**I am breaking from the banned book series today. This is the 700th post on Waldina and I thought I would do something a little fun to celebrate**
Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students from Grade School to Grad School
“The constraint fuels rather than limits our creativity.”
In 2006, Larry Smith presented a challenge to his community at SMITH Magazine: How would you tell your life’s story if you could only use six words? The question, inspired by the legend that Hemingway was once challenged to write an entire novel in just six words, spurred a flurry of responses — funny, heartbreaking, moving, somewhere between PostSecret and Félix Fénéon’s three-word reports. The small experiment soon became a global phenomenon, producing a series of books and inspiring millions of people to contemplate the deepest complexities of existence through the simplicity of short-form minimalism. The latest addition to the series, Things Don’t Have To Be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students Making Sense of the World, comes from TEDBooks and collects dozens of visual six-word autobiographies from students between the ages of 8 and 35.
As an autobiographical challenge, the six-word limitation forces us to pinpoint who we are and what matters most — at least in the moment. The constraint fuels rather than limits our creativity.
This is the last and final post from my “Teenage Angst Clearing House” series.It is always good to do a cleanse around the new year and the best way sometimes to to just get everything out and start fresh in January. But we are not quite done, we still have to talk about Bullies. For this, I absolutely ADORE the “It Gets Better” project. It is a great example of how the internet is amazing. Kids who don’t fit in where they live now know that there are others like them all over the world who feel the same and that they are not alone and it is just a matter of finding yourself, your community, and knowing that it does get better.
R.I.P.: High School Jerks
I would say that through my junior high and high school career, I had four real consistent bullies. Well, at least four people come to mind. There were plenty of other minor players, but four serious ones. I could use their names (and call them a few new ones), but name calling was their style anyone that went to that school, knows enough to know who they were/are. When I told my junior high school counselor that I was being picked on in gym class (guys would punch me in the back, purposely trip me, and call me fag), I was told by the counselor that it was just how guys joked around and I could probably use some toughening up. The counselor must have mentioned it to the gym teacher because he told me to “stop being a pussy” and to not “go crying to the school counselor” about situations where I should just be sticking up for myself and “holding my own.”
One bully sat behind me in history class. He would flick the back of my head and ears, he would make that fake sound that he was spitting on my back, and he would call me fag, faggot, and queer. He made it really hard for me to pay attention in class and learn anything. He was also in my gym class. He would always hit me harder than needed for whatever sport we were playing. He died our senior year. I think he was hit by a logging truck while walking down the road.
Another bully called me the all standard names, but also added hard shoves into the school hallway walls. I was very small compared to everyone else my sophomore year, my mother bought a winter jacket for me that was on the big side with anticipation of my growth. The first day I wore it to school, this bully asked me while he was standing in front of the class if the jacket was my boyfriends. He sat in the front of the class right near the door and the clock, the obvious direction that everyone would look. He would embarrass me by telling me loud enough for the whole class to hear to stop looking at him. Then he would turn to a friend and say how gross it was that I was checking him out, I obviously was not. I rearranged my entire route between classes to avoid going down the hallway where his locker was. He did and said things to me that he knew annoyed and upset me and he clearly got pleasure in my torment. He was instrumental in me hating myself, my school, my town, and my life. He died a few years ago. They never say how or why people die in the newspaper.
One is a minister in now, he sent some bullshit grace/bless message to our class for the high school reunion. Maybe he found a different path. Maybe he found other people to bully? I remember in junior high, he pushed me down as I was walking into the bathroom and accused me of trying to look at his dick. My books and papers were scattered all over the bathroom floor, he kicked a book under a toilet stall as he left. After that, I tried to only use the bathroom if I really needed to and then, I would try to get a hall pass to use it during class time when it was empty. [It turns out there are several 'men of the cloth' from my graduating class. I was not bullied by all of them, just one who had a very accomplished mullet our senior year.]
I don’t know what happened to the other one. I would google him if I could remember how to spell his last name. His hatred and focus on me was maybe in part to his liking my girlfriend. Maybe if he called me names and stuff, she would see how bad I was and how cool he was? As far as I know, their only direct interaction is when she ran over his foot with her car when he was chasing us and screaming about my faggy-ness or something. We were in a VW Bug, so I am sure his foot was fine.
