Raise your glass
If you are wrong in all the right ways
“Raise Your Glass,” Pink

“Do It Anyway” is one of two songs I have been playing in heavy rotation to motivate me.  The other is “Raise Your Glass.”  I wish I had had this when I was a teenager.
“Raise Your Glass” is an anthem for each of us who was different. Geeks were not always considered interesting the way that they seem to be now.  Of course, I am not sure that geeks are ever attractive to highschoolers.

I’ve never, ever been “cool.”  I could, when I was younger, sort of manage adorkable, except I was generally too neurotic to be convincing.  Neuroses are never attractive, unless you’re physically attractive, which pretty much counts me out.

One of the shows in the past few years I have managed to see was The Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.  The title is one of those rare cases where what the show is spelled out there, right above the lights. The musical is about middle-schoolers in the county spelling bee.  The writers manage to wring a surprising amount of humor and pathos out of a normally quotidian situation.

All of the characters in the play are outliers. They’re odd, they’re never going to sit at the popular kids’ table in the cafeteria. “People love to hate us ‘cause we’re too damn smart.” They’re the kids who grow up and go to good schools where they may finally find a tribe to call their own, if they are lucky.  If they are not, they get to be loners.

“Raise Your Glass” is for those kids, and the adults they become.  You’re okay, the song says, even if you are stranger than most. We’ll always be nothing other than freaks. 

And that’s okay.

So if you’re too school for cool,
and treated like a fool,
you can choose to let it go,
We can always party on our own...

To hell with the popular kids.  Let’s go.