Just call me Bagels. 😁 It's sort of a little Buffy boards inside joke.
Bagels it is. I feel like I just decided on breakfast.
😛 Thanks again for the welcome. I'm sure I'll see you around. I mean, look, there you are already.
My parents were dysfunctional and alcoholic. No hard drugs, but they could be messed up which included a lot of court appearances. I sometimes said I raised myself when I was with my parents, and that's probably for the best.
I get that feeling, Pix. I was the younger brother in my house, but you wouldn't know it most of the time. For what it's worth, if you raised yourself a lot of the time, it looks like you did a pretty good job as far as I can tell. Of course, that's just my two cents. Or maybe my halfpenny? I don't know if it's worth a
full two cents.
I feel like maybe I should explain that and show there were good aspects to them as well, but I just don't want to dredge all that up right now.
Understandable. You shouldn't get into anything you don't want to. I can take your word for it without knowing the details. But if you ever want to share them, I'm around to listen. I've been practicing. I think I'm getting pretty good.
Regardless of good or sympathetic aspects, they were still unfit to raise a child, and my mother only insisted on me to hurt her mother (my grandmother who I already shared a lot about) as well as to exploit me for things like child support.
Did you feel that even as a kid? That must have been rough. Well, maybe rough isn't a good enough word. Maybe we need a new word. I'll work on that. I'm good with words. Trust me.
😛
But, bad jokes aside, I'm glad your grandmother was able to be there for you as much as she was. Small favors, as they say.
This is likely why girls shunned me, probably the mothers who wanted to "protect" them from families like mine and said if I was along then they couldn't go places and such. So, to keep privileges they shunned me. That's just a guess, though, based on vague memories.
Right. Guilt by association. It's a cool band name, but a terrible way to treat a human being, let alone a kid.
I also experienced problems with girls as I got older for different reasons that could be really petty. Gods, some hated that I hung around boys without having a boyfriend and spread vicious rumors about me that caused all sorts of problems, though when I finally did get an official boyfriend (though we were just friends who played at dating, and we'd sneak into movies rather than have him pay for me, which I considered fun at the time), some girls conspired to steal him from me. I could not win with them.
I can imagine the sort of rumors they probably spread. And I doubt it was about how you secretly love pistachio ice cream. Though if that's true, I completely forgive you. Everyone's allowed to be wrong once in awhile.
😉
I can't believe they were petty enough to try to steal your boyfriend after spending years criticizing you for not having one. I'm not surprised you couldn't win with them, though. You weren't the one with the problem.
(I usually had way more friends who were boys than girls, but I was generally closer to the few girls I was friends with.)
Most of my friends growing up were girls, and I was definitely closer to them than the boys. I guess most guys would rather be playing sports than reading
Sherlock Holmes and watching
Aristocats. Who would have thought?
😛
What was it that made you feel closer to your female friends?
But anyway, back to Sarah. I was raised to be independent like her, and I had to put up with a lot of crap. I did not cuss because my parents cussed a storm and I felt if I did as well then it would prove I belonged with them rather than my grandmother (who cussed a lot more sparingly, though probably still a lot by some standards.)
Simon: I swear ... when it's appropriate.
Kaylee: The whole point of swearing is that it ain't appropriate.
I get not wanting to emulate your parents. You didn't belong with them. You knew you weren't like them. And you didn't want to act as though you were. It makes sense to me. I'm not sure what a ringing endorsement that is. But ... it's an endorsement. So there's that.
🙂
I tended to be closer to people outside the family (or the extended family) than those inside of it. So yeah, I just connected to her and got fascinated with her on a skateboard. It looked so cool to me at 11 and so an obsession was born, even if it only lasted a few years.
Yeah, I've always been a "found family" sort of person myself, so I get that. My friends are my family. Okay, so it's a small family. But it's a family. I have applications if anyone's interested.
😛
Skateboarding
is cool, and so is Sarah. I always thought so anyway. But I never got into 'cause, well, I'm more of a talker than an athletic type. I know, I know. Big surprise.
And I did like The Crow. It got me interested in dark wave music which I still like to this day. (I like all sorts of music with very few exceptions.) After going with adults (and my friend) to see it, my friend and I snuck in later to see it again on our own. It's rare for me to seek out a movie for a rewatch, especially just after I saw it, but I did then. I do think my being 11 and the movie being forbidden to me by society (with its R-rating) probably added to the appeal. And even back then I was into horror and fantasy.
Of course, you liked
The Crow. Even at 11, you knew the difference between right and wrong.
🙂
I'm curious what's on your playlist, as it were. I bet a lot of stuff I've never heard of but I should probably be listening to.
I never snuck into a film myself. Though I did help a kid in my workshop sneak into
American Pie when I was in L.A. For the most part, I was kind of a boyscout growing up. When people talk about parties they went to in high school, I'm always like, "There were parties in high school?"
😛
I think the film combines a lot of genres that I really enjoy, kind of a fusion between gothic horror, supernatural fantasy, superheroes, noir, and pulp fiction (uh, not the movie, the genre it was named after.) And it did it brilliantly. It's no wonder it appealed to such a broad cross-section of the viewing audience when it came out.
