This may come as a shock to some, but I wasn’t a popular kid in highschool. My friends and I considered ourselves the “normal” kids, even though we were probably geeks. We didn’t get picked on by other groups of kids, and we only really picked on each other in fun. I think that’s part of where my warped sense of humour comes from - well, that, and one of the earliest TV shows that I remember watching with my Mom was SCTV, even though it was obviously way over my head at the time.

Anyway, with that lead-in, I’ll direct you to an interesting article on Why Nerds are Unpopular, by Paul Graham. Apparently he wrote it back in February of 2003, but I didn’t read it until today, because my membership in the Paul Graham fan club apparently got lost in the mail or something.

I find it a fascinating look at the typical American Highschool, and the popularity hierarchy contained therein. My only real quibble with it is that a lot of kids didn’t play the popularity game, and don’t get ostracized because of it - at least at my highschool. It might be because I went to a large school - I couldn’t pick a good portion of my graduating class out of a police lineup - or it might be because I found people who shared common interests, and were interesting people to hang out with. We didn’t get beat up for our lunch money though.

I wore the same basic clothes through most of highschool - jeans and a tshirt of some sort. I didn’t pay much attention to hygiene until around grade 10, when I started combing my hair. I think if I’d gone to Paul Graham’s highschool, life would have sucked. As it was, Highschool was ok. Not the best 4 years of my life, but not the pit of despair that I hear so many geeks talk about. Was I just below the radar, or was it because I was always a big kid? I don’t know. I think my school was civilized because the hierarchy was broken up between grade 8 and 9. In grade 8, everyone in my class had to choose a highschool for the following year. When you arrive for highschool, there are suddenly hundreds of kids your age that you’ve never met before, and three times as many kids who have been at that school for at least a year already. The hierarchy that developed in that situation was that older kids picked on younger kids - but only kids that wanted to play that game. The initiations into highschool were pretty tame, if I recall correctly, and then a year later, the same initiations got carried out on a new batch of grade nine’s.

That being said, I’m sure there was bullying that happened at my school, I was just completely oblivious to it. I don’t think any of my friends were the target of bullies, or at least if they were, they kept it fairly well hidden. I sometimes hung out with the chess club gang, and the math club gang (though there really was no such thing as the math club - it’s just a yearbook photo of people who wrote math contests for fun - and profit.) so if anyone was going to be put through hell by the bullies, you’d think I’d have known them. Any of my highschool classmates out there reading this that would care to comment on it? Maybe I was just my typical oblivious self, and didn’t notice what was going on right in front of me.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “People now… Please, please, I can assure you that we’ll be using the most advanced, scientific techniques in the field of… body finding.” - Chief Wiggum