Nostalgia is part of human nature. People like to sit around and remember how great everything used to be when they were younger. I mean, that's what movies are for, right? High school memories, college memories, falling in love, getting married and having children are popular movie subjects.

Am I the only one who's noticed the absence of movies about middle school?

You remember middle school . . . it's that holding tank we're dropped into to sink or swim through our pubescent years.

In my mind, no matter how bad high school got, middle school was a thousand times more hellish. Many of us try to block out those few years of horror. Especially if we weren't "cool."

At least in high school if you aren't cool you can tell yourself it's because you don't want to be. You can rationalize.

But in middle school, you haven't learned a key lesson of life yet: "Rationalize to Survive."

And so, not only are you fighting your first battles with acne (and losing badly), but you are yanked hard from elementary school security into a world where, if you don't fit in, you stick out. You're doomed to be a very small minnow among a mass of adolescent sharks.

Okay, so maybe I had it worse than you all did, seeing as I was a middle school geek, but I really believe middle school mentality is the same everywhere.

Let's face the facts: There is no place on Earth ruled so tyrannically by the majority than middle school.

Everybody wanted to be so average -- no smarter, no taller, no nothing.

But who were we kidding? And why the hell did we turn our backs on ourselves in order to fit in with a bunch of people who were turning their backs on themselves?

I wish someone had taken pity on me in middle school. You know, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Yeah, Laura, you're pretty much a geek. But, hey, it's better to be a geek than an identity-less carbon copy." But, alas, no one clued me in (besides my parents, and what kid listens to their parents at age 13?) and so I tried my hardest to convince everyone that I was just like them, that I was normal too.

But I had a few disadvantages that put me behind from the start. First of all, my parents were weird and embarrassed me nonstop through my middle school years. People routinely asked me if red was my natural skin tone.

My father was a kid's nightmare. Yes, Morris Benjamin Wexler gunned through the neighborhood every day (at the exact minute I stepped off the school bus) in his run-down, two-mile long Cadillac, tipping his ten-gallon cowboy hat to us in passing.

Here I was in suburbia . . . where everyone else's dads wore Levis and Adidas on the weekends and my dad wore plaid floods held up by rainbow-striped suspenders.

And then there was me. While all the other girls had long straight hair, I was known as "Sonny" to anyone over 30 because my hair was crew-cut short. Everyone else sported the Jordache label across the tight seat of their jeans. Not me. I had generic jeans three sizes too big (growing room, according to my mother, who was not known for her compassionate fashion sense.) It was eighth grade before I convinced my practical-to-the-point-of-ridiculousness mother that I was tired of the neighborhood boys recognizing their outgrown clothes on my body. She finally stopped buying my clothes at garage sales.

By far, my biggest disadvantage was the elementary school teacher who decided to include me in the elite group of "Gifted and Talented" children (fondly remembered to all as the geeks.)

"No, no, not me," I screamed to my parents after the first day of seventh grade. "I'm not smart. I'm normal. I'm average. There's been a mistake and it's ruining my life!"

Useless, all my screaming was useless. I was branded a GT dreg, thrown into the pits of unpopularity to rot until the last day of eighth grade when I would finally be free.

What a nightmare.

I never want to go back to middle school. But if I did, I would do things a lot differently. Because by this time in my life, I like myself a little more and care a lot less about the majority.

And what a relief it was to stop acting like someone I wasn't. What a relief it was to stop acting like I didn't know my parents. I never ever thought I would say this, but I have to thank my parents for being so nonconforming. Because I shudder to think of the woman I would be today if my parents had allowed me to try to shove myself in a certain mold.

When my mother tried to comfort me, her poor geek daughter, by saying, "Those other kids are all jealous of you," I know she was lying. But what she was really saying was, "Be you, Laura. And screw the other kids." I just didn't want to hear that then.

Things are so different in college (thank God). In fact, they're opposite. People are more interested in you if you aren't normal. I don't mean if you're mentally imbalanced. I just mean that if you have your own style, whether it's dyeing your hair purple or burying your nose in a book, you have a better chance of people wanting to know you.

Somehow, most of us have matured from our middle school days. And that's good to know.

Things aren't perfect here, but at least you have a better chance of being accepted, even if you don't follow the latest trends or any trend at all, than you did a few years ago.

I feel I must end in due homage to my parents who suffered with me during my adolescence. For they always said, "As you get older, your parents seem smarter."

How true.