BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

I wasn’t the most popular kid in school.

Hell, let’s be honest, I wasn’t popular at all. I was the target of bullies who were looking for someone to beat on. I was the subject of cruel pranks by popular girls who thought it would be great fun to convince me they “liked me” in that adolescent raging hormone sort of fashion, only to turn around and deride me in front of our peers, en masse, all for the purpose of a giggle at my embarrassment.

Of course, I sort of brought it on myself depending upon how you look at it. I’m not “pretty.” Just sort of average looking. However, when you take average – or even pretty – and hang a scientific calculator from its belt, then give it a pocket protector and a briefcase… Well, you’ve got “Revenge of the Nerds” happening right in front of you. Yeah… That was me. So, in effect, I painted a target on my forehead every single morning – usually around a big ol’ cyclops zit, but that’s just standard puberty for you.

So… Where am I going with this? Someplace different, actually…

You see, my daughter just started Middle School – what we used to call Junior High back about 1000 years ago. Of course, since she’s reaching that “age” there are more and more moments when my wife (E K) and I are persona non grata. Just the old ‘rents that have to be ignored, because we are so out of touch and never ever, ever were her age, so we just can’t understand. However, in between our annoying tendencies to do ‘rent stuff, such as reminding her to do her homework, withholding her allowance when she neglects her household chores, or even sternly explaining why it’s against our rules to leave a half-eaten cheese sandwich under the couch, we have our “moments.”

What I mean by that is we have a pretty great relationship with our kid, and there are those times when she actually converses with us on a one to one level, without disdain, eye-rolling, or “you-just-don’t-understand sighs” punctuating every sentence fragment.

And so, I had one of those moments just the other day. Our brilliant child (seriously – she’s in the gifted program, but I’ll refrain from bragging. For now…) Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah… Our brilliant child was babbling incessantly to me as we headed to the store. Having just started Middle School, everything is new and different. Fun and exciting. A brave new world, so to speak… She paused for a moment and then said, “What was your favorite part of school, Dad?”

Well, as I started out with this blog, you can probably tell that school was sort of a self-contained hell for me. However, like our daughter, it too had its moments. I really enjoyed learning new stuff. I still do. That’s part of the allure of school, even though academia, in and of itself, is not my thing. They didn’t have a Gifted program when I was “in the system.” The best they could do was try skipping me grades which was a social nightmare and was nixed by my parents. So, that led to me being an underachiever for part of my primary education. Fortunately, that only lasted a couple of years, because I discovered extracurricular activities that were actual learning venues tied into classes – The school radio station, the newspaper, the yearbook, the school literary magazine, and even Drama Club… All of these provided me with a creative outlet as well as an advanced learning opportunity. I loved all of them. They literally kept me from pissing away my High School years, even with all of the bullying. Of course, there are certain teachers who were directly responsible as well – I’ve mentioned them here before – Martha Ackmann, Martha Osthoff, Mary Martin, Edward Ross, and others…

It was also during this time that I began honing my sarcastic sense of humor, primarily as a defense mechanism against the bullies, some of whom were even members of the extracurricular clubs that were keeping me interested in school. I was bound and determined that these bullies would not take THOSE away from me too.

But, I need to avoid being maudlin here… That’s not really what this is about. It’s about my kid asking me what my favorite part of school was. It didn’t take much thought for me to answer. I proceeded to “wax poetical” for several minutes about how wonderful the Radio Station, Yearbook, Lit Mag, Newspaper, and Drama Club were. How I looked forward to them, and how they tied into classes, and how I still hold truly fond memories of them today.

After my verbose, detailed, and flowery soliloquy, I paused.  Glancing over at the O-spring for a brief second, I asked, “So, what’s your favorite part?”

Without missing a beat, she replied, “I like the lockers.”

Sometimes it’s the simple things… And, I guess when you get right down to brass tacks, it’s all just a matter of perspective…

More to come…

Murv

Back in 1993 there was this movie starring Michael Douglas. Some of you may remember it. The title was, Falling Down. Now, when you read the plot synosis it repeatedly refers to Douglas’ character as ‘disturbed.’ I will agree with that, wholeheartedly. The problem is, while the synopsis outlines key events in the movie that trigger the character, they paint him as disturbed (i.e. mentally unstable at the outset) and triggered as opposed to being a normal guy who is beaten into disturbia by society and events and then triggered.

