“Why Nerds are Unpopular” is particularly interesting after having read http://www.livejournal.com/users/theferrett/466248.html earlier today. by and large, i tend to dismiss the unpopular nerds article, which i read a while ago, as whiny post-high school nerd justification of being a loser. there’s just a bit too much emphasis on “nerd == smart!” for me, which makes me … well, honestly, it makes me kinda roll my eyes and make wanking gestures to my invisible audience. yes, it’s true that the pre-teen and teenage social environment is a strange and horrific place, but please don’t equate “lack of social skills” with “lack of social interest.” ‘cos really, they’re not the same things. some kids are just plain socially inept, and it has nothing to do with their intelligence. these kids grow up to be socially inept adults, who are just as fucked-up as their youthful peers, but counseling them that “it’s okay” to have no social skills, even that it’s okay as an adult to have no social skills because we adults are somehow above all that silly shit, is stupid and short-sighted. some of the less socially-skilled adults are the ones i hate dealing with, whereas, with the popular “kids,” at least i know where i stand and how to cope with them.

and please don’t misread this as a “i was a popular kid and now that i’m all grown up, i’m dismissive of the pains of the poor, unpopular nerds.” please. i went to a middle school for the gifted, and flunked out because i didn’t want to do my homework. those years i had exactly one friend at school per year. (fourth grade: caroline, who was nice to everyone. fifth grade: kristen. sixth grade: gretchen. seventh grade: kristen again.) flunking out of that school was the best damn thing that ever happened to me in school, because in the eighth grade i was in a normal school. there was a girl in my homeroom class who was pregnant at the start of term. there were black kids simply everywhere. (that’s not a racist remark, although it may reflect some explicit or implicit racism: there was one black kid at my ‘gifted’ school, the entire time. hi, khary!) you want to teach a smart kid how to get on in the world, take her out of her element (such as it was) and force her to figure out that shit’s weird elsewhere.

i admit i wasn’t the target of horrible bullying: i never had my hair set on fire or cut off, i never had used tampons thrown at me. my eighth grade year was a little wonky. i thought that it was the height of cleverness to steal the teacher’s editions of textbooks to classes i didn’t like (like Mr. Spurgeon, my science teacher) and, in fact, hatched an elaborate plot to break into the school under cover of night and steal even more teacher’s editions of books and sell them on the black market. (turns out, there were lots of kids who, like me, didn’t like to do their homework. fortunately, that plan was never executed.) i did cut a lot of school, often in collusion with my friend judy. i got in fights, and got suspended twice, once for fighting — ironically, with another kid who got kicked out of the same gifted middle school. the latter half of the year was lived under the threat of expulsion. and i probably never did actually do any science homework that entire year.

and high school was even better. although my freshman year was initiated with a traditional first-day fashion faux pas — A-line shirts were in that year, as i recall, and i had a particularly nifty one that did not garner me the attention that i felt it deserved — the remaining time was passed in a cloud of relative happiness. i was never one of the popular kids, but i didn’t give a shit, or at least not very much of one. i had other shit to do. i took history as an elective as a sophomore (that’s probably the one class where i felt the most like a reject, as history was traditionally a freshman class and thus i was stuck in a class full of all the popular kids from the gifted school, many of whom did not like.) i carried a walkman to all of my classes and it wasn’t uncommon for me to just put the headphones on if i was bored. i had friends on the swim team, i had extracurriculars i was involved with. actually, the only kids i really envied were the ones who were on the speech team — those were, by and large, the ones who got sorted into the “cool” speech class with the cool teacher, whereas i got the old bat who was clearly just marking time until her retirement at the end of that year (and who failed me because my “demonstration” speech was not up to par. which was a stroke of luck, as it turned out, because taking speech in summer school led to making more friends, different friends than i would have had otherwise because four high schools’ summer school students were consolidated into one summer school program.) yeah, i was never the cute skinny girl who had all the right clothes, but i did all right.

actually, i was sad to graduate — due in large part to the fact that most of my friends were either going to the U of I or Away, and I was going to UIC (turns out: might have been a good idea to have done some of that homework, after all. who knew?). nonetheless, i managed to make friends at UIC despite my lack of the right clothes or the right car or any money.

so i can’t say it worked out badly for me, all things considered, not being a popular kid. and maybe, yeah, if i had had my hair cut off by a gang of rampaging twelve-year old girls, maybe i would have been a little less confident and a little more fucked up. or if i had been popular, maybe i would have had a proper date to the prom instead of going as a part of a big group of friends (although, you know, i don’t know that i would have traded the big group hangout thing for a date if i knew then what i know now. that was a fun damn night.) but still, i don’t think equating a lack of popularity with being smart helps anyone. justifying people’s lack of social skills is stupid. that’s like saying it’s okay to not know how to do basic math — yeah, you can get by without advanced skills, but you are going to get royally screwed once it comes time to figure out how to deal with actual money. social skills are important unless you live in a hovel in the woods — and even then, you’re still going to have to go into town and shop for groceries, mingle with us unwashed dumb people, once in a while.

down with self-pitying screeds! up with fucking saying hi to people! and also up with saying “fuck it” and doing what you want. because, those other people with the right clothes and the right cars and the money, they’re kinda assholes too, just like you. i mean, really, we’re all assholes in our own special ways. unique little individual snowflake assholes.