Over at Bobvis there was a discussion about how much choice the unpopular had in their predicament. Spungen took issue with a recent poll that suggested that teenage girls with a stronger social situation are less likely to take abuse from a boyfriend:

As if it’s a ****ing choice. “Gee, should I stick close with my circle of friends? Nah, I’d rather wander around alone and hang out one-on-one with weirdos.”

By and large I agree with this assessment. Almost nobody chooses to have no friends. I do believe, however, that there is some choice involved. Some people are a little too happy off on their own that they don’t bother to cultivate the friendships they will later need. The conversation later turned to whether or not people are willing to cop to their unpopularity. Spungen believes that this is mostly not the case; I believe that people are fine doing so provided that they can blame it on a broken society rather than on themselves. I also made the comment that I knew more people that believed that they were helpless when there was something they could do about it than people that believed that their unpopularity was a choice when in fact it really wasn’t.

To which Spungen replied:

So Will, do you think popularity is available to everyone as long as they meet a certain set of criteria? If so, that would explain our conflict. I believe all (or most) systems have to have rankings, outcasts, and scapegoats. There will never room for everyone in the fold.

I agree that in most social circumstances there is never room enough for everyone in the fold. I’d also say that it requires more luck than anything to actually reverse your social situation for the better. I believe, however, that there are things a person can do that can help get them out of the social gutter (even if it lands you only a notch or two out of it). My experience (both first and second-hand) of unpopularity mostly pertains to guys rather than girls, so keep that in mind. In any event, here are the ways that one can improve their social standing:

1. You don’t have to outrun the gator, you just have to outrun the other guy. In this case, you make yourself a less obvious target than those around you. You make yourself look good by comparison. The cheap way to do this is to make other people look worse, but simply making yourself look better can help. This is really hard to do if you are unwilling to disassociate yourself with those that don’t change with you (which will be most of them). Nonetheless, in a larger social setting where you are not constantly with whoever it is that is hurting you socially, you can make some friends before they find out who your other friends are. That doesn’t work at all in social settings, though, and they will likely keep you running in place.
2. You can make a really bad situation not quite as bad by winning over the non-scared and non-malicious. There are people that will find some way to go after you. That’s a given. However, the better ammunition they have the fewer potential sympathizers you might get. The classic example here for me is my smell. I was not good about showering daily or wearing deodorant, which in the south that’s something you really need to be meticulous about. Not unexpectedly a lot of people ragged on me about it. I blew it off by saying to myself “Even if I didn’t have the smell they would just be making fun of me for something else. They’re just looking for reasons.” This belief was not at all incorrect. What I was doing, though, was warding off potential sympathizers by making myself more socially toxic than I needed to be.
3. The number of popular-to-unpopular people is not constant. If you behave like the unpopular guys, you’re all but guaranteed to be counted among them. Stopping doing so is not sufficient, but it is necessary to get out of that rut. If luck is opportunity meeting preparation, be prepared.
4. With some luck you can get a rabbi. In the 8th grade I had the good fortune (sorta) of being in the same class as a couple of the more pragmatic bullies. I helped them out with their schoolwork (ie gave them the answers) and they became what I call my rabbis. Their casual association with me warded off many would-be bullies, making my situation more tenable. They never would have gone to fight on my behalf or come to my defense, but they made it less likely that I’d need them to.

At least some of these would be unhelpful to young women since everything is so terribly different with them. Girls are more socially adept anyway and are much less likely to be lazy about hygiene and grooming. I suspect that only raises the expected standard to the point where money becomes more important to buy the right kinds of clothes and have the right kind of make-up, which is unfortunate. There are fewer ways on the whole a young lady can overcome not having money than a young man can. I’m so glad to be a boy.

None of these are going to take an unpopular person and just make them popular

I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions the rank snobbery and spoiled nature of my high school. This week’s Ghostland will consist of two stories about such.

—-

My Freshman year in high school I was at a table where I overheard an upperclassman explaining how she hurt her wrist.

It seems that she was driving down one day and went through what she was sure was a yellow light. Out of nowhere, a car must have decided that even though their light was red (which is what it would have to be if the light was “definitely yellow” as the upperclassman was driving through the intersection) they would go ahead and dart into the intersection.

