Cools Kids vs. The Geeks

With all this talk of high school reunions it’s only fitting - or perhaps synchronous - that yesterday I happened to watch a 30 Rock episode in which Liz Lemon attends her 20 year high school reunion. If you’re not familiar with the show, Liz left her suburban, Philadelphia upbringing and along with it her outcast teen years, and went on to become the head of a hit NBC comedy show in New York.

So the episode follows what looks to be a predictable storyline - “cocoon becomes *flap* *flap* butterfly” as she puts it. And it is noticeable how sexy and sophisticated Liz looks compared to her bouffant haired ‘middle America’ classmates. But when Liz goes to confront one of her former “tormenters”, the episode suddenly inverts. Apparently Liz wasn’t just unpopular because she was a nerd, she was unpopular because she was a bitch (and a nerd). And all those “pretty, popular girls” had not only tried to be nice to her, they had consequently undergone years of therapy due to her razor tongue.

Ah if only this was actually how it worked.

According to a friend of a friend, “no one thinks they were cool at school - you’re always weird to someone.” But my friend thought otherwise. “I disagree that everyone felt like the odd one out. Some girls were bitchy and snooty and knew it.”

I think in high school it’s pretty clear to everyone who is cool, who is not, and, therefore, it’s clear to those that were cool that they were cool, and those who were not that they’re not. For example my fifteen-year-old brother has always been incredibly perceptive about his social status. In junior school he was in the ‘cool group’ but now in high school (and with a grade about four times as large) he’s in a group that sits somewhere in the middle of the social ladder.

A friend of mine told me recently - completely frankly - that she was in the cool group at school. It didn’t surprise me - she’s pretty, funny, absurdly competent at doing almost anything, confident and just the kind of person you can’t help but want to like you. She couldn’t go to her high school reunion but was looking at the Facebook event wall and thought, “oh all these people I thought were boring and losers seem pretty interesting and funny actually, while my friends from the cool group are all on drugs now and total losers.”

Going back to my high school reunion was a bit more like Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. Except the ‘dream version’ - not the ‘reality version’ - where everyone is dressed in pastels and basically hasn’t changed since high school.

In case you were wondering, I wasn’t very cool at school. But I don’t think I was a huge nerd. I had quite a few not-very-close friends in lots of different groups across the social spectrum, and then mainly hung out with this one girl through year 9 and 10, and then a different girl throughout 11 and 12 - neither of whom I keep in contact with anymore.

I think my high school experience could have been different if I’d gone to another high school. Such as my friend Nicole who went to a nerdy school full of Asians who loved show choir and drama and playing the violin. Or my friend Julia who went to a school in Darlinghurst, full of bad, weird types who were kicked out of every other private girls school in the city. Anything would have been better than the smoothed-down pinafores, ribbon-in-the-hair conservatism of my high school.

For what it’s worth, after suffering yet another night of huge unpopularity she ends the night by giving the class a final fuck you - “You know what? Suck it you waling, IHOP monkeys,” Jack interrupts says her the jet is waiting. “That’s right, a jet. To New York Cit-yyyy! Lemon OUT!”

And with that, Tan OUT!