EXTRACURRICULARS: People Who Wear Sunglasses Indoors are Worse than Puberty

When someone who is NOT one of the authoresses of this blog, someone who we'll call Lilly, for no particular reason whatsoever, was in middle school and high school, she was not the coolest kid around. Didn't have the hippest clothes on the hottest body. Didn't listen to the right sorts of music, or the wrong sorts of music that, later in life, you realize were even MORE right. Didn't start trends, or even follow them on time. But that time in her life was made easier by remembering that hey, this is just middle/high school – after this, the whole "cool kid" game doesn't even exist anymore, and no one will have anything to prove.

My my was Lilly wrong.

Little did she know that there are still things that she doesn't do right and will never understand, things that will mark her as irredeemably uncool. Things like wearing sunglasses indoors on heavily cloudy days, right on into the rainy winter evenings. She won't get what's so bright about the interior of the bus, or why the regulars at the restaurant she used to work at felt as though they needed reflective aviators to handle the dimmish corner they usually sat in, or how Boston has recently become inexplicably crowded with paparazzo targets – after all, why else would these people all be wearing glasses specifically designed to block the sun when there isn't any sun to be seen? When those glasses make navigating the world around you more difficult, blurry around the edges, squint-inducing? When wearing them makes you look like you think people really care, when, in fact, they don't?

Poor Lilly is never going to make it into the cool crowd. Not even the adult-world one she didn't know existed and, apparently, mattered to people.

-Posted by Jilly