I had a tendency to speak up and ask questions that made teachers uncomfortable. As one example, I think I was 12 when a teacher explained something about Ragnarok and he could not understand a belief in a heaven that would be destroyed by giants and why they'd go to their (second) deaths. I said something along the lines that I understood because they'd die as who they are rather than live forever as someone they are not. He said I scared him.
Amy Sherman Palladino, creator of
Gilmore Girls, once said, "Your audience is only as smart as you allow them to be." I guess your teachers didn't want their class being too smart. I imagine they didn't know how to answer your questions, which is why they were uncomfortable. People in authority don't like when the train goes off the tracks, and they certainly don't like being made to feel dumb by the people they're supposed to be in charge of.
One of my biggest fears is senility. My mind is who I am. Without it, I might as well be dead. So I get what you were talking about there. It doesn't scare me at all. Spiders, on the other hand. :/
By 6th grade the school came up with the idea that I could read and write in class as long as I didn't participate in class discussions or ask questions. It was unspoken but I figured it out in time. As the school in rural East Texas ended up doing the same, I think they must've called my old school on the outskirts of Houston to ask how to deal with me.
That is some crazy town behavior on their part. I mean, being able to read and write in class isn't so bad (actually, it's how I spent most of my time in school), but making a kid feel unwelcome for being smarter and more engaged than the other students is banannas. Banannas? Who am I, Richie Cunningham?
I always half joked I learned more reading and watching television than I did in school. I imagine that was true for you as well.
... there was the rare teacher who appreciated me and welcomed my participation. One teacher even said I needed to be in the school for the gifted and I was probably just bored out of my mind. And after I scored a 110 on a semester math exam (the only one to get the bonus question right, though it was a wild guess to me on how to solve it and told it was college level) I was even made into a tutor for others in the class with mixed results. It wasn't all bad. But most of them wanted me quiet.
Well, it's good to know East Texas wasn't
entirely devoid of teachers who actually wanted to, you know,
teach. He was probably right. It's not uncommon for smart kids to actually do worse in school because they get bored with lessons that don't challenge their intellect. Even more understandable in your case, given how your teachers responded to your mind in particular.
Math and I? We were not on good terms. I always struggled with that. Words, on the other hand, came to me as easy as breathing. As you can see, I've changed a lot since then.
😛
And I could be hard to deal with as well. I wasn't malicious and usually wasn't obnoxious on purpose (at least not unless provoked). But I did plenty of time in In School Suspension in which I'd complete all my assignments for the week in about a day and a half and spend the rest of the time just reading or typing, which was allowed.
I haven't known you long, but I certainly can't imagine the person who wrote these responses to me being malicious. I can understand retaliatory obnoxiousness, though. I respond to provocation the same way I respond to everything else — with words. And jokes. Jokey words. Yeah. Just pretend I didn't say that.
You sound like me in Reading and English. I'd get all my work done in the first ten minutes and read, write, or draw for the rest of the period. It's no wonder they were my favorite classes. They were essentially free periods.
I helped with a zine (like a newsletter) in high school which featured a lot of original poems and stories. Perhaps it was there that I learned to make long posts as I sometimes do here on BB.
Harvey Danger: I want to publish 'zines, and rage against machines ... (
Flagpole Sitta)
Oh, uh. Sorry. At least you didn't have to hear me actually sing that. So it could have been worse. But now you know
something that's on
my playlist. That's something. Right?
Well, wherever you learned to make long posts, I should send them a thank-you card.
😉
How'd you end up involved with the 'zine? Do you have an interest in poetry? I used to write some myself, when I was an angsty teenager. I can't claim it was good, but it was ... okay, I just can't say it was good.
😛
But anyway, I think that if just given the course work and access to a library that I could've done the work to graduate by the time I was 12. But it wasn't to be.
I was made to undergo a bunch of special tests when I was 16 (to see what exactly was wrong with me) and tested college level for everything but math (and I was where I was supposed to be on math), which I attribute to all the reading I did, including adult books of both fiction and nonfiction. I should add that I had friends in Resource (between normal and special ed) and deliberately got some wrong (basically answered while easy and then just checked random as it was computer graded and thus multiple choice) but still scored high that surprised both them and me. Not that it got me into AP classes (and those testing me were hostile), and I eventually dropped out of school and got a GED which I did really well on. (EDIT: I deliberately got some questions wrong on the test of my academic ability as I was trying to game the system to get put into Resource. I wrongly assumed I was average.)
Still, you were reading at an adult level years before I did!
So the tests revealed what was wrong with you was everyone else? I probably could have told you that.
😉
And you proved the test and I both right by getting out on your own and acing your GED.
I like to think I'm fairly intelligent. Well, above average. Well, not stupid. Okay, not
that stupid.
😛
Seriously, though, my intelligence is largely verbal and problem-solving (which I really just think is common sense.) I used to read constantly in school, which led other students to assume I was super-intelligent. I remember a kid I went to school with asking me one day, "You're smart, right?" And my first thought was, "That depends. How stupid are you?" What? I didn't say it out loud!
