popularity.

one of my life-long obsessions is the idea of popularity.

(i mean obsession in it's true form, like, a preoccupation to the point of negatively affecting my life. not in the newer sense of just thinking about it sometimes, or being into it. just to be clear.)

as most people who know me well know, i have really struggled with my fixation on it.

i blame john hughes movies. seriously.

seeing the stark difference between the lives of the popular kids (fun parties! sex! hot boyfriends!) and the dorks (neck braces that make it so i can't drink from a water fountain. jock straps on heads. ceaseless torment by cooler, more attractive, rich girls.) really set the stage for how i viewed the world, and how i expected middle school and high school to be. i have spent my entire life doing split second comparisons between myself and other people to decide who is cooler.

it's like life for me is a constant process of separating people into familiar groups, and deciding where i fit. i can smell a dork from 10 paces, even people who are exdorks who are cool now. i can tell. i can also tell who the coolest person in any group is. like, the king of the dipshits. i just have the radar for it.

the thing that sucks is that i am seldom very kind to myself when it comes to my comparisons. and i am not kind to others, either. i have had some really, really fucking dorky friends, and loved them to death, but i never stopped being aware of them being dorks. and i have had some friends who were total popular kids, really, really cool, and i never stopped seeing myself, and their friendship with me as a weird blemish on their cool kid record, like an aberation. 

i always end up in the middle of my mental hierarchy, with some people above me and some people below, and, because i always assumed i wasn't cool enough to be a cool kid, i aimed for being able to comfortably float between the two extremes. so i recognize cool bands, or wear expensive shoes or something, but i will embarass myself by quoting from 'lord of the rings.'

i know that i don't have what it takes to be really cool, as far as my hierarchy goes. i laugh too loud, i care too much, i am not a great conformist. being popular usually means a certain amount of predictability. and the parts of myself that disqualify me as a really cool person are parts of me that i like, even if they are cool kid handicaps. 

but i am always striving for a level of coolness that is a little out of my grasp. also, my painfully acute awareness of the entire thing makes me a lame-o anyway.

a couple of things made me think about this a lot this week.

there is a camping trip this weekend that we got invited to that totally hit my buttons. it's a total cool kid field trip, where hilarity will ensure, and memories will be made that will be spoken of by the participants for years to come. pictures will be posted. it'll be incredibly fun for them. me and shannon got invited, and i immediately wanted to go because it's the cool kids. and i like them and they're my friends, but more because the uncomfortable 12 year old in me, who wanted to be invited to the boy/girl parties and wasn't, felt like i HAD to go. i felt this sad urgency over it, like i might die if i didn't go, or i'd spend the rest of my life regretting it. when we got invited, everyone made a big deal about how the had wanted, like, 100 people to do, but really weeded out the guest list to people who would be really fun, and what that 12 year old heard was 'i made the cut! i am really fun! THE COOL KIDS HAVE ACCEPTED ME!!!' 

i started feeling worried about not going, like this was my ONE chance, where we would all get matching jackets, or bonds would be made that would be unbreakable, and if we didn't go, we would be forever on the outside looking in. also, i thought back to this one night in middle school. this story is so fucking embarassing that i should even tell it, but it's important because it has been really prominent in my thoughts about the camping trip.

some background first...

i came to a public middle school after spending my whole life at a small progressive private school where i was totally the queen bee. i had been there since i was, like, 2 and a half, and i left at age 10 or whatever feeling like hot shit. public school was terrifying and humbling. i had no idea what the fuck i was doing, but i was committed, to not being a social outcaste. like, i won't be the girl with the metal neck brace and the braces who wipes her mouth with the skirt on her sweatshirt. if you catch my reference. 

so, at orientation, i looked around the gym and i picked out the two girls who has the most other girls around them and i decided that they seemed popular, so i would become friends with them. it worked out well because i ended up liking both of them and i did become friends with them, and made lots of friends that way, but it was through a calculated assessment of the situation and a firm commitment to not being a dork, no matter what.

