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Blogging about things I don't usually blog about, part I
Some of the topics that you folks suggest probably shouldn't be in a public post. Here are some that can happily be public.
Theme park rides
They're death traps, but I love 'em. Granted, the last time I had the pleasure to ride a rollercoaster was approximately a decade ago, when I took a group of children from the abused and homeless women's shelter where I worked to Canada's Wonderland. The only thing more awesome than going on the rides myself was watching the kids, most of whom had never been to a theme park before, go on the rides.
Anyway, I like rides that go upside-down very quickly (i.e., rollercoasters) but not the ones that slowly bring you higher and higher until you loop around. Those freak me out. I'm very big on ferris wheels and swing-type rides. Log rides are also swell. I'm pretty entertaining to go with as I scream like a girly-girl and get ridiculously excited about the whole thing.
The World Cup, the Canadian Alpine Ski Team, lacrosse, and rugby
I'm grouping these all together, as I know fuck-all about most sports. Out of those, the only one I've blogged about is the World Cup, which I tend to get a bit obsessed about when it's actually happening (I recall that there might have been several entries about Zidane during the last World Cup). I'm into rooting for underdog teams, particularly if they're Asian, and especially if the entire team went out the night before the first game and got mohawks. Then when they get eliminated, I root for Brazil. I'm cliché that way. I also know a few Brazilian and Argentinian footie chants that can't be repeated in polite company.
Because I'm 8.
Okay, that's the World Cup out of the way. Skiing I don't get at all. I'm not afraid of heights or anything (see previous section about rollercoasters) but I am scared of falling off of a mountain and shattering my leg so badly that it needs to be amputated. Also, I have an objection to winter sports in general. Tobogganing is cool but beyond that I'd rather be inside.
Lacrosse I know a bit about because I had to write a chapter on it for a certain Phys. Ed. textbook. It's a pretty cool sport but why do most of the guys who play it have to be such assholes? (Cue defenders of the Duke Lacrosse team—I agree with Amanda Marcotte. Troll me if you dare.)
I dated the captain of another school's rugby team when I was 16. That's, alas, where my knowledge of the sport begins and ends. If you need to know more about rugby, you should ask![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chickenfeet2003.
Night Watch and Day Watch
My friendannaotto is really into those, and told me about them when we were in Russia. As it turns out, the entire population of Russia is really into those. Seriously, there are these massive billboards for them everywhere. The cover art was so lovely that I decided that I needed to read them, but of course, it was impossible to find English translations in Russia.
I did see the first movie, though. I liked it—it's one of those movies where I felt like I was almost exactly the target audience, which is a weird feeling for me—but from what I hear, the books are far better.
What I was like as a kid
That depends on what period of childhood you're talking about. I was presumably a fairly normal infant and quickly progressed into a less than normal young child. My overactive fantasy life—which would get one identified as "otherkin" now—led my concerned parents to consult the family doctor to determine if I really believed the shit that I babbled about. He assured them that there were plenty of children who preferred their own company to that of other children and liked to pretend they were dragons or whatever and this didn't mean I suffered from any sort of mental illness.
Like most children, I wanted to be a marine biologist or possibly an astronaut. I loved animals and kept quite the menagerie of pets—turtles, snakes, lizards, eels, salamanders, mice, and so on—in addition to the family dog. Some of my happiest memories involve wading through a swamp near our house and catching frogs and tadpoles. This concern for the animal kingdom did occasionally get weird, though. At one point, I started catching leeches at the swamp and brought these home as well, keeping them in my childhood bassinet. I referred to this as my "leech farm," and, uh, fed them.
As I might have mentioned in other contexts, I went to a Montessori school until third grade. How terribly bourgeois! It was great, because this was a school where I could actually spend every day reading, writing, drawing pictures, drumming, writing plays with my friends and performing them, and no one actually got on my case about it.
