My dad is a computer programmer and software engineer of unusually advanced skill levels, which made him particularly well-sought-after to the government during the 80s and 90s when most people only got this kind of education through universities because the government hadn't yet given any grants or incentives to put people through the training. So for a good chunk of my life he's been employed by various government agencies and companies that do contracting work with the feds (including Lockheed Martin and Grumann Aerospace), even though he isn't himself a government employee even when the government was paying his salary. He's always been an independent contractor, which meant that even when he was working on military bases the government didn't provide us a place to live. So my parents have always had to find housing within commuting distance of whatever military base he was working on, and not always conveniently closeby because the areas immediately around bases have notoriously high cost of living. He worked for the US Air Force the entire time we lived in Yorkshire into the mid-90s, but we lived in a civilian neighbourhood. When his contract with Lockheed expired, we moved back to the states and my dad got a job that again had a lot of contacts with the government without being entitled to the benefits of actually being a government employee.
The area they ultimately settled was a relatively inexpensive choice at the time, and the reason for this was because it was mostly rural then. It's still pretty undeveloped outside of the widely-spaced pockets of suburbia and you don't have to drive far to see farmland. But at the time it was just about the edge of the known universe, an untamed winderness on par with the Australian Outback or the Sahara, which was why we could afford to live there. Today it's one of the most painfully non-urban places to live--basic cost of living is estimated to be around $75,000 a year, more than twice the national average minimum wage and over four times as high as two full-time minimum wage employees can earn. It was just starting to undergo a boom when we moved there so every year the schools got more and more crowded as they struggled to accommodate more and more children than they had initially been built for.
By the time I left my elementary school, it had about 850 or 900 children attending it, in a building never built for more than 700, so it's putting it pretty lightly to say it was a tight squeeze. Every available space was converted to classroom space and there were at least a dozen portable trailers around the perimeter that were all being used. They just stuck the things wherever they could find space with access to a door, so they took up huge portions of what were initially playgrounds, soccer pitches, and baseball fields. Kids outside for gym and recess could pull faces at the windows and rap the sides of the trailers, which became a huge distraction and carried big penalties.
This story has a point, I swear.
Anyway, so there were way too many kids and not nearly enough room for all of them and the classes relegated to the portables usually supplemented class time with outdoor lessons, not least because the trailers were little more than airless metal boxes that got unbearably hot and stuffy in spring and summer. Anything that could be moved outdoors usually was, which was where a lot of science experiments ended up.
Fourth grade science classes included a study of mold (ew!) that invited hands-on experiments that couldn't be done indoors because mold quickly gross smelly as well as toxic; the teachers in the portable classrooms would douse popular kinds of bread with water and leave them outside under a covering so they would grow mold and the students could observe the animation of food in real time.
These two stories coincide one very worrisome day.
A group of kindergarten students had escaped supervision for a short time one spring and wandered into the forbidden forest of portables to commit illegal acts of distraction and came upon the science experiment. Being young and therefore stupid, they didn't know what it was. Nobody knows which students did it or when, but when the science class went to check on their moldy bread they discovered it missing. Teachers put the pieces together and realized--to their horror--that some small child or children had actually eaten them, mold and all.
Shockingly, nobody came down with a telltale sign of food poisoning to point to the culprits and nobody ever found out who was responsible for the lapse of adult supervision. But whoever mistook mold for a tasty snack, they probably had enough bread mold in their systems to fight every case of syphilis on the eastern seaboard.
Which actually makes me heave a little bit just thinking about it.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
My Relationship Should Have Padded Walls
My relationship is... special. It probably needs padded walls because the boything and I are just slightly less than absolutely insane.
1. We don't do nicknames--nicknames and pet names and shit actually make my skin crawl, and I would punch him in the balls if he called me 'boo' or 'baby girl' or any of that shit. ('Boo' and 'baby girl' and 'hun' and 'sweetie' are some of the ones that truly inspire hatred and disgust in me.) When we first got together I think he called me 'babe' once or twice before I asked him to stop or I'd break up with him. BUT! I do call him my 'pet'. He calls me his 'mistress' I am far and away the dominant partner and that establishes the pecking order pretty clearly. I am very much the one in control here.
2. Because of this, I jokingly asked him if he'd wear a collar. He's very, very easygoing and enthusiastically accommodating so sometimes I'll ask him to do shit I know he doesn't like, just so he'll say no. Call me quirky but I like knowing he isn't a complete pushover. That was why I asked him to wear the collar in the first place, and was shocked he said yes. He said he'd wear it everywhere. So I bought him a very nice blue leather one a few days ago and he wore it. It looks very nice. (I also put my ring on it instead of a tag. I wanted to get one that said 'Bitch' but the ring was cuter.)
3. In case you can't tell, he's very much a submissive. He also loves pain. I've been with guys who liked pain before but none of them came close to Max. I can just about draw blood on him. I can bite him so hard it triggers my gag reflex. (Yes it is possible, for me at least, to bite down so hard it can nearly make me throw up.) Oh, he loves it--I've never met somebody who gets that turned on by pain. By this morning he was covered all over with bruises, blood bruises, teeth marks, scratches... he looked like he'd been attacked by an animal!
4. So, we spent the entire time at a dive of a hotel a few minutes from my flat, which even here is actually a pretty nice place. But sometime one Friday or Thursday there were a bunch of cop cars arresting a guy for drugs and picking up a hooker right across the court. Around 10.30 when he and I went out to get food and some movies (believe it or not, we actually watched movies--when we weren't messing around) there were a dozen cops at least hanging around with lights flashing and everything and I nearly opened the room door into one. I came out looking debauched and underage, like I do because I barely look eighteen when I'm really 24, and the cop looked at me distinctly concerned. I'm 90% sure he wanted to either ask me if I needed help or call my parents or something.
5. When I got back Max told me he worried the cops would think he'd been in the room with an underage girl (he looks much older than I do even though I'm older than he is) and question him. He said, "Fuck, they were gonna think I was fucking a teenager and see all these bites and I was assaulting you and these were defensive wounds! I was gonna have to have 'em call you!" To which I replied, "If they had to call and make me verify my age, I'd've answered, 'Oh GOD, is this the cops AGAIN??' like it happened all the time!" I thought he was going to fall out of bed.
