On the outside, looking in

My -- oh, this is just great, to stop dead exactly one word into this entry! -- what the hell do you call the husband of your step-sister? Step brother-in-law? Yecch. My brother-in-law and a dear friend both wrote me in the aftermath of the other day's kvetchfest to say basically the same thing: why the hell should I care what others think?
Simple answer is, I don't. Except when I do.
Yeah, that was clear, eh? Like fine, transparent mud.
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I used to be Popular.
Quit that sniggering, damn it. I'm telling the truth. From Grade 1 through Grade 3, I was the most popular kid in the class. In those years, nearly every recess was devoted to kissing tag. I don't think there's a girl in my grade 3 class I missed.
Oh, weren't those the days?
Then I moved. And got glasses. At the same time.
Either one I could have overcome. If I hadn't moved away, my contemporaries would have seen me for what I was, Kenny-with-glasses. If I'd never acquired the glasses, I would have simply made new friends. But no...
INSTA-NERD!
Oh, I'd been beaten up before. Actually, through my first three years of public schooling, I used to get gold stars if I went a day WITHOUT fighting. But those were *other* kids, not in my class, some of them three years ahead of me. You never forget the first time you get kicked in the nuts...that feeling that says 'howdy, how's about we shit our pants while we puke our guts out?'
But within that first week of grade 4, it became evident I had something London boys didn't like: a face. They wanted to change it, redecorate it, open new holes in it, just generally renovate to their heart's content. And when they were done with it, they'd just throw the body it was attached to into the nearest garbage can.
And my days of kissing tag? So very over.

We moved an average of once a year from then until grade 10. Who knows why...I sure don't. My parents seemed to get bored really easily with any given house. My mother would always announce each new move with the words "fresh start". I rapidly got to detest those words. "Fresh start" meant that within a week there'd be a fresh cotillion of bullies to start pounding the shit out of me.
Oh, I made *some* friends. Well, one, actually. His name was Tim Gauld; I've written of him here before. I remember practically everything about him except how it was we got to be friends in the first place. (That's pretty common: although I can accept people's friendship in theory, I often think they like me because they are mildly crazy.)
High school brought its own set of stresses, like high school always does. In grade 9, I got exactly five signatures in my yearbook, all of them from teachers. It wasn't until grade ten, at Westminster Secondary, that I started to finally come into my own. I will always revere that high school as the place that allowed me to do that. No cliques there. You were just left to be as you were.
I was really settling down by grade 11, so of course we had to up and move again. Can't let Ken get too comfortable, can we? I carried a torch for Westminster through the first five months of my OAC year, and dismissed my Ingersoll high school as a dump. It's strange, now, looking back: I haven't been in touch with anyone from Westminster in almost six years, but Ingersoll District C.I. netted me my two best friends, a woman I dated for two years and was briefly engaged to, and a plethora of other people I counted as friends.
By the time I got to university, I had finally discovered that I didn't have to fit in to somebody else's group...I could make my own. Said group never numbered more than a few. I took to heart something my grade 13 classics teacher, Reverend McCombe, once passed around the class: "One good friend and you're lucky. Two and you're blessed. Three is impossible."
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To make a long story short, I spent most of my life on the outside looking in, never noticing I had the tools and materials needed to build my own little place. Even after that place was built, I sometimes looked around and only noticed the shitter in the corner.

I have a saying I try very hard to live by: "there are two kinds of things in the world, those you can control and those you can't. Those you can control, you can control, so why worry about them? Those you can't control, you can't control, so why worry about them?
Occasionally I forget myself when the things in question are nasty opinions held by other people. That's all. I must try to remember, too, that I can't be responsible for how clearly my messages are received, only for how clearly I send them.