Harsh reality hit when I was around 8. I was put into a public school, where I had huge problems adjusting to large classes where no one knew how to read and they forced you to sit in desks! And be quiet! And if you were bored, you couldn't just pop out a book or start drawing! And they made you pray to a God I didn't believe in. Here you can see the beginnings of my anti-authoritarianism and critiques of the public education system. Around the same time, my parents' marriage officially started to implode, which no doubt contributed to me becoming a deeply unhappy, withdrawn emo kid. I barely spoke until I was around 13; after that, you couldn't shut me up.
The turning point there was public speeches. I don't know if they still do those, but I found them absolutely terrifying. I was always a good writer but I had a very quiet voice and I hated speaking in front of a class—especially a class that largely held me in disdain. Every year we had to give a speech, and every year that would bring my otherwise stellar English grades down because I didn't "project" and didn't make eye contact. Finally, though, in 8th grade, I started to get a bit more confident. Also, I had a speech topic that I thought was interesting and that I knew no one else would choose. I decided that I had to do really well, because the winner of the in-class speech contest would get to give it in the gymnasium, in front of the whole school and the principal (a woman whom I deeply loathed).
Well, I won. And I got to go to the gym and give my speech on ANARCHY to the whole school. And I got to look my horrible principal straight in the eye and chirp, in my 13-year-old voice: "I am the Antichrist! I am an anarchist!"
If you want to know more about my weird childhood, just ask. I'll continue the rest of the topics in the next post.
Addendum
Regarding the description of my childhood, I'd like to share a poem. Because depending on the context, my answer to the question: "What were you like as a child?" is going to be different. Much of what I think made me interesting was a rich inner life. My mother, at least, did her best to expose me to culture and politics and knowledge, and what I remember most vividly about my childhood is running through shoulder-high yellow grass with my Montessori friends shortly before we all went to different schools, or crying on a fishing trip because my father bashed in the fish's head with his canoe paddle.
WHAT MEMORIES WILL RISE?
Parents are a strange lot, we make
our children's memories like a quilt,
choosing the fabric and the color. We shape
the pattern. As they grow into adults
we hope they'll wear around them as a charm
the heat of ledgy rocks along a coast,
acres of sharp raspberries at a farm,
the bang of a screen door in the summer dusk.
Will they tell their sons and daughters of the taste
of wild blueberries in a pie,
of the night I woke them and we raced
to see Perseid showers in the sky?
Will the scent of lilac bring them back
to their cluttered dressers full of blooms,
Will they hear their skis in frozen tracks
or see the froth of beach plum over dunes?
What memories will rise like slow whales
breaking the opaque surface of their age,
some boy, we never knew of, who once smiled,
the heartbreak of an empty cage,
the way a face swelled from a sting,
a vision of a car just overturned,
kites lost in trees, birds with broken wings,
how maple leaves shrivel before they burn.
Nightmares, pleasure, passion, they'll forget
the way the ocean ferry soothed their hearts.
What they do remember will be hot,
sweet, bitter, sharp, brilliant as fire sparks.
Theme park rides
They're death traps, but I love 'em. Granted, the last time I had the pleasure to ride a rollercoaster was approximately a decade ago, when I took a group of children from the abused and homeless women's shelter where I worked to Canada's Wonderland. The only thing more awesome than going on the rides myself was watching the kids, most of whom had never been to a theme park before, go on the rides.
Anyway, I like rides that go upside-down very quickly (i.e., rollercoasters) but not the ones that slowly bring you higher and higher until you loop around. Those freak me out. I'm very big on ferris wheels and swing-type rides. Log rides are also swell. I'm pretty entertaining to go with as I scream like a girly-girl and get ridiculously excited about the whole thing.
The World Cup, the Canadian Alpine Ski Team, lacrosse, and rugby
I'm grouping these all together, as I know fuck-all about most sports. Out of those, the only one I've blogged about is the World Cup, which I tend to get a bit obsessed about when it's actually happening (I recall that there might have been several entries about Zidane during the last World Cup). I'm into rooting for underdog teams, particularly if they're Asian, and especially if the entire team went out the night before the first game and got mohawks. Then when they get eliminated, I root for Brazil. I'm cliché that way. I also know a few Brazilian and Argentinian footie chants that can't be repeated in polite company.
Because I'm 8.