I do not feel sad, I do not feel anything really. I guess I feel odd that people my age are dying in general. I guess that I feel sad that they are dead and the only thing that some people remember about them is that they were total assholes in high school. That has got to suck because I know or at least hope that they got to love and be loved by someone. I hope they did. I hope that they got to experience passion and and deep connections to other humans. I hope that they managed to deal with the unmanaged fear or rage or whatever it was that caused them to strike out at people.
I do not believe in karma, it isn’t a fair trade. While I admit that they did make my school life horrible on purpose, I really do not think of them or what they did much anymore. I know that it is in part due to them that I went through a very rocky period in my late teens and early 20′s. I hated myself so much, I thought I was stupid and worthless and futureless. But I came out of it and it is because of that journey that I am who I am today. For the most part, I like who I am today.
I used to think it was sad that I will not have the chance to meet them now and see the possible change and growth that has made them into different guys, but now, I don’t care. I don’t care what they have become, how they have become loving parents and husbands.
That said, it is most important that parents do not dismiss their children when they say they are being bullied. Advice of ignoring it is horrible, it does not work. You have to understand what your child’s reality is. While it may seem trivial and no big deal to you as an adult, school and fellow classmates are your child’s entire reality. Being an outcast in your reality sucks. Being called horrible names day in and day out by the inhabitants of your reality really sucks. Do not expect the school to change anything. You need to teach your kids to fight, not necessarily physically, but fight for themselves as people who have just as much of a right to be there as they do and to be there unharnessed. And if it comes to it, fight physically to protect themselves. And if you are a parent, teach your kids to not be bystanders. When they see something happening, teach them to stick up for what is right. There were 30 other kids that sat silent in that classroom while one kid called me “fag” and knocked my books out of my arms every day. They did nothing. While it may not be your child that is the bully or the one being bullied, they can still change the situation.
For whatever reason, even in liberal non-confrontational Seattle, I still get called “fag” to this day, usually from across the street. If they are closer, I simply reply “I know. Does calling me names make you feel better about yourself?” It is a lot to take in all at once, so I have rarely had a reply. That, and I have probably 70 pounds more muscle than I did in high school. Back straight, shoulders down, bend your arms slightly like they are so big they can’t fully straighten, tilt your chin up just a hair, and ask the question again. Ya, I didn’t think so.
When we are kids, we are all just trying to find somewhere to fit in, some people decided that pointing out how others did not fit in was the best way to fit in or maybe it made it seem like they fit in so much better in comparison? Whatever the reason, it displays ‘low character’ and hopefully they have grown and changed.
I noticed a picture on facebook of my first grade class a while ago, I was not tagged as I was not facebook friends with the person who had posed the picture. I remember the girl and remember her name, I actually remember a bunch of the people tagged in that photograph, they had hyper-links to their profiles. I thought about friend-requesting them, but I just do not know what I would say or talk to them about. How do you nutshell 25+ years? And more importantly, why bother telling your life story to someone from first grade? One girl I remember best because she and I were always seated next to each other when classrooms were organized alphabetically. We went kindergarten through senior year together, played on the grade school playground and even went to each other’s birthday parties.
I know, you are waiting for it, so here is where the story turns. Since we were alphabetically connected, at least at the beginning of the year until the teachers learned our names and we were allowed to move around, we sat next to each other most of the time when we had a class together. In junior high social studies class, she called me by my whole name, first and last, then turned to another girl and said “Isn’t it funny how we always call nerds by their whole name?” It hurt, I won’t lie. We had been friends all through grade school, our mothers knew each other, we had history.
In her defense, I was a nerd, a short, skinny, awkward nerd. At the same time, the cruelty of children is absolutely bottomless. She didn’t need to call me a nerd, I knew I was a nerd, I heard it from every single guy (including the teacher) in my P.E. class, well, actually I heard much worse.
