“Love inside jokes. Would love to be part of one some day,” Michael Scott (Steve Carell) says in a season-three episode of “The Office.” And we laugh uncomfortably at him. The truth is, though, I’m laughing uncomfortably at myself, too. Just like Michael Scott, I don’t have a lot of friends to have inside jokes with, but I grew up really wanting to (If you’re reading this and thinking, “I like the dog better!” you should know that’s one of the few inside jokes I actually have, and I’m honored.). But an abundance of inside jokes just hasn’t really… happened for me yet.

In seventh grade, I sat next to one of the most popular girls in school in our Honors English class. She had “PEANUT BUTTER!” written in the middle of her binder surrounded by exclamation points, hearts, and squiggly lines because when you’re thirteen, you can’t get enough of exclamation points, hearts, and squiggly lines. I know from personal experience. Foolishly, I pointed at her binder and asked, much like your Great Aunt Linda would, “Peanut butter?”

And the cool girl looked at me in the way you look at your Great Aunt Linda. Annoyed that she asked you about your totally awesome life but compelled to respond.

“Inside joke,” she said.

For a girl with Coke-bottle glasses, boobs as big as your Great Aunt Linda’s, and enough trivial knowledge of “The Brady Bunch” to win $500,000 dollars on a game show with poor Nielsen ratings, this is the second-most painful two-word phrase to hear. The first-most painful is “Buddy up,” but that’s a different article entirely.

But in times of feeling like an outsider without the cool runaway/saving children from a fire story that S.E. Hinton promised us in her book, I figured there was always one place I could turn—the Internet. There, I would eye-guzzle hundreds of fan fictions in which Sam and Freddie from “iCarly” somehow managed hundreds of different ways to kiss and take long, detailed quizzes to find out exactly which greaser from “The Outsiders” I was meant to marry.

I was knee-deep in what we now know as a classical masquerade ball fan fiction when I realized something that made my whole world (read: my very small, very purple childhood bedroom) crash around me. Sure, I was consuming this content at the speed of light. But someone out there was creating it. Hundreds of thousands of someones. And they all seemed to… know each other. Because of the Internet. Because they all wanted to see Sam and Freddie kiss and/or figure out what their dream wedding to Ponyboy Curtis would look like. They were all linked, and they all had interests similar to mine. And I still wasn’t part of it! Because my mother told me the Internet was for criminals. At nineteen, I actually met my best friend via Twitter, and she didn’t have a problem with that, so thanks, Mom.

Fast forward to today. I’m a twenty-two-year-old woman who visits Tumblr to look at the pretty pictures and fan analyses of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” And all these people seem to know each other while I’m on the outside, hitting reblog instead of chat because even though I know the Internet is not, in fact, for criminals, I have this terrible social anxiety. I can’t make cold calls without stammering, and I’m pretty sure everyone thinks I’m a freak. They wouldn’t be wrong, of course, but not everyone loves freaks as much as I do.

But today, it’s the memes that get to me. Every month, something new happens on the Internet, and it always takes me way too long to understand it. I remember seeing a lot of Tumblr chat posts about shoving breadsticks into purses and going right now, immediately, and being unable to find someone in a crowd. Astrology suddenly became very popular outside of the newspaper. And after reading hundreds of these posts, I thought they were a lot of fun. So, I took my time and crafted my own, expecting the notes to pour in like water pours into SpongeBob’s face-and-body pores.

In case you couldn’t tell where this is going, they never do.

Apparently, memes go out of style quicker than a Barney Stinson love interest on “How I Met Your Mother” (Do people still care about that show?). Apparently, the time I spend perfecting them to my liking is time that hipper Internet-users are using to create more memes, like a confused Mr. Krabs or inserting John Cena’s name everywhere. Memes generate themselves like locusts.

Only I know better. These memes aren’t generating themselves. The cool kids of the Internet are creating them and racking up brownie points like nobody’s business because that’s what the cool kids do. They get the joke started, and as soon as the Coke-bottle glasses girl hears it and runs with it, it isn’t funny anymore. I can’t keep up with the hills-and-valleys setting on my elliptical, and I can’t keep up with memes.

Still, I’ve made my peace with memes. We’re not supposed to hang out. Like always, I’ll have my chips and salsa with the old people and crack jokes about things that are no longer in style. I’ll leave the meme-making to the cool kids. I’m not one of them. And after twenty-two years of wishing otherwise, I’m finally OK with that.