6. Both of us snore, talk in our sleep, flail in our sleep, and otherwise behave nocturnally in a manner that suggests we will both be sleeping alone forever. Somehow neither of us minds.
Other things we mutually don't mind: video games, snorty laughs, incessant swearing, insecurity, depression, belching, and stupid jokes.
Clearly this must be love.
1. We don't do nicknames--nicknames and pet names and shit actually make my skin crawl, and I would punch him in the balls if he called me 'boo' or 'baby girl' or any of that shit. ('Boo' and 'baby girl' and 'hun' and 'sweetie' are some of the ones that truly inspire hatred and disgust in me.) When we first got together I think he called me 'babe' once or twice before I asked him to stop or I'd break up with him. BUT! I do call him my 'pet'. He calls me his 'mistress' I am far and away the dominant partner and that establishes the pecking order pretty clearly. I am very much the one in control here.
2. Because of this, I jokingly asked him if he'd wear a collar. He's very, very easygoing and enthusiastically accommodating so sometimes I'll ask him to do shit I know he doesn't like, just so he'll say no. Call me quirky but I like knowing he isn't a complete pushover. That was why I asked him to wear the collar in the first place, and was shocked he said yes. He said he'd wear it everywhere. So I bought him a very nice blue leather one a few days ago and he wore it. It looks very nice. (I also put my ring on it instead of a tag. I wanted to get one that said 'Bitch' but the ring was cuter.)
3. In case you can't tell, he's very much a submissive. He also loves pain. I've been with guys who liked pain before but none of them came close to Max. I can just about draw blood on him. I can bite him so hard it triggers my gag reflex. (Yes it is possible, for me at least, to bite down so hard it can nearly make me throw up.) Oh, he loves it--I've never met somebody who gets that turned on by pain. By this morning he was covered all over with bruises, blood bruises, teeth marks, scratches... he looked like he'd been attacked by an animal!
4. So, we spent the entire time at a dive of a hotel a few minutes from my flat, which even here is actually a pretty nice place. But sometime one Friday or Thursday there were a bunch of cop cars arresting a guy for drugs and picking up a hooker right across the court. Around 10.30 when he and I went out to get food and some movies (believe it or not, we actually watched movies--when we weren't messing around) there were a dozen cops at least hanging around with lights flashing and everything and I nearly opened the room door into one. I came out looking debauched and underage, like I do because I barely look eighteen when I'm really 24, and the cop looked at me distinctly concerned. I'm 90% sure he wanted to either ask me if I needed help or call my parents or something.
5. When I got back Max told me he worried the cops would think he'd been in the room with an underage girl (he looks much older than I do even though I'm older than he is) and question him. He said, "Fuck, they were gonna think I was fucking a teenager and see all these bites and I was assaulting you and these were defensive wounds! I was gonna have to have 'em call you!" To which I replied, "If they had to call and make me verify my age, I'd've answered, 'Oh GOD, is this the cops AGAIN??' like it happened all the time!" I thought he was going to fall out of bed.
6. Both of us snore, talk in our sleep, flail in our sleep, and otherwise behave nocturnally in a manner that suggests we will both be sleeping alone forever. Somehow neither of us minds.
Other things we mutually don't mind: video games, snorty laughs, incessant swearing, insecurity, depression, belching, and stupid jokes.
Clearly this must be love.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
The Kindness of Strangers
Giving my age away here, but ten years ago I was a high school freshman--in fact, the events I'm about to write of happened exactly ten years ago as of February.
One day I will go into these upsetting stories in detail, but for the moment I'm not going to--not least because it will require a lot of very traumatic memories and take up many thousands of words. All you need to know is that my parents abused the medical community to have me medicated for psychiatric illnesses I didn't actually have, and continued doing this for seven years of my life. I was not allowed a voice in my own health and well-being, adding a feeling of complete helpless isolation to an already abusive environment. By the time I started high school, I had been taking extremely large doses of drugs not even approved for use in children for almost five years. I had never felt so alone and so completely lost in my life.
And it's here where Holly Dacek came into the picture.
Ms Dacek was my history teacher and, like the freshmen, was new to the school. She was a good teacher, but not an overly strict one. She was also very friendly and opened her classroom to students during her breaks and lunch periods to provide a safe place for children who felt they needed one. I spent a lot of time in that classroom, and she provided the only beacon of support I had. Not only was she just an all-around nice person and talked to me, she also listened to me, and listened with an openness and non-judgmental attitude that I had never seen in another adult before. Eventually I felt comfortable enough to open up to her about the situation at home, in particular the medications I was being forced to take that I knew were causing me a lot of problems. (Not light side-effects either. I lost motor function, couldn't control my hands, my appetite was gone, I wasn't sleeping, I had profound memory loss, and felt completely cut off from my own emotions--many of these side-effects are still with me, years after I was old enough to stop taking the medication.)
To my surprise, she was horrified. She tried to get me help. I had only wanted to get it off my chest, but seeing someone--an adult!!--have an intense negative reaction to my situation was one of the earliest indicators that what I was going through was in no way normal and vindicated my growing suspicion that my parents were abusive. Most people scoff, but the fact is that abuse needn't be extreme nor leave marks to be abuse--chaining a child up in the garage is abuse, certainly, but so is constantly berating a child and tearing down any scrap of self-worth they might have. Denying a child medication is abuse--but so is forcing them to take serious neurological medications when they don't need them.
The final straw for Ms Dacek was the day I came to her classroom in tears. I don't remember over what. But she wasn't going to sit and watch and brought me to the administrators and school psychologist, explaining my situation and inquiring about protective services. My parents were called, doctors were contacted, records were searched.
In the end it went horribly awry, but it wasn't Ms Dacek's fault. It was just a question of one obviously emotionally unstable child making claims against parents who provided an awful lot of carefully-selected medical testimony that I was not at all well and had behavioural problems. (I should mention that my parents deliberately doctor-shopped for someone who would slap a mental illness diagnosis on me and that this took some time--many of the doctors I remember seeing I also clearly remember remarking on how normal I was. It took a lot of work for my parents to have me labelled mentally unstable.) The whole thing was a mess and ended up with me spending a month confined to a juvenile mental hospital where I was housed with other psychiatric patients far more disturbed and violent than I ever was, making me fear for my life as well as being treated like a prisoner.