When you watch the movie itself they make this latter point clear, but the synopsis really doesn’t. The main reason I even bother to go into that fact is that some of you may not have actually seen the movie and would base your view on that synopsis. Just want to make sure that is cleared up… So, now that it is, on with the rest of this ranting blog thing…

‘I just want to go home,’ is something Douglas’ character said quite a bit throughout the movie. It is also something I say very often… You see, D-FENS (the character – no, don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not some stupid name… You see, for most of the movie you are only able to apply an identity to him based on his vanity license plate D-FENS – he was a defense industry worker if that helps explain it… You don’t find out his real name until later)…

Anyway, my point here is that I can readily identify with D-FENS. I have sympathy for him. Sometimes I feel like I AM him…

In case you haven’t seen the movie and don’t intend to follow the above link to the synopsis, basically you have a guy who is laid off, divorced, beaten down, and just plain sick and tired of the BS out there in the world. By BS I mean getting mugged by a gang, a store owner who won’t make change for a buck so you can use his pay phone then gouges you on a candy bar so that you still don’t end up with any change (yeah, I know, a bit outdated what with cell phones and all, but you get the idea), traffic jams caused for no reason other than the fact the people with entitlement issues are being assholes… Well, finally this guy cracks and fights back. Granted, it gets pretty bad in the end, (what he does, not the movie itself – I think the movie was great) but, in any case, I’ll let you watch the movie to find out those details…

So… Here I am, on the raggedy edge… No, wait, that was from Serenity… Wrong movie… good movie.. no, actually it was a GREAT movie… but not the one I am referencing right now…

So, here I am… Pretty much feeling like D-FENS… No, I haven’t been laid off (actually, I have a contract to fulfill with my publisher, so that means I still have a job – even though book sales are way down in the current economy, but that’s a different blog)… And, I’m not divorced nor am I in any danger of being so (unless, of course, EK has plans I don’t know about…) But, I have been dealing with the whole entitled asshole thing…

You see, I just got back from grocery shopping for the Yule bash this weekend. I wasn’t even able to finish the shopping because I simply couldn’t take any more… In fact, I was on the verge of re-enacting a few scenes from Falling Down right there in the Shop ‘n Save. Fortunately, since I DO still have a wife and a kid and a job, I have too much to lose, therefore I had the good sense to just head for the checkout stand, pay for my cartload and leave…

But, to give you an idea… As I was politely making my way down the aisles, moving to the side and allowing people to pass whenever I needed to stop, or waiting for folks to finish before trying to get past them myself, I was faced with assholes. People who would ram my cart as I politely waited for the old lady in front of me to finish putting something into her own cart…

They would ram MY cart, push past me, then ram the old lady’s cart in order to rush past her. Then guess what? They’d stop 15 feet up the aisle – in the MIDDLE of the friggin’ aisle – and would they get something off the shelf and move on? No… They’d stand there blocking the aisle while carrying on a LOUD conversation with someone via cell phone. ‘Giiiiirrlrllllllll, I be tellin’ you he be yadda yadda…etc… etc…yadda…’

However, I DID figure something out during all of this – These assholes don’t use the words ‘excuse me’ because they don’t know what they mean. I tested the theory several times by politely saying excuse me while trying to get around them, and was merely stared at like I had grown an extra head. Obviously, ‘excuse me’ is spoken in a foreign language where they are concerned.

If that was all that occurred it wouldn’t be so bad – even though said incident happened MULTIPLE times within the span of 1 hour with different assholes involved each time – but, it doesn’t stop there. I had an idiot bean me with an eight pound ham because he tossed it into the bin without bothering to look first. When I looked up  he stared at me like it was my fault for being there.

There were several other incidents, but I don’t want to bore you with a neverending rant… Suffice it to say, I was pushed to the point where I was imagining myself in D-FENS’s position, and thinking I would do pretty much the same thing he did (see movie – or at the very least the synopsis – for details)

Of course, to add insult to injury, even though I decided to check out and ‘go home’ rather than lay waste to everyone in my path, someone still found it necessary to push in front of me while I was standing in the checkout line.

While I refrained from picking up the nearest blunt object and beating her to death with it, I let her know in no uncertain terms what she’d done… Then, just to be an asshole myself, I told her with as much sarcasm as I could muster (and them some), “But you just go ahead…don’t mind me.”

I guess I had a pretty wild D-FENS kind of look in my eye, because she said, ‘ummm, oh, ummm, no…’ then pulled out of the line and went to the checkout stand at the far end of the store which happened to be much closer to the front door.

It could have been the look in my eyes… It could have been the tone of my voice… It might even have been my posture… But, somewhere in the back of my head I have to wonder if it was all because she had once seen the movie in question combined with the fact that I simply stood there muttering, ‘I just want to go home…’

Yeah, something tells me that might have been it… And, I think she wanted to put some distance between us and be within reach of an exit in the event that I might Fall Down…

More to come…

Murv