Okay, that's the World Cup out of the way. Skiing I don't get at all. I'm not afraid of heights or anything (see previous section about rollercoasters) but I am scared of falling off of a mountain and shattering my leg so badly that it needs to be amputated. Also, I have an objection to winter sports in general. Tobogganing is cool but beyond that I'd rather be inside.
Lacrosse I know a bit about because I had to write a chapter on it for a certain Phys. Ed. textbook. It's a pretty cool sport but why do most of the guys who play it have to be such assholes? (Cue defenders of the Duke Lacrosse team—I agree with Amanda Marcotte. Troll me if you dare.)
I dated the captain of another school's rugby team when I was 16. That's, alas, where my knowledge of the sport begins and ends. If you need to know more about rugby, you should ask
chickenfeet2003.Night Watch and Day Watch
My friend
annaotto is really into those, and told me about them when we were in Russia. As it turns out, the entire population of Russia is really into those. Seriously, there are these massive billboards for them everywhere. The cover art was so lovely that I decided that I needed to read them, but of course, it was impossible to find English translations in Russia.I did see the first movie, though. I liked it—it's one of those movies where I felt like I was almost exactly the target audience, which is a weird feeling for me—but from what I hear, the books are far better.
What I was like as a kid
That depends on what period of childhood you're talking about. I was presumably a fairly normal infant and quickly progressed into a less than normal young child. My overactive fantasy life—which would get one identified as "otherkin" now—led my concerned parents to consult the family doctor to determine if I really believed the shit that I babbled about. He assured them that there were plenty of children who preferred their own company to that of other children and liked to pretend they were dragons or whatever and this didn't mean I suffered from any sort of mental illness.
Like most children, I wanted to be a marine biologist or possibly an astronaut. I loved animals and kept quite the menagerie of pets—turtles, snakes, lizards, eels, salamanders, mice, and so on—in addition to the family dog. Some of my happiest memories involve wading through a swamp near our house and catching frogs and tadpoles. This concern for the animal kingdom did occasionally get weird, though. At one point, I started catching leeches at the swamp and brought these home as well, keeping them in my childhood bassinet. I referred to this as my "leech farm," and, uh, fed them.
As I might have mentioned in other contexts, I went to a Montessori school until third grade. How terribly bourgeois! It was great, because this was a school where I could actually spend every day reading, writing, drawing pictures, drumming, writing plays with my friends and performing them, and no one actually got on my case about it.
Harsh reality hit when I was around 8. I was put into a public school, where I had huge problems adjusting to large classes where no one knew how to read and they forced you to sit in desks! And be quiet! And if you were bored, you couldn't just pop out a book or start drawing! And they made you pray to a God I didn't believe in. Here you can see the beginnings of my anti-authoritarianism and critiques of the public education system. Around the same time, my parents' marriage officially started to implode, which no doubt contributed to me becoming a deeply unhappy, withdrawn emo kid. I barely spoke until I was around 13; after that, you couldn't shut me up.
The turning point there was public speeches. I don't know if they still do those, but I found them absolutely terrifying. I was always a good writer but I had a very quiet voice and I hated speaking in front of a class—especially a class that largely held me in disdain. Every year we had to give a speech, and every year that would bring my otherwise stellar English grades down because I didn't "project" and didn't make eye contact. Finally, though, in 8th grade, I started to get a bit more confident. Also, I had a speech topic that I thought was interesting and that I knew no one else would choose. I decided that I had to do really well, because the winner of the in-class speech contest would get to give it in the gymnasium, in front of the whole school and the principal (a woman whom I deeply loathed).
Well, I won. And I got to go to the gym and give my speech on ANARCHY to the whole school. And I got to look my horrible principal straight in the eye and chirp, in my 13-year-old voice: "I am the Antichrist! I am an anarchist!"
If you want to know more about my weird childhood, just ask. I'll continue the rest of the topics in the next post.
Addendum
Regarding the description of my childhood, I'd like to share a poem. Because depending on the context, my answer to the question: "What were you like as a child?" is going to be different. Much of what I think made me interesting was a rich inner life. My mother, at least, did her best to expose me to culture and politics and knowledge, and what I remember most vividly about my childhood is running through shoulder-high yellow grass with my Montessori friends shortly before we all went to different schools, or crying on a fishing trip because my father bashed in the fish's head with his canoe paddle.
