No matter how bad life is, it's still better than junior high

I live about a block away from a junior high, as I mentioned before about the incident with the boob-flashing lassie. But otherwise, as I watch the (non-exhibitionistic) kids on their way to and from school, as the term comes to an end, I cannot help but be transported back to my time in those grades and I still think to this day how happy I am that it all is over.

Is there a more detestable epoch in one’s life than the years spent in junior high? Before that time, life normally ranges from so-so to pretty good. After junior high life will follow the same hills and dales, but junior high is different and it’s hideous. You could be lying on your deathbed, racked with the agony of an unspeakable illness, but still muse through the haze of your morphine drip: “This is awful, but junior high was worse.”

Kids in junior high hate everybody, and anybody with even a modicum of desire for decorum hates them. With those rules understood, junior high kids do their best to live up to everybody’s worst expectations of their behaviour and attitudes. A stroll through the corridor of a junior high is an intimidating experience in which it is guaranteed you will see the most disagreeable situations imaginable. Do I exaggerate? Somewhat. There are nice kids in junior high. They just aren’t consistently nice, and their moods are more mercurial and unreliable than any mature woman’s most excruciating PMS day. Added to which, the girls are also beginning to experience PMS days. So, remember, especially in the current climate of pubescent violence, if you are taking that junior high corridor stroll, some of those girls pack shivs.

But, you can hardly blame the kids. Everything in their lives is changing, virtually overnight. Sweet little girls in pinafores suddenly become gawky, zit festooned and a foot taller than the boys. Those who want to remain as children develop huge and ungainly womanly tits, and those who’d wished to grow up and be stacked like gangbusters (they started trying on their mother’s bras at age seven) remain boy-like and suffer cruel epithets from the acne-festooned boys like “pirate’s dream,” as in sunken chest. To top it all off, every twenty-eight days (give or take) something unspeakable and hideously embarrassing happens and the more naïve wonder if it has only happened to them.

Mind you, kids of today are more worldly and savvy, and they also reach puberty earlier – like about age seven – so theoretically junior highs should be more placid places today than they were in my day. Of course, that’s not the case.

Boys undergo the same torment. They too either shoot up and look like they need a shave by age thirteen, or remain pudgy little boys with squeaky voices who are reminiscent of the character Piggy in Lord of the Flies. For the unfortunate latter group the PE locker room becomes a chamber of hell and humiliation, (and face it guys, you never really did get over the trauma of the locker-room,) while for the former it is a venue for exhibitionistic braggadocio. “Hey, get a loada this!” But, while speaking of such matters, those same boys (and all will become those same boys at some point during the three year period, if God and testosterone are doing what they’re programmed to do) will also develop monstrous erections at the least appropriate times -- like calls for public speaking in class. While this may seem like a matter of envy to most middle aged men (not the public speaking incident, just the spontaneity), to a kid it is mortifying, mainly because somebody is definitely going to call attention to it. Discretion is not an adolescent strong point.

Meanwhile, there is the voice. The macho lads will develop a booming baritone or even bass, whereas the rest will be left with castrati sopranos, fully believing they are doomed to wander forever sounding like a talentless facsimile of Michael Jackson. When those vocal chords do begin to break, they will waver between soprano and baritone, often within the same sentence, causing much mirth, even amongst those peers that are undergoing the same rigors. Well, it is kind of funny, no matter how compassionate one wants to be.

And, I guess that is the point. Junior high age is so pathetic that you just have to see it all as a big joke from the forces that have always shaped the firmament. Sorry kids, but you are just kind of funny at many levels. Fortunately, sometimes, once in a while, you remain a bit lovable.

Ultimately most kids, parents and teachers survive junior high. At the same time, though, it is one of life’s epiphanies and the lives of none of the players will ever be the same thereafter.