Pajiba

Ah, high school... and middle school...

I was bullied by some for a while in the sixth grade because of something really stupid I did, but I won them over and by the end of the year they gave me the Best Classmate award. It felt very nice.

Still, bullying sucks.

Great review, Nicole.

Beautiful review, Nicole--that last paragraph is all too true--but I don't think I'll be picking it up. Sounds too painful to read. I managed to fly under the radar for the most part in school, but I do remember that lonely outsider feeling well enough, and really don't want to go back there. I feel sad for Blanco just reading the review!

Nice synopsis, but did Blanco draw any conclusions from her experiences or is the book merely a series of painful autobiographical scenes? Just wondering.

Oh, and thanks for the reminder to be grateful for my Y chromosome.

Oh dear God. Sending an adult mind into a school setting is just doomed from the start.

I didn't really fit in much of anywhere. I was probably one of those kids where if you came upon my picture in a yearbook you would draw a total blank on who I was, if you even thought about me at all.

Suffice it to say, I have never been to a reunion, will never go to a reunion, and haven't spoken to or thought of anyone from high school in a good 20 years. My revenge: They're all now total blanks to me.

(Well, I do occasionally think about that girl who could suck a tennis ball through a garden hose. When I need to, you know, rub one out.)

That was a nice review, Nicole. Thanks. Looks like an interesting read.

I found middle school to be sort of awful; high school was fun. Middle school girls are about as cruel as they get. I remember I had a crazy, over-the-top, popular friend named Jill (my best friend for a time), and my mom made me stop hanging out with her because Jill was "mature for her age" (i.e., was messing around with boys and drinking in the 6th grade). Jill hated me for ending our friendship and completely tortured me throughout 7th and 8th grade (spreading awful rumors about me, egging my house, threatening to beat me up), until she wound up in a mental institution. Guess my mom was right?

But I thought people were a little bit nicer in high school - or maybe I learned how to navigate the social waters a little better? I also tried to make friends with more guys to avoid the she-claws :) But luckily women do mellow, and all my closest and dearest friends from college and law school and work are women.

Nobody gets that much hate over that much time without doing something to incite it. It may not have been intentional, but I'm sure she wasn't just a sweet girl that everyone decided to target. She probably grated on people's nerves or picked at the logic of what people said, or something along those lines. I realize now, looking back on my own school life, that half the reason most people hated me was that I immediately destroyed any amount of fun people were having with each other by awkwarding it up. The other half was that I reacted to their hate by trying to force myself into their conversations or acting really crazy for attention.

I have tried to block out my entire school experience. I was the short round geeky kid that misbehaved to try to gain acceptance (so they diagnosed me with ADHD and the prescription amphetamines just made it worse). As it turns out I was just bored.

As such I was picked on often. One recess, as a joke, one of the kids told me to look up, I did, and received a Tysonesque uppercut to the baby maker. I have to assume it was funny watching a 13 year boy curled up in a ball wailing in agony and vomiting on himself for twenty minutes however I couldn't see the humour. Thankfully after everyone went back to class the teacher noticed I was missing and came to pick me up off of the ground. I was bed ridden for three days (and icing your genitals isn't all its cracked up to be). These "jokes" were common, but this one was over the top.

I've never gone to any of my reunions. I have a few acquaintances from grade school that I still keep in touch with, mostly via email, and I'm only very good friends with one girl from high school; she's one of my best friends, actually, and we've been that way since 11th grade. I wasn't an outcast in high school - I went to a private Catholic all-girls' school and there were only 125 of us in my graduating class - and I had a great circle of friends; I've just found that the friendships I had were mostly suited to that point in my life and didn't stand the test of time.

In grade school I was on the fringes of the popular crowd, but I had to jockey for that position, and I was the last girl in the crowd to have her first kiss, much to my shame. I also picked on the weaker kids to keep my place with the cool kids. Jill Davis, if you read this, I'm sorry. I was an asshole.

Lucas, what I got from the book is that Jodee was singled out because she did irritate people. At a party in junior high when the kids took a game of Spin the Bottle to new heights (there was a 13-year-old couple having sex in a closet with the slats on the door open) she freaked out and called her mom to come get her. Her mom insisted on speaking to the parent whose daughter was hosting the party, and that was when Jodee started being physically and verbally harrassed. It seems like that was the point that triggered the steady stream of abuse that she had to endure for the next several years. It didn't help that the deformity she had made her a total target for Mean Girls: she had a condition where one breast didn't grow and the other ballooned, leading her to have corrective surgery at the Mayo Clinic. As a girl who thanked God that we didn't have to strip down in the locker room for gym, I can't even imagine what that must have been like.

Essentially, any memoir is going to be colored by the memories and emotions of the author. If I were to tell my life story, I'm sure there would be people who would call shenanigans no matter how hard I tried to stick to the truth. The fact is, we each make our own truth.

Don't feel bad, Nicole. Even if we didn't pick on the weaker kids, most of us were still guilty of contributing to the oppressive social hierarchy of high school and middle school.

