Yup. That’s nearly exactly what I overheard as a kid. I wonder if that’s a line the feed children? Like, “Oh, this kid’s got brains but isn’t doing as much as we’d hope, so let’s tell them they’re borderline and see if they go nuts trying to prove they belong…”
Nevermind that busywork and I don’t exactly get along.
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I have the weird thumb thing, but on a different joint of both hands:
My dad used to get us to fold sections of the books he published, and I always used to find it much more painful than anyone else. My son’s elbows bend backwards weirdly too. It’s kind of odd how this kind of thing seemed to be really rare when I was growing up, but much more common here.
Also, I’ve never sent or even taken a dick pic, and I have no idea why anyone would. I guess that makes me kind of weird nowadays.
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- Artist, so off the bat there’s going to be some eccentricity.
- I’m anti-pants. I prefer kilts, tunics, sarongs, etc. whenever possible because I can’t for the life of me figure out why it is that women wear skirts and men pants instead of the other way around.
- I profoundly miss the Loompanics catalog
- I love counterculture, both old and new school, from the Principia Discordia to Banksy
- I’ve dressed as every character in the Rocky Horror Show, and even being 275lbs, I still have the legs to pull off fishnets.
- I’m a Pagan elder, which I don’t think is particularly weird, but it is still unconventional
- Complete and unapologetic sci-fi (and to a lesser degree fantasy) nerd, all the way back to before that was socially acceptable
- One of those people who gets all the references in a standard Steve Jackson Games release.
- Had nipple, tongue and prince albert piercings when navel rings were still a new thing. Also, a scarification and a brand just a little after- Maybe 20 years ago now.
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Make it a game: which of the two of you can sort through your half of the pile first?
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I already know who wins that contest, and it’s not my son. 
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I think it is a line they tell all the kids who are naturally smart but not Type A overachievers.
You and me both. These classes were all about busywork. It was the beginning of helicopter parenting, when every moment of a child’s day had to be micromanaged. I swear they nearly called the DCFS on my parents for letting me stay up past 8pm.
On the subject of IQ, my nonverbal intelligence was measured as very superior but my verbal intelligence was measured as below average on the same test. Needless to say, I’m not at all a big believer in IQ.
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I think, at best, IQ could measure one thing.
And one thing does not an accurate picture of a person’s ability paint.
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Ours were weird. They started this program for ‘gifted’ kids that involved pulling us out of our classes for half the day and putting us in a room full of books, board games, big pads of paper, markers, and such, and would say “Ok, be creative! Play chess if you want to! Or take a nap! Draw! Brainstorm!” Sometimes we’d have thought exercises or a group game but typically we’d all just sit around and read or play chess. Which sounds awesome, except that we were also responsible for the classwork we were missing, so it was hard to enjoy unstructured lazy time.
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We got pulled a half day a week (I think?) and usually put up in the library, where’d we be set to doing reports or reading or whatever else. And much like you, we were responsible for all the shitty work missed in our regular classrooms. Bullshit, that.
On the other hand, at least they tried? Lots of places don’t have any programs at all for that end of the spectrum, as it isn’t legally required in the same way Special Education is.
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I go into deeply decayed urban environments. Old Edison transformer stations, abandoned mill complexes, long closed state hospitals. Except I get keys, and am insured. Less romantic, still good work. :).
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It only measures that one thing within certain expected parameters. For someone like me who has a very uneven pattern of abilities and deficits, testing can be hit or miss. Education seems to classify students into throwaway, average, and those worth expending effort on, so it’s kinda important to be put into the right bucket early on. Seeing how deeply uneven my functioning levels are, and how they were even more uneven then, this could have gone so wrong for me.
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Ours was the first one in the district; the lovely lady in charge was clearly figuring it out on the fly. We actually complained to her as a group after a few months of that, and she adapted, and eventually we had projects to work on that took the place of the work we were missing. I remember doing a huge project about Krakatoa. But they definitely tried, and I appreciate it; being in that program let me skip a chunk of high school English classes, put me in an AP program, and let me basically skip a year of college English. So I appreciate what it became!
