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Fix it for a cost.

A cynic is just a frustrated optimist. That was the fortune out of the fortune cookie. "How appropriate," they said. "You would be the one to get that." I stuffed it into my pocket because, really, it was an appropriate fortune. I don't even like fortune cookies. They don't taste good. The only reason I get them is to read the fortune. I couldn't care less about the disgusting shit it comes wrapped in.

Quite clearly, I remember reading a book wherein a character was described as cynical. That actually happened on multiple occasions. I never knew what being cynical entailed. Being so young, I couldn't decipher the dictionary definition. And my mother never had a solid way of explaining it to me. People who see the bad in everything, I think.

It's funny to see how cliques form between people as quickly as they do. Even in elementary school. Little group of best friends. Anthony and Luke and Joe and Jimmy. How they've all grown up. Jimmy used to be that little kid that played Jurassic Park with me. He used to be Ian Malcolm, I would be Alan Grant. Now he's a super liberal political enthusiast and I still wish I was Alan Grant. Luke and Joe used to love playing with action figures. Now they both have jobs. And Anthony used to be my best friend. See how well that turned out.

His sister really grew up, though. Anyways.

A boy transferred into our class. From Saudi Arabia. Tahsir. He was different. He was a different color, his lips were perpetually chapped, and his name was strange. And for that he was shunned. A class of little second grade shits echoing their quietly racist upbringings on the playground. We were young, then. Young and stupid and naive. "Why don't you go away." "Yeah, Trashir." We strung together insults as best we could, being seven years old at the time.

After enduring a verbal barrage one afternoon, he turned to me and waited. I didn't say anything, but something clicked in my mind. A realization that everything about everything that had happened was wrong. I looked back at the playground and soccer fields and basketball courts at all of the kids who found it easy to hate somebody without reason or remorse. And I gave up. I gave up trying to continue going along with them. I became friends with him. Good friends. But I was disappointed in myself and in everyone else. And I held it against them. I root for the underdog. I get angry when I see things that shouldn't be. Things that are wrong.

But lots of things are wrong. Lots of things will always be wrong.

I moved away a couple of years later. A new school full of new kids with new ideas to be inspired by and disappointed in. We tried being pen-pals for a while, after he moved back to Saudi Arabia. But I changed my e-mail address. We didn't even drift apart, we just stopped talking. I reconnected with him, recently. For what it's worth.

Playground pessimism, I guess. You never really outgrow your childhood.

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