erika balsom wrote: well, i'm not american, but my (canadian) high school has been compared to a bad american sitcom many, many times. not only do we have completely segregated cliques of people, but there are also names put on the places Hey! If you were Canadian, couldn't your high school also be compared to DeGrassi as well?:) Although that might be a bad comparison--most kids I knew who watched it loved the show and thought it was actually good. Very fascinating to read Mark C's dream of living in an American suburb. Yeah, it was kind of idyllic, but then again, when you live like that, there's no need to confront any views on race or class really. I lived in a place where everyone had a boat on the lake (man-made lakes for my subdivision, yeesh). And it's funny...money has a way of erasing racial barriers. If everyone's just as rich, everyone's pretty happy and harmonious together. Kinda. We weren't as rich as the other kids which meant we had no boat of our own, we had no scooters (before driving age many kids zipped around in scooter gangs, though they weren't mods by any means), we had no Nintendos, shit like that. It wasn't the worst thing in the world but it was still strange to live in a place like that. And my high school saga: well, I started out in life (middle school I guess is where the hard-line divisions start to form) as a preppy, hanging out with the popular kids, wearing my boat shoes with no socks and wearing shirts with their brand names (very important then!) emblazoned across them: Coca-Cola (remember their awful clothes anyone?), Bennetton, etc. etc. Then I gradually drifted to the indiekid thing--my first show was quite punk rock, Naked Raygun, so much slam dancing (back when that's what it was still called...I sound like a fogey don't I?) but maintained "ties" (sounds so diplomatic doesn't it) with the "popular kids" (not to be confused with popkids) and also knew some metalheads, and the misfits who were into metal and D&D and kung fu movies and whatnot but looked slightly more clean-cut. Come to think of it they could've been our own Trenchcoat Mafia but without the Nazi bullshit. My musical obsessions in high school went thusly: Beatles, Led Zeppelin (I never got long hair and distinctly remember walking around high school inwardly sneering at the longhairs wearing their Zep t-shirts and thinking "I bet I know more about Led Zeppelin than they do...they probably can't even play Jimmy Page's guitar parts!"), Smiths/REM and then onto full-blown "college rock" stuff. So I never really had to experience full-on outsiderdom, I could float between various factions and have a satisfactory-to-great time. Unfortunately high school is a bad time for making friends and having romantic relationships. Unless you fraternize outside of h.s. you are really stuck with whatever you have there. So you might have to endure crushes on people you really have nothing in common with and maybe (realistically, this isn't John Hughes here!) never have a chance with. Real life is better... Xavier BXK M o t h e r , M a y bkim0@dept.english.upenn.edu I S l e e p http://www.english.upenn.edu/~bkim0 W i t h D a n g e r ? X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X---X +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the reborn Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". WWW: http://www.majordomo.net/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "jelly-filled danishes" +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+