Not Your Sweetie

The "Popular" pResident Myth - a High School Perspective by Samela




For four years (or six or seven, if you count the prepubescent crowd of personality
worshipers), the high-school populace falls victim, in its mass hormonal imbalance,
to the idea that a few kids with the right sized breasts, a certain kind of hair, or a
particular self-appointed swagger and self-confidence are possessed of an inviolate
and impenetrable quality called "popular."

You would never dare to disrespect this bunch, except in private (and there, at a
pajama party with your stringy-haired, glasses-wearing soulmates you do it freely,
and with great verve). There is something about them that seems veritably blessed.
They will never get a pimple.

Then, one day (usually, sometime during your freshman or sophmore year of
college, where you have discovered Ornette Coleman or Restoration drama or
drugs) you suddenly realize what a bunch of losers those people were. You realize
that you are likely to sail by them on the ship of life. You come back to your
high-school reunion (never done it, just imagining) and they are bald or badly
peroxided, and have married incestuously amongst themselves. They have
inherited their daddies' insurance offices, but have ruined them and are facing not
only a barrage of litigation for having pilfered from the company till to build an
outside hot tub with cabana but a mean and nasty divorce suit from their spouse, on
account of a cheap and not-worth-it affair with a Hooters' waitress.

Oh, god....I forgot, I'm not at the analyst's!!

Anyway, high school will soon be over, and everyone will realize that "popular"
means lose