Kevin was not popular; he was actually the opposite of it. I was stuck in the middle of the spectrum, but he at least had an identity: he was the kid with epilepsy (I see you seeing where this is going and judging me already; I don't blame you). So one day I decide to pick a fight with Kevin; I honestly don't know why I chose him, but I started following him around the playground insulting him, his family, his hygiene, his mother. Basically anything I could think of to get him to throw a punch at me, because as my Dad always said, he didn't care as long as we didn't throw the first punch. By the way, this was the only time I tried to take him up on that offer. So eventually Kevin's resolve to just ignore me and walk away dissipated, and he turned and threw a weak, poorly aimed fist at the center of my forehead; which, if you've ever been hit there you know is mostly bone and precious few nerves to feel any pain. I punched back immediately, with two quick hits to the stomach, and before you knew it...the teachers stopped the fight immediately and dragged us both away into time-out. Again, I find the inner monologue of my brain while I slammed my fist into his stomach amusing; no joke, I thought : "Ah! My moment has come! I will beat this kid up, and finally be accepted into the upper echelon's of yet another new school's tight, societal infrastructure." Okay, I didn't think of it precisely like that because I was eleven and didn't have a great vocabulary; I probably thought something like, "Yeah I'm going to be popular now!..........I wonder what girls are smuggling in their shirts underneath all of that cotton, and why does it interest me so much?"
And the next day I thought that my moment had come; one of the kids that I thought was one of the popular kids turned to me at lunch and said, "So I heard you beat up Kevin yesterday." I would hardly have said that I beat him up, only getting in two punches; but far be it from me to disagree with someone who's inflating my ego. I responded simply, "Yep."
"That's pretty cool...of course we all have; I did last year. But that's okay, you're finally starting to fit in."
He might not have said exactly that, but it was something pretty similar. And I don't know what it was, but...I had the immediate impression that I was ashamed of myself for picking on this poor kid who didn't deserve it (again!), and that I didn't give a d**n what the supposedly cool kids thought of me. I made a decision right then that I was never going to to let the fear of someone else's opinions make my decisions for me. I decided that I really didn't care about being popular, about being "cool," about being anything beyond what I wanted to be. And I think it has served me well even to this day.
But where that epiphany as an 11 year old really helped me well was in high school; I find that a lot of people are most often caught up in the concepts of acceptance and popularity in high school, probably because of puberty and hormones causing one to feel at once like a little kid and an adult at the same time. Also, Hollywood's depictions of high school don't help. Every film and TV show on the subject would have you believe that there are kids who are popular because they are the cool kids, and that they look down on everyone else below them that isn't. Being strangely detached from this world, though, allowed me to make what was to me a profound realization: the most popular kids in school weren't popular by any god-given grant; they were popular because they had the most friends. They were comfortable in any social situation, they could converse with any "type" of student from whatever "clique" or "group" they may be associated with; in short, they had the most friends, because they were generally the friendliest. They moved seamlessly from one circle to the next. I figured this out when I was a junior or a senior; and by then I was too lazy to care about giving it a shot myself, so I stuck to my guns and carried out my initial plan of attack on L.V. Berkner High School's societal underpinnings: to get in and out with as little recognition as possible; to be, as far as I could manage it, invisible. If anyone remembered me at the ten year reunion, I would have to deem my experiment a failure.
The reunion was last year; I didn't attend most of it, beyond the first half of the "Reunion Football Game." But even then, wouldn't you know it? I still failed...
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