February 9, 2000

I know that since I wrote two entries yesterday, I'm now a day off on the date for my journal. Look, we're in the future! Ooh, spooky!

It's OK, though, I probably won't update on either Saturday or Sunday, so we'll be all caught up by Monday. I suppose the real solution would be to change the format of my little calendar thing on the front page, but dammit, I like the little calendar thing on the front page. So, it stays.

I took the Bitch Test this morning. I only scored 51%, which made me a little depressed at first -- was I losing it in my old age? -- but then it told me that I scored a higher bitch score than 87% of the people who took the test. Rock on. I knew I still had it in me.

I'm mellowing out in my old age, you see. When I was in high school, and most of college for that matter, I was a total bitch. I was antisocial and proud of it. I carefully cultivated my abrasive personality. Not many people liked me, and that was fine with me. Screw 'em if they couldn't appreciate me for the brilliant sarcastic genius I was.

I think a lot of smart kids go through this stage. OK, a lot of smart kids never emerge from this stage, to be honest. It starts in grade school. You take some tests, and you score really high, and they put you in the advanced classes, and maybe they put you in the talented and gifted program, assuming your school has one. You're singled out. You're made to feel as though you're somehow more special than all the other kids. People start to say things like, "Maybe you should think about medical school in college," or "Maybe you should think about skipping a grade." You get the idea that you're better than the other kids, because you can solve problems faster and you can read faster and you just know more stuff than they do.

The other kids get this idea too. They see you getting As on all the tests that they're getting Bs on. Maybe they're getting As too, but maybe they have to study their ass off, and they know that you haven't opened your spelling book since the day they were passed out. They watch you collect a prize every single week for getting 100% on the spelling test. Some of them feel resentful. Some of them maybe start to make fun of you.

You become defensive. You're better than they are. You know you are. Your parents and teachers told you so. You believe your parents and teachers. So if they make fun of you, that's their problem, not yours. I mean, sure, it hurts your feelings, but ultimately what's important? Having lots of friends, or being smart? Being smart gets you into a good college, and that's what's important. You know this, too, because your parents and teachers told you.

Maybe you start to cultivate this antisocial personality. You figure that if they aren't smart enough to be your friends and if that makes them want to make fun of you, that's their problem, not your problem. In junior high, your test scores are still off the charts. Maybe you take the SAT early. You're singled out even more. You become a star student. In junior high, everyone else is forming little cliques of friends, and somehow you get left out of that. You're proud of it. You don't need a clique. Cliques are for popular kids who aren't as smart as you. And everybody knows that being smart is the most important thing, because being smart lets you get good grades, and good grades are the most important thing. Everybody tells you that, but they don't have to tell YOU, anymore. You know.

In high school, you're in full bitch mode. Nobody likes you and nobody has to. You're a motherfucking genius. Nobody can touch you. If you live in a small town, maybe you get your name in the paper for some of your more spectacular scholastic achievements. You. Are. The. Best. Being smart is the ultimate achievement, and maybe you have a few friends who appreciate your sense of humor and the things you do, and that's all you need. Everyone else can go fuck themselves. You're going to an excellent college, and you'll get an excellent (meaning high-paying) job, and THAT is what matters.

I don't know if that sounds familiar to anyone else. Maybe it was just my personal experience. It took me a long time in college to get over that sense of smirking superiority. I don't honestly know why I had any friends at all in high school. I was so utterly proud of being a venomous bitch. In college I started to realize that, you know, grades really aren't the most important thing in life. Neither is your job. I looked around me and saw that I had no friends. My entire freshman year, I made no friends. I got good grades, and had no social life.

My sophomore year, my grades fell slightly, and I met some people. I was still proud of being bitchy, but I wasn't trying so hard to alienate the entire world. I didn't feel like I had anything to prove, or live up to, anymore. I wanted good friends, not good grades. It was hard for me to develop close relationships after so many years of holding everyone at arm's length, but I started to manage. I found people who I liked, and who liked me in return. I didn't care so much about maintaining my bitch-genius persona anymore. Those days were slipping away into the past.

Now that I've graduated from college, I've found myself completely altering my way of looking at the world. I used to base my judgements of people solely on how smart they were. I thought that was OK. After all, everybody always told me that being smart was the best thing that you could hope for. It was a gift, they'd told me. All right, then obviously smart equals good, and I should try to surround myself with smart people, and people who are less than smart aren't worth my attention. I don't believe that anymore. I wish I hadn't believed it for as long as I did. I mean, yes, most of my friends are highly intelligent people, but some of them aren't. That doesn't make them less interesting, or less fun to be around. You don't have to be smart to be a good person, or even a funny or interesting person. I wish I'd realized that in high school.

I still have a sarcastic sense of humor, and I'm still bitchy a lot of the time, but I don't think of myself as a bitch on wheels like I used to. (Some of my friends might disagree with this; to them, I say: you should have known me five years ago.)

Anyway, my point is that I've really mellowed out, and I'm happy about that.

THE FORUM: Are you a total bitch?

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