Friday, October 7, 2011

The Beautiful People

Why do TV shows and movies always portray the popular kids as the ones with a lot of money? Sure, you can totally use money to buy friends. I've seen it done. But being rich doesn't automatically make you popular, and it seems like writers are completely under that impression. I'm not exactly sure where that idea came from. Maybe there was one guy who went to a school where that was true, or he sprung from the earth at age twenty and just assumed that it was true, but it seems like everyone really liked that guy, because people sort of just started believing it.

There was a kid I knew in middle school that was absolutely loaded. Almost cartoonishly rich. This was a kid that owned five different guitars and couldn't play a single note on any of them. This was a kid that threw parties at his house on nearly every holiday and invited everyone just because he could. And you know what? Nobody ever came. You know why? Because the kid was a tool, and everyone hated him. See, there's sort of a stereotype of the popular kids being dickheads, and that's a bit of a misconception. The kids that everyone LIKES, the REAL popular kids, aren't jerks. Because they're likeable. What TV seems to THINK the popular kids are are just the ones that everyone knows. Everyone knows the jerk, that doesn't mean they like the jerk.

And yeah, sometimes everyone loves the dickhead, because sometimes people are stupid. And sometimes the nice kid gets the crap beaten out of him. And sometimes you have to do a lot of stupid things because you feel obligated to impress people you hate. This is called "high school", ladies and gentleman, and 90% of it is balls.

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