#tbt mustang

I used to think that everybody had an awkward period in their lives but then I look at pictures from my middle school years and think...

"Hmm...  Maybe it was just me."

I was overweight, with huge round glasses, and wild thick hair that puffed up in the humidity of Houston.  I was a big giant nerd but I didn't yet care enough about my grades to be a smart nerd.  At least in high school I could justify the nerdiness with really good grades.

I desperately wanted to be cool.  I would sit at my geeky end of the lunch table and observe the popular kids trying to decipher what it was that got them a seat at the A table.  At one point, I noticed that all the cool kids ate Teddy Graham crakers with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches sliced diagonally.  My mom cut my sandwich is half straight down the middle of the sandwich.  I thought that I had deciphered the algorithm of popularity and quickly rectified the situation by requesting that my mom slice my sandwiches in a different direction.

In the eighth grade I convinced my grandma to buy me an expensive pair of Doc Marten sandals because word on the street was it made you cool.  They were $125 and we made a special trip to the mall just to buy them.  I remember to this day the feeling of shock that washed over me as I watched her hand over her credit card at the Journeys shoe store where they gave out handprint stickers that you collected and stuck on your locker.  Today that feeling would have been shame.

What I really wanted to be was a cheerleader.  I at least had the sense enough to know that it would just never happen but I figured there was one way I had an in.

I could be the mascot.

At Lake Olympia Middle School wer were the Mustangs and the mascot wore a big giant horse head with, get this, a cheerleading outfit.  It was like a scene out of The Godfather but if the giant horse head was what I had to suffer through to get to the cheerleading outfit that would seal my fate as one of the popular kids, so be it.  There was only one other geek trying out for the position so I figured my chances were good.

I was so freaking excited.

I came home expecting the same level of hysteria that I had worked up throughout the school day.  Instead, I found a mother nervously trying to explain to her fat daughter that squeezing into a cheerleading outfit and donning a big giant horse head was a bad idea.

I felt like she had ruined my life or at least my chance to be cool.

I should probably thank her now.