Upon seeing that they were entering an intersection on a light that was still read (as it must have been), the other driver slammed on the breaks. The upperclassman swirved to miss the car, dinged it, but went across the median into oncoming traffic where she hit an oncoming car whose driver “wasn’t really paying attention”.

No one was killed or anything, though the driver of the other car (the one that wasn’t watching for cars crossing the median, apparently) did have to go to the hospital.

Upperclassman girl was pissed. She was pissed at the driver for darting into the intersection and forcing her to swerve. She was pissed that the other driver couldn’t dodge her. Mostly, though, she was pissed off at her father. Why? Her father wasn’t going to buy her another car for a month. Further, Daddy was going to get her another Mustang rather than the car of her choice (can’t remember what kind she wanted).

Her friends, throughout this entire story, were completely sympathetic. One expressed dismay that upperclassman was going to be stuck with another Mustang when she wanted something else and they were going to have to replace the car anyway.

—-

My sophomore year I took a theater class with a group of cheerleaders. Bessy was a cheerleader and not among those that I cared much for. We would sometimes have class in the auditorium for whenever we needed to rehearse for something. The auditorium was cold and she was either wearing her cheerleader outfit or something else that wasn’t particularly covering her up. She put word out that she wanted a jacket if anyone would be so kind as to loan her one (she didn’t use that terminology).

Now ordinarily I would gladly loan my jacket to any young lady (or even a guy) that needed one since I was a pretty warm guy anyway and I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress. But not for Bessy. I wasn’t surprised that she never asked me for one as she made the rounds. But then she asked her friend Ally, also a cheerleader, to ask around as well. Now Ally I liked, though I’m not sure why. Anyhow, when Ally asked me for it I handed it over despite knowing that it was going to Bessy.

Bessy snuggled herself into my jacket and thanked Ally for procuring it for her. Then she asked whose jacket it was. Upon finding out it was mine, she yanked the jacket off of her and threw it onto the ground, saying “ewwwwwwwwwwwww!”

Ally shrugged and handed me my jacket back.

A couple years later my class looked at me in confusion when I said “Yes!!” to the PA announcement announcing that the head cheerleader was going to be Donna Lerner. No one expected me to be the type to give a rat’s patoot about who would be the head cheerleader. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have, except that Bessie was supposed to be the odds-on favorite and Donna was okay by me.

It’s been a year or two since my high school reunion, but recent discussions have put it back in my mind.

I did not particularly enjoy my high school experience and (unlike my junior high school experience) I have no one to blame but myself for it. I was always a poor fit temperamentally for Mayne {pronounced to rhyme with “maybe”} High School. It was filled with people that had money and seemed to care most about those things that people that have money care most about. It was loads better than middle school, but it wasn’t for me. I never dated anyone from my high school and my picture appears in the yearbook only once because I never did any extra-curricular activities.

As such, I probably never would have attended the reunion at all had it not been for the chance to be reunited with my best friends Clint and Dave. Dave and I flew down from Shoshona and Deseret respectively, met with Clint in Ephesus where he was living at the time, and then drove to Mayne. Even if there hadn’t actually been a reunion, it was great to hang out with them even if much of that time was spent driving. Much to my surprise, the reunion itself was a blast.

Oddly enough, or maybe fittingly, I did not spend all that much time talking to people that I knew from high school. I spent it talking to people that I didn’t know at all or that I knew in elementary and/or middle school but not high school.

I went to West Oak Elementary School (WOES), which is about as middle class as you can get. We were looked down upon by the people that lived in Mayne, but were better off than those that lived in working-class Southfield and Larkhill. For middle school, West Oak and Larkhill Elementary School (LHES) fed into Larkhill Intermediate School (LHIS). Larkhill was much more working class, so working class that it’s actually mentioned in a Bruce Springsteen song. Larkhill Elementary was significantly larger than West Oak, so the average economic status at Larkhill Intermediate was not good.

The same sort of thing in reverse happened when Larkhill Intermediate fed into Mayne High School with upper crest Mayne Intermediate School*. As with before, the school we were merging with was considerably larger than the one we were coming from. Not only did they have a lot more students, but their students were wealthier, more achieving, and better behaved. Almost all of the “problem kids” from high school I knew from junior high and they were weeded out, dropped out, or farmed out to a correctional institution. So what I ultimately saw happen a lot was that instead of people hanging out with the people they hung out with in junior high we Larkhillers would gradually ingratiate ourselves into an existing group of friends from MIS (and Airfield, see note below).