I was only a few years from being able to take control of my life as a legal adult so from there I made the decision to play by the unfair rules until I could finally play by my own. I was never institutionalized again and just before I turned seventeen I managed to strike a bargain with my parents that allowed me to significantly decrease my medication; when I was eighteen I stopped it all together, but by then the damage had been done. Whether or not I was sick before is a moot point because now I most definitely am. I never again sought the help of another adult or mentor. I never told another person about my situation until I was much older and that part of my abuse was well behind me. The combined abuses are cruelties from which I have never really recovered, nor do I trust people as fully as I would like--even when I know there's no risk, I'm always terrified that something will somehow go horribly wrong.
But I don't blame Ms Dacek for any of this. It isn't her fault. I feel nothing but gratitude to her, for her kindness and her efforts to help me on my terms, not based on what she thought was best for me. Even though it went horribly awry, I still think of her very fondly, even though she herself felt very guilty about what had happened.
I had her as a teacher just once for one semester before I graduated and shortly after that she moved to a different school. At the time I was still going through a lot of problems so I never managed to stay in contact with her. I never got to thank her.
So, Holly Dacek, wherever you are and whatever you're doing with your life now, I want to say this:
Thank you. Thank you for trying to help. You have no idea what you meant to a frightened child who had no idea where to turn, and that kindness has never been forgotten.
One day I will go into these upsetting stories in detail, but for the moment I'm not going to--not least because it will require a lot of very traumatic memories and take up many thousands of words. All you need to know is that my parents abused the medical community to have me medicated for psychiatric illnesses I didn't actually have, and continued doing this for seven years of my life. I was not allowed a voice in my own health and well-being, adding a feeling of complete helpless isolation to an already abusive environment. By the time I started high school, I had been taking extremely large doses of drugs not even approved for use in children for almost five years. I had never felt so alone and so completely lost in my life.
And it's here where Holly Dacek came into the picture.
Ms Dacek was my history teacher and, like the freshmen, was new to the school. She was a good teacher, but not an overly strict one. She was also very friendly and opened her classroom to students during her breaks and lunch periods to provide a safe place for children who felt they needed one. I spent a lot of time in that classroom, and she provided the only beacon of support I had. Not only was she just an all-around nice person and talked to me, she also listened to me, and listened with an openness and non-judgmental attitude that I had never seen in another adult before. Eventually I felt comfortable enough to open up to her about the situation at home, in particular the medications I was being forced to take that I knew were causing me a lot of problems. (Not light side-effects either. I lost motor function, couldn't control my hands, my appetite was gone, I wasn't sleeping, I had profound memory loss, and felt completely cut off from my own emotions--many of these side-effects are still with me, years after I was old enough to stop taking the medication.)
To my surprise, she was horrified. She tried to get me help. I had only wanted to get it off my chest, but seeing someone--an adult!!--have an intense negative reaction to my situation was one of the earliest indicators that what I was going through was in no way normal and vindicated my growing suspicion that my parents were abusive. Most people scoff, but the fact is that abuse needn't be extreme nor leave marks to be abuse--chaining a child up in the garage is abuse, certainly, but so is constantly berating a child and tearing down any scrap of self-worth they might have. Denying a child medication is abuse--but so is forcing them to take serious neurological medications when they don't need them.
The final straw for Ms Dacek was the day I came to her classroom in tears. I don't remember over what. But she wasn't going to sit and watch and brought me to the administrators and school psychologist, explaining my situation and inquiring about protective services. My parents were called, doctors were contacted, records were searched.
In the end it went horribly awry, but it wasn't Ms Dacek's fault. It was just a question of one obviously emotionally unstable child making claims against parents who provided an awful lot of carefully-selected medical testimony that I was not at all well and had behavioural problems. (I should mention that my parents deliberately doctor-shopped for someone who would slap a mental illness diagnosis on me and that this took some time--many of the doctors I remember seeing I also clearly remember remarking on how normal I was. It took a lot of work for my parents to have me labelled mentally unstable.) The whole thing was a mess and ended up with me spending a month confined to a juvenile mental hospital where I was housed with other psychiatric patients far more disturbed and violent than I ever was, making me fear for my life as well as being treated like a prisoner.
I was only a few years from being able to take control of my life as a legal adult so from there I made the decision to play by the unfair rules until I could finally play by my own. I was never institutionalized again and just before I turned seventeen I managed to strike a bargain with my parents that allowed me to significantly decrease my medication; when I was eighteen I stopped it all together, but by then the damage had been done. Whether or not I was sick before is a moot point because now I most definitely am. I never again sought the help of another adult or mentor. I never told another person about my situation until I was much older and that part of my abuse was well behind me. The combined abuses are cruelties from which I have never really recovered, nor do I trust people as fully as I would like--even when I know there's no risk, I'm always terrified that something will somehow go horribly wrong.
But I don't blame Ms Dacek for any of this. It isn't her fault. I feel nothing but gratitude to her, for her kindness and her efforts to help me on my terms, not based on what she thought was best for me. Even though it went horribly awry, I still think of her very fondly, even though she herself felt very guilty about what had happened.
I had her as a teacher just once for one semester before I graduated and shortly after that she moved to a different school. At the time I was still going through a lot of problems so I never managed to stay in contact with her. I never got to thank her.
So, Holly Dacek, wherever you are and whatever you're doing with your life now, I want to say this:
Thank you. Thank you for trying to help. You have no idea what you meant to a frightened child who had no idea where to turn, and that kindness has never been forgotten.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
School Projects
Whiskey-tango-foxtrot, I swear it's like my brain is determined to make up for the few days I didn't post by bringing up zillions of dead memories so I'm forced to post three times as much until I catch up or something. Honest, I'm not doing any of this on purpose--it's just kinda happening.
Anyway. School projects.
Before school became Srs Bsnss (TM), I spent my early school years learning practical applications for the material taught through a lot of rather clever hands-on projects. I haven't thought about them in years, which is why it surprises me that I can remember them this well.