We, along with most of the kids from grade school, got into this familiarity-thing where they sort of acknowledged my existence, but didn’t acknowledge our history. So, they would see that I was standing there, taking up air space, but would not do anything more than that. This started in junior high and continued through high school. It was fine, I made new friends with the other outcasts and misfits, we wrote alternative newspapers, dyed our hair, had dog weddings, and befriended the foreign exchange students. Yes, that was my crowd.
To this day, my mother will say she saw so-and-so-from-grade-school’s mother at the grocery store and I just don’t have the heart to tell her they basically ignored me for the last six years of school.
At my school, groups of kids were friends almost solely based on the radio station they listened to. I am not sure if those were simpler times and the dynamics are much more complex now with the internet and such, but ours was a gentile time where you either listened to butt rock, top 40, or new wave. I, as well as my clan, all listened to New Wave, radio station C89.5 to be exact. This is when C89.5 went off at 11:00 PM. There was a subset of us that listened to the college station KCMU, also. The radio station influenced everything: the clothes you wore, your haircut, the car you drove, and the friends you made.
I guess in some ways, even though we had our own insulated group, we still felt like outcasts and maybe looked up to the popular kids that listened to top 40. I did not look up to the butt rock kids, they were frightening to me. But the popular kids still had the impression of charmed lives. John Hughes was spot on and we knew it.
It is curious how even today, when someone says my first and last name, I instantly think of “Isn’t it funny how we always call nerds by their whole name?”
Directedby: John Hughes Produced by: John Hughes Written by: John Hughes Release date: February 15, 1985 Budget: $1,000,000 Box office: $45,875,171
The Breakfast Club is a 1985 American teen drama film written and directed by John Hughes. The storyline follows five teenagers (each a member of a different high school clique) as they spend a Saturday in detention together and come to realize that they are all deeper than their respective stereotypes.
Critics and fans consider it to be the greatest high school-teen film of all time, as well as one of Hughes’ most memorable and recognizable works.
The plot follows five students at fictional Shermer High School in the fictitious Chicago suburb of Shermer, Illinois as they report for Saturday detention on March 24, 1984. While not complete strangers, the five teenagers are each from a different clique or social group.
The five students—Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy), Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), John Bender (Judd Nelson), Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall), and Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald)—who seem to have nothing in common at first, come together at the high school library, where they are harangued and ordered not to speak or move from their seats or sleep by the antagonistic principal, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), supervising them. They are to remain for a period of eight hours, fifty-four minutes (from 7:06 A.M. to 4 P.M., the only indication of time being on a clock that is 20 minutes fast). He assigns a 1,000 word essay (in which each student must write about who he or she thinks they are) and then leaves them mostly unsupervised, returning only occasionally to check on them. Bender, who has a particularly negative relationship with Mr. Vernon, disregards the rules and riles the other students; mocking Brian and Andrew, and sexually harassing Claire. Allison remains oddly quiet except for the occasional random outburst.
The students pass the hours in a variety of ways. Gradually they open up to each other and reveal their inner secrets (for example, Allison is a compulsive liar, Bender comes from an abusive household and Brian and Claire are ashamed of their virginity). They also discover that they all have strained relationships with their parents and are afraid of making the same mistakes as the adults around them. However, despite these developing friendships the students are afraid that once the detention is over, they will return to their very different cliques and never speak to each other again.
At the request and consensus of the students, Brian is asked to write the essay Mr. Vernon assigned earlier (the subject of which was to be a synopsis by each student detailing “who you think you are”), which challenges Mr. Vernon and his preconceived judgments about all of them. Brian does so, but instead of writing about the assigned topic, he writes a very motivating letter that is, in essence, the main point of the story: that each of them (or any person, in that matter) is a bit of everything and not the whole of what people see in them. He signs the essay as “The Breakfast Club” and leaves it at the table for Mr. Vernon to read when they leave. There are two versions of this letter, one read at the beginning and one at the end, which are slightly different; illustrating the change in the students’ judgments of one another and their realization that they truly have things in common.
The beginning letter is as follows:
Saturday, March 24, 1984.
Shermer High School,
Shermer, Illinois. 60062.
Dear Mr. Vernon,
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong…and what we did was wrong, but we think you’re crazy to make us write this essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us… in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.
Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong…but we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us… In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question?
