Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Let's return to some of the original texts: listen to Glory Days and read/watch/listen to Death of a Salesman with a particular focus on the characters of Biff and Happy.
Lyrics of Glory Days:
This is the basic concept: peaking in high school is about a person who still talks about events in high school, when they were the number one in high school. It's also, we can see, gender neutral. If anything, peaking in high school is way more common for women: girls are often at their prettiest at 16-18, I can remember a lot of girls in college where my wife looked at their old facebook pictures and thought "wow they were so pretty 30lbs ago..."
They were the hottest and the best in high school, everyone thought they were so cool, they did all the cool things back then, and now they don't, their life is limited and boring. So they still talk about high school.
Then consider Death of a Salesman, which Arthur Miller specifically wrote in reference to his uncle Manny a salesman. When Arthur was young, Manny was constantly comparing his own sons to Arthur, with the implication that they were in competition. Arthur, the weedy literary type, would go on to write important American plays and bang Marilyn Monroe; Manny killed himself. Throughout the play, Happy and Biff are Willy Loman's pride and joy, and he brags constantly about their exploits as athletes in high school, and derides his friend's son Bernard as an "anemic" loser. Now in their 30s, Bernard is arguing cases in front of the supreme court, while Happy is a cad and Biff is a burnout working as an itinerant farm laborer. The action of "peaking in high school" is largely through the mechanism of the parents, Willy and Charley, rather than through the boys themselves. Willy is still bragging about the high school exploits of his sons, while Charley doesn't need to even talk about Bernard's accomplishment because they are so obviously superior. Biff and Happy are pathetic, man-children, immature.
Salesman lives on as a canonical AP English Lit play because it speaks to something in the human condition: Arthur Miller's revenge of the nerds fantasy against his uncle. A lot of people, high school nerds, recognize themselves in Bernard.
Huh. That wasn’t how I remembered Salesman at all. The parts that stuck with me were
Which makes it more of a counter-cultural paean than a revenge fantasy. I fit it into the canon as part of the general AP Lit introduction to the cynical. I should do a post, sometime, on how that fits into a broader schema of critique and novelty in media.
At the same time, your reading makes obvious sense. Incentive for teachers, at least.
You can interpret it many ways!
I think the countercultural reading of Biff tends to focus more on the fact that he doesn't want to get a real job, he liked being an itinerant farm hand.
But the Charley-Bernard vs Biff-Willy conflict is the heart of the "liked but not well liked" iconic line in the play:
Willy and his boys are focused on superficial qualities, athleticism and looks and appearance and popularity, High School qualities. Bernard and Charley focus on academics, learning, focus, and Charley finishes way ahead of Biff and Hap, who "peak in high school."
It's a sub plot, but it's there. And I think it can be considered central because of how Miller recounts being inspired to write the play by his uncle Manny and his "constant endless race" between Arthur and his own son.
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I suggest that we delineate female perishableness, which is a biological reality that cannot be addressed in polite company without the penalty of cancelling, from the peaking-in-high-school concept that does exist within the Overton window and is thus safe to discuss. I’d also argue that it’s a bit over the top to argue that girls are often at their prettiest at 16-18. Realistically speaking I think female fertility and beauty usually peaks at the age of 21-22.
I guess maybe I live in a different Overton Window than you do, but it's pretty common both personally and culturally to mock the "hot girl in high school" who now either isn't as hot as the female speaker mocking her or who rejected the male speaker mocking her back then but would be chasing him now (see the link above to Sk8er Boi). My free association with "peaked in high school" is the proverbial prom king and queen, the jock and the hot girl, who are fat and ugly and still talking about prom twenty years later.
I'm not saying most women peak at 16, just that some do. Women in general peak in attractiveness after puberty and before they get fat, and because that's pretty much a ratchet (pre GLP1) and nobody really loses weight, girls who put on the freshman 15 (or 30) when they get to college are less hot than they were in high school.
If we're doing "peak hotness," if you take care of yourself and you don't get fat I don't think there's any really significant decline until at least 35, maybe later. Up to that point variation between people is much more important than variation between age groups.
I ask you to consider that the Overton window has shifted significantly with regard to judging female sexual choice and single motherhood since Sk8er Boi was released. On the other hand I won't disagree that society does indeed give female speakers limited license to mock other women and their life choices in certain contexts.
Like I said, maybe I live in a different one than you do. Because in my social circles, it's extremely common to mock women for getting ugly or having multiple uninvolved fathers to her kids. I guess maybe it's the kind of thing, like being fat, that's tied to another reason to hate them: look at this BITCH from high school and how fat she got. I suppose I wouldn't bring it up at Church, but it's a common enough topic of conversation.
