See these guys on the photo? Yes, it’s us. Just over ten years ago.
I and Delicious met at high-school. Delicious was “that new guy”, but did something new guys don’t do – he started interacting with everyone immediately. So he didn’t hide in the shadows but was right in your face from the start, and we became very good friends in just a day.
We went to this snobbish high-school, sharing class rooms with the son of Benny Andersson from ABBA, the governor’s two children, children knowing the royal children, where Canada Goose winter jackets were school uniform already in August, and where people thought it was cool with golf balls with the school logotype.
We didn’t belong to them, though. Both came from different parts of town, having other friends, Delicious being hiphop-ish/reggae-ish, and I.. uhm… well, I was everything from shirt-and-stuicase nerd to jeans hippie to black leather-coat metal geek (Matrix FTW!!11 haxx0r!)
In our class, we both were known for our crazy antics, one of them being maybe our first experience with social dress-codes.
One day, we decided to mock the snobs at our school by dressing just like them, and acting like them. We dressed in trouser suits, Lacoste tennis shirts with popped collars and heavily waxed hair. We had our chins up and tried to talk with a more snobbish dialect. We even managed to time it on a day we had at least one talk in front of our whole class, whose jaws dropped.
After lunch, we hanged around the stairs in front of our school. As we usually do, as well as everybody else. Normally it would feel like “us and them”, but on this day, only because we dressed like them, we felt like they unconsciously welcomed us into their group, as if we always had been one of “them”.
So we know very well our primitive needs to fit in a group – a flock. But we also know that in a flock you are not special. New people will have problems noticing you when you look just like the others you hang around with. We know how important it is to be yourselves, because at the end of that day, a girl in our class came up to us, stuttering:
“P..p… please.. be .. yourselves… tomorrow…”
We are not against bragging about how special you are, though! Show us your true style!