The below is some thoughts that I clicked out with my thumbs while on the train a couple days ago. I will do my best to get the turn around time down and post as ‘real time’ as possible. I just like to look at it in a browser before posting, to make sure all is sitting where it should and check the spelling and throw in a random photo from the intertubes. As you will see, it is a very rambled stream of consciousness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald died at age 44, leaving behind an impressive and time-tested body of work that any writer would chop off their fingers to have. I am 42, have had a string of unimpressive jobs and a 30-hit a day blog.
Age is something that I rarely think about, it is something that I am reminded of by others when they complain about being old and I am forced to acknowledge that we are the same age. I don’t think I act, look, or think “old” and the I do my best to silence any commentary about feeling old physically.
The internet has single-handedly shattered any possibility of “living in denial” of one’s age. Anyone with a facebook account has “friends” from high school that have not aged gracefully and who’s frighteningly conservative status updates only make you wonder what happened in their lives to take them from the fresh-faced bright-eyed high school seniors that we all were, to the progress-fearing crumpled paper bags that they are today. In those cases, it is best to just unfriend them and keep looking forward. I know for me, their facebook friend request is probably more social interaction than we had in all of our years of high school.
As Audrey Hepburn said to Cary Grant in “Charade,” declining his offer of friendship: “Because I already know an awful lot of people; until one of them dies, I couldn’t possibly meet anyone else.” Sadly, I fear facebook has not seen the film.
It is true, I do everything in my power to remain youthful. I sleep slathered in retinoids, work out daily, wear clothing that fits, and keep my teeth healthy and white, take vitamins, I limit my intake of toxins (animal products, alcohol, etc.) , and control my stress levels (gym, daily analysis of stressors to keep them in perspective, laughter, etc.). What I believe to be more important is a youthful approach to life, an inquisitive and adventurous nature, and an openness to new concepts and ideas. There are a lot of things I do not understand initially, not jumping directly to fear and rejection of them is the key. As we all know, Google has eliminated the need to ever ask anyone a question directly. Look it up. Learn about it. Decide if it fits into where you see your life heading. If it does, great. If it doesn’t, it probably will not have any effect on you. Move on. There is no need to fear anything that you do not understand anymore. It’s all what/Oh. Yes/No. Cool/Whatever. Next. Getting hung up on things is not youthful. Hating things that you do not understand and ultimately do not effect you is not youthful.
While I have absolutely no desire to be 23 years old again, even if I could know everything I know now, I do wish I could go back and tell the 23 year old me to be fearless. To not compare my exterior successes to those of others my age because what I can’t see inside of them is that they are going through the same shit I am.
I guess that is the difference from being youthful and being a youth?
Camp starts today. The last time I was at Interlochen, I walked to the dance building and looked out on the lake. Even though no one was there, I took off my shoes and left them at the front door. I remembered the scared, lost, dumb kid that first stepped onto the sandy ground. I thought about the friends I made each year I was there and how they grew in numbers and strength. I remembered Erik. Like so many people before and after me, Interlochen changed my life and saved my life.
My advice to everyone there right now is to jump in with both feet, let the air rush beneath them, trust. It will change your life if you are open to it. And you will have friends for life if you want.
Interlochen Center for the Arts is a privately owned, 1,200 acre (5 km²) arts education institution in Interlochen, Michigan, roughly 15 miles (24 km) southwest of Traverse City. Interlochen draws young people from around the world to participate in intensive academics with additional study of music, theater, dance, visual art, creative writing, motion picture arts, and a brand new program of comparative arts. Interlochen Center for the Arts is the umbrella organization for Interlochen Arts Camp (formerly the National Music Camp, founded 1928), Interlochen Arts Academy high school (founded 1962), Interlochen Public Radio (founded 1963), Interlochen College of Creative Arts (founded 2004), and the “Interlochen Presents” performing arts series.