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I used to spend a great deal of time sneaking into decayed urban buildings, and there’s plenty of them in the midwest: old schools, power stations, factories, churches, houses, and even an abandoned water park. I even self-published a book of photos (which is wildly overpriced by Amazon, do not buy it).
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Ours was not unstructured at all, and we were pulled out of the mainstream entirely. It was designed to make Type A personalities even more Type A, which I totally understand. Natural ability gets you part of the way in life, but you have to do the rest of the work yourself. This class wasn’t loosey-goosey creativity, but it was a damn sight more creative than the rote memorization that was mainstream education.
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Those customer reviews totally made my day!
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wow, are you me? [quote=“nothingfuture, post:78, topic:92330”]
I have trouble with calendars and dates.
[/quote]
yes, yes, and yes.
Also, I have a mis-shapen rib cage. the bottom of the sternum juts out a bit, and the lower rib cage is concave on both sides. There’s a medical name for it but I forget.
I don’t know how much of my previous post was my “freak flag” and how much of it was me feeling sorry for myself. Sorry guys, I was in a mood last night.
@FerrisWheeler There’s a lot of rich folks in my neighborhood, and my apartment’s furnishings reflect that fact.[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:99, topic:92330, full:true”]
Those customer reviews totally made my day!
[/quote]
thank you for drawing my attention to this : )
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Oh, yes. I read them and appreciate links to them. They are sometimes fake, though, and I’m looking for authenticity.
OK, I find that I can’t post any complete examples, because they are rife with personal information including the names, addresses and other data about mentally ill people and their neighbors and relatives. But here’s a few reasonably safe chunks (apologies for the extremely bad photography, it was very cold so the fluorescent lights weren’t happy):
That’s part of a two-page handwritten xerox that includes a drawing that numerologically connects the birth dates of the author, his parents, and Franz Mesmer to the release dates of Hollywood films, critical events in the Bible and WW2, and George Orwell’s 1984. It is a very good example and fascinating to me.
The text reads, in part, “Do not call or write to me, Big Bros. intercepts calls & mail… and will hypnotize you over the telephone…”
This one is a little less interesting because it’s more connected to reality, but basically it claims that “dizzy jene research” is being conducted by a University of Delaware professor (name and full address included, of course) who is being hunted and oppressed by secret government technology suppression teams led by Al Gore. Ol’ Al apparently has Illuminated, nefarious reasons for wanting the discoverer of the “dizzy gene” (which is activated by something resembling reflexology) to be silenced.
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That is some really nice handwriting on the first one.
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This happened to me too. At the time IQ was positively and strongly correlated with socio-economic status (“can’t recognize a blender? Off to the slow stream with you!”), so I would be tested almost regularly from age 3 to age 9. I was moved from the slow class into a faster class two months into first grade. I also have a memory of being shunted off with a fellow kindergartner “Bruce” into a third-grade math class which might as well have been university calculus for my tiny mind: I thought maybe we were being punished, perhaps for speaking English too much (we went to bilingual Kindergarten, not at all freakish where I lived). My mom would never tell me my IQ score, which made me suspect it was higher than hers.
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I’d say fairly typical of a person born in 1934 to a literate urban family. But that document has two or three different styles of handwriting, all by the same hand, also some type. Handwriting variations are frequently a primary characteristic of the kind of stuff I collect; also micro-writing, multidirectional writing, acrostic writing and occasionally rebus writing. Mental illness that has physiological origin is often telegraphed by style as much as content; I’ve learned to recognize “stroke jaggies” and “parkinson’s microwriting” for example. Extreme paranoids (like the dizzy jenes guy) never use handwriting at all, and will still use physical cut’n’paste rather than typing complete sentences into a computer.
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