My story - a lot of my close high school friends were who I guess you could call the cool kids (though I mostly engaged in icy truces with the other girls in that crew and my true friends were all guys). These guys, though spectacularly nice to and protective of me, were downright awful to some people. I should clarify that not all of them were like that, but some definately were. I was friends with some genuinely nice guys, too. Our clique had good and bad in it, probably the same as other groups at our school. But I did know that some of them were shitty to other guys in our class, kicking the crap out a few of them and mocking others publicly and repeatedly. I personally was never openly mean or hostile to anyone. However, did I ever stand up to any of my friends? Maaaaybe once or twice - I did have a conscience. But mostly I stayed quiet. Did I ever reach out to befriend anybody outside of my social circle? A little bit, but not really. I had several quasi-friends in student government and in debate club that were a little on the nerdy side. However, those friendships never really carried over into other parts of my life, despite the fact that I really enjoyed some of them (probably more than some of my closer friendships) - I didn't sit with these people at lunch and they weren't at the parties I went to on weekends. So again, I was guilty of not doing anything to break down those stupid social barriers that seem to always exist at that age.

In law school, I ended up getting to know this girl that went to my high school. At one point over drinks, she confessed that she used to think I was a completely stuck up bitch and that...get this...she and her friends called me and the other cheerleaders in our class "The Wonder Whores" (which is hilarious, because if anything, I was the biggest prude around) and gave us all nicknames - - mine was "Malibu" (not sure why). I never once had any negative interaction with her or her friends (I spoke to her maybe once or twice), but she absolutely hated me! So it goes both ways, I guess. I was guilty of not keeping my friends in line, but she was guilty of judging me before ever getting to know me.

But I guess the thing is, you don't really think about these things in high school. I, for one, can admit how totally and completely self-absorbed I was back then. I was too focused on the boy I currently liked, or too concerned with the latest gossip floating around our little crew to even think about anything else. I think most teenagers are that way. And that's why people hate them :)

In my experience, 7th grade was definitely the peak of crap. Fortunately, I guess. In high school people fragmented and factioned more and for the most part you and your friends didn't have to be around the other people, so fuck em!

Schmoe that I am I wasn't an exceptional case, so it definitely got easier for me.

Since then, I've gravitated towards smart, funny, and slightly nerdy men. Initially shy? Don't worry, I'll break the ice for you. Glasses? Yes, please. Extensive sci-fi collection? Come here, I think I love you.

Damn you, woman! I am still getting over ATO! I am not ready to hit on another cyber person again! JUST NOT READY!!!!!!

I think it's worse in middle school. 7th graders are a special kind of evil.

I myself was tormented so badly that my mom moved me. I'm a small girl and groups of boys would wait outside my house to beat me up, so I couldn't even leave my house. I had to get medicine or my father once and had rocks thrown at me the whole way and got beat up by the five of them until an adult pulled up and scared them all off. It scares me to think of what my life would have been like had I stayed-- or been forced to stay, people always forget how little control over your life you have before 18.

I always remember this story my history teacher told us because there was this other really unpopular girl and her mother died and people were making fun of her, about a girl he knew who never got over the bullying and lived on the streets and stuff. Wow, yeah, it is amazing how you forget how psychotic people are.

I read this book several years ago, immediately after it came out. I found it to be hugely disappointing. Although I was very sympathetic to the author at first, I figured out that something had to be wrong with her.

I was bullied all through school. I caused some of it. I could be a know-it-all, and I'm a "rule follower." If the author had been tormented at one school, I would have bought that she was the victim of a bunch of sadists. However, she changed schools. Something in her behavior was causing the abuse. Which doesn't make it okay. However, as an adult, she should recognize that she was not a totally pure victim while the people bullying her were brainless sadists. The fact that she doesn't recognize this made me really dislike her.

I always despised school. I only went there because I had to, not because I wanted to. To me, it was always this place where I was stuck having to go, and where I never wanted to be.

I hated everything about school; the cliques, the whispering, the gossip, the nasty things people said behind your back and to your face, the anti-intellectualism, the emphasis on blindly following rules - those of the teachers and the popular kids - and never thinking for yourself.

I didn't always have this attitude. At one point, when I was in seventh or eight grade, I tried to fit in at school. I hung out with different cliques - the "brains," the stoners, etc. - but I never felt that any of those students really accepted me. Eventually, I gave up. I spent more and more time by myself. I ate lunch alone at the cafeteria and hated it. When the students were let out of school at 3PM, I always went straight home. I never hung around the school like most of the other students because I knew if I did I would just be ignored.

Soon, I stopped taking school seriously. I felt that no matter what I did, I would never be accepted by my classmates anyway, so what difference would it make? I still studied and stayed a decent student, but I got into the habit of always coming in late to classes - usually first-period classes in the morning - and would have notes sent home to my parents. I also often skipped having lunch in the school cafeteria, and would sneak out of the school and have lunch in a coffee shop nearby. Of course, students weren't supposed to do that.

Like Jodee Blanco, I was definitely a school outcast. Unlike her, I don't feel that school and the popular crowds are the be-all and end-all of existence. I never attended any reunions, and have no interest in doing so.

To this day, I also don't give a fat fuck what any of my classmates think of me.

If any of my ex-classmates are reading this and would like to gang up on me for old times' sake, I highly encourage all of you to do so. I don't go to school with you any more, so I don't have to care. If anything, I will laugh. I will find your animosity amusing and flattering, because it will just make me think that you never grew up, and never moved on.