Today I got immersed in high school again. My dad is the principal at Towns County Middle, and I spent the afternoon shadowing him around school. As a senior in high school, I swore I would never go back to school and visit. That was just too lame. But now I am over that, b/c I realize that that was a declaration of selfish pride, wanting to set myself apart from my peers. It is not going to hurt me to go back to my high school for the afternoon.

By the end of the day I was in Mrs. Frezell’s physical science class. To me, she was Alicia Nichols. She and I sat next to each other in chemistry in that same classroom. Now she is teaching? She did a great job, it was just weird. lol.

My youngest brother was one of the students in the class, so I was particularly interested in the social dynamic of the room full of freshman. After talking with my little brother over a round of golf this evening, I’ve got to vent some stuff on popularity.

Only on rare occasions does one’s popularity mean anything at all. I mean, popularity is determined by what the masses think of you. And given when and where you are in life, those masses change: some masses are good, some are stupid. What does it say if the “Young Pig Farmers of Podunk, Alabama” think you are cool?

What makes you popular? I was voted class president the same year I enrolled at TCHS, does that make me popular? I wasn’t the prom king, does that make me unpopular? I was on the homecoming court once, does that make me cool? Or does it make me uncool b/c I was only on it once? I wasn’t the QB of the football team, but I did battle it out as the fastest cross country runner. Our football team won one game a year. Our cross-country team made it to state. I played soccer and golf too. I was average at both. But, maybe in playing three sports that qualified me as a jock, but maybe not b/c they weren’t one of the big three: football, basketball, and baseball. Does being popular mean the pretty people want to hang out with you? What happens when a pretty person is an idiot or a tool, but you have to hang out with them b/c they are pretty?

The problem with being popular is that you have to maintain that image. Just ask any president of the United States what it is like to be popular. Every decision could continue his popularity or destroy it. Being popular can force you to make decisions you don’t want to. But if you want to keep the badge of popularity, you have to do like this.

I don’t know how to wrap this all up. I don’t have this whole thing figured out. It has been so long since I’ve dealt with the whole popularity in high school thing. I try no to talk about popularity b/c it seems too “high school,” and I am a young adult now, and it isn’t popular to talk about being popular. Isn’t that funny?

Having witnessed popularity on different level with “The Real World,” I have seen a new facet of the race. High school popularity was like this…college popularity was like this…Real World popularity meant this…

And all I can say is, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how much I love myself, how much I accept the gifts I haven’t and have been given. It matters what I do with myself, with those gifts. Isn’t this the lesson I learned in high school? Yes. Isn’t this the lesson I learned in college? Yes. I know that sounds hokey, but it is true. We’ve heard this so much b/c it is a lesson everyone eventually learns, and everyone shares.

So there is my journal entry for today: unpolished, scattered, maybe popular, maybe not.