my inner geek

You may not believe it, but I used to be a geek. I know it is hard to imagine my amazingly cool self as a nerd, but it is true. Try not to be shocked. In middle school, I was teased a ridiculous amount and those wounds will never heal. But that's not something I wish to discuss. The fact is, people think that the "smart" kids become geeks. They think that the popular kids prey on the smart ones. This is very wrong. The reality is, the geeks are picked out early in life. With with no intelligence requirement at all. Without friends, who wouldn't make good grades and be smart? Studying is a great distraction from all the teasing and one's own self-depricating thoughts. Success academically replaces the need for social achievement and being a "teacher's pet" means you have a friend in someone, even if she is old and uncool. Smart comes after geek, not before. How do I know this? Because I have no natural intelligence. A lot of people would disagree with this because I have been called a "brainiac," etc, my whole life. I don't say this to brag, just to establish that many people's general opinion of me is wrong. I had no friends, so I was obsessed with my grades. I refused to make anything but As, believing that if I couldn't be the most popular, talented, or funny, I could at least be the smartest. This tendency lasted all the way through high school. Even though I began to outgrow my geekiness and I actually found some friends, it was almost habit for me to get all As. I took the hardest classes and aced them. It wasn't because I was smart, but because people thought I was smart. I fooled them and I manipulated myself into the honor roll. I graduated valedictorian when the reality was that most of the people under me were smarter and harder working than me. Now that I'm in college, this has more or less caught up with me. In a school this large, I can't fool my teachers into thinking I'm smart. I don't have the time to devote to studying because of my committment to theater. First semester I flirted my way onto the Dean's list. I was lucky. This semester, my grades dropped like WHOA. Here's the final breakdown:

English - B+
Drama - B
French - B
Religion - B
Anthropology - C

For those of you keeping track, my semester GPA is a 2.86. I laugh at people with GPA's that low. My cummulative GPA is now a 3.2. The geek in me is freaking out. How can i have NO A's when i used to get nothing but A's? And I have NEVER NEVER NEVER in my life gotten a C. In anything. I graduated high school with a 4.9. Now I have a 3.2. Yes, I was busy with Footloose, which is perhaps the greatest play EVER. But I am still sad. And not really because I feel like I could have done more, but because this proves what i've believed all along - that I am just not naturally smart. I wish I was. And I don't have the drive (at least not anymore) to do the work needed for As. So I think this is my new reality. I'm not sure how I feel about it.