So all of this is the long way of saying that the people I talked to were in three distict groups: people I was friends with in elementary school (who I was not friends with in junior high because they started going to advanced/honors classes), people I was friends with in junior high (a fair number of whom were weeded out or reinvented themselves into some other group in high school), and people I knew from high school.

Here are some observations that I recall (after looking over some emails that I wrote at the time) from the reunion:

• There were almost no Asian-Americans there, despite their presence on campus. I can literally remember two that I think are more of Pacific Islander descent and they were twins.
• The people I was most anxious to talk to were the ones from elementary and intermediate school. Particularly elementary.
• Once they started tracking us into regular and honors classes I lost contact with a lot of them. I hung out with the smart kids in elementary school, but didn’t get into the smart classes in high school.
• The Mayne/Airfield contingent was over-represented. The number of people I knew from Larkhill Intermediate but not West Oak Elementary (read: those that went to Larkhill Elementary) was nearly non-existent.
• I spent the first hour or so talking to someone that I didn’t even know in high school. After I got my food I needed a place to sit down but none of the tables had a friendly congregation. I decided that sitting alone while eating was one high school memory that I was not going to relive, sat down at a random table and made some friends. When we finally parted, our last words to one another were, “I wish I’d known you back in the day!” “You, too!” I wish I’d made more of an effort to get to know people back in the day.
• A couple of the guys did not really think that it might be inappropriate to talk about all the girls a guy “banged” when his wife of six months is sitting right next to him at the table.
• There was only one awkward instance of a guy that I knew that didn’t know me. I knew him in junior high and we were actually pretty good friends. It did not occur to me that he would not remember me. I guess it’s understandable, though. He was a nerd when I knew him but he became an ROTC nut in high school. he’s probably blocked out his nerdy years.
• The reward for the coolest guy goes to Jesse Brooks. I remembered him as being a really cool guy for a goth/punk/industrial dude. He ended up going to MIT, flying jets for the Navy, and working for a venture capital firm in Ephesus. Unlike the ROTC guy, Jesse remembered me despite having done a lot more in the meantime and more genuinely reinvented himself.
• While smoking a cigarette I had the obligatory conversation with a girl that I never, ever could have mustered up the courage to talk to back in the day.
• All of the cheerleaders and drill team members I saw there had engagement and/or wedding rings. Every last one. Only one that I saw married her high school sweetheart.
• Two Larkhill classmates had four or more children. I was not surprised by either of them.
• The girl that Clint obsessed over and Dave’s serious high school girlfriend both had kids. I missed out on any of that since I never dated anyone from my school and besides I was rarely interested in people my own grade. I wonder if I can sneak in for the reunion of the Class of 1999, wherein I could see the fate of the girl that I obsessed over.
• I don’t know what the jocks made of their lives since I didn’t really talk to them at the reunion. They didn’t look like they’d completely wasted away like I might have hoped once upon a time.
• High School reunions are great places to meet people romantically if you’re still single. None of the three of us were, though, so that was sort of a waste. On the other hand, the fact that we weren’t single may have made it easier to go. In fact, I considered my wedding ring a giant shield. So long as I wore it, I was impervious from female rejection.

* – It’s actually a tad more complicated than this. In my 8th grade year they built a new middle school, Airfield Intermediate School (AIS) and my 8th grade class was smaller than my 7th grade class with a portion of the wealthier students siphoned off. Most of the students at Airfield had previously gone to Mayne Intermediate, so they essentially had the same experience we did with the integration of the snobs, they just had a year sooner and on a slightly more limited basis. As such, I’m counting both the Airfield and Mayde students in a single group since they were both (at one point or another) dominated socially by the same people.

At the anime convention that I recently attended, I ran into an unexpected friendly face. Marianne Silbet and I went to the same school from about the seventh grade onward. She moved in from parts unknown. Marianne and I were never friends. The only real memory I have of interacting with her was when she went to the prom with Scott Sanders and the two of them plus Julie and I left the prom together and walked on the beach together.

