High School



That's what it was like going to high school in the early 90's.
(Also, I never knew Screech was a Lennon fan.)



Do you remember high school? I'm sure it was the most positive and self-affirming four years of your life, especially if you were ever different in even the slightest way. My ten-year high school reunion is coming up next year and I have been thinking a lot about it (mostly concerned with calculating whether I can become an astronaut/best-selling author before that night.) I also currently work in a school, so I suppose the subject has been on my mind lately, and now that I am older, wiser, and a little more wider in the middle, I find myself looking back on those days with mixed feelings.

I like to equate high school to watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In reality, it's not as horrible of an experience as people usually want to make it out to be. There were good moments and there were many moments we would as soon forget, much like all of Shia Labeouf's acting career after Holes. It was certainly not the absolute worst thing I have ever had to endure (That was Pirates of Caribbean 3), but I'm not exactly eagerly popping the DVD again to relive all the great moments.

High school for me was a fairly standard experience. In the hierarchy between quarterback and that kid-that-smelled-like-eggs, I usually found myself somewhere in the middle. I was never popular, but I wasn't disliked. I was never fully accepted, but I was never truly shunned either. In high school, I had an uncanny superpower to be able to walk into most situations or groups and render myself invisible enough that no one truly cared I was around. Of course, the draw back of that is that no one truly cared I was around. However, in order to achieve this sort of power it meant that -much like Batman- no one could ever know who I truly was.

I was a nerd, but I did my best to hide it. Just like Xavier's pupils I concealed my true self for fear of ridicule and persecution. Worst yet, I did it not because I blasted energy from my eyes, not because I had the power to read minds, teleport, or turn my skin to hardened steel, but because I read Star Wars novels and comic books, because I spent my free hours writing fantasy stories or playing with twenty-sided dice. Instinctively I knew how poisonous that kind of information could be to my social standing. Sure, people knew I had geeky tendencies, but no one knew that all they saw was the tip of an iceberg the size of Andoria. My secret allowed me to be accepted, but it never allowed me to truly connect with anyone either.

Despie what Disney wants you to think, kids, high school
was never like that.

Even to this day when I meet an old classmate or friend I find myself falling back into familiar patterns. They could be over-weight and balding, but I still see them as the person who was cooler than me and I still find myself involuntarily guarding my speech and adjusting my perceptions. Similarly, I ate lunch in the faculty cafeteria the other day and found myself seeing the same divisions among the teachers that I observed from the students, the cool kids, the gossipy table, the rejects, etc. It's ironic that high school is something most of us spend so much time trying to escape, yet no matter what we try, we find it coming back around like a bad plot point.

Still, life is not a sitcom and inevitably we all find ourselves changing. After I left high school I changed, for the better. For anyone still going through the rigors of high school I can only say: Be yourself. As hard as that adive may be to follow or even understand, you'll just have to trust me, because life goes on. In four years you'll realize that the opinions of all those other people really didn't matter at all. So don't take them to heart and don't let them keep you down from trying to be the the person you want to be.

For me I didn't get that till I got to college. I met like-minded friends that showed me it was okay to be proud of who I was, regardless of what others thought, and more impossibly that people would like all the more for it. They proved to me that paradoxes existed. That it is not only entirely possible to be a nerd, but at the same time be the most popular guy in the room. In a lot of ways, they gave me the confidence to be the person I am today, and if it wasn't for them I am sure this blog would not exist at all. I suppose the moral of the story is that high school doesn't last forever and who you were does not define who you will be for the rest of your life.

The Luke Skywalker Complex

"Okay boss, I invoiced all those
power converters we had shipped
from Tosche Station."

I was off last Friday, but that's not what this story is really about. A day off means that I have to work that much harder to make sure everything runs smoothly in my absence. Having a day off can be really stressful. I know it sounds irrational, but in all fairness I'm not always the most rational of people. As absurd as it might be I have myself convinced that if I abandon work for one day the whole place may come down around me. (This is doubly irrational when you take into the account I have only been working in my current job for three months.) Now, I am well aware that my work has survived many years before I ever came along, but I still feel the need to prepare for every possible contingency, whether it be a major network crash, printer running out of paper, or an alien invasion. (FYI, the plasma rifle was disassembled into three separate parts and hidden around my office.) Returning to work on Monday I found that the place did not burn down nor was it invaded by malevolent extraterrestrials, and thus all my worrying was for nothing. So why do I do this?

It all comes down to what I call the Luke Skywalker Complex, and I would argue that such an affliction of the mind is not limited to soley me. It all stems from fears driven by my own desire for self-worth. I think we all want to believe that we are the most important people, not only in our jobs, but in our families, among our friends, and other social and work-related settings. A study (or maybe a Snapple cap) I was reading recently pointed to the idea of being needed as a major source for our feelings of happiness and self-worth. Whether we actually are crucially needed or not usually seems irrelevant to our increased feelings of happiness. By believing that those around us and the things we do would be reduced to a horrific and fiery wreckage without our amazing and awe-inspiring presence, is usually just another way of validating ourselves... much like Luke Skywalker.

