Some days I realize that I�ve never really left junior high. I�ve grown and I like to think that I�ve changed but I keep running into grown-up women who still belong in junior high. Unfortunately, I really disliked junior high and some days I have to work at liking the very real, very current junior-high-age girls in my girl scout troop. (Luckily, they are a very mild group of junior-high-age girls.)

You remember junior high, don�t you? For girls, in junior high even more so than in high school, there were the ins and the outs. There were snubs and, more often, pretended snubs and perceived snubs, the main importance of which was to reinforce the pecking order. If you hated (or at least ragged on) the girls that your friends or those you wanted to be your friends hated, you were important. If you could get the others to believe you did it with style and perceived justification, you were really SOMEBODY.

The worst such behavior occurred if the �outs� showed weakness or made any attempts at appeasement. Junior high girls can be such pack animals. Some groups of them can put wolves to shame. The worst groups of them can put hyenas to shame.

When I see an outward adult and an inward junior high kid as I do all too often, I suppose I should feel sorry for her. Life must be tough when you are trapped in all that anger, confusion, and fear. As I recall it, anger, confusion, and fear were the operative emotions of that time. I would find it much easier to be charitable, though, if the outward expression of those emotions did not tend to be so downright mean and ugly and they weren�t worn as a badge of honor.

What I hate most about encountering these grown-up junior high girls is my reaction. They seem to carry a virus with them that threatens to turn me into one of them. There was a time when, blunt soul that I am, I used to tell such women off directly. Those were the days when I was young and foolish. Since then, I�ve learned that telling such people off just tends to exacerbate the problem. They thrive on the attention. If I were really mature, I�d learn to ignore them entirely but while I�m no longer in junior high, I�m not always sure that I�ve made it out of high school emotionally myself.

Instead, I write pieces like this one�and hope the victims of these grown-up junior high girls know where I stand.

(Please note that I have posted the 9/28/01 entry early. There is an earlier entry that is the real 9/27/01 entry.)

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