The thing I remember most about Marianne, though, was that she was very, very unpopular in junior high school and I never remember her having very many friends at all. Marianne was sweet as sugar cane, cute if not hot, slender, acne-free, and at least after those awful junior high school years a smiley and pleasant person to be around. For some reason, though, she really, really got it bad in junior high school. And for prom the date she mustered up was Scott Sanders, one of the friends I was most ready to get rid of when I graduated from high school. The thing that I noticed then but struck me now was how completely, totally unfair that was.

I’ve mentioned before that I slummed around amongst the socially marginalized class of high school. I got to know a lot of them quite well. The guys, anyway. Some of them were a lot of fun to be around and I light up when I think about them. Some, like Scott, I would talk to only if there were absolutely no one else around and maybe not even then. But whether I personally liked them or not, I could easy tell you why they were unpopular. They were socially inept, they were fat, they were awkward, they were anti-social, they were smart-asses they were consumed with bitterness. The reasons go on and on.

I’m not saying that the criteria that found them lacking was a good one. It was stupid and superficial I am so glad to be away from it now. But at least I understood it. I knew what was hurting me and I could try to change it or I could accept the consequences of it. If they were to ask me and I were feeling particularly honest I could have told them ways that they could have improved themselves. It was warped and twisted, but it had its own little logic that if one could step away from themselves just for a little bit they could decipher.

But thinking about Marianne brings to light another observation: I have no idea at all whatsoever criteria, if any, the girls had for sorting themselves out socially. I have no idea what precisely it was that made Marianne so reviled and she’s not the only one. I knew a girl in elementary school named Louise that was dreadfully unpopular. As far as I could tell I was the only nice person to her. Then in the fifth grade her family moved and she went to another elementary school. Both our grade schools fed into the same junior high and apparently at the other grade school she had made quite the splash and when we ran into each other in junior high she had a lot of friends. Even though I was the only one nice to her in grade school, she was unusually cruel to me in junior high perhaps because she did not recognize me or perhaps because I was a throwback to an unfortunate time in her life. Other than the sudden cruelty, though, there was no big difference in her behavior to warrant the reversal of fortunes and I don’t think cruelty alone did it (there were a lot of cruel girls that were very unpopular).

A little closer to home, I understand why my wife was unpopular in K-12. I love her but she is stubborn and has unusual tastes and is not socially gifted. But the ferocity with which other kids went after her completely baffles me. I get angry just thinking about the things that she’s told me and there are things that were so bad, so much worse, that she refuses to tell me. When it comes to the guys that got it really, really bad in K-8 I understand why even if I think that the reason is dumb. But when it comes to Clancy, Louise, and Marianne I am completely and utterly baffled at the degree of derision they got.

My inclination is to say that the female social structure in schools is random and illogical, but it’s quite possible that I just don’t understand the logic because it was all in a world that I was not a part of. There were some that I understood. She was unpopular because she was fat or abrasive or socially awkward. But there were a number of them that I didn’t understand at all. I don’t understand either why they were unpopular or why they were as unpopular as they were. If I have a son like me, I’ll have an idea of what to say or what advice to give if they ask me why other kids don’t like them. If I have a daughter like Marianne, I won’t have a clue.

A case of banning the flag:

On the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, students at one high school were not allowed to wear clothes with an American flag.

Under a new school rule, students at Hobbton High School are not allowed to wear items with flags, from any country, including the United States.

The new rule stems from a controversy over students wearing shirts bearing flags of other countries.

I have difficulty figuring why exactly students wearing flags of other countries is such a problem that it requires this solution.

Back during and after the Gulf War, there was a student of Middle Eastern descent that was a vocal Saddam Hussein supporter and actually had an Iraqi flag pinned to his bag. It was a bit of a distraction because a lot of people took great exception to someone wearing the flag of a nation that we were at war against, but teachers were unusually capable of alleviating the conflict and getting on with class discussions. It seems to me that the ability to express oneself, even if it causes some conflict, was worth the minor distraction.

The superintendant explained it thusly:

The superintendent of schools in Sampson County calls the situation unfortunate, but says educators didn’t want to be forced to pick and choose which flags should be permissible.

Even if we make a different judgment in the above case of an Iraqi flag in a time of war, it would seem to me that there is a substantive difference between wearing an American flag and the flag of a foreign nation. We are, after all, on American soil. I don’t think a “home rule” exception to the flag ban is wholly inappropriate, on 9/11 or any other day. Even if we don’t want to leave judgment in the hands of educators (heaven forbid), that seems like something of a no-brainer.

