Chuunibyou is a Japanese slang term for “second year middle school syndrome.” It describes pubescent delusions of grandeur, know it all-ness, or a sense of being ascribed almost mystical levels of different-ness. Being a “special snowflake,” if you will. As the name suggests, it’s something that often begins in the second year of Japanese middle school (which is 8th grade). There are some tags on tumblr that are very rich with examples. Working with jr. high kids every other day, I’ve seen it quite a bit. It’s hilarious to watch because in a few years you know they’re going to look back and be so embarrassed by themselves.
I also see myself in them, because I had it, too. I was highly intelligent, a little weird, and had read far too many science fiction and fantasy novels. These factors combined had me do….unusual things.
1. I was convinced I could see the future in my dreams.
In my defense, I had (and still have) hardcore deja vu. On a daily basis, I would see something or experience something that I KNEW I had seen in a dream. Not anything big. Just a smell, or a motion, or a change in light. I started keeping a dream journal because I knew, just KNEW that someday it was going to be important. I failed in this endeavor because I wouldn’t think to write down the weird, abstract dreams, and those were the ones that would cause my “ESP.” No proof, then, that I had super powers.
I totally did, though.
Now I think it might just be the result of a time travel malfunction a la Steins;Gate.
2. I promised all my friends that I would dedicate a book to them.
I started writing my first book when I was in seventh grade. I never finished it because it was dumb, but at the time, I had grand expectations. I was going to be a best-selling novelist by eighteen, and everyone had to know about it. So I not only bragged about it, I assured them that they would be acknowledge by my biographer. Now, I did write a book (that I do want to get published someday) and I’ve a had a short story or two published, but I feel I might have gone a little overboard back in the day.
3. I pretended I got attacked by a shark once.
With bandages and everything. It was a…complicated…fulfillment of a fantasy I had had since elementary of faking a death or injury so that everyone who teased me would feel bad for not being nice to me. I was a weird kid, but the bullying was also really bad when I was little. That, however, is an entirely different story.
4. “I only listen to music from before the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
I actually said this on no small number of occasions. In jr. high and early high school I listened to The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles, The Who, and all those great 60’s and 70’s rock bands. At the time, we were in the dying throes of N*Sync and Backstreet Boys, the beginning of “Toxic” era Brittney, and pre-Destiny’s Child breakup, and I thought I was far too good for any of it. Now, a few years before, I was still listening to the Spice Girls, so this feeling of musical superiority was not something I had a right to.
5. I thought I was totally incapable of having friends because no one my age would ever be able to understand me.
Eh…I still have this sometimes, but I used to break down crying for, like, no reason. And anytime no one wanted to sit with me on the bus or I got picked last for lab groups, it would just make it worse and worse. I would console myself with sad 70’s songs and writing pseudo-emo poetry that I still have kicking around in an old notebook. “Seventeen” and “Alone Again Naturally” were my particular favorites.
6. I corrected people. All the time. Just because I hated people being wrong.
There’s a specific story that goes with this one.
I was in theatre in high school. One time in class we were going through a warm up with the word “quay” in it. That word, typically, is pronounced “kee” (I learned eventually that there were two acceptable pronunciations). The warm up leader, a year older than I, turned to me expectantly upon hitting that word to ask for pronunciation because that was a thing that happened.
“Kee,” I said.
Then, from a across the circle, this guy named David said, “no, it’s ‘kwey.’”
“No, it’s ‘kee.’ It’s like a ship dock thing.”
“Well, in Latin, it would be ‘kwey.’”
“This isn’t Latin, though.”
Then this girl Hannah who was a year younger next to me was like, “Uh, no. You’re wrong. It’s ‘kwey.’”
“I’m, like, 100% certain it’s ‘kee.’ It’s used in Treasure Island, and I had to specifically look it up, so I remember.”
“I never saw that movie.”
“It’s a book?”
And the whole thing went on and on and on, and no one tried to stop it. Not even the teacher. Finally it ended when David said, “Why do you always have to be right about everything?”
Now, I remember this happenstance almost verbatim for two reasons: it led to a two year fight with David about stupid ass shit like whether Lewis Carroll was on LSD while writing Alice in Wonderland (he was of the opinion that he was, while I said he probably wasn’t). To highlight just how dumb this particular argument was, LSD wasn’t even synthesized until seventy years after the publication of the novel. The second reason was that it royally pissed me off. Like, to an extreme. I wrote an essay about it for English later that year, and I still occasionally dwell on it ten years later.
This was probably the biggest reason people disliked me, even though, I thought, I was coming from a good place. I liked being right, I thought other people would like being right, too. Well, obviously, things don’t work that way. Correcting factoids is still a thing I do, but I try to be less irritating about it. I didn’t even correct our friend Alex when he got his East Asian history wrong while playing Risk….though I did complain about it to Husband the next day (mostly because I was too tipsy to remember the exact year of the Meiji Restoration, and, therefore, unable to provide an adequate rebuttal. That year was 1868, by the way.)
There are a slew of other stories of me being a complete and total dork, but we can’t live in the past, you know? Just go forward, knowing that you’re, hopefully, a better person that you were back then.
Ashe Etc... 