I wouldn’t call myself a rebel, but of course I wouldn’t call myself caustically witty, dashingly charming or Helen of Troy reincarnate in this post- I hear readers don’t like egotistical bloggers. But just because I wouldn’t say it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Pasted all over the walls of basically every pre-college teacher I’ve ever had were objectionably bright posters ardently emblazoned with vaguely noncommittal motivational slogans, so when you think about it, the public school system had verily been goading me in to founding my rogue pancake club for as long as they’v e been telling me to ‘follow my dreams’ because ‘no goal is too small’. I never presumed, of course, that starting a pancake club would demand a certain brand of maple flavored insurgency in the first place, but I learned my sophomore year in high school that those dreams they were encouraging me to follow only included the ones that didn’t contain lumberjacks and that truly, ‘no goal is too small*’ *unless deemed insignificant by the school administrators.
The Lumberjack Society was shut down after its first meeting with my only consolation a perfunctory “maybe next year”. We were going to be the biggest club our school had ever seen with over 70 members and were well within the limits of every explicitly stated regulation, but rules don’t seem to perturb those who create them, which was a fact that certainly perturbed me. Sure, a bunch of kids wearing flannel and eating pancakes together isn’t the most typical premise for an organized gathering, but obscurity shouldn’t warrant invalidation. I was resentful and indignant, but I knew there would be another breakfast, and this time, towards the naysayers, the ones who attempted in vain to abolish my club, it would be far less complimentary.
Pancakes don’t hurt people (unless people choke on them). Pancakes don’t promote prejudice (at least, as far as I am aware). The only way in which the term ‘downside’ applies to pancakes at all is if it is referring to the area of the flapjack that faces the plate. These thoughts were my backbone as I carried in 102 contraband hotcakes into my school, and, clad in my flannel war banner, I met a hearty welcome from my devoted brethren who came in reverent regard to our club mantra, for they believed as much as I did 'to eat pancakes or not to eat pancakes is never the question'.
The school administrators didn't like me much after that. Vice Principal Brown had a special vehemence, always stared me down in the halls when he saw me and always watched through the windows every Wednesday morning when we had our meetings. But it wasn't against the rules for be to bring pancakes or for my friends to wear flannel, so there really wasn't much else for him to do but glare. I learned later from gossiping moms volunteering in the front office that he specifically was the reason our club was rejected, because it would have had more members than spirit club and he seemed to find personal offense to that, his students liking free breakfast more than cheering for the school's football team, but if that's true I pity him, a man who truly had nothing more to do than try to thwart a girl's dream of plaid, pals and pancakes.
It’s hard to say what really killed the Lumberjack Society; it could have been the then-budding societal obsession with the lumber-sexual, a concept that objectified and belittled the great ideal to which we LS members had subscribed in our perceptions of the eccentrically transcendental and clandestine existence timber-cutters surely must lead, or it could have been that as the school year went on, I had less and less opportunities to spend an afternoon whipping up a few hundred pancakes for my hungry friends. We’ll never know. What we do know, however, is that while Lumberjack Society persisted, I witnessed people come together in a way I’d never foreseen; in a magnificent instant my silliness served a purpose, and I felt that I would start thousands of Lumberjack Societies to expand this revelation beyond my school, for there was no longer the underlying competition of the classroom I’d grown accustomed to between schoolmates, between friends. This club required no talent, there was no basis for membership, just a free breakfast and a brief moment in time where it was easier to forget the different caste systems and other miscellaneous anxieties of high school, because you tend to forget who is more popular than who when you’re all laughing at yourselves, laughing with each other over the whimsical absurdity you’re participating in at your local anti-establishment pancake club.
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