Why I’m Not Cool And Shakespeare Is My Homie

I recently read a Facebook post that said people who cuss are just trying to be cool. I take great exception to this statement.

I have never tried to be cool because I have always known I am NOT cool.

Let’s be real. I can recite lines from Star Wars by heart. As a kid, I used to read the World Book Encyclopedia for fun. In fourth grade, my favorite book was a biography about Abraham Lincoln.

These are not the traits of a “cool” chick.

It didn’t bother me until that very brief period of time my freshman year in high school, when I was trying desperately to find my niche. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of making inroads with some of the girls who seemed to have their shit together. I know now that no fourteen-year-old girl has their shit together, but back then I still had that illusion.

My illusion of fitting in was shattered in one fell swoop by a girl I’ll call Bangle because she wore shit tons of jewelry…like a guy selling stuff out of the trunk of his car in an alley.

Before school, some of the girls would congregate in the atrium. I was sitting there trying not to look nerdy in my red and gray wool uniform skirt. That’s when Bangle flounced over to me, with a million gold bangle bracelets jangling on her wrists.

“I met your brother!” she said, staring down her broad, pointy nose at me.

I froze instantly. I DID NOT want the girls sitting around me to hear any stories about my brother.

“We were partying in Juarez and when he found out where I go to school, he told me his sister goes here too.”

In those days, it wasn’t unusual for high school kids to go over the border and drink in Juarez, where the ID checks and drinking laws were very lax. My underage brother spent a large chunk of his late teens there, as did many of my classmates.

Bangle let her words sink in and then got a very smug look on her face and said, “He told me you never party, you’re little Miss Perfect, and you’re a real square! He made fun of you all night!”

I’m pretty sure she cackled like The Wicked Witch of the West at that point. Or maybe that’s just my fourteen-year old-self remembering it that way.

In any case, I heard a couple of other girls start to snicker and my heart dropped a little. My brother had gone to the same middle school I did, and I could never escape the comparisons with him. I had thought that surely going to a new high school, and an all-girls Catholic school at that, nobody would know him and I would be judged on who I was.  Even if that meant people thought I was a nerd, at least it wouldn’t be because I was being held to the standard of a brother who…well, had questionable standards.

I left the atrium that morning and never hung out there again. I hung out down in the basement where our lockers were, or on the second-floor hallway. Those are the places where I met my tribe. All the other weirdos like me who didn’t fit into those other cliques. Girls who liked to read, who liked to listen to heavy metal music, who liked to be creative.

I have people tell me sometimes that they think I’m cool because I don’t care what other people think. Again, I say, I’m not trying to do that. I just made up my mind at a very young age that people are going to judge you based on THEIR perceptions, and not necessarily on any facts or reality. In the end, you have to live with yourself, so why not be happy with the person you live with?

In a VERY roundabout way, my point is I’m not trying to do or be anything. I’m not “trying to be cool.” I just love language. All language. Even rated “R” language.

Especially rated R language.

I love language, so much in fact, that I studied it in college. I grew up fairly fluent in Spanish, and I quickly learned that I had a knack for languages in general. I majored in Spanish and minored in English, and my degree required that I take a lot of classes that involved origins and sociology of language.

I have, over the years, taught myself rudimentary German (so that I could exchange a few words with my friend’s grandmother) and Italian, just because I figure someone who marries into an Italian last name should have some basic knowledge of Italian. I studied French for one grading period in middle school and still remember some of what I learned. I had a crush on a Russian major in college and learned a few phrases to try to impress him.

I guess this is why swearing is just another language to me, and I don’t place a judgement on it as to whether it’s “good” or “bad”. To be completely cliché, it is what it is.

And sometimes calling someone a twatwaffle just fits the situation better than calling them a knucklehead.

This might explain why I love Shakespeare so much. I know people find his plays and sonnets boring and difficult to understand, but I find him fascinating. He invented words in the English language that we still use five hundred years later. Consider that for a moment. A playwright and poet who invented and changed the language of his time.

Until recently, I still owned my Shakespeare textbook from college. It was a huge brick of a book called “The Complete Works of Shakespeare” and it held every play and sonnet written by him. It must have been about six inches thick and wouldn’t fit in my backpack. I had to carry it when I took it to class.

I think it finally ended up in a pile of books I gave to charity recently. I had moved that book repeatedly from apartment to apartment and house to house and I’m not really sure why. Maybe it was just sentimental.

No, not because I studied it voraciously as part of my literature studies at A&M.

It was sentimental because I used it to knock the shit out of my ex-boyfriend’s head when he told me his “side-chick” didn’t complain nearly as much as I did. Since that was my first time hearing about said side-chick, I lost my temper, as I’m prone to do, and grabbed the closest weapon at hand that evening. Unfortunately for “K” it was the Shakespeare book.

And speaking of smacking someone with a textbook, there are days I wish I could go back and talk to that sad fourteen-year-old girl and tell her when Bangle comes up to her in the atrium, she should put that bitch in her place. I know, though, that’s not who I was then. I didn’t develop that fire until later.

Really, Bangle did me a favor by being such a bitch to me in front of all those girls. It shattered any desire I had to hang out with the rich girls and talk about their bland, vanilla boyfriends who wore polos in pastel colors and complained about having to drive their dad’s BMW hand-me-downs.

It spurred me to embrace my weirdness and find others who didn’t fit into the cliques either. In my new group, I could be myself. I could tell completely inappropriate jokes using language that was forbidden at home, listen to music performed by guys in spandex with hair down to their asses, and talk about boyfriends that wore black t-shirts, wore earrings, and generally pissed off our parents.

We were from all different backgrounds: military brats, middle class kids, doctor’s kids, kids with money, kids whose parents were barely scraping by. Some were artsy. Some performed in show choir. Some were stoners. Some were jocks. A couple of us wrote stories to entertain the others. Some of us went to college and some of us went to the School of Hard Knocks. I keep in touch with a lot of them through Facebook.

As for Bangle, I never had another conversation with her in high school after the atrium incident. I never saw her again after that until our twenty-year high school reunion. I still didn’t really talk to her, but she sent me a friend request on Facebook, and I accepted so that I could be nosy.

There is nothing to report. She has lived an ordinary life.

If I ever did talk to her again, I would tell her thank you. Her unkindness in the atrium that morning was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I wouldn’t trade who I am for anything.