Do you remember the "It" girl from high school? The girl everyone was dreaming about being with, or being? The girl whose name would be blurted out before you could even finish the question "Who is the most popular gir..." no matter who you asked in school--band geek, sports freak, outcast, cheerleader, chess team captain, loner--because her status, her place at the top, was inescapable; was THAT established and certain.
Remember how much power she had? Just one "hello" from her in passing would totally change your seating options at lunch. An overheard "call you later" would earn you an invite to every A-list house party for the rest of the year. A date with her? Being her best friend? Dude... Set. For. Life. Even teachers would start being nice to you and sh*t. Change your F's to C's.
Did you ever wonder why she was the "It" girl? Like, who decided she'd be the IT girl? Because when you really thought about it, she wasn't the prettiest girl in school. She didn't have the greatest face or the slammingest body. There were other girls who were equally good looking, but who were crazy smart and wicked fun too. Like that fox in your English class for example.
When you figured out that IT girl's popularity and status was totally manufactured, was a baseless consensus born from nothing, and persisted solely because of the same brand-recognitive inertia that heightens the worth of all kinds of otherwise worthless crap--like designer clothes and trendy, stupid, overpriced vehicles and corporate media--did it piss you off? Were you all filled with righteous indignation and rage at the system and the man in all of the man's many forms...or did you vote for these sons of bitches?
Posted by Antigeist at March 9, 2006 10:44 AMi've been thinking about this a lot lately, mindreader! i've been thinking about how my tendency to dismiss the IT girl off the bat without even investigating whether she might be of some substance, my tendency to assume that the popularity is totally manufactured --that this puts me just as much in high school as the existence of the IT girl shows the rest of the world to be. it is exhausting to evaluate everything on its merits, individually. but voting against (just because everybody else votes for) doesn't make me better than the poople who vote with the crowd. gives me more time to find the crazy smart and wicked fun girls, though.
Posted by: anne at March 9, 2006 03:12 PMI agree, opposing for opposition's sake is about as adolescent as it gets. Dictionary definition, textbook. But so is going along, just going along, without question, without ever taking a moment to think about...what am I saying, to think!
That's just pathological.
Posted by: antigeist at March 9, 2006 04:38 PMI like the practice of dredging up memories from schooldays and trying to make analogies with contemporary famous people and politicians. For example, one has to go back farther than high school to get an analogy for the behavior of George Bush; he is most like a kid I knew (and feared) in the fourth grade. And I think most of our celebrity actors and actresses are beyond comparison with that old IT GIRL, or JOCK GUY--who both seem like tragic models who didn't fare very well in adult life. Staying in the past is no fun, but leaping about from past to present is, how shall I put it? the key to immortality!
Posted by: Mortimer Shy at March 9, 2006 07:01 PM