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I feel like the way the brain encodes memories just means that the adolescent years that coincide with high school tend to produce a lot more formative memories good/bad that are very available. Maybe I'm unusual since I lived at home for my university period but I feel like my 5 years of bachelor's + masters produced like a quarter of the core memories that my high school days did
Total opposite for me. High school feels like a blur in comparison to undergrad. High school me feels largely remote and unimportant, closer to kindergarten than to today, where freshman to junior years of undergrad there's hardly a month that didn't hardwire an important part of me through some experience or other.
So I don't think it's just that. Rather peaking in high school is a useful insult because someone who peaks in high school doesn't do anything high status or interesting (to writers), where peaking in college you probably move on to something more high status. Perhaps, like Stoner you become a professor, the guy who peaks in high school and now coaches the high school wrestling team is historically regarded as less than the guy who peaks in college, hangs around to get a phd, and becomes a professor, even though it's much the same behavior.
I had a reasonably successful collegiate experience it just didn't leave much of a mental imprint. IMO cultures/countries where you move out of home to go to college probably more likely to have a bunch of associated big memories, since I didn't move out till like 2 years after finishing university and have way more memories from that first 6 months than like all of college
I think it varies person to person, not just culturally or on a biological clock. People mature at different rates, hit important milestones at different times, have particular peak experiences at different times. For some people it's high school, for some it's college, for some it's serving in the military, for one of my second cousins he talks the same way about the time he spent working as a milkman.
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Semi-related: There was a girl I went to high school with who, though I didn't think she was particularly hot, certainly acted like she was. I guess she was reasonably popular and hung out with the popular crowd, to the extent that my school had one, but I can only recall being in one class with her and her just coming off as self-absorbed. Fast-forward ten years later and a couple friends of mine were joking about her Facebook account and what a riot it was. They knew her better than I did, and I didn't have a Facebook account until well after people were sending requests to literally everyone they knew, so I hadn't seen it or thought of this girl in years.
It seems that she had taken the idea of becoming a celebrity seriously. Not that she wanted to be anything in particular, or that she had any particular talent, just that she wanted to be rich and famous. Unlike most people with such aspirations, she actively pursued this pipe dream to hilarious ends. The thing that makes it even better is that she didn't fall flat on her face but had just barely enough success to keep the dream alive. I would also add that she grew up in a dumpy, run down part of the Mon Valley and due to school feeder patterns I didn't know her at all until high school. I will say now that the highlight of her life to that point (and probably to this day) was that she was a backup dancer for Beyonce for some period. I don't know how long this lasted, and as far as I know it was only for one performance. She also released an instructional DVD on hip-hop dancing, which at least means that some production company was willing to foot the bill.
Anyway, after professing my ignorance my friend emailed me some pictures with his own captions added. I'd love to just post them but that seems inappropriate, but I think descriptions with his captions will suffice:
Rov_scam,
See Attachments, I feel by being ghetto, from [school], and constantly posting photos like this (aka starving for attention) that you're good enough to achieve [our other friend's] constant yet private attention via facebook.
She had apparently also recorded some tracks in an attempt to enter the music industry. I had previously been unaware that she had any musical talent whatsoever (she still doesn't). She did not sing in high school. She did not act in high school either, but this did not stop her from attempting an acting career. Her real last name is, shall we say, of the ethnic variety. Specifically, of the Eastern European ethnic variety that, while not unpronounceable, is not the kind of thing you want to see on a marquee. So she obviously uses a stage name. A stage name that, I might add, was obviously not selected with SEO in mind, because it shares enough similarity with an extremely popular website that Googling it will not yield other results. She is evidently unknown to AI either, as Claude didn't know who she was when asked directly. She said she planned on having a million dollars in her bank account by the end of the year, which obviously didn't happen because even if it did one doesn't keep that kind of money in a bank account.
My more recent forays into her current history show that she has had 20 addresses in as many years, all of them in New York, Los Angeles, and now Florida, though I don't know how one's [drawing a blank] career progresses at age 40 i Daytona Beach. And by New York I, of course, actually mean New Jersey, because there's no way she could afford to live in the real New York. She was evidently under management by a modeling agency at some point, though I'm not sure that means anything. Her music career has progressed to "creating" AI songs. She billed herself as a YouTube creator at some point, though I haven't watched any videos and I'm not going to. Somehow it's gotten even more pathetic.
I can see her Facebook posts pretty easily despite not being friends with her, because she thinks she's important enough to have followers. She still posts multiple times per day, mostly pictures of herself. She has a son, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that the father isn't in the picture. She has multiple LinkedIn profiles. All the jobs are suspicious because none of them have ever ended. These include professional dancer, founder and CEO of her own record label, YouTube content creator, and owner/dance instructor of some kind of.. studio? I guess? And she's a Trump supporter to boot, which doesn't make sense for someone whose primary appeal seems to be to the African American community. Though it makes total sense for a ghetto white girl.
