Why You'll (Probably) Never Ride the Bus to School

Your grandparents never sat me down for "the talk" when I was a kid. Which is fine with me. If I had questions, I would've been too embarrassed to ask, and if they had answers, I would've been too embarrassed to listen. The truth is, I never needed to have "the talk." 'Cause I rode the bus to school. I had all sorts of talks with the older siblings of my classmates.

My sex education at home was, "Whatever you do, be careful." At school it was "Whatever you do, you'll get AIDS." But school bus sex ed sounds more like, "You guys ever heard of a rusty trombone?"

Public school transportation is the original Urban Dictionary. Every useful thing I ever learned about sex, all my terminology and strategy, I learned on the bus. But sex is only the tip of the iceberg. I learned countless life lessons on my daily bus rides, including but not limited to:

How to make a cigarette lighter explode.

How much pressure it takes to choke someone out with a backpack strap.

How to use crosshatching to shade dick veins with a mechanical pencil.

How to conduct oneself in a freestyle rap battle.

These lessons have been invaluable to me as an adult, and are the reason I think you should also ride the bus.

But your mother disagrees.

And that's why you'll probably never ride the bus to school.

What I Learned from the Teen Chick Lit Craze

Almost ten years before you were born, the first of a series of wildly successful novels about sparkly teenage vampires was published. The Twilight series might be a bad place for me to start this conversation, because I never read any of the books or watched any of the movies. But there was a time, when the rest of the world was going crazy over it, that I thought Twilight might actually be worth checking out. What stopped me from buying and reading the series wasn't self-respect or stubborn-held personal beliefs about masculinity and adulthood, rather, it was the reviews I read online. Almost every review I read, positive or negative, lamented the irrelevance of Bella, the supposed central figure in the series. These were books written for teenage girls about a teenage girl who really didn't matter much.

Everybody was "team Jake", or "team Ed." Nobody was team Bella. Even the actress who played her in the movies seemed bored with the character.

Bella seemed to be just another addition to the long list of helpless prop princess characters; characters whose only influence on the narrative is to fall into trouble or pick a suitor; character's who begin miserable and end happily ever after, due almost entirely to the efforts of some male character. If these reviews were at all accurate, not only did I not want to read the books myself, but I worried about a generation of young girls obsessed with the series.

A month after the final installment of Twilight was published, people of all ages scrambled for the next young-adult fiction craze: The Hunger Games. I haven't read this one either, but I have seen the first movie. Here's my attention deficit synopsis:

First Act: This girl named Katniss basically martyrs herself to save her sister from competing in the post-apocalyptic murder olympics.

Second Act: Katniss meets Lenny Kravitz and gets set on fire, 'cause fashion. . .

Third Act: Katniss dominates the murder oplympics with superhuman instinct and physical ability, while showing compassion for this guy she knows--who, come to think of it, is kind of like the "Bella" of The Hunger Games--and then figures out a way to save both of their lives.

From my limited experience with Twilight and The Hunger Games, it's obvious that Katniss is superior to Bella in every way. Bella is an ancillary character. Katniss is a hero. Bella is a sadpants. Katniss is a badass. Bella hangs out on the sideline while the male characters compete for her affection. Katniss saves lives and climbs trees and kills her own dinner.

As I write this, your mother and I are still 4 weeks away from knowing whether you're a girl or a boy. But it doesn't matter. Regardless of your gender, be a Katniss, not a Bella. Be the hero in your narrative, not just the love interest in someone else's. Too many people spend their first 20 or 30 years, or even their whole lives seeing themselves as a secondary character in someone else's story. If you make yourself ancillary, when the hero leaves--as will happen at some point in your life--they take the story with them. Then you end up lost for weeks, months, years, struggling to construct a new narrative around a character you barely know--yourself.

