I Got Stuck in Junior High -- Wednesday, March 15, 2006

I wanted to post my doggy adventure yesterday, but I'm missing the cord that unloads digital pictures into the computer. It's at hubby's office (30 minutes away and lots of freeway driving) and it will come home probably when I get fed up enough to go get it myself.

So meanwhile I'll take up another topic. And since Dad says no mudslinging, it'll be a safe one like Junior High.
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I Got Stuck in Junior High

Can you point to a time in your life that was so traumatic you never progressed beyond it? that was so painful you got mired in a deep emotional rut you couldn't break free from? That time for me was Junior High.

I never saw it coming. I was top dog in elementary, partly for my deep compassion toward others. I was truly destined to be the next Mother Theresa were it not for those horrid girls in Junior High.

Our sweet little elementary school was nestled in community-minded Deer Park, Texas, where parents kept close watch on their children and shielded them from sordidness.

But in sixth grade we were bused to Pasadena, where the children were more worldly. They had been having boy-girl parties since third grade, where they necked and french-kissed.

And they thought we were retarded, since our elemantary had provided special education for retarded and handicapped children and theirs hadn't. So they didn't readily accept us into their cliques. One by one, we would have to prove ourselves cool and intellegent.

And then the throat cutting began.

We had to vie for attention, then jockey for position into the cliques. Once knee-length, our skirts and dresses shrunk to minis. Once bare-faced and innocent, we sported sultry raccoon eyes ringed in black liner,heavy with mascara, and slathered layers of rouge and base about.

We dumped former close friends for fear that the popular girls wouldn't like us if we associated with anyone they snubbed. I dumped my friends and they dumped me. My best friend since first grade, whom I had stayed with many, many weekends, never spoke to me or looked at me again.

Three years into Junior High, in eighth grade, I finally got noticed by the popular girls. One of them, my drama class partner, discovered that I was cool and spread the word to her clique. She invited me often to her house for sleepovers. Former friends who had dumped me took notice and began warming up to me--me, their ticket to popularity.
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Invited to my first popular party, I stood in the doorway and peered into the dark hallway of the still darker house where the party was. Older, sophisticated guys who did not attend our school were holding beer cans, laughing among our girls.

I never went in. I can't remember how I got away from there--just that I could'nt stomach the evil I felt. And the popular girls now knew I wasn't cool and dumped me.

Upon seeing their ticket to populartiy had devalued, my former friends dumped me again . And I never trusted a girl again, never had another close girlfriend, never even tried to kindle a close friendship with a girl.

Until my sophomere year of High School.

But that's another post.

posted by Susie Hovendick Chan