Everything Is Awful Page 9

  This is, of course, a complete asshole’s way of thinking, and a cheap way for an insecure little shit to convince himself he’s not at the bottom of the totem pole. (And sure, I was, like, the class clown or whatever, and that counted for something, but still. Dick move.)

  I guess it was important for my nerdy, chubby, insecure self to have a place, even if that place was a fantasyland I created in the middle of the social order. I could never be one of the quirky, carefree kids who didn’t give a flying fuck about what other people thought of him. I cared deeply about what everybody else thought, and even if I wasn’t the most popular, it mattered that there was an identity that I fit into.

  And this way of thinking stayed with me well into high school, where my nerdy asshole-ness could reach its fullest form. I needed an identity to cling to, after all, even if that identity was to be an asshole nerd. So that’s what I became.

  There are all types of nerds in the world. There are nerds who play wizard card games and nerds who play chess and nerds who read comic books and nerds who know way too much about Star Wars. I was a math and science nerd. When I started high school in 2004, I tested high enough on my entrance exams to skip freshman-level honors algebra and jump right into sophomore-level honors geometry, which would be impressive if this wasn’t the public school system in suburban Chicago, where a literal monkey could have broken the curve. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a public school, especially one in Chicago, but it’s basically prison, but with paler food and more bathroom sex. Seriously. One day, we found a loose DVD of heterosexual pornography on the cafeteria floor. Straight porn! Where we ate! Disgusting.

  Anyway. I happened to be one of two thirteen-year-olds who outsmarted the system, and I started my first day of high school a virtual prodigy.

  Now, it’s not easy being a boy genius. Everybody assumes it’s all fun and games and strippers and cocaine. “You’ll be so popular,” they say. “All the ladies will love you! You’ll grow up and Russell Crowe will play you in the movies!” But let’s be real. Being a boy genius is hard work. You have to get new glasses every two months because your eyes are so terrible. You have to bring candies to the teachers so they know you’re a suck-up. And legally, you’re required to fail gym class.

  But something in my brain responded to being called smart. It made me feel good that I was the smart kid. It had its negative connotations, but at least I knew who I was. So I leaned into it.

  I carried around heavy books because it made me feel smarter. My backpack weighed over a hundred pounds and stuck out at least ten inches from my back, and I’m sure it led to long-term spinal degeneration, but it was worth it for the extra time I got to spend studying. I studied aggressively for tests because I needed to get not just an A, but the highest score in class. There weren’t enough periods in the day for the number of AP and honors classes I wanted to fit into my schedule. Literally. I had to petition the administration to let me skip my lunch period to add on AP Biology. I was literally begging the school to let me sacrifice the one good thing in the world.

  And here’s where I became an asshole, or at least started my journey toward asshole-dom. I prized good grades over any meaningful relationships. I wanted to be the smartest. I didn’t like sharing my notes or even studying with other people. Group projects were my personal hell. (Seriously, fuck you if you ever asked me to cheat. Some girl tricked me into sharing my binder of meticulous notes, which I know for a fact she straight up photocopied before giving back to me.) Every time we took a test, I’d create an impenetrable tent out of my shoulders and arms so nobody could catch even a glance at my answers and steal my precious knowledge.

  By the way, children, if you’re reading this, cheating is totally fine. Nobody cares. As long as you cheat together. Don’t give anybody your answers unless there’s something in it for you. The bargaining and socializing skills you’ll learn in these transactions will be far more useful to you in the future than any actual knowledge you’re losing by cheating. So go ahead.

  Eventually, the grind broke me. I was constantly sarcastic, bitter, snappy, and worse, perpetually exhausted, which made me even more insufferable to be around. I went to the doctor for fatigue, and that’s when he first suggested that maybe I wasn’t just overworked but depressed, which not only makes your brain feel like it would constantly be better off with a nap, but also that you’re somehow not good enough.

  Regardless of the source of my insufferableness, there’s nothing worse than a teenager who thinks he knows more than everybody else. My mother would ask me to clean up a pile of junk I’d left on the stairs and I’d dramatically shout back something like, “You know I could be a drug dealer, right?! I could be out on the streets doing all kinds of marijuana right now. But no. I’m wasting my time being an honors child.” It’s like she didn’t even appreciate the bumper sticker I got for her every semester.

  Applying to college only made things worse. There’s nothing like cornering a child who’s already racked with hormones, acne, and itchy pubic hair and pressuring them into sacrificing their sanity for higher education. I mean, I was a teenager! I could barely be trusted to stay at home by myself without accidentally setting fire to a frozen pizza. And now colleges were like, “It’s no big deal. We just need you to figure out what you want to do with the next sixty-five years of your life.”

  There’s a thing that happens when you’re kinda smart in public school, and that is, you get fed into a machine that demands that you try your very hardest to make it to college. You have to get the best grades and join eleven clubs and be good at sports and speak five languages and nurse wounded animals back to health. And I fell into it hard.

