I’ve been shirking my regular work-related subway reading in favor of a new anthology entitled When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School, consisting of personal essays by various writers about how awful high school was.
It is, like any anthology, a mixed bag, but the good stuff is truly good, rich with period music references, infrequent and incompetent sex and eye-watering acts of adolescent cruelty. It confirms for me two things that I always suspected: 1) it was just as horrible for girls as it was for guys, and 2) reading stories about former losers is kind of like sitting at an AA meeting where everybody is trying to one-down each other with stories of alcoholic excess. I’m convinced that I was a way bigger loser than any of these people.