Sure, if one kid wants to wear a British flag and another a Sudanese and we allow the former but not the latter, that can become problematic. I could see how banning both might be preferable to making those distinctions. But we’re in America and an American flag ought to be uncontroversial.

The only gray area I see with the home rule exemption is if an exchange student says that Americans can fly their flag but he is not allowed to fly his. As such, maybe make the rule about flying the flag of the nation they come from. If a young Mexican or Canadian going to school hear wants to wear something with a Mexican or Canadian flag on it for Cinco de Mayo or Canada Day (or any other day, for that matter), that too is substantively different from some kid just deciding to wear some other nation’s flag cause he likes it or he wants to register his protest somehow.

These do not strike me as terribly difficult distinctions to make. They are pretty clear (American flag or flag of a nation that you have citizenship), easy to state, and not too difficult to enforce. I find it odd that the school district declined to make these distinctions and must attribute it to either some sort of transnationalistic thinking (we should want to be citizens of the world!) or, more likely, schools being terrified of making any distinction, no matter how unsound, that might come across as unfair to somebody, somewhere.

Either way, from a PR standpoint it almost never makes sense to mess with the red, white, and blue.

When I was in the fourth grade, I had a hot teacher, Mrs. Nelson. She was under thirty, attractive, and very nice and warm. So was so nice and pretty that she had relatively few disciplinary problems with the boys because none of us wanted to make her upset with us.

On the first day of class she gave a speech that it was in the fourth grade that she started needing glasses and that she would be on the lookout for kids in her class that might need glasses.

I’m not sure there was any clearer way that she might have said “If you have bad eye sight, or at least behave as though you do, you will get extra attention from a very attractive school teacher.”

Suddenly I couldn’t read the chalkboard so easily. I had to squint. I had to raise my hand and ask about any writing that might have been the slightest bit smaller or less legible than other writing. In no other class would having been moved to the front a reward rather than a punishment. When Mrs. Nelson told my parents that I needed to get my eyes checked, I was in too deep to do anything but intentionally fail my eye exam.

My first pair of eyeglasses had big, giant, purple frames. I was not particularly averse to wearing glasses in the abstract (I knew my genes and knew I’d get them eventually), but the combination of the girliness of the glasses and the fact that it made my perfect vision blurry, I wore them next to never.

A couple years later I was stuck in the back of my Spanish class, where the ability to read a chalkboard was more crucial in others. I could not for the life of me read what was going on. I don’t know if it was the first time I’d been sat in the back of a class in a year or two* or if my eyesight had just suddenly deteriorated between the fifth and sixth grades, but it was harsh. Out of pure desperation I put on the Ole Purples. They actually helped!

Unfortunately, I had enough popularity problems without those things saddling my already unimpressive personal appearance. So once again I was pretending that I couldn’t read what was reasonably clear so that I could get another visit to the eye doctor and another pair of (preferably black or silver or brown or gold or anything but purple) glasses. When it was all said and done my prescription was… almost identical to the bad prescription I had faked two years before. “This is great!” Dad said, “no need for new glasses!”

Ole Purples met with their untimely demise a week later when Dad sat in them in his chair. “So strange,” he said, “you’d think I would have seen them there.” Somehow they’d ended up below the armchair cover, which had itself been placed on the seat of the chair, making it pretty difficult to see. I managed to convince Dad that my glasses must have been on the armrest and that they must have fallen onto the seat of the chair where he sat on them. The elaborateness of my explanation was probably the most suspicious thing about the whole affair.

* – I don’t believe this to be the case. My last name for whatever reason would usually stick me near the back of the classroom in any alphabetically-assigned seating chart and any time we were given a choice I’d sit as far back as I could.

Via Dustbury, the civil war in four and a half minutes:

Whether you are a fan of South Park or not, five of the funniest minutes I have ever seen on television are from an episode a few years back about smoking. South Park elementary invited in this group called Butt Out that put on a presentation so obscenely lame and yet so familiar that I turned red from rambunctious laughter, which doesn’t happen often with me.

Up until my senior year Mayne High School would invite some person to our school to warn us about the dangers of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and/or depression. One year it was this black guy that flung a basketball around a bit and sang some song about a girl named Emily who was addicted to drugs, alcohol, or tobacco or maybe committed suicide or maybe all of the above. The next year was the announcer for that Chicago-based clown… Bozo, I think. He was actually pretty good. A bit schmaltzy, but entertaining enough that we went back to see him that night. The next year was a stand-up comic that was absolutely hilarious.

