100/365: 1981-1982
A few nice who is my true love quiz for girls images I found:
100/365: 1981-1982
Image by bloody marty mix
Wednesday, 03 September 2008.
40 Years in 40 Days [ view the entire set ]
An examination and remembrance of a life at 40.
For the 40 days leading up to my 40th birthday, I intend to use my 365 Days project to document and remember my life and lay bare what defines me. 40 years, 40 qualities, 40 days.
Year 14: 1981-1982
As I began the transition from junior high to high school, I found myself increasingly pigeon-holed as a brainy kid and a teacher’s pet (I’d always been pigeon-holed as brainy at home). The latter, in particular, galled me. My dad was a teacher, and many of the teachers in our small school were friends of the family. These were people I saw regularly in a social context, outside of school. I knew the combination of my smarts and my family’s connection to the school was too much for cruel kids to resist. Teacher’s pet, teacher’s pet. There was nothing I could do about it, other than take a dive on a few insignificant quizzes here and there. I did that a few times, but I was not stupid enough to sacrifice any important tests to my desire to be un-mocked, and I don’t think any of my teachers believed me, or even bothered to count it against me, when I turned in poor work. I did not help myself any by developing a reputation for quibbling about every red mark I felt was less than 100% fair. I couldn’t help it. I was a stickler for logical consistency, and couldn’t stand being confronted with inconsistency. I usually won those arguments.
This time of transition also marked the point at which my affection for and attraction to oddballs developed. As I began my freshman year, I took a liking to a guy who’d been on the periphery of our group of band geeks and bookworms. He was fascinating to me, at the same time as he repelled many others who felt he was weird. I couldn’t disagree. He was weird. But, the more I observed his weirdness, the more I liked it, and the more I came to think of it as a kind of adventurousness of the mind. He seemed more alive to me than anyone else. He was into David Bowie long before China Girl made it popular to be into David Bowie. Sometimes he would stand with his arms out, like he was flying, and gently sway to his own inner music. He was only 5’6", and had no chance of ever being a great basketball player, but he was on the team. He rode the bench every game, and on the rare occasions when he got in the game, he would play like a man obsessed, a monster driven by some irresistible force. He wasn’t very good, but I loved watching him play, because he played as if he were playing out a game that existed only in his head, a reality in which he was fearless and invincible. I silently adored him, and continued to do so all throughout high school.
Things were steadily worsening at home. It was clear by now that my dad had a drinking problem. There were fights — loud, screaming fights — regularly. I stopped bringing friends to our house, and began insisting on spending time at their houses. My relationship with my mother had started deteriorating a few years prior, and it continued to worsen. As is common in alcoholic households, it was the non-alcoholic parent who became the enforcer, and the alcoholic parent who became the fun one. Most of the time, at least until it got unbearably bad, my dad was a funny drunk. He would tell jokes and stories, punctuating them with sound effects and faces. I would laugh and laugh. As the years went by, though, he got less funny and more drunk. My mom, who had her own demons to battle, was suffering from tremendous amounts of stress, and we fought continuously.
Who am I?
I am an admirer of oddity.
I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage to be strange. When people ask who or what I think is brave or courageous, I usually surprise them by saying drag queens and transgender folk. Not firefighters, they ask? Not cops, soldiers, skydivers? Yeah, those people are all brave. But, they’re expected to do what they do. They fit neatly into our image of the world, and into our categories of reality. They are utterly non-threatening to our understanding of who we are. Not so with people who play with gender. People find gender ambiguity intensely threatening on a very personal level. Gender is one of those things we tend to think of as absolute and immutable, a solid rock upon which we build our understanding of the world around us. When someone gives that rock a good kick, it upsets our balance. Many people lash out, reacting with intense hatred and violence toward the source of the upset. The person who is different, uncategorizable in the world as we understand it, has painted an enormous target on their back.
Most people who are oddities in one way or another know this, but they remain true to themselves, because to do otherwise is to succumb to an obliteration of the soul.
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