2/22

"I hated everyday of highschool.

It's funny I guess you did too.

It's funny how I never knew.

There I was, sitting right behind you..

I guess you finally stopped believing that any hope would ever find you

I knew that story, I was

sitting right behind you"

It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that I couldn't wait for high school to end. I didn't "fit" anywhere or into any of the groups and did a pretty spectacular job of isolating myself.

I was a smart kid that didn't want to hang out with the other smart kids who practiced math sets for their SATs after school and on the weekends. I was an athletic kid that would rather talk about books than stats. I wanted to be in the popular group, but I didn't drink or smoke in highschool and I wasn't religious enough (yes, there was a very religious church-going popular crowd) to fit into the other popular group. I just floundered socially. Academically, I never felt inspired. Some of the work was challenging, but not engaging.

Basically, I joined as many extra cirriculuar activities, sports and honors groups as possible to make sure that when the time came, I could get as far away from high school as I could.

I went to Smith College, 3,000 miles away from my home town. There, I found the love and support that I had been looking for in highschool. I found interesting, fiercely intelligent women who didn't put me down for using "big words" to express myself. We all secretely admitted that we liked to read, write, draw, paint and go to elitist coffee shops where people recited spoken word poetry. It was a coming out moment for the intellectualism that we had supressed throughout puberty. I reveled in it and drank up as much as I could.

Just recently, I had a friend from high school tell me that a mutual friend was looking for me on myspace. I've had a myspace account for the last two years or so, but left it completely blank and only used to occasionally message people or check other people's pages. I updated my page, added some pictures, and suddenly - it's like a windown into my past has blown open.

The crazy part is that I love the fresh air. I love finding out who got married and who got their master's degrees in chemistry or education. I'm sure that it's time that has helped heal some of the wounds that teenagers mutually inflict on each other, but people genuinely seem surprised and happy to hear from me. It's allowed me to reconnect, not only with the people that I grew up with, but with a part of myself.

I had written off the teenage version of myself as someone that I didn't want to know. Turns out, she had a lot of problems and a whole hell of a lot of insecurities, but the NSP in high school wasn't as bad as I had originally thought.

11/16

Today when I dropped Zac off at daycare, there were only 6 kids in his classroom. Which left me wondering: "Where in the hell did the other 8 kids go?" Clearly, I need to talk to the staff.

As for Montessori schools, Aunt Jen and I went to one when we were little. For me, it was a daycare/preschool. It was more of an elementary school experience for her until the school started going ultra-religious. We started praying every couple of hours in class and my Mom says that I came home with a story once about "laying our hands" on a student that had done something wrong. Apparently, a bunch of 3-4 year-olds were praying for the soul our wayward classmate. I'm guessing that I was picking my nose and lifting my dress up during that activity.

When we went into public school, I was 4 and went into 1st grade. My sister was 7 and went into 4th grade. I had to repeat a year because my motor skill development was behind (sound familiar? oh, the irony!). I couldn't cut straight or draw in a straight line and my feet didn't touch the floor when I was sitting at my desk. That last reason was clearly some 'short-kid discrimination' that I've never fully gotten over...Anyways, my first grade teacher found out how old I was and freaked out. I was put in her classroom for the first part of the day and was sent to a kindergarten classroom for the second half.

All I remember from kindergarten was getting to wear one of my Dad's old long sleeve shirts to paint in. The teacher had to roll up the sleeves 6-7 times on each arm and the shirt went all the way down to my ankles. I felt so safe in my Dad's shirt. Kindergarten was full of painting, cooking, coloring, and playing with kids that I ended up going all the way through high school with. At the beginning of the next school year, I had to repeat 1st grade over, even though I could already read and write. On the bright side, I am an excellent scissor-wielder and my juvenile delinquency didn't seem to have any adverse affects on my social or academic development.

I don't remember much from Montessori school. By the time I was in second grade, I was pretty much equal to my peers. I could still reader faster than the other kids, but I learned how to hide it better. In 5th grade, I tested into a G.A.T.E. classroom, which is the epitome of academic tracking. G.A.T.E. stands for Gifted And Talented Education. The aim of the program was to challenge and prepare' us for junior high school while still attending our regular elementary school. Not surprising, all of the G.A.T.E. students immediately went into 7th grade honors classes and then into high school Advanced Placement classes. All of the kids in the AP classes went onto four-year college, even though most of the other kids in my graduating class didn't.

So, if it seems like I take education of young kids seriously, that's why. I was tracked and escorted all the way through my public school education. It wasn't until I got to college that I realized that it didn't matter if you went to public or private school, if you were in an AP or IB program, or if your high school was a magnet school for math and science. It didn't matter how much money your parents had in their bank account. Those things weren't good indicators of academic success. What really matter the most was how hard someone studied and how much time they devoted to school work, rather than -say- acquiring a taste for beer (something that I master by the end of my first year).

I'd be lying, though, if I didn't acknowledge that studying was a hell of lot easier for me because I had been "preparing" for college since the 5th grade.

9/15

Anytime I'm around a preteen or teenager, my mind splits down the middle. One half of my brain identifies with the child while the other half of my brain observes the action as parent. "Going to bed" and "getting ready for school rituals" are especially problematic for me.