WHAT MEMORIES WILL RISE?
Parents are a strange lot, we make
our children's memories like a quilt,
choosing the fabric and the color. We shape
the pattern. As they grow into adults
we hope they'll wear around them as a charm
the heat of ledgy rocks along a coast,
acres of sharp raspberries at a farm,
the bang of a screen door in the summer dusk.
Will they tell their sons and daughters of the taste
of wild blueberries in a pie,
of the night I woke them and we raced
to see Perseid showers in the sky?
Will the scent of lilac bring them back
to their cluttered dressers full of blooms,
Will they hear their skis in frozen tracks
or see the froth of beach plum over dunes?
What memories will rise like slow whales
breaking the opaque surface of their age,
some boy, we never knew of, who once smiled,
the heartbreak of an empty cage,
the way a face swelled from a sting,
a vision of a car just overturned,
kites lost in trees, birds with broken wings,
how maple leaves shrivel before they burn.
Nightmares, pleasure, passion, they'll forget
the way the ocean ferry soothed their hearts.
What they do remember will be hot,
sweet, bitter, sharp, brilliant as fire sparks.
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Oh! Like that Republican who autoerotic asphyxiated himself?
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1- did you have imaginary friends? If yes, until what age? (A lot of people I know who were outsiders as kids, myself included, had imaginary friends until much later than most 'normal kids' so I was curious about this)
2- did you have any talents/big interests as a kid that just disappeared as you grew into an adult?
3- when you think back to situations you were in as a kid/teenager, can you always recognise yourself or have you changed so much that sometimes its hard to get in touch with who you were and how you reacted to things at particular moments?
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No, really. I had a recurring nightmare about a wheeled-robot thing that was possessed by a ghost. It wanted to steal my fingers. I used to count my fingers before I went to bed every night and every morning when I woke up. I had a special way of counting so that it would lessen the shock if it so happened that the thing got to me.
Anyway, at some point within one of these dreams, I was able to turn it around and actually converse with it. It agreed not to take my fingers if I agreed that it wasn't evil, just misunderstood. Afterwards I used to silently confess things to it at night.
I don't remember how old I was, but it was probably after the point at which one is supposed to have imaginary friends.
2. My interest in science as a career path lessened (due in large part to a very assholish science teacher). My interest in science in general didn't.
I was really into music. I played piano and some guitar, and I wasn't awful at the former. I also liked hair metal way too much (this being the 80s and early 90s, after all). I've mostly forgotten how to play piano, and I have to be quite drunk and at a karaoke bar to get into the shit I used to listen to.
3. I was pretty much the same as a teenager as I am now. As a kid, my personality was radically different. I can sort of see the transition, but it's a bit painful looking back at how awkward I was.
So how late did you have your imaginary friend? Now I'm curious.
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*I had a few terrific gal pals but you sort of had to be romantically into girls or not hanging out with them at all in the young teen years, so that happened later
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Also, that's awesome that you got to take those kids to the amusement park.
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The shelter job was one of the best/worst jobs I've ever had. It was probably the most fulfilling job I ever had, but I came home crying an awful lot.
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I have a few friends (all male gendered) who had really fucking normal, unremarkable childhoods. I totally don't get that. I'm really not sure how you grow to be an interesting person if your childhood is straight out of some suburban wet dream (i mean, who has wet dreams about suburbia? that's my point!!!)
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oh my freggin god I died laughing!
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Wow, proof in the pudding that awsome kids make awesome adults :)
(Seriously, I think that's cool in a twisted way)
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My answer: "You raised me".
Really ;)
When I was 14, my teacher wanted me to give a speech, because I was the good, quiet girl that never submitted to peer pressure... I did and I kicked ass and almost made my teacher cry with my comparison of her as the warden to the prison that was our scholastic education. My mother - a teacher - was seriously impressed.
Anyway, you're a cool and neat person :D
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