’ve had this TV show
on the brain lately.
Every once in a while, I find a new TV show that piques my interest
– the problem is, it usually doesn’t last more than six months. Hopefully,
that won’t be the case with the one I watched last night – “Freaks and
Geeks” (though the magic of a VCR, since it actually airs on Mondays).
The show is set in high school back in 1980, but the time period doesn’t
matter – their portrayal of high school is exactly how I remembered it
from ten years ago (or ten years after the setting of the show).
The memories are bittersweet, however….
I was a geek.
There’s no denying it. I remember that, from basically the first
day of my freshman year, I had this crush on a girl. It lasted at
least a year, and I never said a single word to her. Well, actually,
I did – one sentence. The one class we had together was meeting in
the library one day, and we both forgot and went to the regular classroom.
So I said to her – are you ready for this?…
“That’s right – we’re supposed to meet in the library today.”
Shakespeare couldn’t have written anything better.
Oh, and here’s a good one! There was the time I was harassed by
a punk rocker.
He was the leader of his own rock band, actually, and looked the part
– long, scraggly hair and leather clothes and the ugliest mug you can imagine.
He also happened to hang out with a bunch of, for lack of a better term,
groupies -- one of whom was the lanky kid who hated my guts that I
had a dream about just a few months ago.
Of course, I was totally innocent in all of this. Somehow, the
lanky kid got the leather rocker to start bothering me -- his excuse was
something like I looked at him funny (which may have actually happened,
although he was sitting behind me). He tormented me for twenty minutes
during lunch -- and all that time, not a single teacher passed by, and
not one of my friends stepped in to defend me (although I really don’t
blame them; they were probably as scared to death as I was). After
lunch was over, he followed me to my locker, and just for good measure,
slammed me into it. Not hard enough to hurt, but just hard enough
to know that the guy was certifiably crazy. Now at this point I was
trying to decide whether the best way out of the situation was to go tell
the principal, or just drop out of school. He never bothered me again,
though -- probably because from then on, we sat at the opposite end of
the cafeteria.
So in a way, it’s hard to watch this show. A couple of the kids
on it are -- dare I say -- even geekier than I was. But the amazing
thing about the show is that it shows how possible it is to transcend your
geekiness, something I’m still trying to do ten years later.
