content: At least Soph seemed to have been thinking for herself. You could tell by looking at her she was the homely type; probably didn't fit in well with the "clique". She probably spent a good deal of time on her own and was that girl who picked up reading very early. I respected her mind. She was clever and didn't pull any punches. The girl in the OP is not a new Soph. She is repeating things an adult is telling her to say, and it's obvious. You can tell when something is original. It's this very complex, strange computation humans perform. Almost as if there is an invisible intellectual watermark on original thoughts, and you can just sense when someone is repeating strings of thought that didn't originate with them. Soph was an exception that I'd rather not see other kids try to emulate. More importantly, I'd rather see the adults of the world do something so kids that age don't have to be concerned about politics and migration. Just go back to worrying about 13 year old things for fuck's sake. I'm perpetually bothered by the phenomenon of young people behaving like adults, not just emulating, I mean displaying the sensibilities of adult people, and the same concerns. When I was 13 all I thought about was playing my guitar, learning to lift more weights on my little weight set with the plastic covered concrete "plates", and that fine ass girl Nicki who was two grades ahead of me that looked at me for more than two seconds once.