Punk nerd!

As I have mentioned in a previous post, my fashion sense in middle school was slightly sub-par.  As a refresher, here was my standard outfit:

Standard hoodie and jeans.  Not going to get any popularity points, but not awful.  But wait, there's more.

You see that little rectangle in my hoodie pocket?  That was one of the many books I might carry around on any given day.  I wore hoodies with big pockets that could hold relatively big books.  That cemented me as a nerd.  However, there was something even worse that completed my accidentally self-inflicted social ostracization: the bracelet.

I was so hardcore.

I wore this bracelet every day for months.  I happened to have a couple of friends who were more on the punk end of the spectrum.  The girl who inspired me to buy it had one with only two rows, but I figured that more had to be better.  I can't make this stuff up; I was just a really, really awkward middle schooler.  Take a look at the complete picture:

Wow.  Shapeless, nerdy, and a poser; the trifecta.

If there had been a nerd group at the school, the bracelet would have tipped them off that I didn't belong.  The punks clearly wouldn't have adopted me for reasons which I should hope are very clear by now.  Basically, I was lucky that a few very nice people decided to risk social suicide by being friends with me anyway and that by high school I had wised up to the fact that my bracelet was not helping me socially.  I still love that thing, though.  I don't know where it is now, but I do know that I wore it to an academic award ceremony back in the day.  Oh yeah, I was a total rebel.