This episode was all about kids being mean. That sometimes kids are just mean to be mean and trying to understand where bulliyng and mocking people came from.
Now as much as I would like to think that I lived in Las Vegas and my schools were even somewhat normal, I honestly can't think of any bullying that happened to me, and so I have a hard time really trying to identify with people saying that bullies are the worst thing in existence.
Now, lets make one thing very clear - I know, and will openly admit, that I am (and was) a grade school/ middle school/ and even high school bully's dream target. I'm weird. I like music in a weird way, I do weird sports, I play the cello, I like school, I like books, I like science, I'm super awkward when it comes to sports, I'm clumsy, I'm lanky, I'm a twig, I wear glasses, I'm nerdy, I play D&D, I play MtG, and the list keeps going. On all levels I look back at my school career and think that there should have been SOMEONE who picked on me or tried to bully me.
The only, singular, time that someone even threatened me with a fight or bullying was in 6th grade, and that was a weird situation that the dean got involved in and people got suspended for threatening violence. Past that weird stint in 6th grade with a person who I'm now friends with (turned out that that's how he makes his friends, everyone that I ever talked to that were friends with him said that it first started out with them fighting or arguing and then becoming friends from there) but that was about it.
I had a few quick comments here and there about me that were rude, but as for straight up day in and day out bullying where I had a person who lived to make my life hell, it never really happened, ever. Yes, there were times that people said mean things, but even now as an adult people say mean things about me, and I brush it off. It's part of life, not everyone is going to be happy with you, not everyone is going to love you, and you move on and get over it.
I think the best part about being the weird/smart kid in school was that after a certain point, I simply didn't associate with anyone outside of the weird/smart group. Around middle school the school naturally separated us into groups that were smart, and those that weren't. You start to go down the honors track of classes, and you get grouped with the smarter kids. The kids that are dumb, slackers, or bullies, drop out of the honors programs and go to the easy classes. By 8th grade the lines were pretty set, and by 10th and 11th grade there was a solid 60 students that were going to be in every single one of my classes because they were the only ones doing honors. By senior year, the group of us were so entrenched with being the 'smart ones' that you could walk into any of our AP or honors classes and we all knew each other, we all could share stories about being in classes with each other for years, and we had a communal understanding that we didn't make fun of each other because by making fun of one nerdy kid, you were only making fun of yourself because you were just as nerdy as they were, but in a slightly different way.
The only time that this broke away was in 12th grade when I purposefully took classes just because I wanted to do something. Between 11th and 12th grade, I took summer school American Government so that I wouldn't have to take it my senior year. The teacher was known for being over the top and wrecking students GPA's, so the best way to deal with her was to take it during the summer so I could take the classes that I wanted to. First on the list of classes I wanted to take that had no purpose in my education - physics. I took the lowest level of physics purely because of the yearly field trip to six flags. The class was a snooze fest, and I passed it with over 100%. The teacher understood why I was there, and I quietly screwed around in the back corner of the class while laughing at the stupid things that she was trying to teach. The students didn't dare mess with me because I could take the equations that they were working with, and show them just how messed up I could do things because at the time I was also taking pre-calc and learning just how all of those formulas worked so I could do a whole lot more than just drop things off of tall buildings and calculate when they would hit the ground.
The other class was Economics. I took this because I liked the teacher (he was easy to distract and funny to distract at the same time, and also another easy A) and I wanted to play the stock market game. Yet again, I'm weird, I want to do weird things, and the stock market game, to me, is worth an entire class of build up. This is one of the only times that I can remember in my high school life of a person actively making fun of me, the 6'1", 150 lbs, cello playing, nerdy white boy. We were talking about piracy and downloading files (was a tangent on a topic that we had managed to get the teacher to go off on) and I was trying to say that through piracy I became a fan of artists and then when the opportunity came, I bought their albums.
From the back of the room, I heard some laughing and wispering and the question came from one of the kids who were in basic math and English classes, and great things like weight training, of "Who was it? Mozart?" Oh no! Someone was making fun of me! They only thought that I listened to clasical music! They were making fun of me! My life was crumbling around me! I should just go commit sucide because someone thinks I'm weird!
Wrong.
Time to crank up the weird level to 11.
"No, it's a synth-pop group called Freezepop."
Silence.
End of discussion.
I am the weird kid.
So yeah, kids can be rude and say rude things, but you've got to get some thick skin. Find your people and hang out with your people. If you're surrounded by people who like the same things that you like, and do the same things that you do, you can't be bullied or be made fun of. There's a chance that in grade school when you can't separate that well, that a kid might be rude to another one, but just let scholastic darwinism kick in, and by the end of middle school find your people and be with them.
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