The next year they had a power forward for the Colosse Spiders professional basketball team. He gave us his life story, which mostly seemed to consist of screwing up (or, as he put it, “making poor decisions”… he never went into detail). So it was something like: screwed up in high school, got into college anyway. Screwed up in college, got to stick around for four years anyway. Screwed up again, ended up in the NBA. The moral of the story was that having a great jump shot entitles you to all the poor decisions you care to make.

When I explained this whole thing to Dad, he laughed. The basketball player in question had been caught with pot in his car and had copped a “Community Service” plea. I guess we were the community service.

So many of the morality crusaders that came to our school were entertaining in their own way. We missed those guys that rip the phone book in half and attribute their success to Jesus Christ* moral living. I guess they figured that as a senior we wouldn’t be impressed or that they would be washing their hands of us sooner or later so no need to give us a lecture at that stage in the game.

The other day I was standing outside a pizza place and looked over and saw a DARE table manned by a black guy in a suit (in unbearable heat). My first thought was that maybe he had been caught with some pot in his car like the basketball player**, but he was way too enthusastic for it. He was walking up to all sorts of people. He was more like a LaRouche fanatic at the airport, a religious missionary, or a military recruiter*** than someone filling out a time card to avoid jail. You couldn’t pay me enough to spend time doing that sort of thing, but I guess it’s good that someone is enthusiastic about it.

* – More than one of these speakers danced the church/state line, particularly (interestingly enough) Bozo the Clown’s right hand man. The Emily guy did, too. Bozo’s Buddy managed to get by by touching on the subject very briefly and then saying that he would talk about it that night for anyone that wanted to stop by (as long as it is afterhours, I don’t think that there are any church/state issues). The Emily Dude got by because after a certain point none of us cared what he was saying. I’m told that the phonebook rippers never mentioned God or Jesus per se, but their speech was riddled with religious terminology (shepherds and immoral temptation and whatnot).

** – I’d like to think the fact that he was black did not enter into my thinking that he might be a criminal. I think not, though, because when I think “pot possession” I tend to think bored suburban white guy.

*** – Interestingly enough, the DARE table was set up caticorner to a military recruiting station. If you ever get a chance to stand outside a military recruiting station, I recommend it. Lots of father’s pulling their sons in by the collar threatening what’s going to happen if they don’t get into a good college.

As mentioned last week, the power system at my alma mater, Southern Tech University, left a lot to be desired. This was particularly true at Greenwood, the aging dorm that I lived in from my sophomore to my senior years. Around my sophomore year I decided that to help beef up my networking skills I would have two computers instead of one. With some help from my friends, my two computers became three computers pretty quickly as I needed a file server so that I didn’t have to worry about one computer being screwed up by the other goofing up. As long as no applications were running on the fileserver, it remained reliable, but running any application on Windows 95 and Windows 98 presented risks. It’s easy to take for granted how stable Windows has become since Windows 2000.

In our dorm we also had a fridge and a microwave. My roommate also had a computer. This proved to be more than the room could handle, no matter how evenly we tried to distribute the technology. Worse yet, whenever a short would occur it would take out the whole wing of the dorm. Outages weren’t constant, but they weren’t infrequent, either. The further into the semester we got, the more frequent they started to become, however. It got to the point that we would cross our fingers whenever we’d put something in the microwave. For some reason, it was the microwave beeping that seemed to be what pushed it over the edge. It didn’t matter whether it was beeping because it was done or beeping because we told it to stop.

There started to become incidents when we’d come home and the power would be off without the assistence of microwave. Then I started coming home and the power would be on, but my computers would be unplugged. Apparently the electrical team decided that my computers were part of the problem. Fair enough, but they also spoiled a lot of food by unplugging our fridge. So I took the hint and simply stopped turning on all of my computers. Except when I was working on networky things, I could just use the fileserver.

Then one day I came home and every last appliance in our room (right down to our alarm clocks) was unplugged. We also had a “warning” slipped under our door that we had caused the power to go out and if it happened again they reserved the right to impose a fine on us. They specifically cited my computer set-up as the chief culprit. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I informed them that my computers were off at the time and asked what we could do to start using less power. They said that as long as it was just a couple computers, a fridge, and a microwave we should be fine.