Interlochen Arts Camp (formerly the National Music Camp) is an annual summer camp for approximately 2,500 students ages 8 to 18. It was founded in 1928 by the late Dr. Joseph E. Maddy as the National High School Orchestra Camp. Today, students participate in music, theatre, dance, visual arts, creative writing, or motion picture arts. Camp admission is competitive, and auditions are required in most cases. Programs range in length from one to six weeks, and participants are divided into three divisions: Junior (grades 3-6), Intermediate (grades 6-9), and High School (grades 9-12). As another alternative, students may apply to one-week advanced institute programs that take place the week prior to the typical summer camp season; within the past few years, there have been institutes for oboe, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, and percussion. The Interlochen All-State program, which formerly consisted of two-week band, orchestra, and choir programs for Michigan high school students, was dropped in 2009.
Interlochen Theme
The Interlochen Theme, an excerpt from Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, is played at the conclusion of every Interlochen Arts Camp concert. It is conducted by the concertmaster for orchestra performances and by the first chair oboe player for band concerts. In recent years it has been accepted for any member of the band to conduct the theme during the summer camp. At the end of the Interlochen Theme, audience members are requested not to applaud and to depart in quiet reflection.
The Interlochen Arts Academy was founded in 1962 as an independent boarding school dedicated to the arts. As of 2007, it has 300 faculty and staff, and roughly 475 students. While more than half the students major in music performance, IAA also offers majors in comparative arts, creative writing, dance, theatre (performance; design and production), motion picture arts, and visual arts. Beginning with the 2005 school year, IAA (along with Interlochen Arts Camp) established a major in motion picture arts, and beginning in 2011 began offering comparative arts. The vast majority of students at Interlochen Arts Academy are boarding students, including many international students; some day students who live in the vicinity also attend. Interlochen Arts Academy has also been noted for its academic rigor, as IAA expects students to excel in the classroom as well as artistically. Upon graduation, most IAA graduates continue to universities or conservatories for further study in the arts or academics. Conservatories that often admit Interlochen students include Juilliard, Eastman, Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM), School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Curtis, New England Conservatory, Oberlin, Manhattan School of Music, Boston Conservatory, Peabody, and CalArts.
Interlochen Presents
Interlochen Presents has a summer festival running from June through August (schedule announced in April) and a performing arts series from September through May coinciding with the Academy school year (schedule announced in August). It features concerts, plays, art exhibits, readings, film screenings and dance productions presented by students, faculty, and staff, as well as both well-known and obscure guest artists. Interlochen Presents events are held in numerous venues around campus. The list of recent guest artists includes Steely Dan, Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, Joshua Bell, Jason Mraz, Bonnie Raitt, Olga Kern, Sara Bareilles, Dierks Bentley, Norah Jones, Martha Graham Dance Company, Ra Ra Riot, Bob Dylan, Jewel, Carol Jantsch, Josh Groban, Tiempo Libre, Paula Poundstone, Nathan Gunn, Chris Thile, and Bela Fleck. Interlochen Presents and Interlochen Public Radio serve as the primary channels by which Interlochen Center for the Arts connects with the northern Michigan region.
There are nearly 70,000 alumni of Interlochen Arts Camp and Interlochen Arts Academy living all over the world. Many of them have achieved fame for their artistic abilities or because of other achievements; some of their names are listed below.
Rachel Carns
Chip Davis
Josh Groban
Christie Hefner
Felicity Huffman
Tom Hulce
Linda Hunt
Norah Jones Jewel Kilcher
Dermot Mulroney
Jessye Norman
Rain Pryor
Mike Wallace
Rufus Wainwright
Rumer Willis
Peter Yarrow
Sean Young
I do enjoy getting the photo challenge and then looking through my “stock photos” on my phone and/or computer to see if any of them match what is required. Luckily, I had three that I thought matched “create.”
This photo is well known to my family, it is a handprint in wet cement created by a very young Reed Anderson some 50 or so years ago. It is below the hand rail on the steps leading down to the Minnesota “Minnie” Building on the waterfront at Interlochen Center For The Arts. This photo was taken last summer when we were all gathered for Reed’s father’s (my Grand Uncle’s) memorial service. The Anderson family has a strong connection with Interlochen, three generations deep. I love it. I miss it. It changed my life and possibly saved my life.