I can clearly remember being 7 or 8 and waking up, taking a shower, getting ready to go to school by myself. My sister's bus was earlier than mine (she was older and in junior high school by then) and my parents left for work very, very early in the morning. It was just me and, as a result, I went through a number of memorable incidents growing up. There was the time that I was so excited by the falling snow, which is a rare oddity in Western Washington, that I ran outside to look at it and locked myself out of my house. I had to knock on a neighbor's door to call my parents at work and ask them to come home and unlock the door. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention the morning when I couldn't find my shoes. I looked everywhere for them: in my closet, in the hallway, under the pile of clothes in my room. I started crying. I knew my Mom and Dad would be so angry with me for asking them to come home from work, but I couldn't go to school without shoes. I finally broke down and called my Dad. His fury is clearly embedded in my memory, when he threw off the covers to my bed to find two pairs of beaten-up tennis shoes sitting there. It looked like I had purposefully hid them. I hadn't. I just couldn't find them.

Then there is me as a parent. The constant worrier. The one that marvels: they really go to bed all by themselves? You don't need to tuck them in, read them a story, make sure they turn out their lights?? Older parents usually look at me like I've grown two heads. They mutter, "She's a teenager! She can put herself to bed. Last time I tried to tuck her into bed she turned her back to me and asked me to close the door on my way out." In the mornings, I'm even more flabbergasted. To me, it's amazing that 10 year-olds can wake themselves up with an alarm clock, dress themselves, get breakfast, get all their books together, and walk to the bus stop, even though I was doing the same activities at an even younger age. Seeing them walk out the door with a jaunty little wave and an enormous back pack is enough to bring the parent-me to my knees. I want to yell out: "Come back. I'll drive you to school. Do you know what kids will do to you on the bus? Someone could hurt you while you are waiting at the bus stop!" This is regardless of the fact that I once walked a mile to my elementary school after waking up to hear the bus thunder down the street outside my house.

I couldn't have ever predicted the duality of being parent. Child-me is in constant battle with parent-me and I'm thinking about restricting my privileges until it can start showing me some more respect.

8/03

I did gymnastics for a looooong time when I was growing up. While learning tricks and new moves on different pieces of equipment, I would crash, horribly. I mean, it was so bad that my parents weren't sure I was going to make it to puberty. Once I was in puberty, they weren't sure I was going to last through high school. There is one fall in particular that I remember right before Thanksgiving break, my sophomore year in high school. I was on the balance beam, practicing my leaps and combination moves (a jump to a acrobatic). I did a hitchkick into a roundoff, landing squarely on the slender four inches of faux-leather covered wood. In a hitchkick, your left leg goes up first, followed by your right. You land on your left leg to prepare for the acrobatic move. Since I'm right-handed I always led into a tumbling move with my right leg.

It was the last practice before Thanksgiving break and I was excited because we were driving down to see my sister in college. My arms were above my head and my left leg was preparing to land on the beam. Except it didn't land. It glanced off the right side of the beam, causing my leg to cross in front of my body with my right leg still in the air. If you imagine a contorted pair of scissors, falling perpendicular to the horizon, you have some idea what I looked like. I instinctively tried to put my hand out, to stop the inevitable fall. My back hit the beam first and crushed my hand, which was trapped underneath my body. My entire left leg was scraped in a giant raspberry and I had bruises forming on my forearms and elbows. My head ricocheted off the beam, whiplash style, and I fell like a rock to the mat below. I laid there and tried to clear my head and force air into my lungs. I had severely sprained my right hand and broken one of my fingers. I still can't completely straighten it to this day. I have my own version of "the claw".

Immediately after Thanksgiving break, I was back up on the balance beam. In gymnastics, you know that the best cure for fear is to get back up and do it again, and again. You do the move so many times that your body will find the beam without your mind. You do it so many times that your body forgets its fear.

That is what dating is like for me now.

Blind Date #10: T. a.k.a.: Larry the Cable Guy

I met T. at a Mexican restaurant close to my work. He lives in way, way north Houston (really, this city is so sprawling that parts of Houston are almost in another county), but he said that he would drive into to meet me.

He works as a commercial construction foreman. He owns his own business and makes his own schedule. We had only talked over IM and e-mail a couple of times, but he had lived in my home town, not just Seattle, but the actual suburb that I grew up in, for six years. He also has two kids and an ex-wife that he didn't seem unbelievably bitter about.

I was very surprised when he started talking to hear the strongest, thickest Texas accent come out his mouth. It wasn't just the accent; it was the words he was using. He sounded just like Larry the Cable Guy. Here are a couple of examples of actual sentences: "I wodn't too smart in school. Well, shoot, if my Coach hadn't a been my history and math teacher, I don't think I woulda grad-uated," and "Sheee-it, I ain't never been out of the country before."

Yep, I was out to lunch with a redneck. He tried to tell me that he wasn't a redneck; that he just sounded like one. I asked him if he liked hunting, fishing, and Nascar (the penultimate trilogy of redneck sports). He said yes to two out of the three.

I'm a little bit afraid that there might be a shot gun in my future if don't agree to go out with him again.