Originally Posted by stegosaupus
and it was enough to smush me back into feeling like a weirdo highschool loser.
That might not be terribly abnormal. It's interesting what subtle "damage" can happen to us over the years. Once, long ago, when I was thirty-something, I was sitting on a curb by a grocery store eating a cooke I had just purchased, when three kids, female, probably under ten years old, and probably from a bad home life, stopped and started heaping assorted verbal abuse on me. Almost instantly I felt bad. I was thirty, they were ten, they had never seen me before, they were so poorly raised that they could walk up to a total stranger and start insulting him, and I felt bad. Where did that come from. I sat there for a while and let them do it, and marveled at how they could pull a trigger like that.
At some point you know intellectually that you shouldn't care, but then when you pass age fifty, you really don't care.