revelation about my high school self August 19, 2006
Maybe it’s the Depeche Mode (or INXS? Who knows?) that I’m listening to as I prepare for my poorly attended 29th birthday party, but something’s getting me nostalgic for those more complicated high school days. You know, when everything you said was dissected by your friends and reassembled behind your back to your great chagrin and detriment? Well, anyway, I was thinking about Megan and John. Ah, yes, you know which Megan and John. And if you don’t, it’s okay, just fill in the blanks with the names of the same archetype from your high school days.
You see, they had the same predicament in high school. Super smart people who seemed so simple and straight-forward that people of the opposite sex fantasized that beneath that happy-go-lucky exterior, they were actually brooding even more than the rest of us. Megan had a string of obsessed young men follow her around, waiting for her still waters to run deep. She and I discussed her predicament many times, and she was quite open about the situation. “They think that I’m hiding some secret, deep person inside,” she’d tell me during Calculus (since neither of us understood what was going on, we would talk through class most days), “but what you see is what you get”. Interesting.
Now here’s the fascinating part, to me anyway. Many girls, including myself (if anyone who is reading this knows both me and John and didn’t know this they are clueless), had a similar enfatuation with John in high school. I was sure that underneath his too-laid-back-to-be-believed attitude and his seemingly simple view of life, there was some super analytical, tourtured genius. I was wrong. John’s an awesome guy, but, as Megan said to me about herself, he is what he is.
So…why did I accept the truth about Megan, but refuse to believe it about John? I mean, it seems so simple it’s ridiculous, looking back. Obviously, I had a vested interest in believing Megan, and in not believing John. My jealousy at all the attention Megan was getting for a person that wasn’t even her led me to be the champion of the “Stop Obsessing Over Megan” cause. But no one could convince me that John just wanted to hang out at the pool and play volleyball; because I had created an entire alter ego for him, and if admitted that it just wasn’t who he was, I’d be as much of an idiot as the Megan-lovers were.
Yosef is glad I have a blog so that he doesn’t have to pretend to seem interested as he listens to me tell him this whole theory in bed at 12:30 AM on a Tuesday night.
yes. thank you, blog.