There are many boring conversations in this world, but currently number one with a bullet on Xtin's All-Time List is The Trauma of High School. When this subject comes up, I want to reach for a handy icepick and pith myself.
Just for starters, isn't this a long time ago yet? Sure, I'm 32, which makes me about five years older than most of my grad school littermates, but that still puts them ten years from walking out the doors of the damn place. For the love of God, have we not had any experiences in our adult lives that we might discuss? But of course we have. Naturally no-one wants to discuss those, because they are far too real and intimate and personal. You might have had an experience that someone else hasn't had. You might actually have something idiosyncratic and interesting to say. Good heavens, much too risky. Let's whip up some totally ersatz intimacy instead. High School Horrors are a lovely shared narrative that everyone can settle into like a rerun of Welcome Back, Kotter. Even though of course, no-one here was in a remedial class. Which just makes it so much the easier. Wasn't it awful being the smartest one in school? Weren't you persecuted by the girls who talked about lipstick and INXS? The teachers never paid any attention to me because all the disruptive students were always painting on the walls/giving the Chess Club wedgies/passing notes containing their latest pregnancy test results/whatever ...
Which brings me to reason number two that these are the most boring conversations in the known universe -- they're not even a real discussion about trauma. (Frankly, I wouldn't really care even if they were, but that's just because I'm evil). Part of of the subtext is the conclusions that everyone can easily draw from the very fact that all of us had this experience -- we were all nerds, we were all persecuted for being the smartest in the class, blah de blah. So guess what? You're not special any more. This is one big group of hyper-smart people. And that makes you nervous and insecure, and this high school talk is a way of everyone discussing how they were once intellectually special under the fatally dull cover of how awful the whole experience was. Please. It's just sad.
Naturally, I don't intend that this prevent anyone from using the shared horrors of high school as a handy and evocative metaphor when discussing whatever else you'd like to talk about -- emphasis on whatever else.
I'll take Human Relations for two hundred, Alex ...
5 comments:
You know how lame it is to identify with something, just so you can be, y'know, identified? I wasn't ostracized for my brains. But if we were to discuss high school I would say, yeah it was horrible, I'd never do it again, blah blah, but damn I had some bad fun. (In fact I'm writing a nasty swearing cussing novel based on the horrible fun.) And also I thought the Breakfast Club was a numbingly boring movie. So I'm unidentified and uncool. I'm cool with that! Xtin, be glad you're not a drone like those you are surrounded by. And you look totally evil in that picture, tee hee.
Thanks Heidi! I love to be evil ...
For the record, I am perfectly convinced that the people I'm surrounded by aren't drones and are full of unique and intriguing fascinations of all sorts ... but for some reason, no-one wants to talk about that. Go figure.
Why do people act like drones? I think it would be totally okay to stick out a little, not? And why are the villians always more fun than the bad guys? Go figure, eh?
Is it ok to talk about the horrors of high school if we do say in a particular, more interesting way? I don't often get into the whole "I was persecuted for being smart in high school" thing, but I have talked about the (and written on my blog about) the difficulty of being very poor in high school and being in an abusive home and of trying to find a way from that to the life that I'm living now. In fact, to harken back to your earlier post, I'd say that to the extent that my blog is About Stuff, that's a big part of its Stuff.
So maybe the trouble is not so much the topic, but the fact that the people around you just discuss that topic in such a boring manner?
Scrivener, of course. What strikes me about what you say on those topics is that they are not about "High School" per se, they are about you -- your life and what has built you into the person that you are. There's nothing strange or boring about talking about one's childhood or teenage years or indeed any period that one thinks of as being particularly formative -- what bothers me is situations where what gets discussed is school -- particularly fine-grained analyses of what the others at school were like, and debates start up about whether one taxonomy of high-school cliques is more accurate than other, etc etc etc. My feeling is that if these divisions have some sort of impact now, let's talk about how those divisions apply now. If not (and very often not), then why is it so important?
In general, I sense that it is important because something else about the experience was important to those discussing it -- but that is off the table. And it's been off the table so long, and the discussion is so ritualised, that no-one has any sight any more of why the experience was important to them.
None of which applies even the slightest to your subtle, tender, perspicacious musings on the subject.
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