Being Fashionable... Or Not

It seems to be that all my life (ok, maybe all throughout middle and high school) I have never seemed to be fashionable.  I mean if you could look at me right now, you'd never think that I would be contemplating about what is fashionable or what looks good, stuff such as Ralph Lauren Polo Purple Label or Chanel.  It wasn't like I was so blatantly stupid as to know that Lands' End khakis looked better, let alone more formal, than sweatpants.  It was just that I grew up in an environment where almost no one around me could afford even 1 article of clothing from those mentioned brands, let alone think that kind of stuff.

All my "friends" at school probably think that I dress very yuckily but they don't know inside my head that I'm evaluating whether or not a certain Gaultier look that I saw last night was a hit or miss.

Anyways, the point I really wanted to make is that I seem like I'm totally uninterested in the topics that really intrigue me.

I think that my "friends" think I'm antisocial or something among the lines of that because I don't connect with them on Facebook or Twitter or some other shenanigans like that.

Well, let me propose this point to that argument.

Back in the summer of 2007, when people who were really Internet geeks or quasi-Internet geeks, I was just a rising 7th grader.  At the end of the school year, I was asking all my "friends" in class to join me on Facebook.  (I found out about Facebook through my judo club, where people claimed it was a "neater version of MySpace."  I avoided the whole MySpace shebang because I heard about that kind of "sexy" stuff and other 18+ material tended to happen on MySpace anyways.)

All my friends were saying, "Um, I don't think I need it now." They said that as if I was doing something that was above my age limit, as if I was drinking alcohol.  Over the summer, I did manage to get 3 friends onto Facebook but at that point I was impatient with the process of everyone jumping on the bandwagon.

Flash forward to 8th grade.  Now everyone had a Facebook. (At least the 50% extroverted people did.  But I found my "friends" to be obnoxious things on Facebook, such as this friend having one of his girlfriends do a dropkick on me in Pet/Friend Arena.)

Flash forward to 9th grade.  (Sorry about the corny "flash forward"-s.)  My US I history teacher asked if people used Twitter in class.  (Because one of John Adams relatives wrote 1 sentence journal entries, comparable to tweets.)  One of my classmates openly declared that, "Only 30-something-year-olds use it," and the whole class was in accordance.  Well, what do you know?  By the summer after 10th grade nearly all of those teens in that room were tweeting away avidly.

[I was initially drawn to Twitter when it became quasi-mainstream and mentioned in newspapers but I didn't join right away because I was suffering in a antisocial phase of my depression then.]
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The bottom line is that I know what's trending even before the trend sweeps the world.   I was interested in Facebook and Twitter before any of my peers even gave those sites a thought.  So, who's really "in" and who's really "out"?

Everyone might say that I'm "out" while they're "in", but I'd like to suggest that this more-than-a-conjecture from my subconscious may have more veracity than what the masses say.