Monday, January 31, 2011

on schoolyard drama, suckiness, and Steves

I spent much of the weekend avoiding social functions where I'll have to deal with seeing people I don't want to see, who ask me questions I don't want to answer, usually in regards to my perpetual state of singleness.

You'd think that people'd have something more thrilling to talk about than the love lives of people they barely know but this seems to be universal.

One of the crushing realities of adulthood is that while life is not the hell it was when everyone hit puberty, people really don't ever change. Those yearbook exclamations really did end up ringing true and not in the best way.

My aunt came up this weekend and we ended up talking about this over coffee and wine. We were both English majors and have overlapping musical and literary tastes, and while she's in the corporate world and I'm in the humble land of Peon, sometimes things don't seem that much different.

I look at the people in the board room at these meetings and I feel like I'm on the playground again. That guy was the bully, that girl was the mean girl, that guy was the weak one who hung out with the bully so he wouldn't get picked on, that girl was the one who started drama, that guy was the one who never got it. It never really changes!"

Thankfully, after a couple decades of cooking in the social incubator, I've developed a thick skin over my sensitive soul. It doesn't mean that I don't feel anything, but that it doesn't get so epically blown out of proportion anymore.

When I was in library school, me and a fellow youngish miscreant coined the term "Steve" to describe many of our fellow classmates who were incredibly arrogant and simultaneously extremely ignorant. There will always be Steves everywhere. I can tell which ones are the Steves at the license bureau or the checkout line or wherever I go.

Just as long as I can continue to ignore their foolishness and not become what I see, I think I'll be okay.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ha, i taught (if you can call it that) at my college's pre-k one semester and to my dismay there was the jock pack the queenbee and her court, the kissup geeks and the gay kid, and my favorite the future punk rock girl from south america.
the good news is that some folks do manage to grow up and have some dignity/gravitas but they are few far between and I am thankful for everyone of them, maybe someday I'll be one too.

Randal Graves said...

What did Rick Steves ever do to you, single type chick?

Word verification: punon. A peon who wishes to punish, i.e., the bully's toady, i.i.e. Grover Dill.