one of the girls in particular was fucking gorgeous. she and i were friends all through middle school and the beginning of high school and she was just so beautiful that she made everyone else in our class look like little kids. and she drank! she had a MUCH older boyfriend! she had long nails! and she was kinda mean, which sucked, but was cool because she wasn't mean to me usually.

anyway, once, in middle school, she called me and invited me to spend the night with her at another girl's house. and i wasn't home, for some reason, and i didn't get the call. at the time, i would have seriously given a kidney for that kind of invitation, and i missed it. and i was never invited out with her again. it was like i missed my single chance for the bonding and the door was forever closed to me.

it's probably better because i would've been peer pressured into doing something that sucked and maybe ended up heading down a bad path, for all i know, but the memory of that seemingly-pivotal missed opportunity has stuck with me.

and so, the idea of missing this trip felt like a chance to make up for it.

and, of course, i can't go.

the dog is still doing poorly (better, actually, but not back to normal), shannon's aunt and grandma are in town, he's working all weekend...it's just bad timing for it.

and it feels like a huge deal to me, even though it doesn't matter at all.

also, when i think back to similar situations, i have had a terrible time when i have gone to that sort of thing. i spend the whole weekend painfully aware of everything that i say and do, and feeling like an intruder. i just end up feeling out of synch, or like an extra from a western who got lost in a movie about elizabethan england. in the wrong place.

another thing has brought this stuff up, also.

there is a fundraiser concert for a guy i know, who destroyed his knees in a totally improbable scenario, and who doesn't have health insurance. he has to have reconstructive surgery on both knees, extensive physical therapy, basically learn to walk again. he's really athletic, and is a weight lifter, so this pretty much fucks that forever.

it sucks for him. 

but i made me think about my mom.

she had two brain surgeries in one month. she had months of chemo and radiation. doctors' appointments, medications, driving back and forth from her house up north, legal fees, not to mention regular bills which she also had to keep dealing with.

she wracked up a not-unimpressive amount of bills, for sure.

and not a single person volunteered to hold a charity concern for her. 

no, she doesn't have a handlebar mustache, or drive an old car, or get tattoos. she's just a lady who is my mom.

but it just seems like suck a popular kid show of solidarity, this concert.

people involved in the concert, and friends of people involved, have been posting bulletins about it ceaselessly, to the point of making me consider not going just as a knee-jerk reaction to aggressive advertising. and it made me think about 'napoleon dynamite' and the 'vote for summer' buttons and their retarded spirit team sign language dance thing and how middle school it felt. 

i don't know where i am going with this.

i guess it made me feel like i am totally not 'in there' because no one offered to do anything like that for me and my mom.

i got the money for her medical bills the old fashioned way - by calling everyone in the world to find out how she could qualify for health insurance after the fact. we negotiated a cheaper rate on a lawyer, so he could help us get her qualified. we filled out the paperwork, talked to the social workers, made deals with doctors...

and it would have been nice to not have to do that, to just have a concert thrown for me.

i'm just jealous, and reminded of that feeling of not TRULY being popular, just being allowed to be friends with the popular kids. because i am funny. or because my boyfriend is a bad-ass.

this isn't a cry for readers to tell me how cool i am.
it's just, like everything i talk about here, me sharing what i think about, and what it's like living in my head.
and this is the stuff i spend a lot of time thinking about.

finally, unrelated, some thoughts:
-lizzi worked with me this week and it fucking ruled.
-the new michael chabon book is typically brilliant, and also makes me feel alienated because i can't understand all the yiddish terminology he uses. i hate having to look things up constantly while i am reading.
-i worked my ass off this week, and was successful.
-i am feeling really creative, and my natural fears and filters are choking me, keeping me from even attempting stuff for fear it'll be dumb.
-i have been thinking a lot about death, and entropy, and how to find meaning in a world that feels like it pulls us all apart, from ourselves and each other. life can feel like we're stars, dying slowly in the middle of the vast emptiness, with the lights of other people bright, but beyond reach. how do we bridge that gap?