Geek.
Why don't I seem to fit in? It can't be for lack of friends; I have plenty of those. Most of them are quite close. So why do I feel so distant? Not always in a bad way, though...on the contrary, standing out as a math and computer expert can sometimes be quite rewarding and fun. My main problem, I guess, is not being a geek. I hate it when people using that term to describe themselves without ever having earned it. I've become somewhat territorial about this term, albeit slightly insulting. I feel as if the past year spent learning advanced math and programming mean nothing in the face of pretentious jocks who wish to stand out from the crowd by labeling themselves as geeks, when, in reality, the extent of their geekiness is adding a bold tag to their MySpace pages. The question isn't what I'm feeling; that's jealousy and pride. It's WHY. That's actually pretty stupid. I completely know why. Jocks are athletic, popular, and all-around admired people. Geekiness is the last thing I have left. With that taken away, I'd be an average, plain, non-muscular teenage boy, whose main interests would concern Family Guy and girls who I'd never even get to know (Thank you, social stigma, for making it transitively uncool for people to talk to me!). Programming and math give me not only pleasure, but a reputation as the, quote-unquote, "smart one". If a popular, good-looking football player labels himself as a geek, people believe him, because he's a jock. And, being a jock, girls are "impressed" with his pseudo-intelligence. Meanwhile, I'm using my real computational intelligence to code something similar to MySpace, itself. Girls aren't impressed with that; why would they be? They're barely impressed with the muscleheads' knowledge of HTML (which they mostly learned from me). It's the six-pack that draws them in, and keeps them in. They just need some form of useless intelligence to justify a meaningless teenage relationship; to tell themselves that they're not shallow. That they're compassionate beings. Are you? Are you, really? If you really are, I'd be glad to get to know you. Until then, I'll be waiting. I'm good at that.