At some point during my school career in the UK, for whatever reason part of the curriculum was learning about how English schools functioned in the past. (For those of you who don't know, British schools were fucking sadistic. Up until at least the 60s and probably even longer, corporal punishment was not only allowed but actively utilized in private AND public schools. Everybody else in my class came to school with stories to share about their parent's experiences with school and they involved 'canings', whereas my parents were actually kind of horrified that I'd been taught about all this. I was surprised to learn my parents were never 'caned' in school. I felt left out. Seriously.) Anyway, in the 'olden days' we learned that kids didn't write on paper but on little tiny slates--they didn't have desks, just benches. Or they used old-fashioned ink pens. Part of the 'hands on' project in this lesson was that we lived an entire day as if we were attending a nineteenth-century school. Sans canings, because by the 80s it was really illegal. We sat in our chairs without desks in rows, our teachers were very strict and we weren't allowed to talk, and we either wrote in ink or with a little slate. (I had a slate. I wanted ink. I was disappointed.) We also had to eat on the classroom floor since schools didn't have cafeterias back then. I don't remember a good deal else of what happened but one of the teachers apparently got so into the part of a nineteenth-century schoolteacher that one of the girls started crying. In her favour, the teacher did stop and hugged her and said it was only pretend. I think we might have been as old as six at the time.
One of my other favourite experiments was when I was in the fourth grade in the US. We were learning about electricity. I don't know who on the school board was having seizures or huffing glue at the time, but it was evidently agreed upon that the best way to teach nine-year-olds about electricity was to let them play with electricity. We made rudimentary light switches by connecting brass tacks to copper wire and hooking them up to batteries (yeah, REAL BATTERIES), completing the circuit with a paper clip that could be flipped up or down to turn a small light bulb off and on. I mean we actually seriously were playing with electricity and batteries and, as we all discovered through experience, an electrical current running through a copper wire makes it BURNING HOT. It was good fun at the time but as an adult I can't help but wonder why anybody thought that playing with batteries and electricity was a good idea for small children.
My absolute favourite school experiment was done the following year. I don't even remember what the point of the exercise was, what we were learning about at the time that made the activity relevant--I think we might have been studying 'structure', a science unit on basic concepts of architecture like beams and columns and balance and shit. But I honestly don't remember. All I remember was the egg experiment. This experiment was actually kinda famous in the school and all the kids knew that you got to do it your last year before middle school. The instructions were to build some kind of 'shelter' or contraption that would prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from the second floor of the school. The windows opened all the way back then (since apparently nobody was concerned we might jump out of them like they fear today), and one by one we all dropped our egg-cushioners and then went outside to see if they'd survived. I don't remember what mine even was or whether or not my egg survived. (Your grade didn't hinge on this anyway.) I do remember that parachutes were forbidden, since word had gotten out that a parachute was a guaranteed success. Kind of a shame, since my parents used to work for Grumann Aerospace and at the time I knew more about aeronautics than most hobbyists. I hated it, though--which is why I don't really remember any of it today.
This last one isn't a school project, more like something my school did and got the kids involved in. Student-produced morning news programs aired on CCTV to every classroom are pretty commonplace now, but in the early and mid-90s it wasn't something most people were even aware of, much less participating in. It happened that the school I went to was one of the first to start doing a student news program. There was one faculty member, Mrs Eggleson, who supervised us and taught us to use the equipment and made sure we didn't cost the school thousands of dollars in repairs, but other than that it was entirely done by students--none of whom were older than eleven. We manned the cameras, we did the editing, we recorded the weather and interviews, operated the lights and sound, not to mention all the 'reporters' and 'anchors' were kids--I'm not kidding, we did everything. Adults hardly featured in it at all. It was actually kind of cool. I preferred being behind the scenes rather than on camera (I had--and still have--a huge hangup about my voice and my accent), but for some reason I was harangued once into doing the weather broadcast and since it was recorded, Mrs Eggleson kept it for years because she said it was one of the best weather reports ever done. I can't really fathom why. A student news program was such a novelty back then that we ended up going on a field trip to the state's news headquarters to learn how grownups worked in the news--we got a segment as a fluff piece on air. Just one of thsoe things that's normal to me that turns out to be quite unusual.
Anyway. School projects.
Before school became Srs Bsnss (TM), I spent my early school years learning practical applications for the material taught through a lot of rather clever hands-on projects. I haven't thought about them in years, which is why it surprises me that I can remember them this well.
At some point during my school career in the UK, for whatever reason part of the curriculum was learning about how English schools functioned in the past. (For those of you who don't know, British schools were fucking sadistic. Up until at least the 60s and probably even longer, corporal punishment was not only allowed but actively utilized in private AND public schools. Everybody else in my class came to school with stories to share about their parent's experiences with school and they involved 'canings', whereas my parents were actually kind of horrified that I'd been taught about all this. I was surprised to learn my parents were never 'caned' in school. I felt left out. Seriously.) Anyway, in the 'olden days' we learned that kids didn't write on paper but on little tiny slates--they didn't have desks, just benches. Or they used old-fashioned ink pens. Part of the 'hands on' project in this lesson was that we lived an entire day as if we were attending a nineteenth-century school. Sans canings, because by the 80s it was really illegal. We sat in our chairs without desks in rows, our teachers were very strict and we weren't allowed to talk, and we either wrote in ink or with a little slate. (I had a slate. I wanted ink. I was disappointed.) We also had to eat on the classroom floor since schools didn't have cafeterias back then. I don't remember a good deal else of what happened but one of the teachers apparently got so into the part of a nineteenth-century schoolteacher that one of the girls started crying. In her favour, the teacher did stop and hugged her and said it was only pretend. I think we might have been as old as six at the time.
One of my other favourite experiments was when I was in the fourth grade in the US. We were learning about electricity. I don't know who on the school board was having seizures or huffing glue at the time, but it was evidently agreed upon that the best way to teach nine-year-olds about electricity was to let them play with electricity. We made rudimentary light switches by connecting brass tacks to copper wire and hooking them up to batteries (yeah, REAL BATTERIES), completing the circuit with a paper clip that could be flipped up or down to turn a small light bulb off and on. I mean we actually seriously were playing with electricity and batteries and, as we all discovered through experience, an electrical current running through a copper wire makes it BURNING HOT. It was good fun at the time but as an adult I can't help but wonder why anybody thought that playing with batteries and electricity was a good idea for small children.
