'Biggest Nerd' and 'Most Likely to Secede from the Union'

[x_los]

Have suddenly remembered how funny my high school superlatives were and added them to my profile. Am still angry over loosing Most 'Interestingly' Dressed to Naomi Dickerson.

I really don't remember any of the others, or who won, though I hazily suspect Todd Gingerich may have been my male cohort in biggest nerd-dom?

Did any of you guys get thingies? I think I would have remembered the ones awarded to y'all, though.

I probably don't remember because I didn't go to Baccawhatsit. Or those award assembly things. Or any assemblies, actually (special thanks to the team with the get away car, who parked so that I could get off stage from that stupid Nat'l Merit b.s. I had to show up for, which enabled me to slink directly 1) from the stage 2) out the side ventilation door 3) into the Gibson car waiting at the bottom of the hill and 4) out to the park for the remainder of the pomp and circumsuck).

Oh, also Special Thanks to Wilson for never appropriately checking the bio-wing doors after the teacher blockade closed in to prevent escape, and to Stover for never properly locking those windows in the journalism lab I used to limbo-shimmy out of. Without you I might have had to find out what happens at a pep rally.

...Also: thanks, Burns, for being too senile and Vietnam'd out to properly wield that claymore you kept in the filing cabinet and occasionally waved at us in a threatening manner, and for specifying, when no one had asked, that you weren't a babykiller because the Vietcong guerrillas you'd offed had all been at least ten. Thanks for specifying that repeatedly. We were all greatly comforted.

Comments

[sanestlunatic.livejournal.com]

I didn't. I lost out on most musical to the girl whose only ostensible musical talent was the ability to jump up and down on a stage and show off her large breasts.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Ugh, I haaaated pep rallies. But the goddamn band always had to play at them. Fuck you, high school.

This is a surprisingly long comment for just drive-by icon love. Eeeeee Rani!

[bellsandblades.livejournal.com]

I won "Most Individualistic." Mostly because I got the nerd vote, as they packed all of us AP kids in the same classes from junior high onward, and gods know none of the rest of them were about to be so unseemly as to be. You know. Themselves. =T Or violent, there was the violence, and the graphic threats, and the hatred of Marshmallow Peeps...

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Er, so she was like, show choir?

What do you play? Poor band kids got the football games too! Much sympathy.

OMG I love your icon moooore!B/c he looks so convinced of it!

[x-los.livejournal.com]

We had that weird 'school within the school' style system too, where it was like, the honors/AP ghetto AND YOU NEVER SAW OTHER CHILDREN AGAIN. That's why I was so surprised at having gotten superlatives, b/c it was all 'People know me? I don't know them! Like, not at alllll. Who are you people, again?'

Yeeeeeeeah, knowing you, you earned your superlative at knife point.

Peeps do AMAZING things in the microwave. It's Easter, J. Do you know your the post-sale Peeps that can be hilariously, graphically destroyed through heating and super-inflation are?

[sanestlunatic.livejournal.com]

School rock band, actually. Don't ask...my choir director was a bit...strange.

I marched on piccolo, but played bass clarinet/contrabass clarinet the rest of the time. Gaaaah don't even remind me of football games. I hate football.

Mmmm, Anthony Ainley. I need to watch more Five with the Master. I also need Ainley!Master icons...and Five icons. All of my icon slots are going to be taken over by DW.

[gritsinmisery.livejournal.com]

THank heavens my school did not do the "most likely to" / "best ___" crap at that time (it'll be 30 years at the end of the decade, chilluns, and I am proud to say I NEVER WENT BACK -- not to visit a teacher, not to pick up a sibling, not for a reunion, not for NUTTIN.)

Believe it or why not, AP ghettos are a good thing. When smart / nerdly kids are stuck in the same classes as everyone else (and oi, you should try getting into a college from a high school that had NO AP CLASSES) you learn to hide, lie, dissemble, and hope like hell your teachers don't take a sadistic delight in announcing just who the frak it was that blew the curve all to hell and gone. After the accursed senior awards assembly, I had several people come up to me and say, "I knew you were smart, but I didn't know you were THAT smart." That's because I'm smart enough to have a well-honed sense of self-preservation, which meant I did NOT go showing off my grades to the stoners and the goat-ropers.

