To Cool For School

It’s kind of funny how the times change.  I swear, if I was a teen now, I’d be so freakin’ cool!

However, I’m not!   A teen or cool.

No, I don’t wish to relive THOSE years but it just kills me sometimes to realize that the dork I was back in the day would be practically the coolest kid in school by the standards of today. 

Maybe not.

I was really introverted but that was really because no one got my humor or my likes and they surely didn’t get me.  I went to school during the age of designer jeans and jocks.  I wasn’t the pretty blond nor was I athletic.  I was raised by a single mom and we didn’t live in a cool house.  The area I grew up in was rich and it was petty.  It still is, sadly.

However, I look at my children and I see the same dorkiness I myself possessed (without the high doses of shy) and they do really great.  They only have a few friends but those friends are good friends.  They are into fandoms and music and art and they aren’t treated like lepers for it.  If they decided to go to school dressed like it is 1982 or 1967, it doesn’t matter because they are only expressing themselves.  If they get said clothes from Good Will that’s even cooler.  Today’s kids don’t realize that if it weren’t for geeks and freaks like me back in the day they wouldn’t be so free to be themselves. 

We fought the battlefields of wedgies and abuse just for the right to read Douglas Adams without ridicule.  We stood up to the ignorant jocks and the shallow beauty queens just so we were able to listen to classic rock and give reports on The Who’s Tommy.  We were the ones that laid the paths with our own blood and tears just so kids these days can dress up as anime characters at cons and not get beaten up for it.

They just don’t appreciate what we gave up for them so that they could be so bloody cool.

Now, to be a geek is cool, mainstream, almost…too much.  When you can see a fashion model wearing an 8-bit MineCraft diamond pickaxe necklace that you’re just so sure she doesn’t get or that tee-shirt that says she’s a Ravenclaw (RIGHT!!!) and you die just a little bit on the inside.  I know there are geeks and dorks and nerds in every corner of the world but sometimes you just know that some people are just doing it because it’s cool and they really don’t get it.  I have a shirt that has a picture of the TARDIS and it says ‘Let’s play Doctor’ and I can’t begin to tell you how many people JUST DON’T GET IT!  Now, I don’t expect people to get the more obscure of my geek stuffs but I would hope people would at least understand my COEXIST shirt.

Or not.

Anyway, my point is these kids nowadays just don’t appreciate how hard it was for us geeks.  They just don’t appreciate how easy it is for them.