  The whole process of going to college is fucked. First, you have to pass a bunch of tests to prove that you know enough to even be able to go to college. Then you have to know where the fuck you wanna go. Then you have to write approximately seventeen personal essays, and all the example essays they give you are by people who almost died of cancer or cured AIDS in their hometown.

  Neither of my parents went to college, and as much as they wanted to help me through the process, they didn’t know how, and it only made my teenage asshole self more resentful and self-entitled. “Fine,” I thought. “I’ll figure this shit out myself. Just get ready to write a very large student loan check every month for the next twenty to fifty years and we’ll totally be OK.”

  Making it even worse: my archrival, Alonso Garcia. That’s not his real name, but I want you to know it’s close to his real name, so don’t go thinking I made up some fake-sounding Mexican name just because he was Mexican. Anyway, Alonso was the cooler, multicultural version of me. Besides being a fellow boy genius, he was a college admissions counselor’s wet dream: he was a soccer and volleyball star, he emigrated from Guadalajara when he was six years old and could read and write fluently in both English and Spanish, and he was socially adept enough to be charming with absolutely everybody. I’m sure he cured babies with cancer in his spare time. Alonso and I were friends, but our friendship was infused with a potent rivalry. Who would get a better score on the ACT? Who would get into the better college? And who would be valedictorian? There could only be one and we were both after it. (And by both of us, I mean me, and Alonso just happened to be there, too. I think, in retrospect, he got more fulfillment out of watching me try to best him than from actually winning. But I cared. Oh, did I care.)

  Of course, Alonso was always ahead. He scored higher on the ACT, got into all the best schools, and was our valedictorian. He gave some beautiful, bilingual valedictory speech that I probably would’ve remembered if I hadn’t been so busy seething in anger at the time. He’s married now with kids and a job and everything, and I’m just here writing about how I hate children. But at the time, Alonso kept me on my toes, and I was determined to nerd out as hard as I could.

  So, in addition to taking every class I could, I insisted on joining every club there was, which, according to most kids and also movie
s about high school, is only a thing that high schoolers do when they want to take long trips to state tournaments so they can stay overnight in hotel rooms with other high schoolers and also do dirty stuff on the bus ride there. I, not surprisingly, was in it for the game. Yes, I was a mathlete, and yes, before you ask, I was indeed our team’s MVP. I was also editor of the school paper and, for good measure, treasurer of the Art Club, which was actually just a bunch of closeted gay children who spent their afternoons pretending they were simply eccentric and not also homosexual.

  Perhaps most illustratively, though, I was president of the Science Club, a group whose primary purpose was to give nerds like me a place to escape getting beat up after school. We spent half of the year building what’s called a Rube Goldberg machine, which is basically the game Mouse Trap, a ridiculous contraption that takes a thousand ridiculous steps involving marbles and slides and falling shoes and buckets that all happen one after the other like falling dominoes. Each year, there’s a national Rube Goldberg competition, and nerdy engineer-lings in science clubs across the country gather their pimply faces together to build a dumb machine that does a dumb thing. And you better believe our nerdy asses were in the game.

  The task this particular year was to build a machine that could assemble a simple hamburger: a (precooked) patty, lettuce, tomato, ketchup, mustard, and pickles, with a bottom and top bun. Now, to remind you again, we were a science club in a public school in Chicago. Well, technically the suburbs, but still. We weren’t working with titanium steel or precious oaks and marbles. We could afford a box of rubber bands, a pile of toothpicks, and a heap of rotted wood someone’s dad left at the side of the garage. Somehow, we had to turn this into a working structure that could assemble an edible hamburger.

  We spent months working on this thing, sketching diagrams and building prototypes and causing a not insignificant number of small but terrifying table fires. And finally, under what I can only imagine was my stellar leadership, we built ourselves a clunky monstrosity that put together a goddamn burger. I mean, barely, and only about 10 percent of the time. But we were proud of it nonetheless.

  Here’s how it worked: our creation was carnival-themed, with the bottom bun sitting on a carousel in the center of the structure. When the machine launched, the carousel would start to spin, and each of the ingredients would fall neatly into place on top of the bun—the patty fell through a Plinko-style tower that triggered a hammer that smashed a bottle of ketchup that set off a bell that triggered a butcher knife that swung onto a head of lettuce, and so on and so forth until we had a fully constructed burger glistening in the center.

  At least that was the idea. We were ten sixteen-year-olds with nothing but hot-glue guns, moldy sesame seed buns, and feral hormones. Our machine worked in theory, but more often than not, a string snapped here, a knife flung there, our machine would start smoking under duress, and we’d devolve into a battle over who fucked it up this time. There were days when we thought bringing this mess to a competition would surely bring more embarrassment than glory, and we considered letting it burn itself to the ground.

  But by sheer force of will, we got our beautiful burger baby to cooperate just long enough to do what it had to do. And so, on the morning of the state championship in downtown Chicago, we lugged it onto a bus and brought her in. And by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a bus with a bunch of teenage nerds and a pile of cheap wood that’s been covered in raw beef and cheese for five months, but it’s not pretty. The fact that we survived that bus ride was a miracle unto itself.