Band nerd, tambien. Worse yet, I got into the scottish drum corp, which supposedly was all popular girls, but they had bagpipes and needed "real" musicians to play on those (it's easier to teach a slut to bang a snare drum than make a bagpipe go, and the seriously slutty got the bass drum.) So they worked really, really hard to teach me to swing my butt appropriately (we high-stepped, double-time.) Just one more place I was ignored or degraded by my "peers"...

Please to kindly cut the VietVets some slack, even the batshit crazy who should not have been back in society. They got screwed on both sides of the ocean.

[heather-macleod.livejournal.com]

I saw Baccawhatsit and all I can think is "Bacchanalia" and then I wondered if maybe I had missed out on something.

But no.

The only assembly I remember going to was shortly after 9/11 and my future US history teacher reprimanded me for not standing during the pledge of allegiance. But then he himself was scolded for doing so by Mr. Nunley. Did Nunley have any real duties, or did he just walk around stoned and act cool? IIRC, he turned a blind eye to our break outs during MAP testing senior year.

This post reminded me of the happiest times in high school: escaping from it.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

I guess that, especially in a school like mine that actually sounds much like yours (trying to get into a decent school when not from the type of high school they expect (i.e. East Coast/in an area with money/ with an educational tradition of sending kids out of state) sounds so eerily familiar...can't think why) the AP ghettos serve their functional purpose: leaving nerds free to nerd.

But it was kind of alienating, and, one couldn't help but notice, awfully class-stratified b/c the tracking system went into effect and never accomadated merit outside of what you could demonstrate in gifted ed qualifying tests in like 3rd grade. I remember my 3rd grade IQ test had short term memorization questions based on remembering Urdu names for animals-- since my family was of a class to have attended some college, they had read me Kippling's children's stories, so I already knew the terms, whereas random kid with different background wouldn't have had my advantage. Obviously that's a small incident, but I think a telling one. If your parents had ANY money you drifted into the good classes from the good elementary schools that taught you to qualify for them, where the teachers had clean, mid-Western accents and corrected you from when you entered first grade when you said ain't or drawled to make you 'marketable' for your future job prospects.

AP ghetto was a double-edged sword in that you emerged with a better education and largely unmolested, but pretentious, incapable of engaging with your peers and with weird notions of perscriptive linguistics. And still got no access into the upper echelons of education: you went to MU or (dream of dreams *eye roll* Wash U). What do you mean, leave the state?! No one does that.

Um, the fact that you can play a bag pipe makes you 10x cooler. For real.

You're right, I do need to be more sensitive about that. I have nothing against him because of his involvement in something he obviously couldn't control per se, but more because he was one of those special people that avail themselves of any opportunity to manifest their natural tendency towards sadistic nastiness. So you really have to disapprove of them rather than the opportunity.

But I guess I never think about being more tactful about it b/c it seems so distant from me, like the Crimean War or something. (Which is not an excuse, because being more conscious of things that affect people = never wrong, just an observation.) I know that's dumb because it only officially wrapped what, 33 years ago? It's odd, WWII even seems more contemporary (probably b/c more of an impact on areas I study/am personally affected by/more exposure in media).

[x-los.livejournal.com]

OH SNAP, IT'S A BLAKES 7 ICON OFF!

GOD, Goddell (sp?) would have thrown one rock-ass Bacchanalia. Charging through the halls fueled with wine and rage? She could have led that like a champ. We could have performed that play, with the prude guy being eaten? What was that, Euripides? Only we could have offed Mr. Murphey.

I would not wanted to have supped of his clammy white-guy flesh. I suppose in a Bacchanal frenzy I wouldn't have scrupled, but ew.

Oh Nunley. You seemed LOGICAL. I liked that about you. Yeah, wasn't he like, home-school coordinator, or some bullshit that translated to 'get stoned, seem reasonable?'

Man, we got so good at it too! Except for the chicken farrago. THANKS, KEL.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

I had to work at my college's stadium for money, that's how hard up. We're Big 10. I had to GO. And ply the newly installed Rich People Section with concessions and beer. I feel your pain at every level.

