Well, here's the deal: I'd have none of that crap either. When I was in grade school, I had to have my front baby teeth removed leaving me with one big adult tooth, three missing teeth, and then braces. Dad lovingly called me "chopper one." On top of that, my mother had trained to be a beautician, so she cut our hair in these old 60s styles in order to save money.
I was friends with the nerds, the people considered ugly and brainy. In 7th grade, the teeth straightened out and all of a sudden I was considered worthy of admittance to the "in group." What I observed there was a lot of shallow, gossipy, mean people who, I guess, considered themselves something special: they came from wealth or their parents were engineers, doctors, lawyers, C-level execs. Some where children of laborers, low-level white collar workers like me. The ticket to admittance was appearance and being good at school, so class origin wasn't a barrier - as long as you had intelligence and good looks, you could get in. Whereas you only had to have class origin to get in for those who weren't that bright and/or weren't considered good looking. Sports was the avenue for boys.
I spent the rest of high school irritated with their behavior, at how mean to people they were, and trying to challenge the gossipy, shallow meanness by being friends with everyone whether they were nerds, stoners, jocks, geeks, farmers, whatever.
I also spent most of that time eager to get the hell out of the idiocy of small town life, convinced that it could only get better in a big city where diversity and freedom of anonymity created pockets of resistance to the gossipy, mean, snooty shallowness of the "in" crowd. I never found that, natch. I sure as shit didn't find it on the left.
I remember getting an invite to my 10th year reunion. One of the meannest women among this crowd was organizing it. She'd gotten pregnant while at William and Mary, dropped out and had become a dental hygienist. She wanted us to tell her all about ourselves: did we still have all our hair, teeth, good looks? Had we grown pot bellies, flabby arms?
I declined. Once I got out of that town, I've never been back. Too bad I can't consistently find, on this list, something more clever than Susan H's priorities as to what counted in life.
shag