cooooool.

to this day, one of my fondest memories and greatest achievements remains the speech i gave at my high school graduation. to a captive audience of approximately 3000 people, i spoke of ferris bueller and the beatles, proudly eschewing the favorite crux of the other two speakers: green day's "the time of your life." i spoke slowly, too slowly, as sound was traveling the length of the football field more slowly than i'd anticipated. unsurprisingly, i was nervous as hell. like so many other tormented artistes, i'd never really felt that high school was my milieu; aside from my core group of lovely and brilliant friends, i had pretty much labored under the impression that i hadn't really registered on the radar of the rest of my classmates. i was always that weird girl with the glasses and the stripe in her hair, the smart one with the filthy mouth.


so imagine my abject terror and surprise when half the graduating student body leapt out of their chairs when i finished, roaring my name and screaming their approval. after the ceremony, i had so many people come up to me and wish me luck at college in the fall, how they'd really miss this thing about me, or that thing about me. i was flabbergasted, having been utterly convinced that most of my fellow students never even SAW me, much less noticed.


since then, that feeling has occasionally reared its head in my life, in those moments when people from my past willingly seek me out for reasons i can't fathom, reappearing with the announcement that they'd been thinking about me for ages, and were so pleased to have finally found me and caught up. people who i thought were too cool for me when i knew them.


it's happened twice in the last week, with people i haven't spoken to for eight years and three years respectively.


all of which begs the question: am i cooler than i think, and has that always been so?
don't answer that.