OK, so you were about three years ahead of me: I started Grade 7 in 1986. That look is so familiar, I think, because I was in Grade 4 that year and for the first time began to notice the phenomenon of cool/not cool as such. (I had had a chequered childhood, which I won't go into here; I knew I was not exactly like all the other kids, for a variety of reasons, but I hadn't put it that way to myself before.) It was also the year my parents split up, which meant that cool was that much more unattainable than before: my dad, who had the money (such as it was), would only shop at K-Mart, and my mom, no matter how much she sympathized with my difficulties, could only make her income go so far. So it was a pivotal year, cool-wise ;).
By high school, things had changed a lot, thank goodness. Not because I'd magically become cool (if anything, I'd gone in the other direction) but because I'd found a peer group that valued other qualities than cool. We were so far from the A-list that we had our own party, actually ... Anyway, my point here was that my (very few) junior-high friends and I were already noticing the "used to be cool and popular and is now just stupid and boring" phenomenon by Grade 11. And laughing our asses off, needless to say :P.
By high school, things had changed a lot, thank goodness. Not because I'd magically become cool (if anything, I'd gone in the other direction) but because I'd found a peer group that valued other qualities than cool. We were so far from the A-list that we had our own party, actually ... Anyway, my point here was that my (very few) junior-high friends and I were already noticing the "used to be cool and popular and is now just stupid and boring" phenomenon by Grade 11. And laughing our asses off, needless to say :P.
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