Being made fun of?

I'm in 8th grade as well and I sometimes feel as though I'm the onlu teenage model railroader in the world, and yes, I am regularly made of. Or, rather, I would be, if I was hanging around with the sort of people that make fun of people. I am actually one of the people that will occasionally make fun of others. The reason why these people do it is because you are either:

 1. Attempting to fit in and not doing a good job at it

 or

 2. Completly stupid and unable to do anything right at all.  Hardly anyone fits into this category. 

 One way to avoid being made fun of is to stop trying to fit in. Most teenagers have a mad urge to "fit in." Someone has to lead, and that leader never tries to fit in. I used to be the geek/nerd/smarty-pants. Then I did something completely crazy. I used my talents to make something cool. In my case, I used my talent as a computer guy and my talent for having a Macintosh computer to make an entertaining movie for my class. Shortly afterward I became one of the most popular kids in class. So my advice would be:

    Don't try to fit in! Stand out! Be assertive!

and

    Get a Mac. You'll never want to use Windows again, and the programs included in iLife will allow you to do all sorts of creative things no one would think you'd be able to do like movie making, composing music, and making fully fledged DVDs withy menus.

    Of course, you can use any skill you have. Model railroading? Build a model skatepark, or whatever it is that these people like, and show them that you can model anything.

alexweiihman wrote:

MilwaukeeRoad wrote: I am 13 (8th grade) and I guess I am extremely weird for modeling. I quit model railroading because I got made fun of it. I am planning a new model railroad right now but hesistating because I may get harrassed again.   Im 13 too just brush off the coments and iggnor them.  By the way what do you model

What I said works better. LOL

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A teenage throw back to the 70s.

vsmith wrote:

Well since Bergie deleted my initial post due to a one slightly offensive word. . ..I would have edited it if asked Eric....but, whatever.... . I got all thru school and the fact that I had a model RR was never a real issue because I never made a big deal about it myself, it was just another thing I did throughout school, I also did BMX biking, trying to sneak into R movies, chasing girls, cruising in cars, ya know, the usual stuff kids do in school. I will say that I had no desire to hang with the "Cool" kids since they were all A#1 jerks and I was glad to have the real friends I had that were cool with me just the way I was. I never made an attempt to "convert" them as I already knew they were not interested. Honestly I didnt really want to have someone else coming in trying to change my master plan so I kept my hobby mostly to myself. That was fine with me, it was my hobby, something for me to do on my own time. If no one else at my school cared, that was fine with me and I really didnt care for them to know about it anyway. I found a circle of friends that I could do all the other things I enjoyed in high school and still kept the hobby for my own entertainment. Maybe thats the key.

Think back to the garden railroad coffee shop a started awhile back. Now we are even.

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A teenage throw back to the 70s.

That sounds like a heck of a good deterent.

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A teenage throw back to the 70s.

Honestly, I'm 14 and have never been made fun of. I have told many about my hobby and all my friends that come over think my layout is really neat and are always disappointed when I don't run the trains because I've got a huge ballasting project going on. I did a speech in my speech class about model trains and the whole class had tons of questions and was intrigued. I hope you see that this hobby really isn't nerdy and there are many people that would find it interesting