My absolute favourite school experiment was done the following year. I don't even remember what the point of the exercise was, what we were learning about at the time that made the activity relevant--I think we might have been studying 'structure', a science unit on basic concepts of architecture like beams and columns and balance and shit. But I honestly don't remember. All I remember was the egg experiment. This experiment was actually kinda famous in the school and all the kids knew that you got to do it your last year before middle school. The instructions were to build some kind of 'shelter' or contraption that would prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from the second floor of the school. The windows opened all the way back then (since apparently nobody was concerned we might jump out of them like they fear today), and one by one we all dropped our egg-cushioners and then went outside to see if they'd survived. I don't remember what mine even was or whether or not my egg survived. (Your grade didn't hinge on this anyway.) I do remember that parachutes were forbidden, since word had gotten out that a parachute was a guaranteed success. Kind of a shame, since my parents used to work for Grumann Aerospace and at the time I knew more about aeronautics than most hobbyists. I hated it, though--which is why I don't really remember any of it today.
This last one isn't a school project, more like something my school did and got the kids involved in. Student-produced morning news programs aired on CCTV to every classroom are pretty commonplace now, but in the early and mid-90s it wasn't something most people were even aware of, much less participating in. It happened that the school I went to was one of the first to start doing a student news program. There was one faculty member, Mrs Eggleson, who supervised us and taught us to use the equipment and made sure we didn't cost the school thousands of dollars in repairs, but other than that it was entirely done by students--none of whom were older than eleven. We manned the cameras, we did the editing, we recorded the weather and interviews, operated the lights and sound, not to mention all the 'reporters' and 'anchors' were kids--I'm not kidding, we did everything. Adults hardly featured in it at all. It was actually kind of cool. I preferred being behind the scenes rather than on camera (I had--and still have--a huge hangup about my voice and my accent), but for some reason I was harangued once into doing the weather broadcast and since it was recorded, Mrs Eggleson kept it for years because she said it was one of the best weather reports ever done. I can't really fathom why. A student news program was such a novelty back then that we ended up going on a field trip to the state's news headquarters to learn how grownups worked in the news--we got a segment as a fluff piece on air. Just one of thsoe things that's normal to me that turns out to be quite unusual.
Misguided Intelligence
As much as I'm the first person to admit that I'm radiantly unintelligent, I'm aware that I've had my moments of cleverness--when the stars and planets align and I find myself capable of harnessing my brainpower, the results are often very surprising. I'm either really stupid, or extremely cunning. Unfortunately I've never been especially motivated to apply it to anything that might help me in the long run so my moments of intelligence are usually very petty and entirely self-serving. And occasionally illegal. But--and here's the thing--I always get away with it. The fact that I've spent my life perpetrating schemes to let me break rules and even break federal laws, yet I've never been caught... yeah, that's impressive.
It's a bit disappointing that the only thing I can ever be fucked to apply my intellect to is breaking rules.
My brother was always the golden boy--he never got into trouble at home, at least not when he did shit to me. No matter what he did, whether he hit me or kicked me or broke my things or stole something, he never got into trouble--in fact, I'D get into trouble for tattling. (And I got into trouble for the same behaviours, meaning I learned how to do them surreptitiously and he never did because he never had a reason to--making me infinitely sneakier and a lot more shrewd.) So I learned from a young age that if he was ever going to get his, it wasn't going to be from something he did to me. But that didn't stop me from longing to see him in trouble.
Now, when he was in the first grade his teacher would send home a little index-card sized piece of paper with a happy or sad face on it and the message 'I had a good day at school' or 'I had a bad day at school' written beneath it accordingly. (This was back in the days when parents still tended to look through their children's knapsacks for teacher notes and shit.) These weren't especially complicated missives, just a cut-down piece of paper and written in what appeared to be black crayon. They were so unsophisticated, however, that it occurred to me very quickly that they would be easy to forge. Since my parents took school very seriously, I realized that this would be a golden opportunity to finally see my brother punished.
At the time my parents both worked, so my brother and I were watched at home by a sitter for two or three hours after school every day. This gave me a morsel of time during which to put my plan into action. I took an old note from his teacher and carefully traced the smileyface onto a sheet of computer paper, but with a sad face; then I traced the words, too, with a black crayon to make the writing match the teacher's so it wouldn't be immediately recognizable as a forgery, writing 'bad' in place of 'good'. I cut the paper down to size and, while my brother and the babysitter were elsewhere, replaced the note from his teacher with my forgery.
It worked.
In order to sell it, I had to feign total disinterest in what my parents were upset with my brother about, but in our house the rooms are all connected via ducts, so it's possible to listen to a conversation from anywhere in the house by listening at the vents. I listened in my room to them yelling at him for misbehaving in school--they never called the teacher to find out what he'd supposedly done to warrant the negative note, and it was the first time I ever saw him punished. And I was never caught.
I was eight years old, and I felt invincible.
After this incident I never forged another note from his teacher again. Even at that age I knew lightning wouldn't strike twice and I risked giving myself away if I did it again. The whole thing doesn't seem terribly impressive to adult eyes, but it's a remarkable feat of cunning intelligence in at child too young to be trusted to cross the street safely.
Not all of my schemes were malicious or aimed at getting somebody in trouble. My longest-running scheme was snooping. I was a horrible snoop and my parents actually knew I did it even though they never actually punished me for it more than a few times. It started when I was actually probably about eight (pivotal time for me, I guess?) and found Christmas presents hidden in my parent's bedroom closet, a place completely and totally off-limits to me at the time. There was something weirdly thrilling about being able to find things I wasn't supposed to find and from then on it was an impulse of mine to sneak into my parent's bedroom and look for gifts before I was to get them. I never opened them, nor was I ever tempted to take them--that wasn't what I wanted, rather I just wanted to know what was there. (Except once, when one of the presents was a book that I read in its entirety a few pages at a time during the weeks leading up to Giftmas.) I love knowing the ending before I get to it. I'm the kind of person who reads the last page of a book before they start. I actively look for spoilers for movies, books, video games, and anything else that has a plot. Remember when the last 'Harry Potter' came out a few years ago? Everyone had a shitfit over spoilers being leaked on the internet but I loved it. It meant I knew was was going to happen, mostly, and was protected from being blindsided by a tragedy I didn't see coming.
So I snooped for presents at every opportunity. I only stopped when I moved out.
