Keys To The Kingdom

Earlier this week, I was bitching about ways that the Internet tells you what a pile of crap you are. Like blog traffic stats or number of comments or stars on Tweets. I’d recently learned that Klout had labeled me a “Celery Pundit” which, as you might guess, is something I take into high esteem. Or cry at night over. Whatever.

As I sat there, weeping into my computer over a vegetable so foul I can barely call it a vegetable, I remembered back to the Glory Days. Back when I had boundless ambition and absolutely no direction.

Back when I was a member of Key Club.

Ah, yes, Aiming Low-ers, there was a day when I thought, “you know what colleges like? EXTRACURRICULARS. And you know the extracurricular that makes the least amount of sense? KEY CLUB. I like keys. I like clubs. I like clubs that require keys to enter. Therefore KEY CLUB is the perfect fit for me.”

Or maybe I just thought, “SWEET, this gets me off campus to a fancy lunch twice a month” because that is WAY more my speed.

Either way, I found myself off campus twice a month, sitting at a table with seasoned old Kiwanis’, trying to look like I hadn’t been out until 4AM drinking whiskey with my boyfriend. It wasn’t particularly easy and while the company was nice, I was clearly an assjacket for being there. The ONLY assjacket in the entire high school to join.

I can’t honesty tell you what our meetings were about. I still don’t know what Key Club is about or where my key is. All I know is that I ate, uncomfortable among the people clearly more respectable than I, trying to make small talk about things I knew nothing about. It’s like any cocktail party I see now. I suppose these good people expected that someone who actually READ the description of the club, rather than simply selecting one based upon the level of commitment and the idea of a room full of talking keys. Which is really all I did.

Now that I’m old and know what the Kiwanis are and what they do, I feel mildly guilty for my actions. Because after the third uncomfortable luncheon, I began to do precisely what a mature, responsible young teen does: blows shit off.

And I did.

I have to wonder, though: were they waiting on the fourth meeting to give me a key to the city or something? Maybe my key is in the mail. I’ll have to go check.