I know I don&#039t fit into most crowds being something of a minority in a minority of a minority…but sometimes when the crowds I do belong to leave me out, it makes me a little irritated for lots of reasons. This rant actually started formulating Wednesday, but I&#039m just now getting to it today because yesterday was spent apartment hunting and playing the Puzzle Pirates game for about eleven hours. So today gets the rant since I think I&#039ll be alone in the office and therefore will have no one to talk to to interrupt my thoughts.

In high school, I didn&#039t fit in with the jocks or preps or, well, honestly, most people. There were only two people in my class who I would label as being &#034smart&#034 in any intellectual form, and I was one of them, the other being my ex-best friend after she decided I was too fucked up to be around. I mostly fit in with the band peeps and later the madrigal types, but even then I wasn&#039t quite right having switched to too many different instruments (clarinet, bass clarinet, trumpet, double horn, mellophone) to really be part of a section. There at the end, I was the only French horn we had anyway. In madrigals, I was a late-comer because I didn&#039t start until my senior year (didn&#039t have time until then) and I don&#039t feel I was much good at it. Oh well. That was high school.

College offered me the opportunity to be part of an awesome group simply because of our shared scholarship. I finally felt like I belonged to something because I was friends with lots of other Pres Scholars and by association, their roommates and pals. I&#039d have to say that despite the fact that we were all so vastly different by major, religion, and background, we all somehow managed to stay part of one group. It was awesome. I mean, it was rough enough going through college shifting to be an Atheist (an unwanted group by 99% of the globe) in an esoteric major (I mean, who the hell majors in French in Indiana?), so belonging to a group was pretty cool. Work helped in those regards because as a tutor, I could hang out with the other tutors and at the library, I could hang out with other bibliophiles. Of course, long story short, many of my friends moved away and I&#039m no longer a tutor nor working at the library.

Grad school put me in another group of students interested in linguistics, and this group has been fun and inspirational. I&#039m glad I&#039ve gotten to know these people from Costa Rica, Taiwan, Australia, Germany, Russia, Korea, Japan, and Thailand. They&#039ve kept grad school entertaining and have made me feel accepted again for my weird obsession with languages. Even if I was a little too extreme into the hard-core linguistics for them, they still appreciated my fervor and excitement because they too liked the subject matter though not to that degree. Of course, now that most of them have graduated, that leaves me in the dark again since I won&#039t be taking classes with the newer students since I&#039ll just be taking thesis hours. Dippy.

So where does that leave me now? Working as an intern at SASC with the same people I&#039ve been working with since my sophomore year. I&#039m on the other side of the building from where I was a tutor before, and now I have an office and responsibilities and projects and all that jazz. Do I feel included here? Not so much. Case and point: Wednesday I spent all morning working on next year&#039s day planner, leaving my office at noon for lunch to find everyone gathering together to go to lunch together somewhere. They turned to me and asked if I was going, and I pointed out that I hadn&#039t heard anything about it, no one said anything about it to me, and so I had already made plans to eat with the LLL peeps in the Commons. This isn&#039t unusual, and quite frequently damn near the entire department will go out together leaving me to wonder what&#039s going on and what could I have missed? Other than for projects, people really don&#039t swing by my office much though I swing by theirs from time to time. Brad stops by, but he&#039s cool and has known me the longest. Heather feels left out as well, I know it, and so we stay to our little island of rural-girldom doing our projects, working on our homework, and playing on-line games. It&#039s not that I need to go out to eat with them all the time (I&#039d save money bringing my lunch or hitting the Commons), but the fact that things like this are going on all the time without me always makes me worry that there are other things I&#039m missing out on like basic information, forms, training, whatever. Our receptionist came in after Wednesday&#039s lunch and asked me where I was. I told her that I hadn&#039t been told about it in the first place. She said that they often do that to her, all going out without ever asking if she&#039d want to go along. She said that it hurts her, and that if I were her, I&#039d be upset too. I dunno. Am I? I think I&#039m more worried that I&#039m missing out on information than upset that they&#039re leaving me out of lunch dates. It&#039s something to ponder, I guess.