The awkward years

I'm always absolutely shocked when I see middle- and high-schoolers around downtown Evanston. To me, it's such a college town. Everyone I know here is connected to the university, and it's jarring to be reminded that there is life outside Northwestern in Evanston. And then I start getting bitter, partly because I sometimes miss having a life outside of school, but mostly because I hate middle-schoolers.

I'm sitting here in Panera (at 8pm on a Friday night...I lead an exciting existence), glaring at a group of middle-schoolers across the room and trying to drown their chatter out with Queen. It's not working, but god bless Pandora and classic rock for doing their darndest.

Was I ever that obnoxious? Hell, yes. I mean, I am DAMN obnoxious now, but the self-importance and the shrillness were multiplied about ten billion times over back in middle school. I guess it's because that's the time when you're turning into an actual person (and that's kind of a mind-blowing process--just like what Kirsten was saying the other night about having the realization that all babies are actually future PEOPLE), so you try to compensate for the weirdness by being as many people as possible, sometimes all at once. And when you have all of those personas clamoring for attention, I guess you kind of have to shout to be heard over yourself.

Back in middle school, I guess I was undergoing the struggle between Goody Two Shoes and Drama Dork and BAMF. The BAMF didn't really stand a chance, but I was friends--best friends, in one case--with people who had serious shit going on in their lives and did drugs and wrote poetry. I wasn't. I'm still not. But it made me feel important to be friends with people who were, so I kept my own personal BAMF in a little cage on a shelf and sort of taunted it with my choices to do homework and spend time with my family and get good grades.

My BAMF hated that. I laughed the laugh of the evil in its face.

But in all seriousness, middle school sucks. I don't think that I'm saying anything too revolutionary when I say that. It's a festering wasteland of pre-hormone hormones, and if you get out of there with one single personality, you are the luckiest bastard of them all. So maybe I should be feeling sorry for those kids across the room instead of glaring at them. After all, they're going through something you could not PAY me to do over again.

In a certain way, though, college is kind of middle school-y. You get here with no established personality. You can try on different people and do different things until you find something that works for you which, god willing, you will. You have to fight it out with yourself to find a level of comfort that doesn't reduce you to a total shut-in (guilty), but at the same time doesn't result in you partying every night and sleeping with every douchebag on campus.

Oh god, now they're all singing "Staying Alive" in their cracking, weedy voices. Screw solidarity. I'm going to glare at them until I kill them with my eyes.