don't drink, don't smoke, what do you do?
Oct. 22nd, 2006 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enamouredI am currently twenty years, ten months, and twelve days old. During this period of time, I have been what could possibly be considered as popular once.
I was eight years old, in third grade. I had taken to making little "notebooks" for my stuffed animals by cutting up pieces of notebook paper and stapling construction paper on each end for the covers. I'd draw something on the front or put stickers on them and call it a day. For some reason, this caught on with my classmates, and soon I had this red-haired boy I had a crush on asked me to make him a mini-notebook with a guitar drawing on the cover.
Somehow, this became a trend. First all the kids in my grade seemed to want me to make one, then the second graders wanted them and some of the fourth graders too. I began charging--a quarter for a plain one, fifty cents for a decorated one. During recess I'd take sheets of construction paper, scissors, and markers with me, so I could work on everything. Katie, who was my best friend at the time, and Stephanie (who would become my "second best-friend" the next year) ended up somehow helping me with this project, which lead to trouble. One day one of the teachers told me to stop making the notebooks, because apparently some of the kids I'd made them for didn't pay me, and Katie and Stephanie had been going up to them at recess and threatening them. What two eight year old girls who probably both weighed eighty-five pounds each were going to do to anyone is beyond me. But I stopped, and so ended my brief foray into anything resembling popularity.
The concept of cool has always been something I've wanted to master. I liked the book So Yesterday because it made the idea of cool into something that made sense to me: a construct; something that happens by accident, that other people scout out and pick up and spread around whether unconciously or not. A social disease, if you will. I've been fascinated by what is and isn't cool for a long time. Unfortunately, I can't always keep up with what is in. Two examples of this:
--I liked the Spice Girls in sixth grade, which was the fall of 1997. They were still pretty popular on a large scale then, but most of the girls who I knew obsessed over "Wannabe" the spring before called them "lame" then.
--Remember back when flared jeans were starting to get popular? Then (and God, it wasn't even that long ago, less than ten years), there weren't many places for slightly bigger girls to shop, so if you were chunky and had boobs in middle school, you basically bought stuff from the misses department. The misses department didn't sell flares, or even bootcut jeans, so I wore straight-leg jeans on no-uniform days. In a misguided attempt at coolness (and imitating some of the "cooler" kids I knew), I tried to cut my jeans and make them look flared, but the lines got jagged and I ended up looking like a massive poser.
Cool is a social construct. I get that. And the desire to be cool isn't just something you encounter in middle school. The quest for cool extends into high school and beyond, and sometimes I think it doesn't stop; the definition just changes. Since say, my junior year of high school I've grown a little apathetic in regards to what coolness really is. This explains why I don't care for Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco, why I hate the leggings/miniskirt combo.
But the other side of cool? The social side. The cool kids. Cliques.
I've never been a cool kid. I've been popular only fleetingly. In middle school, I had an overabundance of friends. Once I moved, though, all that vanished. Since then, I've been on my own. And most of the time, I don't mind it. I'm a textbook "good kid" even though I'm almost twenty-one. I'm polite, a good student, smart, bright, and cheerful. I am a model citizen.
But all I want--just once--is to be stupid and careless, to be a cool kid who goes to parties and says the right things and kisses tons of good-looking guys and can actually walk in heels and speak without slurring words or babbling senselessly. If I were, tonight I would've been in my costume at that party doing God knows what instead of coming home defeated at midnight, talking to my puppy and getting ready to call it a night and watch Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
I don't want to be the nice girl anymore. I wish that my coworkers were actually my friends.
I was eight years old, in third grade. I had taken to making little "notebooks" for my stuffed animals by cutting up pieces of notebook paper and stapling construction paper on each end for the covers. I'd draw something on the front or put stickers on them and call it a day. For some reason, this caught on with my classmates, and soon I had this red-haired boy I had a crush on asked me to make him a mini-notebook with a guitar drawing on the cover.
Somehow, this became a trend. First all the kids in my grade seemed to want me to make one, then the second graders wanted them and some of the fourth graders too. I began charging--a quarter for a plain one, fifty cents for a decorated one. During recess I'd take sheets of construction paper, scissors, and markers with me, so I could work on everything. Katie, who was my best friend at the time, and Stephanie (who would become my "second best-friend" the next year) ended up somehow helping me with this project, which lead to trouble. One day one of the teachers told me to stop making the notebooks, because apparently some of the kids I'd made them for didn't pay me, and Katie and Stephanie had been going up to them at recess and threatening them. What two eight year old girls who probably both weighed eighty-five pounds each were going to do to anyone is beyond me. But I stopped, and so ended my brief foray into anything resembling popularity.
The concept of cool has always been something I've wanted to master. I liked the book So Yesterday because it made the idea of cool into something that made sense to me: a construct; something that happens by accident, that other people scout out and pick up and spread around whether unconciously or not. A social disease, if you will. I've been fascinated by what is and isn't cool for a long time. Unfortunately, I can't always keep up with what is in. Two examples of this:
--I liked the Spice Girls in sixth grade, which was the fall of 1997. They were still pretty popular on a large scale then, but most of the girls who I knew obsessed over "Wannabe" the spring before called them "lame" then.
--Remember back when flared jeans were starting to get popular? Then (and God, it wasn't even that long ago, less than ten years), there weren't many places for slightly bigger girls to shop, so if you were chunky and had boobs in middle school, you basically bought stuff from the misses department. The misses department didn't sell flares, or even bootcut jeans, so I wore straight-leg jeans on no-uniform days. In a misguided attempt at coolness (and imitating some of the "cooler" kids I knew), I tried to cut my jeans and make them look flared, but the lines got jagged and I ended up looking like a massive poser.
Cool is a social construct. I get that. And the desire to be cool isn't just something you encounter in middle school. The quest for cool extends into high school and beyond, and sometimes I think it doesn't stop; the definition just changes. Since say, my junior year of high school I've grown a little apathetic in regards to what coolness really is. This explains why I don't care for Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco, why I hate the leggings/miniskirt combo.
But the other side of cool? The social side. The cool kids. Cliques.
I've never been a cool kid. I've been popular only fleetingly. In middle school, I had an overabundance of friends. Once I moved, though, all that vanished. Since then, I've been on my own. And most of the time, I don't mind it. I'm a textbook "good kid" even though I'm almost twenty-one. I'm polite, a good student, smart, bright, and cheerful. I am a model citizen.
But all I want--just once--is to be stupid and careless, to be a cool kid who goes to parties and says the right things and kisses tons of good-looking guys and can actually walk in heels and speak without slurring words or babbling senselessly. If I were, tonight I would've been in my costume at that party doing God knows what instead of coming home defeated at midnight, talking to my puppy and getting ready to call it a night and watch Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
I don't want to be the nice girl anymore. I wish that my coworkers were actually my friends.
