…I’ve been on Team Amanda pretty much since the get-go, and I was totally down with her chats with the really pissy, immature Alex, especially when she told him that he was living in the past and just needed to get over the fact that he wasn’t elected editor-in-chief.

But what I wasn’t down with was Amanda’s curious opposition to Mrs. Weiss’s team-building excursion. First of all, ropes courses are fun. Second of all, Amanda’s been beating the team-building drum since the beginning—remember the ice cream social? So why was she all of a sudden flaking because she had to work on her college essay? Another episode made a big deal about how she gets everything done in advance—she finished her editor-in-chief application way before everyone else, and then she made a big deal about talking about how much mroe responsible she was. So why was she leaving her college application to the last minute?

My theory is that she couldn’t handle someone else coming up with the idea for a team-building exercise, and her control-freak tendencies got a little ugly. Team-building was all well and good when she was the one in charge, but as soon as Mrs. Weiss (who, let’s face it, is kind of awesome—her dance moves ruled) wants to build the team, Amanda is all pouty. Unbecoming, my friend. Unbecoming.

Yes, yes and more yes. It didn’t help that the clique of newspaper cool kids suddenly became completely adorable in light of their obsessive shared crush on Michael Jan, Superteen.

By the way, why isn’t That One Senior Who Can Do Everything a teen movie trope? My high school definitely had a Michael Jan every year. Is it a Millennial thing? There used to be a fairly large gap between the requirements for impressing colleges and the requirements for impressing your fellow 18-year-olds, but as that gap gets smaller, maybe Michael Jans become more and more prevalent. Plausible?

Pretty Standard

Amanda Lorber, you have sort of forsaken me