Think about Luke and his position to the Rebellion. Skywalker is just some kid from a desert world on the outer-rim. Sure he is a half-decent pilot, but in the beginning he's not even a ranking officer. Realistically, Leia is much more important as the daughter of one of the Rebel Alliances founders, (Jimmy Smits,) and as a representative to the newly disbanded Imperial Senate. However, the only difference between you and Luke is that without him there is a good evidence to show that the Rebel Alliance probably would have hastily become nothing more than a dirt stain on the boot of the Empire. The whole Death Star incident aside, just look at the Empire Strikes Back. Luke takes a vacation to Dagobah for a few weeks, and long story short, Han spends the next few years of his life in carbonite as a mantle piece in Jabba's palace. In other words, Luke literally is one of the most important people in the Rebel Alliance and to his friends, even if he never even reaches the rank of general (at least not in the movies.) Han Solo and Lando Calrissian are actually promoted ahead of him, which really brings us to a whole other point.

"You think he'll be mad I forgot the quarterly reports again?"

Luke for all his hard work, dedication, and proven importance to the Rebellion is actually passed over for promotion for men who are proven smugglers, gamblers, and mercenaries. I imagine Luke is the kind of person who spends all weekend preparing a presentation, graphs, charts, figures, etc and when he walks into the meeting on Monday morning finds himself out-shined by Han Solo who probably wrote something down on his breakfast napkin 15-minutes beforehand and just pretty much winged his entire presentation. We won't even go into Lando who somehow achieved the rank almost immediately, and after betraying some the Alliances' most valuable members and one of his best friends. He must have had an amazing resume.

However, this only serves to show the contradiction of the Luke Skywalkers of the world. Our irrationality is only further proved, because if you ask anyone who grew up watching Star Wars the overwhelming majority would probably tell you how much they would rather be like Han Solo than Luke Skywalker. I mean, let's face it, who really wants to be an overworked, under appreciated, and sometimes whiny Jedi-wannabe, when you can spend your life getting by on your natural luck, charm, and by sleeping with a (at least one that we know about) princess?

Meta-Humanity

Meta-Humanity [mee-tuh-hyoo-man-i-tee]: noun, 1. the quality or condition of being something more than human; mutant, mutate, enhanced-human, super-human, etc; 2. all humans collectively whom have something special about them and the way they see the world; 3. a shameless website made by a hack writer in order to promote his self-serving need for attention; 4. the quality of being a nerd; geek, dweeb, poindexter, dag, freak, etc.

The other day, I was out with this girl I have been seeing, and as the conversation so often does, the topic turned to shoes. She was wearing a brown leather boot-type thing with two or three clasps that ran down the side. I looked at them for a moment and gave her my honest opinion "They look like Jedi boots," I said. She laughed politely, probably not knowing whether to take it as a compliment or some sort of joke, but I was entirely serious in my assessment.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th century philosopher, often talked of the idea of non-standard perspective. In other words, its the idea that two objects cannot experience the world in the exact same way. If a dog sees the world through black and white and a Predator sees the world through rainbow-like infrared vision than neither will look at something as simple as a flower and truly understand, or even perceive it, in the same way.

It makes a lot of sense, and Fredrick Nietzsche was a damn smart man. In fact, if he were alive today, CBS would have given him an afternoon talk show by now. He is famous for -among other things- proclaiming that God is Dead, he is credited for indirectly inspiring the idea of Superman (the ubermensch), and starting a serious opposition to conventional morality in his book, Daybreak, which I am pretty sure was the fouth novel in a series of books that starred an angsty emo teen girl who was in love with an immoral vampire.

All of this really just leads to my point: There is no right or even normal way to experience the world around us. Like the dog and the Predator we all see things and understand things differently. This is especially true for people who have grown up with different experiences, different thoughts, and with different ways of processing the world. One person may look at designer boots and think that they are nice because they go with their belt or purse, while another may look at them and see a resemblance to an accessory from a fictional universe.

There is no wrong answer, but I like to think that Meta-Humanity is for people like me who see the world from a very altered point of view. It's a blog for anyone who has ever caught the last snippet of a conversation and equated it to quote from a Matt Groening cartoon; who has looked up into the skies of New York City and hoped that maybe for a moment they might catch sight of a webslinging wallcrawler; who has given serious thought to making an emergency bag in case of a zombie outbreak.

Perhaps more importantly, this blog is for anyone who has ever wanted to follow their dreams; or for anyone who has ever looked out the window and wondered where their place was in this world. As Nietzsche would agree sometimes the world is literally what you make of it. This is my world. You don't have to be a nerd to appreciate it, but it helps.