Confessions of a Dork

Jester · May 30, 2002, 8:38pm

I just thought I’d post this up here to share; it’s an article that I wrote for our school newspaper. As this is my senior year, this is the last article I’ll ever right for a high school paper, and I’m pretty durn proud of it.

Walt’s Last Hurrah

It has been called to my attention numerous times over the last couple years that I am a dork. This observation has been made by a very wide range of people, from my closest friends to people I have just met, from the occasional good-natured faculty member to my very own beloved mother. And I will readily admit to it. If there was ever anyone who deserved the title of “dork,” it’s me. I wear the most god awful of ugly Hawaiian shirts, I have a box full of comic books in my room which I’ve been amassing since I was five, and I know enough about “The Simpsons” to make Matt Groening blush. I even wrote an entire news article about a speed bump.

But there is a distinction to be made here.  I am a dork, yes.  But the important thing about me being a dork is the fact that I couldn’t care less about it.  Rather, I have embraced my dork-dom to the point where my parents aren’t even surprised when I wear my shirt with the Pirate Onions on it out of the house in the morning.  What’s my secret, you ask?  How can I live so contentedly with a title that in most respects is considered a derogatory term?  Well, gather round, children, it’s high times ye learned about an editorial writer and his three rules for survival in high school.  Once you have read over these rules you are free to either commit them to memory or throw this entire newspaper into the nearest incinerator.  But I highly recommend that you take them to heart, because I’ve found that in my four years here I have only been really happy when realizing the truth behind them.

Rule Number One: *You are not cool.*  Yes, I’m talking to you.  No matter how big your biceps are, no matter how smart you are, and no matter how much Simpsons trivia you’ve packed away over the years, it is completely impossible for you to be cool.  I’m sorry, but that’s life for you.  Coolness is a term that implies that you’re above someone else.  And here in high school, none of us are ever cool enough to be beyond associating with anybody else.  I’m not cool, you’re not cool, all the graduating classes before us were, in fact, not cool.  No matter how mature we think we are, we’re all pretty much a bunch of insecure kids running around trying to figure out where we fit in.  Calling ourselves cool is just something that we do to avoid facing the fact that we may not have it all together, after all.

But there is a silver lining, because Rule Number Two is this: *Just because you are not cool does not mean that nobody likes you.*  After all, if I’ve managed to get friends, it’s sure possible for anybody else to do so.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that the sooner you realize that you’re not cool, the sooner people will begin to want to be your friends.  It isn’t until you start treating people like equals, and level the playing field a bit, that they will actually begin to take you seriously.  After all, they’re just as insecure as you are.

Which leads us to Rule Number Three: *If you are not cool, that means that nobody else is cool, either.*  There’s no such thing as a “cool” crowd.  If you start labeling people by what group they hang out with, you miss out on some very valuable human interaction.  Believe me, I know this from personal experience.  It seems like a lot of the conversations I’m having with people this year are along the lines of “Wow, I’m really glad I got to know you this year.”  Why was it this year?  Well, that’s easy to answer; it was this year because for the last couple years I’ve been an idiot.  Don’t tune somebody out with the excuse that “They hang out with a different group than I do.”  So what if they’re in a different group?  They’re still people, and chances are they might even have something to add with a conversation.

So, what I guess all three of these rules boil down to is the one greatest piece of advice that I've been given in life: don’t take yourself too seriously.  I’m a dork, and a flawed one at that.  I mess up, and do things that I regret, but I’ve found that the more willing to admit to those sorts of things that I become, the easier they are to deal with.  So embrace your non-coolness.  Dance around like an idiot in the middle of the Pit, or start a sing-along in the middle of the Dining Hall.  Because if you don’t, you’ll be a senior before you know it, and believe me, trying to cram all the dorkiness that you can into one year is a lot harder than it looks.

So long, High School. <sniff>
-Walt

auntie_em · May 30, 2002, 9:26pm

I love dorks.

SwimmingRiddles · May 30, 2002, 9:53pm

Bravo. My high school epiphanies were 1.) The popular people are not terribly interesting, funny or nice. 2.) The dorks, be they drama-geeks, band room dorks, or goth kids, tend to be all of the above. 3.) I’d rather be a dork and have fun then be popular and bored. In addition, I later learned that all those popular people I feared and hated really thought I was far cooler than I was. So four years of insecurity was misplaced. Bah.

ps: newpaper geeks are the best dorks. This from a chick who had a column with ran for three years under the title “Whine Tasting.” Heh.

Jimson_Jim · May 31, 2002, 2:19pm

While in another thread reminiscing about 80’s music and my graduation from high school in that decade, I claimed I was the Prince of Dorkness. But I would happily cede my title to one who would wear as nobly as you.

Jim
f/k/a The Prince of Dorkness
n/k/a The Dork Knight

Sophie · May 31, 2002, 2:29pm

I love dorks, too.

College is better, baby. You shall see.

Eonwe · May 31, 2002, 4:12pm

Jester,

Well put, sir.

jlzania · May 31, 2002, 4:13pm

Great article. Jester!

slortar · May 31, 2002, 5:40pm

I’d throw pennies at you dweebs and then peel off in my beat up Camaro if I had either of those items at this moment.

Homebrew · May 31, 2002, 7:19pm

I am 32 years old. I wear garish Hawaiian shirts. In one Simpson episode in which the guest star was John Waters, John gave a Hawaiian shirt to Bart, much to Homer’s dismay. Homer says to Marge:

“There’s only two kind of guys who wear those shirts: gay guys and big, fat party animals. And Bart doesn’t look like a big, fat party animal to me…”

I fit both criteria.

In my former life as a professional newspaper reporter, I wrote more than one story about speed humps (not bumps, humps), that required interviewing the local police chief and residents of the neighborhood where they were placed. Seriously. More than 24-inches of copy on speed humps.

Ellen_Cherry · May 31, 2002, 7:23pm

Great writing, Jester! I wish I’d been as mature as you in high school. I’d have saved myself a lot of grief.