You know how they say if you were never molested as a child then you were an ugly kid?

Well, I think if you were never traumatized as a child then you never turn into a funny adult. (I’m not sure how this hypothesis correlates with the first sentence but there’s a meaning in there somewhere.)

But think about it. The best comedians and comedy writers had harrowing childhoods. Chris Rock got beat up by white kids. Judd Apatow was the last one picked in gym class. Chris Farley was obese. Tina Fey wasn’t good at math.

But thanks to middle school I now have a sense of humor. My first year in middle school was probably the worst experience in my entire life. I had glasses the size of my face. I wore clothes that my relatives sent me from Korea because they were cheaper. So instead of wearing a GUESS shirt I wore GEUSS. Oh, and I was like the only Asian in a school in Miami.

So the hierarchy of cool kids went like this:

White guys with facial hair
White girls who were Jewish
Cuban kids who looked white
Black kids who looked like they would beat up white guys
Learning disabled kids
Kids with fake body parts
Math nerds
Science nerds
Band nerds
Me

I’m not exaggerating when I say I had no friends. Our classes were divided into Advanced and Regular. I was in the advanced classes and most of my friends from elementary school were in Regular. But I wanted so badly to be in Regular. I just wanted to be Regular!

Lunch was the worst part of the day. Imagine three hundred screaming kids in a cafeteria that smelled of cheese and chocolate milk. I sat with this one girl Alice and her friends and one day one of the girls turned to me and said, “Why do you eat lunch with us? No one talks to you.”

So I would go to the library during lunch. I read alot of magazines. Mostly Teen and Seventeen. I was obsessed with the articles titled “How to be popular” or “How to get clear skin”. I also read ALOT of Archie comics and Reader’s Digest–especially the humor section. I also wrote alot of short stories and skits. You could say I used comedy as a coping mechanism. Or a substitute for friends.

Eventually I made some friends. I befriended the one other Asian girl Nguyen Nguyen. She didn’t have many friends either because her first and last name were exactly the same. And she always wore the same white, collared shirt to school. She was gorgeous though. See, only in Miami would a gorgeous Asian girl be ridiculed.

And then through Nguyen Nguyen I met some of the drama nerds. We would even eat lunch together and hangout in Spillout. Spillout was a post-lunch break where all the kids hangout in this outdoor area and watch the black girls get into fights and pull eachother’s weave. It was inspiring.

Around this time our school was holding student government elections. Seventh graders could run for Secretary. I decided I wanted to run. I don’t know what made me think I could possibly win. My only friends were Nguyen Nguyen and the future gay men of America. But I really wanted to run for student government. All the popular kids were in student government. If you were in student government you could do the afternoon announcements and get out of fifth period early. I so wanted that!

I was up against this girl Christie. She was a brown haired, blue eyed cheerleader. I was running against a cheerleader. That is like an honest democrat running against George Bush. There was no way in hell I was going to win.

So I passed out tons of hand painted stickers that said Vote for Me. I enlisted my artsy friend Lisa to make my posters. Because I wasn’t in a real clique I befriended all the outsiders like the black kids who liked to read. Actually, unlike most of the kids at my school, I had a lot of black friends. I befriended the black jocks because I was on the track team and the black dancers because I was in The Flysteppers. Isn’t funny how middle school elections reflect the elections in this country? Don’t ignore the black vote!

Election Day came. I prepared a televised speech. Yes, I had to speak in front of a camera. Votes were tallied at the end of the day and announced over the speakers.

And guess what?

I won. Yes, the nerd beat the cheerleader. You didn’t think I was going to give you a story without a happy ending did you? I don’t know how I won. Or who I must have paid to miscount the votes. But I won.

I still wasn’t popular. I joined the drama department and hungout with theater geeks. But I had friends.

(This post is dedicated to my friends Sabbie and Prom Date and the former nerds of America who are now funny as hell. Actually, Prom Date wasn’t a nerd but he went to my middle school and is funny as hell.)