I was not a cool kid. Up until high school, my experiences with friendship generally started with convenience and were maintained by mutual interests. But because I was not cool, these interests were a bit unorthodox. I was obsessed with reading ultra-bleak history tomes, as well as even bleaker fiction. Much of my choices surrounded World War II , and in particular, the Holocaust. I had learned at a young age that my grandfather's family was all but exterminated in their home in Ukraine, for t…