Surmounting the Seventh-Grade Syndrome
For most of my childhood, I was your typical ugly kid: a dynamite blend of coke-bottle glasses, braces with neon rubber bands, and pasty-white, gangly limbs. I say this not in an attempt at false modesty or a consequence of deep self-loathing. If you were to look at my seventh-grade yearbook and point to the ugliest child, you…