Symbols of Category Membership

When I moved to Chicago to go to High School, I encountered a whole new system of life that I had not experienced before. I grew up in Singapore where drugs were extremely illegal and hard to get your hands on. The social dynamics of my class were more based on various hobbies and interests. For example, there were skateboarders, computer game geeks, jocks, as well as people who floated between the lines. Everyone sort of got along with each other since there weren't that many faces in each grade and it was not uncommon to see the peer groups coerced. When I moved to Chicago in the tenth grade, I attended a high school of around four thousand people, about a thousand per grade. I noticed right away that there definitely existed more boldly drawn lines between cliques. My homeroom was divided amongst jocks, nerds, potheads, metal heads and punk rockers. From the first day onwards, I made friends with the nerds, potheads, and punks. It was apparent that within each of the cliques there existed silent signs of identity. Whether two people from a certain category knew each other or not, it was almost possible to distinguish whether they could be friends just by looking at them. The punk rockers and metal heads would wear band shirts representing the music that they listened to. The potheads could be broken into multiple subcategories, but at the end of the day they would all get along. As for the jocks however, it seemed that they themselves were the ones keeping up their guards of social conformity. In many cases that I witnessed, the jocks tended to isolate themselves if they couldn't find a matching jock to socialize with. I think that many of these communication and compatibility issues associated with peer groups can be boiled down to the idea of interests. The so called "burnouts" seem to understand that they are on common ground with those around them. I believe that this makes it easier for them to relate and expand their ideas and influence across a wider ranged audience. For the jocks however, it is about status and competition, and those factors seem to be more important than really finding true satisfaction in your friendships. Through my experiences in high school, I made friends with people from all different cliques and identities. By the time it was over, we had managed to create a whole new group made up of mismatched personalities and it worked out great.