Dusty in one of the drawers, this Spongebob Squarepants toothbrush holder and cup. No, it is not a vestige of early childhood. Sam received it, new in box, at his forum's white elephant exchange his freshman year at Community. The white elephant exchange to which I forced him to take a funny old thing from our house - a neon blue liquid-filled squishy rubber ball with soft droopy spikes and eyes that bulged when you squeezed it, like a cross between a water balloon and a soft porcupine - instead of a new thing as he had requested. By definition, I told him, a white elephant exchange is an exchange of funny old things.
Silly me. At a teenager white elephant exchange, embarrassment must be avoided at all costs. He was the only kid to bring a used thing, an embarrassment that he will be still talking about in psychotherapy in the year 2050.
A white elephant exchange - in theory so eco-friendly, so hilarious and so low-cost as to be a completely egalitarian team-builder - is a non-starter for high school kids. Conformity or death! This is why the franchise Plato's Closet, which buys and resells gently used teen clothing, is a great idea, while Style Encore, which does the same but for women, is a bust. Adolescent girls all wear the same size and like the same style. Grown women wear a wide variety of sizes and an even wider variety of styles. One is great business, the other a recipe for bankruptcy. You can see this exquisitely painful conventionality from the audience of every high school performance, which feature 97 girls with long straight hair, two rebel girls with short haircuts, and at least three girls above 5'8" with hunched shoulders.
Individual style is an ironic artifact of mass production. One hundred fifty years ago, no one had individual style. Everyone had homemade. Were adolescents peer-identified and conformist back then? Who knows? I suppose they were mostly married with children and chapped hands, a little underweight and with only a dress or two in the closet.
Well, times have changed. It's probably a good thing to get rid of this ever-smiling reminder of Sam's humiliation.
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