Sinister: dont want acceptance, dont want tradition

[FourJacksAndAJill]

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 at 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 ?
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