Man, maybe B_E should have a big icon post with icons for the pairing, labeled with their creator, and just let the grabbing begin? Or is that kosher/would people be interested? B/c I have more Ainley!M icon prettiness than I can ever use myself.

Yes you do need to watch that! It's so fun! So cute! ...except for Time Flight. Gawd, Time Flight. If I could get through the bit of you 'till the Master takes off that Vaguely Asian Fat Suit, you might be redeemable. But I can't ever again. Once>enough.

[gritsinmisery.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the only kids screaming to get out of state were the musicians / actors, who if they had $, were eyeballing Northwestern. Other than that, the moneyed were headed to Drury, the "lucky" were headed to Mizzou, and the masses were resigned to four years at Southwest. (Sprangfield, being heavily Baptist and the headquarters of the Assembly of God to boot, also had church "colleges" out the ass.) Me, I had teh Branez and a trig teacher who was a Rolla grad, so to Rolla I went, along with a couple-three other nerds from my school. It's still a state school just like Mizzou or Southwest which means all you needed was a C-average to get in, but getting OUT was a damnsight harder.

'Nam's a lot more real when your dad did two tours there; when your husband's cousin and a friend's husband were there, too.

[sanestlunatic.livejournal.com]

I knew there was a reason why I'd picked a teensy liberal arts college with a virtually nonexistent football team (or any other sports team). I am lost in the not giving a shit about sports crowd here.

Hmm...I'd imagine a links post would probably be better than an icon-grabbing post, but that's just me. I'd probably ask permission before posting any actual icons.

Shhh, don't tell me that. I have Time Flight somewhere on my Netflix queue. I really want to watch Planet of Fire, but that doesn't appear to be on DVD yet.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

re: crowd o' disaffection. God. Know the spiritual "Saints go marching in?" I have never so keenly felt the line "Oh how I want to be in that number."

True that. I may just leave it to one of the more web-savvy mods, as I dunno how I'd accomplish All That Linking.

I'm going to LMAO if we're in the same Netflix distribution region, since we live reasonably close, and Time Flight suddenly becomes available on your queue b/c I sent it back not long ago myself.

Poor thing! Well either I'll upload all my eps to the com under that flock like I keep saying or I can burn you all the D/M eps like I told reserve I would?

[sanestlunatic.livejournal.com]

Mine ship from Springfield, IL - though they had to ship Arc of Infinity from Madison, WI (and I haven't watched it yet...*shifty look*). I think Time Flight is pretty far down on my queue, though - I've got more Four to get through first. Four totally needed more episodes with the Master.

Burning would be excellent; downloading at school tends to be sketchy at best, as I've found that large downloads like to randomly stop about 2/3 of the way through.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Ah, different depots then. k, it seems like weekend o' burnination is in order.

grits_in_misery and I were just talking about how burned out Baker is by the end and how they would have developed a fun working relationship/on screen dynamic if Tom'd had more energy/they'd had more time. But he's so alky/fresh from the Lalla divorce there at the end, and so Logopolis is meh. Which makes it REALLY hard to observe the dynamic and write Four/Master slash.

[sanestlunatic.livejournal.com]

Burnination FTW!

I think I see more slash in Keeper of Traken than in Logopolis, which is both bizarre and disturbing, since nobody wants to ship Four/corpsey!Master. (If they do, I would much rather not know about it.) Granted, Keeper of Traken is one of my favorite old school arcs, so I may be biased.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

I do love that one. And the choice of Tremas as a host-body is fundamentally interesting. "You appear to really like/respect this person." *INHABITS/DESTROYS* There's cool resonance w/ Yana here.

You could totally think piece some EXCELLENT four/corpsey!Master without the awkwardness of sex but with the sweet, sweet angst.

[sanestlunatic.livejournal.com]

After the last time I rewatched Keeper of Traken, I really wanted to write an AU where the Master succeeded in taking over the Doctor's body, but a remnant of the Doctor remained and caused an interesting symbiotic sort of relationship, working to fight the Master and his eeeeevil plots from within.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

I'd love that! You should!

I was totally just saying over on the b_e discussion that taking over someone's body/"I Want Your Body (In A Give Me Your Regenerations Way)" is, in the Fromm sense of sex/romance as a search for oneness/self-abnegation, SO very involved with the politics of desire and identity.