My parents actually did know I'd been doing it, but it took them a long time to figure it out since I was smart enough to carefully put everything exactly as it had been so there would be no immediate evidence of tampering. Beyond being grounded a few times, there weren't any consequences--instead they just started finding new places to hide presents and the whole thing became like a weird scavenger hunt for me. There was something exciting about outsmarting my parents and I just couldn't stop. I learned to see things an entirely different way and developed an impressive talent for looking at a room and being able to spot potential hiding places that aren't anywhere near obvious. I can still do it. It isn't very useful.
The two tactics that they eventually tried that I'm sure they thought put an end to my snooping only presented a very small obstacle. To keep me from being able to see presents even if I found where they were hidden, they took to wrapping everything as soon as they got it. Obviously there's no way to sneak a peek at wrapped parcels without leaving obvious evidence. But I circumvented that, too, and the way I did it is impressive. All you need is a very thin blade--like a razor or exacto-knife. I used it to carefully slice the tape where the paper was folded and unfold it without ripping it. Once I got a look at what was inside, I folded the paper back up and re-taped it. It's almost impossible to find evidence of this unless you know exactly what to look for--the two layers of tape--and nobody would think to look anyway because nobody would figure out how to do this.
By the early 2000s, online shopping became commonplace and my parents again used this as a way to thwart my sneakiness. They just left everything in their sealed shipping boxes, the theory being the same as with wrapping--you can't get into the box without leaving evidence you've done it. Most online retailers place their shipping labels over the box flaps, meaning that in order to open the box you have to cut through it, which leaves obvious signs of tampering.
This didn't work either.
All I had to do was turn the box over and open it from the bottom. There's never any labels or stickers on the bottom of the box, so there's nothing to cut through that can't be easily camouflaged. I just sliced the tape on the bottom and unloaded the box's contents that way. When I was done I re-packed it and re-sealed the box with the same kind of tape it was originally sealed with.
Not only is this pretty astoundingly clever, it's also kind of illegal. Mail tampering or mail fraud constitute federal crimes, since they involve the postal service which is a federal institution. But I was never caught. Nobody ever worked out that I'd been doing it.
Nothing I described here is at all intuitive. It requires a lot of abstract thought and very well-developed problem-solving skills.
I might not be the smartest cookie, but I'm definitely one of the cunning ones. Even though all I ever did was break the rules, these anecdotes serve as pretty compelling indicators that I am occasionally capable of some pretty clever feats--and the fact that I got away with everything I ever schemed is testament to how far out of the box I can go.
It's a bit disappointing that the only thing I can ever be fucked to apply my intellect to is breaking rules.
My brother was always the golden boy--he never got into trouble at home, at least not when he did shit to me. No matter what he did, whether he hit me or kicked me or broke my things or stole something, he never got into trouble--in fact, I'D get into trouble for tattling. (And I got into trouble for the same behaviours, meaning I learned how to do them surreptitiously and he never did because he never had a reason to--making me infinitely sneakier and a lot more shrewd.) So I learned from a young age that if he was ever going to get his, it wasn't going to be from something he did to me. But that didn't stop me from longing to see him in trouble.
Now, when he was in the first grade his teacher would send home a little index-card sized piece of paper with a happy or sad face on it and the message 'I had a good day at school' or 'I had a bad day at school' written beneath it accordingly. (This was back in the days when parents still tended to look through their children's knapsacks for teacher notes and shit.) These weren't especially complicated missives, just a cut-down piece of paper and written in what appeared to be black crayon. They were so unsophisticated, however, that it occurred to me very quickly that they would be easy to forge. Since my parents took school very seriously, I realized that this would be a golden opportunity to finally see my brother punished.
At the time my parents both worked, so my brother and I were watched at home by a sitter for two or three hours after school every day. This gave me a morsel of time during which to put my plan into action. I took an old note from his teacher and carefully traced the smileyface onto a sheet of computer paper, but with a sad face; then I traced the words, too, with a black crayon to make the writing match the teacher's so it wouldn't be immediately recognizable as a forgery, writing 'bad' in place of 'good'. I cut the paper down to size and, while my brother and the babysitter were elsewhere, replaced the note from his teacher with my forgery.
It worked.
In order to sell it, I had to feign total disinterest in what my parents were upset with my brother about, but in our house the rooms are all connected via ducts, so it's possible to listen to a conversation from anywhere in the house by listening at the vents. I listened in my room to them yelling at him for misbehaving in school--they never called the teacher to find out what he'd supposedly done to warrant the negative note, and it was the first time I ever saw him punished. And I was never caught.
I was eight years old, and I felt invincible.
After this incident I never forged another note from his teacher again. Even at that age I knew lightning wouldn't strike twice and I risked giving myself away if I did it again. The whole thing doesn't seem terribly impressive to adult eyes, but it's a remarkable feat of cunning intelligence in at child too young to be trusted to cross the street safely.
Not all of my schemes were malicious or aimed at getting somebody in trouble. My longest-running scheme was snooping. I was a horrible snoop and my parents actually knew I did it even though they never actually punished me for it more than a few times. It started when I was actually probably about eight (pivotal time for me, I guess?) and found Christmas presents hidden in my parent's bedroom closet, a place completely and totally off-limits to me at the time. There was something weirdly thrilling about being able to find things I wasn't supposed to find and from then on it was an impulse of mine to sneak into my parent's bedroom and look for gifts before I was to get them. I never opened them, nor was I ever tempted to take them--that wasn't what I wanted, rather I just wanted to know what was there. (Except once, when one of the presents was a book that I read in its entirety a few pages at a time during the weeks leading up to Giftmas.) I love knowing the ending before I get to it. I'm the kind of person who reads the last page of a book before they start. I actively look for spoilers for movies, books, video games, and anything else that has a plot. Remember when the last 'Harry Potter' came out a few years ago? Everyone had a shitfit over spoilers being leaked on the internet but I loved it. It meant I knew was was going to happen, mostly, and was protected from being blindsided by a tragedy I didn't see coming.
So I snooped for presents at every opportunity. I only stopped when I moved out.
My parents actually did know I'd been doing it, but it took them a long time to figure it out since I was smart enough to carefully put everything exactly as it had been so there would be no immediate evidence of tampering. Beyond being grounded a few times, there weren't any consequences--instead they just started finding new places to hide presents and the whole thing became like a weird scavenger hunt for me. There was something exciting about outsmarting my parents and I just couldn't stop. I learned to see things an entirely different way and developed an impressive talent for looking at a room and being able to spot potential hiding places that aren't anywhere near obvious. I can still do it. It isn't very useful.