We weren’t fine. The next week I came home and everything was unplugged again. Another warning on our door about the excessive power usage. My roommate and I just shrugged. We’d done all we could. The power went out again and this time we got a $50 fine. Not only were my extra computers not on, I had actually unplugged them from the surge protector. Naturally, they didn’t check that.

It’s SoTech’s policy not to graduate anyone that has any outstanding fines. Nor would we be allowed to enroll in classes. This concerned Hubert and I because he was supposed to graduate and I still had a couple credits to pick up that fall so I would need to enroll in classes. We decided to petition the fine. The first “hearing” was set while we were still living on campus. We decided to delay the hearing until that summer. Hearings didn’t happen over the summer so it was pushed back to that fall. Neither of us were living on campus that fall. He had already graduated and for me they must have simply forgotten about it because I did end up getting my degree.

So technically I still owe Southern Tech $50. That’s okay, though, because they owe me $125 or so. Or rather the state does. The Delosa State Treasurer’s office has my name on a database of people the state owes money to. My guess is that it’s uncollected paychecks from columns I used to write for the Daily Packer. I kept procrastinating those piddly $6-8 checks until they’d get turned over to the university’s burser’s office and then over to the state. It added up after a while, I guess. If you’re curious as to why I haven’t collected the paycheck, it’s because I can’t prove that I lived at the address they failed to enter into the system in the first place (my address reads “NULL, DA 00000”).

Shoddy paperwork by the university giveth and shoddy paperwork by the university taketh away.

I’ve known Kyle since he was a junior in high school and even back then he was something of an unusual guy when it came to girls. Not only had he not had a girlfriend, which was not unusual for the likes of us, but he had neither actively pursued a girl or longed for one that he didn’t have the guts to pursue. That put him in a special category of odd. If I’d had any indication that he was gay — even something as flimsy as a slightly high-pitched voice or strong support or opposition to homosexuality — I might have just assumed that he was. But nothing, so the ongoing joke was that he was an asexual.

The first girl that Kyle ever expressed interest in was a friend of Hubert’s, Chloe. Chloe was a fellow Southern Tech student in the Greenwood Hall dormitory. I can’t remember how exactly she became a part of our group, but she did and though I never got to know her all that well myself, she was a fixture around our dorm. Kyle didn’t have the money to go off to college when he graduated, so he took some classes at the local community college and knocked around Colosse trying to get the grades to get into the University of Delosa. I was trying to recruit him to go to Southern Tech instead and thus invited him up to the dorms quite frequently. And thus he met Chloe.

I honestly think that Hubert and I were more excited about the date than he was. Our little asexual friend was going on a date! Awesome! I won’t go into what happened on their first date, but Hubert ended up intruding on it and ruining the mood. The weekend after that date, my best friend Clint rolled into town. Hubert and I invited him to stay with us at the dorms in part because he was my friend (and Hubert wanted him to be his as well) but also for the same reason as Kyle: we were trying to recruit him to transfer out of Southern Cross, where he was unhappily attending school. And just like with Kyle, this lead to his meeting and hitting it off with Chloe.

Now under any other circumstances I would have been thrilled for Clint. After all, not only had he met someone but he met someone that could bring him back to Colosse. That would make recruitment so much easier. But she had just gone out with Kyle and he was fixing to completely ruin Kyle’s first relationship. Good heavens, who knew how long it would take for him to find another? I expressed my concerns to Clint, who was quite understanding and told me that he’d back off. He didn’t, though, because he’s incapable of backing off a cute girl that might be interested in him. Besides, he reasoned, Kyle was my friend and not really his so he had no loyalty to him.

As expected, Clint won Chloe over and Kyle was left in the cold. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise because Chloe was a butt-awful girlfriend and put Clint through hell. I wanted to be mad at Clint, but I don’t know that I would have done any differently in his shoes and Kyle wasn’t the slightest bit upset by it all. In fact, it was during all this that he and Clint got to know one another and became really good friends. The worse things got between Clint and Chloe, the better friends they became.

-{Note: In the past I’ve referred to Kyle as “Quen” and “Quenton”. I’ve found myself getting Quen/Quenton/Clint/Clinton mixed up, so I’m changing it to Kyle Quindlen}-