Socially Unacceptable

Today I'm fulfilling the promise I made last Saturday to post the next section of one of the chapters of my new book that I introduced HERE This chapter is titled "Socially Unacceptable" and first deals with the fun of social groups in high school. Here is the next section....

People may grow up, but they don’t really grow up, and it seems we are destined to play these silly little social games until the day we die. The way we play them just becomes more subtle and harder to figure out.

I realized that one day when my oldest daughter was lamenting the fact that her best friend had suddenly qualified for the Popular group, while she was still relegated to something closer to Outcast. Overnight it had become socially unacceptable for said friend to associate with Anjanette. I was in the middle of my Mommy Speech 112, telling her to buck up, that this, too, shall pass, when I realized it wouldn’t.

It certainly hadn’t for me. And I think my brother-in-law summed it up aptly one day when we were looking at homes in a “tony” part of town. I mentioned one that I particularly liked and he said, “You can’t buy this house. You wouldn’t fit in.”

I looked at the woman jogging past in her designer track suit – she wasn’t even breaking a sweat in the 90 plus temperatures – and realized he was right. My blue jean cut offs and penchant for doing my own yard work would not make it in this neighborhood.

I amended my talk to Anjanette that day and told her that nothing was going to change. “So you can either learn to thumb your nose at them or figure out how to operate within the system.”

Later, I would tell a variation of that sermon to each of our kids, and it is interesting to see how they have chosen to respond. Some of them followed in my footsteps and opted out of the social games, while playing just enough to be successful in their careers.

Luckily, they figured out the subtle nuances of social interaction quicker than I did.

Nuance number one: People don’t always mean what they say.

Gosh. I always thought they did. I do, so I figured everyone else did, too, as evidenced by the time I dropped in at my neighbor’s for coffee. This was when I first moved to Texas and I had just met this neighbor. As I left after our first meeting she said, “Y’all come back, now, ya hear.”

So I did. A week later I was lonely for friends in Michigan, so I decided to visit my new friend down the street. I rang her doorbell and when she answered her expression clearly indicated that she did not expect “drop by” company. To her credit, she was gracious and invited me in, but the chill could have cooled a small stadium.

Nuance number two: People can smile and treat you like a dear friend while secretly wishing you would drop off the edge of the earth.

I won’t even go into how I learned that fact. Suffice it to say, I did. But I haven’t learned how to do it myself and I’m sure there are times it would come in handy. Like the time I tried to work on a PTA fundraiser with the woman who had reported David to the principal for pushing her Timmy into the mud and ruining his Izod shirt. Of course, she didn’t report that darling Timmy punched David in the nose first.

I could have happily gone the rest of my life without having to see that woman again after our shouting match in the principal’s office, but, no, she had to volunteer to man the cake-walk booth with me.

Nuance number three: Despite the old adage of not judging a book by its cover, people judge you by how you look all the time.

Oh, they won’t come right out and say, “Where on earth did you get those jeans and that shirt.” Or, “Would you like the name of my hairdresser.”

Okay, some women might. But most will simply smile politely when you try to join their group at a party and tighten up the ranks. It’s a very similar to what happens with nuance number two, and some people must practice for years to perfect the smile and the slight.

Another Book Excerpt

Here is another excerpt from my latest creative effort that I introduced HERE back in June. This is the beginning of Chapter Two; SOCIALLY UNACCEPTABLE: Otherwise Known as the Crazy Things We Do.

We all remember those horrible days of middle school and high school when our social standing depended on who we were friends with and what kind of clothes we wore. Other than a change of setting and a change of attire, I’m sure the social posturing started in ancient times when Garthea was kicked out of the clan for inappropriate use of a bear skin and continues unaltered through present time.

When I was in high school, I was in the Outcast group. You remember that group. It was made up of kids who didn’t belong to the Popular group, the Jocks, or the Nerds. Among the many things that made us socially unacceptable was the fact that we were a bit lacking in the looks department. Not that any of us had faces that would make little kids run away screaming, we were just plain, ordinary, and some of us wore glasses. That alone was a severe stigma in high school in the 60s.

I remember meeting a former classmate a year out of high school, and laughing at his reaction. “You’re not THAT Maryann,” he said. “You can’t be. She was… uh… well… You sure have changed.”

We in the Outcasts were also not quite good enough athletically to be on a sport team, and some of us just hid our brain power because we didn’t want to be with the Nerds. In our minds, that group was lower than ours, even though most folks thought otherwise.

One of the things I liked best about belonging to the Outcasts, was I could pretty much do anything I wanted and it wouldn’t affect my standing. Think about it. I was already on the lowest rung of the ladder. So I just clung to it the best I could and looked forward to the day when I would be out of high school and this silliness of social groupings would end.

Ha.

People may grow up, but they don’t really grow up, and it seems we are destined to play these silly little social games until the day we die. The way we play them just becomes more subtle and harder to figure out.

Come back Monday if you get a chance and see how we play some of those silly games.