The two tactics that they eventually tried that I'm sure they thought put an end to my snooping only presented a very small obstacle. To keep me from being able to see presents even if I found where they were hidden, they took to wrapping everything as soon as they got it. Obviously there's no way to sneak a peek at wrapped parcels without leaving obvious evidence. But I circumvented that, too, and the way I did it is impressive. All you need is a very thin blade--like a razor or exacto-knife. I used it to carefully slice the tape where the paper was folded and unfold it without ripping it. Once I got a look at what was inside, I folded the paper back up and re-taped it. It's almost impossible to find evidence of this unless you know exactly what to look for--the two layers of tape--and nobody would think to look anyway because nobody would figure out how to do this.
By the early 2000s, online shopping became commonplace and my parents again used this as a way to thwart my sneakiness. They just left everything in their sealed shipping boxes, the theory being the same as with wrapping--you can't get into the box without leaving evidence you've done it. Most online retailers place their shipping labels over the box flaps, meaning that in order to open the box you have to cut through it, which leaves obvious signs of tampering.
This didn't work either.
All I had to do was turn the box over and open it from the bottom. There's never any labels or stickers on the bottom of the box, so there's nothing to cut through that can't be easily camouflaged. I just sliced the tape on the bottom and unloaded the box's contents that way. When I was done I re-packed it and re-sealed the box with the same kind of tape it was originally sealed with.
Not only is this pretty astoundingly clever, it's also kind of illegal. Mail tampering or mail fraud constitute federal crimes, since they involve the postal service which is a federal institution. But I was never caught. Nobody ever worked out that I'd been doing it.
Nothing I described here is at all intuitive. It requires a lot of abstract thought and very well-developed problem-solving skills.
I might not be the smartest cookie, but I'm definitely one of the cunning ones. Even though all I ever did was break the rules, these anecdotes serve as pretty compelling indicators that I am occasionally capable of some pretty clever feats--and the fact that I got away with everything I ever schemed is testament to how far out of the box I can go.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Bad Habit, Worse Reason
A few posts back I mentioned that I habitually bite the inside of my lips and cheeks, sometimes so badly that I leave large open mouth sores that take weeks to heal. I said I had no idea why I do this, but that's actually a bold-faced lie. I know exactly why I do it.
I want the blood.
There's no way to make that sound less creepy so I'm not going to try, but the fact remains that I mutilate the inside of my mouth because I have a totally inexplicable desire to drink the blood. I've always, always done it and that has always, always been the reason.
I'm a hardcore skeptic here, so I don't harbour some freakish delusion that I'm a vampire or something, or that I 'need' blood to survive. I don't believe in that shit and I don't have any vitamin deficiencies (like iron, which blood is positively chock full of) that might explain this bizarre compulsion. I would never drink someone else's blood, either, like you see occasionally in 'blood play' fetish material--I think it's gross. But I do it to myself, do it to the point where I cause myself a massive amount of discomfort for weeks, and do it FREQUENTLY.
It's not something I can reasonably try and look up since I know where the internet will point me and it wouldn't be pretty.
I want the blood.
There's no way to make that sound less creepy so I'm not going to try, but the fact remains that I mutilate the inside of my mouth because I have a totally inexplicable desire to drink the blood. I've always, always done it and that has always, always been the reason.
I'm a hardcore skeptic here, so I don't harbour some freakish delusion that I'm a vampire or something, or that I 'need' blood to survive. I don't believe in that shit and I don't have any vitamin deficiencies (like iron, which blood is positively chock full of) that might explain this bizarre compulsion. I would never drink someone else's blood, either, like you see occasionally in 'blood play' fetish material--I think it's gross. But I do it to myself, do it to the point where I cause myself a massive amount of discomfort for weeks, and do it FREQUENTLY.
It's not something I can reasonably try and look up since I know where the internet will point me and it wouldn't be pretty.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day...?
I have a moderate interest in the European royalty of centuries past kind of in the same way I have a moderate interest in Australia--it's entirely composed of things that are so completely alien to me and so radially different than anything I have ever experienced before that it's fascinating to think that for a good many real people, that was and remains 'normal'.
But it's just a small amount of interest and I don't spend a lot of my time scouring books and articles for whatever scraps of information I can find about Queen Awkwardia VIIXICML of Derpland or anything like that. They start to meld together in my mind unless they distinguish themselves in some way or another, not least because there seemed to be this really intense desire to make sure everybody all had the same three or four names. (Think about it--you could probably account for a good chunk of England's kings with just four names: Henry, George, James, Richard. English queens could probably make do with only three: Catherine, Anne, Mary. Add numerals to taste, garnish with fresh surnames.) Another reason my interest doesn't intensify is because--and this might come as a surprise to some people--royal lives are fucking boring. There's this hugely romanticized and largely fantastical collective delusion a lot of people, a lot of whom might also be women-people I venture, have about what royal life was like. Here's what it was like: you were never alone at any point in your entire life, every decision was made for you by somebody else, you had no control over your own fate, you were expected to dutifully uphold an impossible standard of behaviour and appearance, produce heirs that survived to adulthood (no half-points for making a boy if he doesn't live!), and participate in as much or as little of the actual governing of the actual normal people as is expected of you at any given time and is subject to change without notice.
Without complaining.
Plus there was always the possibility that you could be left with a kingdom full of problems caused by all the idiots before you and if you didn't fix it completely they would revolt and then you'd be screwed and have to take all the blame for everything. And then they chopped your head off because fuck you, Queenie.
And that was provided you made it to adulthood yourself, didn't die in childbirth, and the husband someone else picked for you didn't turn out to be homosexual or give you syphilis from one of his many mistresses--all circumstances that happened a lot more often than most people realize.
So, yeah, royal life wasn't as great as most people think it was. If things went wrong they went really wrong, and even when things went well your life consisted of pretty much nothing more exciting than gossip. You know why every successive royal couple built new castles all over the place when there were already perfectly good ones available to use? Because they were fucking bored and building a castle was a complicated and lengthy undertaking that would at least occupy some of their otherwise totally monotonous lives.
And if all that isn't a big enough deterrent for you, consider this: if you were a member of a royal family, you were probably aggressively ugly.
