081813 #treefrog The problem is, there's a dissonance between two branches of the same perspective here, I think. Here you are, an actual grown-up, certified by undeniable, inevitable, self-evident facts resulting from having survived, reproduced, etcetera. Now here you are, a grown-up in high school, and of course it doesn't take any special kind of grown-up to see that high school kids are still, most of them, as most but not all of them were the first time around, assholes. Here's the problem: part of you wants to win the battle from which in youth you shied away, when you were overwhelmed by the omnipresence of socially sanctioned boorism. Part of you demands it of yourself; you're a grown-up; you're powerful now (aren't you?); shouldn't you be doing something to avenge your juvenile humiliation? Don't you owe it to yourself, to all the quiet ones, to anyone who knows better, who is not, in short, nor never wanted to be, an asshole; to prove, definitively and sure-footedly, that the assholes aren't the superior beings their continual, facile braying insists that they are? But the other part of you pretty much accepts that there's nothing you can, or even should, really, do; assholes will be with us always, and if you really care what they think or say, then you really haven't changed at all, have you; you're really not--dare not whisper it--a grown-up at all!