| | I'm also young enough (25) to remember school with accuracy, and I vaguely shudder at the memories; I too was a nerd in school. I remember well the carnivorous zebra stampede of the "in" crowd... until intermediate school, I was one of their prime targets. There are some memories there that I am quite glad the changed light of hormones and the prism of an escort's decentered personality make uncertain and unreal. But I can still remember the taunts, the threats, the air of a pack about to be let loose... and I was on the highest tracks in a wealthy bourgeois suburb of Washington, D.C.
I survived school by girding on battleship armor of intellectual superiority, and learning to use words to cut people down in preemption against declared hostility in strength and numbers. I carried Thoreau, Rand, Nietzsche, and a scarlet anarchist armband on my sleeve; my idol was a variant of Faust. Sigh... things which in hindsight I wish I had not had to do. But being a nerd, and transgender in denial, I had little choice; I hung out with teachers and a few of the intelligent students; otherwise, I felt like I was traveling trough a desert of slaver caravans. I haughtily disdained the 'masses' and 'mensch', as I thought of them, in someways deservingly, but in other ways I think in serious error. I taught myself to disdain popular music, laughter, fellowship, celebration, and sexuality along with the mindlessness and anti-intellectualism... and I wonder how many unnecessary wars I provoked in my terror at the natives. Now, I think under better circumstances the nerds and the beautiful people could learn from each other. But I don't think that's likely somehow.
I was a weird child, half teacher's pet, half civilized troublemaker. Teachers really brought me up more than anyone else; I was a libertarian who preferred government schools to the so-called civil society of family life, as the upbringing I received from my family was something I had to tear out of me and then hack until the damn thing finally died. I loved many of my teachers who cared about intellectual passion and curiosity when others did not... I would stay after class talking with teachers until 60 seconds before the bell... my watch was synchronized... and then tear up and down stairs to the next class. But I also hated authority; I wrote for an underground zine, passed around Matt-Groening style attack cartoons at unwise times, taped quotes from Voltaire over a PC teacher's classroom window... plus a few other things I think I'll keep quiet about here. But I didn't drink, smoke, or sleep with anything until college (and even then little). I very much regret it.
Something I've since wondered at is that everyone else could sense there was something 'strange' about me... the herd could always somehow smell it, evidenced by repeated insults far more viciously accurate than my own self-concepts. I have since concluded that those whose identities exist in social matrices have a crude but effective intuition attuned to modes and senses of lives.
Oh dear... I'm getting into nostalgic reliving of the past. ~Sigh~... empty pages for the no longer young.
Jeanine Ring 
stand forth!
P.S. An ancient authority, speaking on schooling:
"Sheep are wise enough not to vomit up grass, but to digest it and produce milk and wool."
Epictetus.
(Edited by Jeanine Ring on 10/20, 2:00pm)
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