These two photos are macramé wall hangings done by my grandparent’s friend and neighbor, Mrs. Richmond. They must have been created in the 1970′s some time, at the height of the craft-craze. The Richmonds passed away quite a few years ago and the house has been sold, but to their credit, the new owners have kept Mrs. Richmond’s handy work hanging, even after painting the house. I love these guys, in a way they remind me of my grandparents.
Dorothy Counts was one of the four black students enrolled in all-white schools in North Carolina. She was harassed by students and their parents, including receiving threatening calls which made her family decide to move for fear of their safety.
Dorothy Counts (born 1942) was one of the first black students admitted to the Harry Harding High School, in Charlotte, North Carolina. After four days of harassment that threatened her safety, her parents forced her to withdraw from the school.
In 1957, forty black students applied for transfers at a white school. At 15 years of age, on September 1957, Dorothy Counts was one of the four black students enrolled at various all-white schools in the district; She was at Harry Harding High School, Charlotte, North Carolina. Three students were enrolled at other schools, including Central High School. The harassment started when the wife of John Z. Warlick, the leader of the White Citizens Council, urged the boys to “keep her out” and at the same time, implored the girls to spit on her, saying, “spit on her, girls, spit on her.” Dorothy walked by without reacting, but told the press that many people threw rocks at her—most of which landed in front of her feet—and that many spat on her back. More abuse followed that day. She had trash thrown at her while eating her dinner and the teachers ignored her. The following day, she befriended two white girls, but they soon drew back because of harassment from other classmates. Her family received threatening phone calls and after four days of extensive harassment—which included a smashed car and having her locker ransacked, her father decided to take his daughter out of the school. At a press conference, he said:
“It is with compassion for our native land and love for our daughter Dorothy that we withdraw her as a student at Harding High School. As long as we felt she could be protected from bodily injury and insults within the school’s walls and upon the school premises, we were willing to grant her desire to study at Harding.”
The family moved to Pennsylvania, where Dorothy Counts attended an integrated school in Philadelphia.
I would say that through my junior high and high school career, I had four real consistent bullies. Well, at least four people come to mind. There were plenty of other minor players, but four serious ones. I could use their names (and call them a few new ones), but name calling was their style, not mine and anyone that went to that school, know enough to know who I they were/are.
One sat behind me in history class. He would flick the back of my head and ears, he would make that fake sound that he was spitting on my back, and he would call me fag, faggot, and queer. He made it really hard for me to pay attention in class and learn anything. He was also in my gym class. He would always hit me harder than needed for whatever sport we were playing. He died our senior year. I think he was hit by a logging truck while walking down the road.
Another bully called me the all standard names, but also added hard shoves into the school hallway walls. I was very small compared to everyone else my sophomore year, my mother bought a winter jacket for me that was on the big side with anticipation of my growth. The first day I wore it to school, this bully asked me while he was standing in front of the class if the jacket was my boyfriends. He sat in the front of the class right near the door and the clock, the obvious direction that everyone would look. He would embarrass me by telling me loud enough for the whole class to hear to stop looking at him. Then he would turn to a friend and say how gross it was that I was checking him out, I obviously was not. I rearranged my entire route between classes to avoid going down the hallway where his locker was. He did and said things to me that he knew annoyed and upset me and he clearly got pleasure in my torment. He was instrumental in me hating myself, my school, my town, and my life. He died a couple years ago. They never say why people die in the newspaper.
One is a minister in now, he sent some bullshit grace/bless message to our class for the high school reunion. Maybe he found a different path. Maybe he found other people to bully? Whatever.
I don’t know what happened to the other one.
I do not feel sad, I do not feel anything really. I guess I feel odd that people my age are dying in general. I guess that I feel sad that they are dead and the only thing that some people remember about them is that they were total assholes in high school. That has got to suck because I know or at least hope that they got to love and be loved by someone. I hope they did. I hope that they got to experience passion and and deep connections to other humans. I hope that they managed to deal with the unmanaged fear or rage or whatever it was that caused them to strike out at people.
I do not believe in karma, it isn’t a fair trade. While I admit that they did make my school life horrible on purpose, I really do not think of them or what they did much anymore. I know that it is because of them that I went through a very rocky period in my late teens and early 20′s. I hated myself so much, I thought I was stupid and worthless and futureless. But I came out of it and it is because of that journey that I am who I am today. For the most part, I like who I am today.
