In my life, why do I smile at people who I'd much rather kick in the eye?*

When I was in High School, I was pretty much the biggest outcast you can possibly imagine.

My family was at the time living in a small town in central Michigan, where I attended a school that was quite literally surrounded on every side by enormous tracts of cornfield. The students of my school were overwhelmingly average, white, middle-class kids who were destined for average, white, middle-class jobs and lives that I had no doubt they would be quite content with. It was the late 1980s, and I vividly remember that the hair metal band Poison was in vogue. Just about every student in my class regularly sported a t-shirt featuring the fried, white-blond maned clown heads of the band's members -- apparently the group had orbited near enough to my podunk town that all teenagers within a certain square-mile radius were compelled to attend their live show and purchase a t-shirt. At the time, those t-shirts seemed perfectly emblematic of the oppressive, lock-step conformity of High School -- of MY High School, at least. The unwritten, but universally understood rules of High School of course being: Do what others do, like what others like, dress as others dress, don't speak out of turn, and nobody gets hurt. (PS: And like bad hair metal bands, dammit!)

Needless to say, I didn't abide by those rules.

And let me stress this: there was nothing heroic about dismissing conformity -- at least for me there wasn't. In all honesty it sucked ass and made my life infinitely more difficult, often downright miserable. During High School I hung with a small, protectively-tight cluster of other weirdos -- kids with mohawks who wore black and listened to punk rock, who pierced their ears on the fly with flame-licked safety pins and smoked a whole lot of pot, among other things -- and we were continually targets of open ridicule and overt disdain. Every. Single. Excruciating. Day.

We ate together in the school library at lunchtime, because the lunchroom was too dangerous (at least emotionally too dangerous). One of my first journal keeping efforts ended with said journal being stolen, read by just about every kid in my class, and then unceremoniously tossed in a hallway trash can. In English class, I was the only kid who could explain what a specific Shakespearean sonnet meant, and so was thereafter tagged "Sonnet Buster" -- a nickname you must imagine said in a sing-song tone dripping with contempt and ridicule. I was different. I saw the world differently, I liked different things, and I didn't pretend otherwise. For this, I was finally named Most Unusual in my High School graduating class. But what that really meant, as far as my fellow students were concerned, was Most Hated Freak. Voting me Most Unusual was just a final, parting jab, the mocking cherry on top of four years of relentless sneering.

And fine, fine. It was twenty years ago, I'm over it. If anything, it was character-building. I learned to look inside myself for strength and support. I learned that a small, tight circle of friends can be a flotation device. I learned that popularity does not necessarily betoken quality, whether we're talking metal bands or human beings. I also learned that I slept better at night and liked myself a whole lot more when I stood up for what I believed in, said what I thought, voiced my opinions, and was generally unabashedly myself, whether most people liked it or not, agreed with it or not.

My entire life would have been a lot easier had I not done those things and then continued to do them for the remainder of my adult life. If only I'd kept my mouth shut. If only I'd dressed as everyone else did. If only I'd played dumb and not admitted to understanding Shakespeare, or not spoken critically of a band everyone else liked. Yes, a whole lot easier. But also boring, middling, and downright stifling. It would also have also been lying, which I am not especially keen on.

I hated the movie Titanic with a passion. I saw it in the theater with my parents when it was first released, and had a hard time keeping my fingers away from my face throughout that single viewing, as they wanted desperately to claw my eyeballs from their sockets and hurl them -- rotten tomatoes style -- at the screen. I believe wholeheartedly that despite it's accolades and box office returns, Titanic is a complete cinematic waste of space, and I could never understand why anyone would enjoy a movie I honestly believe to be trite, clichéd, poorly written, and horrendously executed (with the possible exception of the actual ship-sinking-scenes -- all of that groaning wet CGI-rendered metal plummeting downward into an inky-black abyss was, I have to admit, somewhat beguiling). I know I am in the minority in expressing those thoughts, that my criticism chafes against popular opinion. But I stand by my opinion and my voicing of it, because upon entering this world I never signed anything saying I had to keep my mouth shut, or claim to like things I don't, or give respect to things I just plain don't respect.

All of this to say: I have strong opinions, and indeed, I will express them here and wherever else I roam. You are welcome to disagree with them. You are welcome to be offended by them, and be thrown into some kind of frothing tizzy, and think I am a bad person. You are welcome to decide to never come back to this blog again because I have expressed an opinion or idea about something that you disagree with. Your call, and I leave you to make it. But know now that I will not EVER change my opinion about anything or anyone to suit others, to make people feel better, to massage someone's ego, or to keep in lock-step with peers who would prefer I think as they think, do as they do. I like thinking for myself, and after so many years of doing it-- in environments both hostile to and supportive of individuality and free thought -- I'm frankly just plain good at it (or just plain bad at conforming, whichever you prefer).

. . . . .

*The Smiths, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now