Fly on the Wall

I'm really lucky. For most of my life I've been wonderfully privileged to have inhabited a bizarrely fortunate social caste. I was nowhere near the popular peers whose social standing accounted for the first rungs of the latter, but neither was I all the way at the bottom. It's a curious misconception among most people that the biggest losers and weirdest nutbags in school are ignored--in reality, when you've managed to find yourself at that level of off-putting eccentricity, you're almost as well-known as the varsity athletes and the cheerleaders. Just, not in a good way. Everybody knows who those kids are because they're so fascinatingly fucked up. They're not popular--they're just notorious.

Lucky for me, I was a few steps above that. So I wasn't smart or talented or outgoing or funny and I didn't have any real mind-boggling weirdness, which meant there was nothing about me anybody saw as worth attention. Essentially, being a dork but not that much of a dork allowed me to pass my entire school career more or less completely under the radar. I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating, but believe me, I am not. I went to school with people for ten years who have no idea who I am. People just elected not to notice me.

So how is any of this 'fortunate'?

Being invisible comes with the fabulous advantage of being able to take up a position near people's conversations and eavesdrop in a startlingly obvious manner without rousing suspicion. As socially retarded as I am, human psychology and sociology and in general just human nature have always fascinated me--and my ability to be conspicuously inconspicuous because I wasn't interesting enough to notice meant I had fairly easy access to pretty much any personal information I cared to listen to.

There's just something about knowing things I was never intended to hear that appeals to my general love of being sneaky. And no one knew that I knew these things. There are people out there today going about their lives who are completely unaware that a girl they never even noticed has all their dirty secrets--and no real motivation to be quiet.

Vaguely related to that is this tangent--I don't let people know that I have a grasp of any language that isn't English. Most people wouldn't pick me out of a crowd as looking like someone who might speak more than one language--middle-class white chicks rarely give off that impression--so people who do speak something else have absolutely no qualms speaking it in front of me, thinking their conversation is private. Sometimes they even talk about me. I'm good at pretending not to notice things so when their conversations fail to startle a reaction out of me, they usually conclude I don't understand it and feel free to say anything they want.

Well, guess what?

I know what you're saying.

And you are all assholes for calling me and my co-workers horrible names.