So where are the promised posts from my other questions that arose from reading Mean Boy? I imagine you've must be frantically asking yourselves, awaiting my answer with baited breath :)

Well, I had to give Mean Boy back to the library (mean library, always asking for stuff back) so I don't have the quote on me, but at one point one of the soft spoken professional poets and the main character (who is a student) are having dinner and the pro is saying how he loves the poetry and the writing and how he imagined so romantically what being a paid poet would be like, and then he got there and with the politics and the self-promotion and all the other stuff you have to do to get to that position, it was actually so much like high school.

Of course, this is not what the protagonist wants to hear and he doesn't really get what the guy is saying at that moment. But it got me thinking that most of life is like high school. I mean, what is high school if not a representation of what we as human beings are like when massed together in one building with different age groups, genders, and races together? And what is work, any sort of job really, but exactly that same situation? It's still a popularity contest in many ways, only that as you get older, hopefully some of the criteria for that popularity changes. There are still the cliques, the people you must show respect to even when you don't respect them, the people you have to pussy foot around because they are more sensitive, the social climbing is still relevant (if not more so), the socially awkward, the lazy, the annoying, the beautiful. It's all still there folks, high school is all around.

I mean, thankfully, the criteria for popularity and success evolve to include a much higher ranking for intelligence (smart didn't really get you very far in high school), but prettiness? still a big ol' factor. And being able to be a good social navigator, people skills, also huge. But the biggest similarity I find is that, no matter what job you have, if you want to be really successful at it, you have to play at least some of the popularity games people want you to play and most of those games were developed in high school.

The high school games were ruthless and they taught us well, maybe this is why a lot of the geeks go on to be so successful, they went through the ringer and came out alive, kicking, and fully cognizant of the consequences of not knowing how to play these games. The popular people in high school didn't have the same sort of education, they doled out the beating that taught the geeks their lessons, but did not get that beating themselves.

And I'm saying this in a far too negative way. High school is a miniature scale, over-hormonalized, version of the world at large. It's not bad, it's just the way we are. I liked high school and I like life, it was just somehow funny to discover that I'm still playing the same games I used to have to play and, me being me, I get a little bored with that. It would be nice to get past that in some ways, but that's what we have our friends for.

So I continue to be intrigued, piqued even, by art representing high school. Perhaps the similarity to our current lives is why many of us find ourselves still watching shows like Buffy and Veronica Mars and finding meaning in them. And yes, you can say that the emotional tone of these texts is "overwrought," but isn't that sometimes how we still feel, but the years have taught us to hide that level of emotion from others? It's not just the similarity to our social/professional lives, but to our emotional lives as well. I mean, 3 years ago I broke up with my boyfriend and it just about killed me, but you're not really allowed to really admit that sort of emotion about your lovers anymore - people would be all "she took a day off work because of that?" But I wanted to take a year off work and just cry. Over the top? Sure, but it's still how I felt. It's nice to watch shows where people are allowed to feel what they're feeling, even if it is overwrought.

I just finished Looking for Alaska by John Green and it was the best book I've read in ages. I think sometimes that authors put more work into creating meaningful prose when it's written for high school age kids (to create a message or some such thing), and sometimes the meaninfulness is too preachy or too Oprahy, but sometimes it is just right. Looking for Alaska gets the job done.

I leave you with a passage from this well-written high school book, a passage that with all the death in my last year, I found to be completely meaninful. The main character is asking himself why he feels fear, of all things, after the death of one of his friends:

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.