I suggested to my friend years ago that we could easily make a little bit of money off of her by starting a dubious consulting agency and offering to triple her exposure for $500. This didn't seem like that tall an order since her exposure was probably so little that tripling it wouldn't be hard. It appears that that ship hasn't yet sailed.
My own "peaked in high school" anecdotes: a few years back I was waiting for a table at a Perkins with a couple buddies, and in the lobby I kept looking at this guy surreptitiously across the room. Because I couldn't decide if I knew him or not: he looked just like Johny Johnson the quarterback and star pitcher I went to high school with, but he was fat. Like, really fat. Like Johny ate himself. And I couldn't quite make up my mind to go say hello before we were seated, I wasn't sure if I knew him or not.
So I went home and found Johny Johnson on Facebook and, yup, that was him. He was a middle school teacher at a local school, and an assistant coach for their football team. And fat. Very fat.
And I'm not going to lie, there's an atavistic part of my brain that wants to buy into the revenge fantasy of the "peaked in high school" narrative. In high school he was a star and I couldn't make the baseball team, but now I'm in the best shape of my life and he is obese. In high school he made fun of me and got invited to the good parties, now I make twice what he does. It's an easy and appealing narrative for me. He made fun of me on occasion in high school for being a loser (I was), but now I will make fun of him for being a loser!
But if I'm honest, that's both cruel and pointless, and it's an attempt to impose a just-world meaning on events that are basically unconnected. Johny wasn't that mean to me, probably less mean than I deserved if I'm honest, the urge to get one-up on him is just retrospective jealousy. The "peaked in high school" narrative is an attempt to impose meaning: his success in high school destined him to be a middle school teacher, my nerdy loserdom destined me for success. My dateless suffering as a teenager lead me to read Tolstoy and Chomsky and built my mind for law school, while his easy athletic success stunted his growth. But that's not really true. I probably would have wound up pretty much the same if I had made the baseball team, and nothing about his college football career prevented him from joining my gym and staying in shape. My suboptimal talents and choices in high school didn't lead to optimal talents and choices as an adult, nor did Johny's more optimal talents and choices in high school lead to suboptimal outcomes as an adult. At any rate, middle school teacher is a noble profession and I hope Johnny is happy.
Two other kids from my graduating class illustrate the point.
There was another kid on the football team, an absolute brick shithouse of a running back. I was briefly madly in love with his ex girlfriend senior year, she and her family referred to him as "Hooked on Phonics" after a disastrous Scrabble game at her house. Hooked on Phonics would seem a prime candidate to peak in high school, a hulking jock who could barely spell, but last I heard of him he's a captain in the Army, I think in some kind of missile targeting role. Good for Captain Phonics! And frankly he looks like he'd still mog me in the power clean.
A close friend of mine from high school, Ben seemed like the classic kid who would blossom after graduation, he was a straight-A AP student who was majoring in STEM at a state honor's college on scholarship. And more than raw academic smarts, I never met anyone like Ben for competitive gaming, he was a genius, he once pioneered a strategy in competitive Pokemon so unbeatable that it was later banned, he was a wizard at texas hold'em and brilliant at any card or board game. He seemed like he had all the traits to succeed as an adult. Ben got into drugs, never graduated, got arrested a few times, and died a couple years back, probably a drug overdose.
The truth is that provided you graduate high school and go to college, there's not much that happened in high school that will really hold you back or matter for the rest of your life. If you don't get arrested, don't get a bunch of DUIs, or get yourself killed or addicted to drugs, a free man in America can probably turn himself around. In either direction.
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In this case very little, since it's worth about five minutes every decade, or about 30 second per year. And that's only because I knew her IRL. It's kind of pathetic, but she hasn't done anything to me personally, and she hasn't done anything to warrant anyone trying to destroy her life. I'm not going to condone anything Kiwifarms does, which is why I'm not posting any real details, even though she's still after attention.
"Trying to destroy people's lives" is explicitly against the terms of Kiwi Farms (harassment is illegal, but
doxingphonebooking is not), and the admin quickly bans anybody who crows about engaging in such activities (though detractors of the website like to pretend otherwise).Regardless, I posted the quote only to call her a lolcow, not to suggest that you make a thread for her on Kiwi Farms.
There are too many lolcows in the world to have a thread for every one of them on the Kiwi Farms, and the standards for a thread have dramatically risen since the heyday of Christian Weston Chandler back in 2013. Most threads nowadays are only successful if there's plenty of content to laugh at, along with sufficient interest from other users posting in the thread. When a thread clearly falls below standards, users often deride it as NYPA (Not Your Personal Army) and mock the OP instead, oftentimes because OP brings a misconception that they can sic harassment on a lolcow by creating a thread on them.
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