  But the biggest miracle of all was what happened when we got there. Because guess what? We won that shit. We won it all. Good ol’ Burger Machine did her very best, and we clobbered the other nerds and their measly attempts at engineering perfection. In retrospect, we more than likely won because the other Chicago schools were even more ridiculously underfunded than us. But still. We fucking did it.

  A week later, we went to nationals, a contest so highly prestigious and respected that they held it in none other than an empty warehouse in West Lafayette, Indiana. We went in with as much confidence as ten virgins hot off a stunning upset victory can muster in a situation like this—and, as you would probably suspect, got utterly and horrendously destroyed. Good ol’ Burger Machine just couldn’t survive the bumpy two-hour bus ride from Chicago to West Lafayette, and lost her magic. Besides, it was bound to happen when you pit a Chicago public school (from the suburbs, but still) against a bunch of high schools with words like “institute” in their names. We didn’t have a chance.

  But the week in between our victory and loss was a fantastic one. Yes, it was the nerdiest accomplishment possible. And no, we didn’t get a pep rally or anything. But still, victory validated our dweeby existences, and gave me even more fuel to continue my nerdy conquests.

  Later that same year, still fueled by Rube Goldberg glory, the Science Club entered the Chicago South Suburban Science Invitational, a regional competition of veritable geeks in all areas of science from all over Chicagoland. It was generally less nerdy than it sounds. There were contests for the strongest Popsicle-stick bridge, the lightest paper airplane, and the farthest-traveling mousetrap-powered vehicle. Our school entered students in every category for the broadest possible chance at victory. My category? Insect identification.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Matt, you hate bugs.” And even though I never said that and you just assumed it because I’m a giant gay pansy with absolutely no backbone, you are absolutely right. I hate bugs. I think they’re gross and ungodly and responsible for billions of dollars in crop damage annually, and I refuse to support any broad group of the animal kingdom that plays even the smallest part in limiting my access to potatoes. But listen. Duty calls. And when duty requires that you spend an entire night of your precious teenage years making and studying flash cards to identify which of the twenty-nine taxonomic orders of insects a butterfly belongs to, you fucking do it. (It’s Lepidoptera, by the way, you moron.) I stayed up all night studying those flash cards, until I could classify a bumblebee with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back, and I walked into the Chicago South Suburban Science Invitational Insect Identification Contest like a mounted knight enters his field of battle. Twenty minutes later, I walked out a christened insect king. First place. In fact, I would’ve gotten a perfect score if the exam proctor had conceded that what he believed was a true bug (order: Hemiptera) was obviously just an unconvincing beetle (order: Coleoptera). But that man was an idiot and a coward. And guess who walked out of there with a first place blue ribbon and twenty-five-dollar Applebee’s gift card? Not him.

  By now you understand quite well that my nerdiness had gotten out of control. I had become merciless. I was an Almighty Nerd, my identity unquestioned. Anybody who stood in my way was subject to my wrath. Alonso. The preppy West Lafayette Institute kids. The insect man. They were all just people in my way.

  So I understand now why teenagers are assholes. They know who they are. And we’re just in their way.

  But that doesn’t mean I have to like them.

  ON MY FIRST 100 DAYS AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  Nobody likes a complainer who doesn’t put forth solutions. Or at least that’s what people like to say when they get tired of listening to someone complain. The reality is, some things don’t have solutions. That’s why we’re complaining about them. If I could fix half the shit I rant about, maybe I’d be a happier person and the world would be a better place. But like those old English guys said in that song that one time, “You don’t always get what you want, so shut the fuck up, and stop complaining about people complaining.” Or something like that. I don’t really remember.

  Nonetheless, I thought it wise to put forth an agenda—a working plan, if you will—of priorities that I might enact were I elected to a position to make them possible. I’m not saying this is the official declaration of my campaign for president, but if I were saying that, you migh
t consider the following as the top of my to-do list.

  Decrees I Would Make Immediately as President

  1. Vice President Oprah Winfrey is to be appointed chief ego-booster to the president, and each day, she is to recite positive affirmations at me until I cry.

  2. Any vegetable claiming to be a noodle, however thinly it may be sliced, is to be immediately exterminated, and any person who dare claims their vegetable is a noodle shall be sentenced to a life of hard labor in a pasta factory so they may understand that the true art of noodle-making will never include zucchini.

  3. It shall be legal to violently murder any person who steps off an airplane, walks down the little hallway, and then stands right in front of the exit while they figure out where to go when there’s a whole line of people waiting behind them.

  4. All Starbursts will be pink Starbursts and all who protest in favor of yellow, orange, or red will be executed on the spot in the name of our Lord and Savior, the Almighty and Powerful Pink Starburst.

  5. All public restroom stalls will be fitted with doors that span the entire stall, leaving no gap for creepy coworkers to leer at you mid–bowel movement, even though sometimes you understand the urge to see yourself pooping through the gap in the stall door.

  6. All hot guys with cute dogs shall be enlisted in the president’s secret reserves and called to serve at the pleasure of the president.