I guess that I also am a bit sad that I will never have the chance to see and meet them now. That I do not have the chance to see their growth and change and say, “Think nothing of it, I know I don’t” if they are able to recognize the torment they caused.
That said, it is most important that parents do not dismiss their children when they say they are being bullied. Advice of ignoring it is horrible, it does not work. You have to understand what your child’s reality is. While it may seem trivial and no big deal to you as an adult, school and fellow classmates are your child’s entire reality. Being an outcast in your reality sucks. Being called horrible names day in and day out by the inhabitants of your reality really sucks. Do not expect the school to change anything. You need to teach your kids to fight, not necessarily physically, but fight for themselves as people who have just as much of a right to be there as they do and to be there unharnessed. And if it comes to it, fight physically to protect themselves. And if you are a parent, teach your kids to not be bystanders. When they see something happening, teach them to stick up for what is right. There were 30 other kids that sat silent in that classroom while one kid called me “fag” and knocked my books out of my arms every day. They did nothing. While it may not be your child that is the bully or the one being bullied, they can still change the situation.
For whatever reason, even in liberal non-confrontational Seattle, I still get called “fag” to this day, usually from across the street. If they are closer, I simply reply “I know. Does calling me names make you feel better about yourself?” It is a lot to take in all at once, so I have rarely had a reply. That, and I weigh 50 pounds more than I did in high school. That helps.
I noticed a picture on facebook of my first grade class a while ago, I was not tagged as I was not facebook friends with the person who had posed the picture. I remember the girl and remember her name, I actually remember a bunch of the people tagged in that photograph. I thought about friend-requesting them, but I just do not know what I would say or talk to them about. How do you nutshell 25 years? One girl I remember best because she and I were always seated next to each other when classrooms were organized alphabetically. We went kindergarten through senior year together and even went to each other’s birthday parties in grade school.
I know, you are waiting for it, so here is where the story turns. Since we were alphabetically connected, at least at the beginning of the year, we sat next to each other most of the time for twelve years. I mean, whenever we had a class together. In junior high social studies class, she called me by my whole name, first and last, then turned to another girl and said “Isn’t it funny how we always call nerds by their whole name?” It hurt, I won’t lie. We had been friends all through grade school, our mothers knew each other, we had history.
In her defense, I was a nerd, a short, skinny, awkward nerd. At the same time, the cruelty of children is absolutely bottomless. She didn’t need to call me a nerd, I knew I was a nerd, I heard it from every single guy in my P.E. class, well, actually I heard much worse.
We, along with most of the kids from grade school, got into this familiarity-thing where they sort of acknowledged my existence, but didn’t acknowledge our history. So, they would see that I was standing there, taking up air space, but would not do anything more than that. This started in junior high and continued through high school. It was fine, I made new friends with the other outcasts and misfits, we wrote alternative newspapers, dyed our hair, had dog weddings, and befriended the foreign exchange students. Yes, that was my crowd.
To this day, my mother will say she saw so-and-so-from-grade-school’s mother at the grocery store and I just don’t have the heart to tell her they basically ignored me for the last six years of school.
Basically, at my school, groups of kids were friends almost solely based on the radio station they listened to. I am not sure if those were simpler times and the dynamics are much more complex now with the internet and such, but ours was a gentile time where you either listened to butt rock, top 40, or new wave. I, as well as my clan, all listened to New Wave, C89.5 to be exact. This is when C89.5 went off at 11:00 PM. There was a subset of us that listened to KCMU, also. The radio station influenced everything: the clothes you wore, your haircut, the car you drove, and the friends you made.
I guess in some ways, even though we had our own insulated group, we still felt like outcasts and maybe looked up to the popular kids that listened to top 40. I did not look up to the butt rock kids, they were frightening to me. But the popular kids still had the impression of charmed lives. John Hughes was spot on and we knew it.
It is curious how even today, when someone says my first and last name, I instantly think of “Isn’t it funny how we always call nerds by their whole name?”
