Quote of the Week...from Stephen King

Let's face it.  No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.                  ---Stephen King

I remember conservative "no-spin" spinner Bill O'Reilly once making a similar comment to Stephen King's above quote when he said that kids were naturally awkward.  I think both of them speak mostly truth here, but I need to make an important distinction between what someone was feeling during that period in their life and his or her actual outward demeaner.  When I was going through junior and senior high school (I just missed out on the "middle school" experience), I was continually baffled by the confident, sometimes even arrogant composure of my fellow classmates.  Surely as humans we shared the same biological processes: weren't their changing bodies also wreaking the same havoc with their minds as mine was?  In retrospect, I'm sure they were going through a lot of the same stuff I was, but they had learned to cover it all up...a mask I think many have never gotten around to taking off.  As for me, I don't think I ever got over adolescence...when I was a little kid, I thought I already had everything figured out by the time I was nine.  And then the big change came and screwed everything up. Like most of us, I have both good and bad memories of that period in my life, but unlike the movies I can't go back in a time machine and change it all...nor should I: like that great old Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Tapestry, it's all crucial in making me what I am now, for better or for worse.  And if there is a specific regret about something I may have done wrong back in those bygone years, then I can still see whether I can apply what I learned to my life in the "now", where all of reality exists anyway...