Cat Fight In The Kitchen-Wattpad Rant

Prodigies

Just so you know, I can't stand rereading this, so it's completely unedited. Sorry. No I'm not.

A while back I got a request to write a rant that has had me stumped. So, as usual, I put it on the backburner hoping to have epiphany on what to do about it, when I came across one of my high school yearbooks. While flipping through the pictures I saw something that just shocked me: a picture of me with my favorite coach and a caption that said my coach's name "and his prodigy".

I don't really talk a lot about my athletic career in high school, because any way I put it, it's going to sound like I'm bragging. Even now it makes me uncomfortable, and I feel really pretentious and selfish, but in the email I got, the requester asked me to write a rant about how these stories with characters that are prodigies (usually musical) are overdone and all alike.

And I put off writing it, because I don't really have experience with prodigies. I preach to you guys all the time about how I don't believe in prodigies because all my years in the gym and behind a guitar have taught me that prodigies will always be second rate to people that practice.

I've seen it over and over and over and I refuse to ever admit that prodigies will ever be better than season veterans who cut their teeth in old fashioned ways.

So seeing that caption absolutely pissed me off so much. People actually thought I was a prodigy.

So I think that even though have other rants a bit like this (check out the golden boy chapter, the cliché chapter, the musicians chapter, among others), it's something I should talk about. I seriously can't tell people no, so you guys get to stuffer through this rant, because it's the closest experience I have to this "prodigy" business, so it's the only way I know to try to help.

And I'm going to start by just apologizing if it sounds like I'm bragging or talking myself up to be this celebrity. It's the reason I stopped talking about my athletic career at the start of my junior year and haven't really said much about it since: because it always sounds like I'm being pretentious and I really hate that. It's one of the biggest reasons I didn't start running again in college. I got tired of everyone bitching.

So, with a great fear that you guys will end up thinking I was some sort of running prodigy bitch who likes to talk herself up, I'm going to share this list of things to keep in mind with a prodigy character/story (through my own experience that has nothing to do with being an actual prodigy, but it's all I got):

1. People will probably find you fake

By the end of my sophomore year, called me my Coach S's Saint, because I was a) the reason he kept his job, and b) always really nice to the other athletes. I dunno who started it, but by the end of my career, that's what the district knew me as. But it drove me crazy, because people started using it as an insult. Like it was an ironic name, because I totally wasn't a saint. I was a fake bitch (which I like to think isn't true).

I love being nice to people. Honestly. People thought it was so weird that I would always shake the other girls' hands before or after races and tell other teams good job or anything, but I just genuinely like being nice. And it's how I was raised and how I was coached. My best friend did the same thing at every one of his games. All our teams did. It's how we were taught. You support your peers. You're nice and polite. You don't act like you're better than anyone even if you are. And I was always taught to believe that I was never guaranteed a win. You were nice, modest, and did your best.

But it wasn't okay when I did it. I could always feel the other girls at meets rolling their eyes at me when I walked away. And by my junior year they weren't even fake smiling back at me or extending any courtesy. It sucked, because I had never done anything to wrong these people yet they were so cold to me. Yes, we were competing against each other, but it wasn't a good enough reason for them to hate me like they did.