I had a dream last night. I was walking up the stairs inside a high school and I passed a bunch of nerds. "Nerds!" I said aloud, as they glanced at me uncomfortably. I immediately felt bad, and said "I'm one too." At this, the sage nerd with the sparse mustache from Freaks and Geeks came up next to me and walked aways with me. I said "I don't know why I said that, because I'm a nerd too." He was chatting with me and being reassuring and I thought he was annoying but that I also should be nice to him. As we walked a pretty girl passed by and acted all disgusted by us. A few minutes later the sage nerd went away and I was hanging out with some female friends. The pretty girl came by and was now all nice and friendly to me. She seemed to not recognize me as the nerd from before. I told her who I was and she was actually fairly nice and apologetic about it. And that's all I remember.

The dream was similar to my high-school life, since I was friends with the nerds but not exactly one of them (never was in marching band or on the academic decathalon team or whatever it was called). I was more of an art nerd, which didn't have a tidy label to it ("art fag" was the closest, which doesn't really fit for girls) and was not quite as ostracizing as being a totally brainy nerd. Being an art nerd also earned some respect from some of the popular kids, the ones who thought they were cool enough to be considered "alternative," all the while sticking to their j. crew uniforms. (The girls who teased me were all "burnouts" with big hair and skin-tight acid-washed jeans; they were in a lower caste than the popular people.) However, we were still nerds, underneath the vintage clothes and crazy jewelry and combat boots, and we didn't mix with non-nerds/freaks outside of school. Not that we ever spent time wishing that we were.

The kinds of things the geeks on Freaks and Geeks deal with is more like my junior high school experience. Our junior high was located on top of a hellmouth. I am convinced this is so. Actually, 8th grade was when I grew a spine (figuratively) and started being "bad," and sticking up for myself a tiny bit, so that part wasn't horrible for me personally. But the entire school (the building housed 7th and 8th grades only) was a roiling cauldron of hormones and nastiness and rage that would suddenly erupt without warning. *shudder*