I've heard that success in our society can depend a great deal on looks. However intelligent you are, appearance plays a significant role in the ease with which you stream through life. Women who are prettier, according to the cultural and media models of the time, and in the eye of whoever is judging, receive jobs quicker, receive higher grades for similar work, and are lauded, touched, and spoken highly of more frequently.
The same is true of men, though in variant fashion. Men who are taller and handsomer are more likely to receive jobs, get friends, get picked up in playground or pickup sports, or receive the admiration and adoration of peers and patrons.
I've often wondered if this, partially, is what fueled the furnace of my competitive spirit and fierce motivation. I was always the shortest in school, and the smallest. In basketball match-ups in elementary school, the referee at the beginning of the game matches each player up against the nearest height equivalent, so that each kid knows who to guard, and without fail, the boy or girl matched against me was always several inches taller.
I remember the first time I was taller than someone in school (it was a small class of forty or so - private school) was in ninth grade when I'd finally passed a few of the shorter girls. A few years later, I passed a couple of the shorter guys, though I only brushed the edges of average height for males in America, on the lower end (5'10" - I might be that tall if I let my hair grow out). Whenever playground sports were underway, I was always selected last, alongside the girl who kicked her teammates and perpetually scowled. This could be partly because I was unpopular as well as tiny, though I was athletic. I was fairly good at basketball, above average for soccer, quite good at throwing left or right handed, quicker than most everyone, and had a surprising lung capacity for a little guy - and still I was picked dead last.
Small schools don't cater to finding friends that suit your style. Instead, you are tossed into a social bracket, and if the people there don't like you, you drop another bracket. It's like being plopped into an algae infested pond, and, depending on your social burdens, you either float, or drop until the water is heavier than you are. I dropped to the bottom.
On top of being short, I'm not particularly handsome: rail-thin limbs that make me more of a stick-bug or a street urchin, buck-teeth that required 6-years of braces to remedy, darker than average skin, a swan-thin, long neck, hawkish nose, long face, brown eyes (brown eye color is the only one without bonuses it seems - mine are light brown and I carry blue-eyed recessive genes, though there are 6 alleles for eyes, not one, so it is more complicated than that), a perpetual youth (not a bad thing, unless you are trying to go into R-rated movies when you are 25 and asked if you are 17 - I have since grown a beard), and a debilitating shyness that shoved my social-pond rock to the very bottom.
So I compensated. I developed a bunch of defense mechanisms to prevent myself from getting locked in sheds, or lockers, or cornered by bullies, with a modicum of success (even in private schools, these things happen). I became the stick bug in truth, or a tiny chameleon, blending into the silence. I made the friends I had to to survive high school, and got the grades I needed to, without trying to learn. I considered my teachers ill-read and tiresome, and my social bracket was libertarian, gun-slinging, drinking, anime-watching, risque-movie watching, angry kids. I became known as the one who canceled hanging out with people, because I didn't want to go shooting, watching dirty movies, drinking, or terrorizing neighbors.
So I would lie, because I didn't want to say no to the only people who would still call me friend, and say that my family was going out, or I was sick, or that I couldn't get a ride (this was the worst excuse, because I had friends faithful enough to me that they would always come pick me up with this excuse), or that I was behind on homework etc etc.
I've still never had a strong female friend for longer than five months, and no female friends until college, don't enjoy the taste of any alcohol, dislike the idea of shooting, and steer clear of risque movies, though I don't even remember how long it's been since I last engaged any of those high school persons. And that wasn't fair of me, as none of them were terrible people, and perhaps those things weren't all terrible things, I just didn't want to do them by association. I felt no obligation towards those people, and I felt like they weren't friends with me for my sake.
So I read. I read and I competed, because I never found a deep love for television that consumed the rest of the nation. And now, I don't have the job-that-earns-so-much-money-that-I-can-buy-a-boat-anytime (though I could, actually), but I love the peacefulness of my job. But things are changing. My roommate and one of my best friends (dat's you, J) is getting married, and that will be the last of my great oregonian friends left to get married. I've never been spectacular at making friends, as specified above. I don't even know how I made all of the friends that I've made over the years, or why they are friends with me. It's something that baffles me and I can't even speculate why they've continued to be my friends through difficult times, but I'm ever grateful and loving to them for having done so.
But the time may be coming to decide what's next in my life, where I want to go. Or, perhaps, where I *can* go, and what my initiative is. I've stockpiled a fair sum of money, and have no debt, and even if I didn't have a job or wanted to spend my time traveling, I'm fairly certain I could do so for some time without running dry. But where do I want to go? And with whom? Or do I want to just sate the eternal wanderlust and experience places? I could buy a home, or move, or find a tiny house in the woods, but I just don't know what I want, or who to share these experiences with.
I have friends in a number of places, scattered across this vast globe. Perhaps I could just go see them in each of their new homes, or maybe I will wait some years more. I don't have the looks or the imposing figure requisite for easy success, but I'm happy with how the Lord has blessed me, and excited for upcoming adventures. I've considered taking the PCT the whole way, or wandering around a few select countries, but there is time. Will this world lead me back to washington? Or somewhere new in oregon? Or somewhere exciting entirely new?
My paths diverge as wide as the world tree, with so many branches of fruit.
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