I'm not asking you to be selfish or narcissistic. I'm only asking you to never forget your true value. There will be times when your role changes. There will be times when you lift up and propel other people towards their goals, instead of focusing on your own. When the time comes, be brave and selfless. But never forget that however you may impact someone else's story, you are the central character of your story.

What to Do When You Realize All Your Friends Are Assholes

When your daddy was in 8th grade, he went to something called a "Valentine's Dance." This is where the popular kids went to rub themselves on other popular kids, to the rhythm of the edited version of Montell Jordan's "Let's Ride." Meanwhile, the unpopular kids danced at arm's length from one another, and made frequent trips out to the hall to trade Pokemon cards, or whatever they were doing out there. Truth is, your daddy didn't really fit in with either group.

I was stuck in social limbo. I was desperate to impress the popular kids, with whom I had very little in common, and desperate to differentiate myself from the unpopular kids. I quickly learned that the best way to achieve both goals was to bully the unpopular kids as loudly and obnoxiously as possible. Once I had demonstrated a talent for linguistic terrorism against the "nerds" of our 8th grade class, a group of slightly more popular kids adopted me as a sort of insult attack dog. When the popular kids needed to effectively insult a person of higher intellect (I use the term loosely, as all 13 year-olds are blithering idiots), I was the guy they turned to. It was kind of like doing their homework for them, only exponentially more deplorable.

So at this Valentine's Dance, I was unconcerned with finding another kid with whom to rub bodies, while trying not to mess up the choreography of Freak Nasty's "Da' Dip." Rather than have a good time myself, my task was to make sure the unpopular kids felt shame for the good time they were having. 

One of these unpopular kids was a 6' 2", 350 pound monster of a man-child. This kid could have stomped us all to little grease spots if he wanted to. Fortunately for us, he either lacked the confidence for grease spot-stomping, or he had superhuman restraint. 'Cause if he ever got mad, none of us would have ever made it to 9th grade.

When I say that this kid was an easy target, you may think, Oh, of course. Because he was big and overweight. But you'd think wrong. He was huge. That's not an insult, that's just reality. But if he were huge and obsessed with football, and rap music, and titties, he probably would have been in with the popular kids. This guy was an easy target because he was huge and obsessed with Dragon Ball Z and Magic the Gathering, and had a 4.0 grade point average. Anime, role-playing, and scholastic achievement were not considered cool when your daddy was in 8th grade. This is one unfortunate lesson of being a teenager: The criteria for being popular or unpopular, admired or tortured; the attributes and qualifications that separate a bully from a victim are completely ARBITRARY. Who cares if you play sports or watch anime?! Teenagers do. And they are ruthless about it. There is no universe where I--all 5'6" of me--should be able to make someone a foot taller, and more than twice my size leave a middle school cafeteria in tears. But at the 8th grade Valentine's Dance, that's exactly what happened.

I don't remember what I said. And if I did remember, I wouldn't tell you. I'm not proud of ruining that boy's night, and I don't want you to have that kind of artillery in your vocabulary when you're 13 years old. I hope to hell that viciousness isn't hereditary.

Whatever I said to him that night, I didn't realize the extent of the damage I'd caused. I ran back--tail wagging behind me--to seek the approval of the popular kids. Several songs played before I even noticed the big kid was no longer there, towering over students and faculty alike. I asked someone where he went. They said they didn't know, but that they saw him run out of the cafeteria crying.

I realized in that moment, that all of my friends were assholes. And I was worse than any of them, 'cause I didn't even share in the popularity we were cultivating with our cruelty. I had become some kind of asshole court jester.

If you ever find in 8th grade that all of your friends are assholes, and that you're just as bad, or maybe worse than they are, stop. 

Just stop.

You may find, as I did, that most of your friends will also stop being assholes. It's like a law of nature, that when one asshole stops playing along, it's less fun for the remaining assholes. And if your friends don't stop being assholes, don't worry about it. In less than a year they'll find themselves on the bottom rung of an even more rigid and brutal caste system, called high school.