I graduated from high school in 1984. This means that my classmates will be meeting for the twenty-fifth alumni meeting this year. In this regard, many of the people I studied with try to friend me on Facebook, send me an email and try to persuade me to come to a meeting. I don't have the faintest desire to answer each of them individually, and that's why I'm writing here.
Almost every reader of this blog — unless they're a complete idiot, of course — should have known long ago that I'm a geek. I've been like this since the cradle. My dad introduced me to the concepts of the Gaussian curve and standard deviation when I was in third grade, and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever heard of. This is the kind of kid I used to be. I was also very young — fifty-five meters when I went to ninth grade, and sixty meters — in 11th grade. And even when I quickly grew to 80 meters between 11th grade, I weighed less than 55 kg. So imagine a petty skinny hyperactive geek. Like most other geek kids, I had a bad time at school. I don't think my experience is exceptional; I know many people who were much worse off, but it's not normal either, because the administration of the school I went to allowed excessive bullying. Almost every geek child has been publicly ostracized and ridiculed. And, of course, they all faced physical violence sooner or later. The school administration has the deciding vote on how much physical bullying geeks will face. My school administration didn't care much about this: “Bruises? He must have poor coordination and ran into something. Broken fingers? Hmm, it happens. We're pretty sure it was an accident. What do you want? Have your child be accompanied by armed guards?”
I didn't have a single friend in my class. There were a couple of friends who graduated from high school a year before me, and a few others who graduated a year or two later. To be absolutely precise, there wasn't a single person in my class who came close to treating me like a friend. Not a single one.
Like I said, the way I was treated by my high school classmates was pretty typical of geeks. At best I was ignored, at worst I was beaten up. In between, they used it to improve my rating: telling others that they saw me doing some disgusting or hysterically funny things was a standard method for moving up in certain circles. The limit was when someone painted a swastika with gasoline on the street in front of my house and set it on fire. (It was autumn, in a wooded area.)
I'm not going to pretend that I wasn't an easy target for my tormentors, or that my responses didn't make them even worse. I was a hyperactive geek. My social skills were in their infancy. I don't think I deserved to be treated like this, but at the same time I'm well aware that my hyperactivity and lack of proper social skills made me an excellent target and discouraged people from standing up for me.
But I don't think that excuses those who mocked me. It doesn't excuse those bastards who wrote dirty stories about me, nor does it excuse those who threw me against the wall. That doesn't explain the behavior of the guy who broke my fingers to see what the sound would be like. And it doesn't relieve the people who watched it and laughed.
It's been 25 years since I got out of that damn wretched hole. But suddenly my classmates started looking for contact with me, sending me an email, making me friends on Facebook and trying to persuade me to come to the reunion with their family. (This meeting is meant to be a picnic with families.) Even people who regularly beat the crap out of me tried to communicate with me like we were bosom buddies.
My reaction to this is... What the hell is going on with you people? How do you think I want to have anything in common with you? How did you have the nerve to act like we're old friends? How dare you? I saw an email marked RSVP (please reply) that one of you sent me and I almost vomited just because I started remembering your names.
The only positive thing I learned from that time was that my children go karate. My son will probably have a black belt by the time he finishes fourth grade. He's a little hyperactive geek, just like me. He might have to face some social difficulties like me, but when some damn scumbag like one of you tries to raise his hand against him or his friends, he'll beat the crap out of him. One of the rules of a karate school is that you should never be the first to start a fight, but when a fight starts, always be the one to end it. And that's exactly what he'll be able to do. End the fight in such a way as to teach the offender and his company to stay as far away from him as possible.
And that's all I want from you too. Stay the hell away from me. I don't want to hear about how you live. I'm not interested in how you've changed since high school. I don't care about your job or your spouses or your kids. My life is great and I can't think of a single reason why I'd be willing to let a bunch of dirt into my world by getting in touch with either of you.
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