Because--by the way--you would be the product of many centuries of dedicated cousin marriage and you would have to continue with that proud tradition yourself by marrying a relative and producing increasingly atrocious-looking children with them. Some of them probably had webbed feet and extra fingers and everything. Turns out that cousins marrying was actually a really bad idea, but by the time anyone thought to stop doing it the royals were all pretty offensively unattractive and the boys kept turning out to have hemophilia thanks to all that cousin-fucking. Well done, everyone, you couldn't have screwed your descendants over any better if you tried.
Obviously it's not entirely fair to render opinions on eighteenth-century beauty standards with a 21st-century bias--what one generation considers attractive usually inspires hysterical laughter from the next. Across the passage of centuries conventional beauty has undergone so many radical redefinitions that the surviving portraits all represent an ideal so far from our own that it might as well have originated on another planet.
But I'm going to do it anyway.
The thing you have to realize about the portraits painted of royals--and nobility of any kind, but especially with royalty--is that they weren't painted to be accurate. They were painted to be as flattering as possible and assure that their image would be preserved in the best possible light, even if it meant walking the thin line between 'artistic license' and 'outright dishonesty'. Not that too many painters were tempted to do otherwise when the guy they were painting had the authority to sentence them to death if they decided to go for a little more realism and depict the king's excessive ear hair and acne problem. You'd have to have a real artistic hard-on for realism to decide a risk like that was worth taking.
Knowing that, you start to see all those royal portraits a bit differently. Let's be honest here, shall we? The people in those portraits are definitely not pretty. Sometimes they look like they could be, but the effect is ruined with subtle--but arresting--irregularities in their features. Something is off about these portraits and you don't know exactly what it is. Somehow, though, it all just doesn't seem quite right.
What doesn't seem quite right about the portraits is that they're still not actually very flattering. And yet the paintings met with the approval of the subject or else they wouldn't have been kept, which leaves us with only one question to ask:
Exactly how ugly were these people in reality that their most flattering pictures could look like this and it was still the best job anybody could do?
In all it just sort of brings all of those princess fantasies you've secretly held onto crashing down to earth like a skyscraper demolition. Reality bites sometimes, doesn't it?
But it's just a small amount of interest and I don't spend a lot of my time scouring books and articles for whatever scraps of information I can find about Queen Awkwardia VIIXICML of Derpland or anything like that. They start to meld together in my mind unless they distinguish themselves in some way or another, not least because there seemed to be this really intense desire to make sure everybody all had the same three or four names. (Think about it--you could probably account for a good chunk of England's kings with just four names: Henry, George, James, Richard. English queens could probably make do with only three: Catherine, Anne, Mary. Add numerals to taste, garnish with fresh surnames.) Another reason my interest doesn't intensify is because--and this might come as a surprise to some people--royal lives are fucking boring. There's this hugely romanticized and largely fantastical collective delusion a lot of people, a lot of whom might also be women-people I venture, have about what royal life was like. Here's what it was like: you were never alone at any point in your entire life, every decision was made for you by somebody else, you had no control over your own fate, you were expected to dutifully uphold an impossible standard of behaviour and appearance, produce heirs that survived to adulthood (no half-points for making a boy if he doesn't live!), and participate in as much or as little of the actual governing of the actual normal people as is expected of you at any given time and is subject to change without notice.
Without complaining.
Plus there was always the possibility that you could be left with a kingdom full of problems caused by all the idiots before you and if you didn't fix it completely they would revolt and then you'd be screwed and have to take all the blame for everything. And then they chopped your head off because fuck you, Queenie.
And that was provided you made it to adulthood yourself, didn't die in childbirth, and the husband someone else picked for you didn't turn out to be homosexual or give you syphilis from one of his many mistresses--all circumstances that happened a lot more often than most people realize.
So, yeah, royal life wasn't as great as most people think it was. If things went wrong they went really wrong, and even when things went well your life consisted of pretty much nothing more exciting than gossip. You know why every successive royal couple built new castles all over the place when there were already perfectly good ones available to use? Because they were fucking bored and building a castle was a complicated and lengthy undertaking that would at least occupy some of their otherwise totally monotonous lives.
And if all that isn't a big enough deterrent for you, consider this: if you were a member of a royal family, you were probably aggressively ugly.
Because--by the way--you would be the product of many centuries of dedicated cousin marriage and you would have to continue with that proud tradition yourself by marrying a relative and producing increasingly atrocious-looking children with them. Some of them probably had webbed feet and extra fingers and everything. Turns out that cousins marrying was actually a really bad idea, but by the time anyone thought to stop doing it the royals were all pretty offensively unattractive and the boys kept turning out to have hemophilia thanks to all that cousin-fucking. Well done, everyone, you couldn't have screwed your descendants over any better if you tried.
Obviously it's not entirely fair to render opinions on eighteenth-century beauty standards with a 21st-century bias--what one generation considers attractive usually inspires hysterical laughter from the next. Across the passage of centuries conventional beauty has undergone so many radical redefinitions that the surviving portraits all represent an ideal so far from our own that it might as well have originated on another planet.
But I'm going to do it anyway.
The thing you have to realize about the portraits painted of royals--and nobility of any kind, but especially with royalty--is that they weren't painted to be accurate. They were painted to be as flattering as possible and assure that their image would be preserved in the best possible light, even if it meant walking the thin line between 'artistic license' and 'outright dishonesty'. Not that too many painters were tempted to do otherwise when the guy they were painting had the authority to sentence them to death if they decided to go for a little more realism and depict the king's excessive ear hair and acne problem. You'd have to have a real artistic hard-on for realism to decide a risk like that was worth taking.
Knowing that, you start to see all those royal portraits a bit differently. Let's be honest here, shall we? The people in those portraits are definitely not pretty. Sometimes they look like they could be, but the effect is ruined with subtle--but arresting--irregularities in their features. Something is off about these portraits and you don't know exactly what it is. Somehow, though, it all just doesn't seem quite right.
What doesn't seem quite right about the portraits is that they're still not actually very flattering. And yet the paintings met with the approval of the subject or else they wouldn't have been kept, which leaves us with only one question to ask:
Exactly how ugly were these people in reality that their most flattering pictures could look like this and it was still the best job anybody could do?
In all it just sort of brings all of those princess fantasies you've secretly held onto crashing down to earth like a skyscraper demolition. Reality bites sometimes, doesn't it?
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