What a lovely thread! I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve
frightened shorter women when we meet at the rest room door, or
how many have turned around and left when I’m standing at the sink.
Sure, I walk the line, but make some room for diversity!
5’11" Het, short hair, with a more athletic build than most men.
Growing up, I thought the world was affiable enough, until I gave my
first presentation in first or second grade. We were to share our
passion with the group. I had drawn a giant crayfish, and explained
the anatomy, how to catch, care for it, and how to pick it up without
getting hurt. The teacher said next time I should pick something that
would interest the class.
My son brought a slug to preschool and let it crawl around on his arm. Then he led the class on a dig for worms in the playground. The teachers were appalled. Some people have no appreciation of wildlife.
I’ve always thought of myself as kind of weird, yet as I take an inventory I find that i’m almost unusually not-weird.
All the interests that used to be weird (sci-fi & video games) are now firmly mainstream. I don’t even know what counts as weird anymore (except apparently ketchup on hotdogs, according to certain threads)
Even the stuff that I find weird about myself is maybe common. Like finding real emotion hard to access than fake or cued emotion. I remember my dad basically breaking down while we were watching “Corrina, Corrina” and at the time it seemed so weird because he was generally not very demonstrative, and now that’s me. When our cat died I just felt this intense heaviness inside and kept on trucking. But listening to Hamilton or rewatching the first season of Steven Universe can bring me to literal tears.
A fine naturalist, that son of yours. I have fond memories of cooking dinner when the kids were very young, while their first preying mantis catch (eventually released), and god knows what else looked out from the small plastic aquarium.
My fourth grade class undertook a huge study of beetles (including beetle races) after I found a nest under the steps outside our classroom. My fifth grade class was impressed by a terrarium I made that was home to a couple of snails and our teacher had us do a project on lichens because I had one of those in there too.
I went to a whole school of smarty pants kids after being told the same thing as you*. We didn’t have much of that fun stuff, just accelerated classes. In middle school we taking the same history class as the seniors in the nearby highschool. I clepped a decent amount of my freshman year at college, after graduating 63rd out of 64 in my class. I was one of the dumb kids there. I still feel dumb.
*I just realized they told us the same thing about my son before recommending him for gifted classes.
I refuse to groom before exercising, am extremely susceptible to “bed head,” and only own one set of exercise clothes so I just usually run in my street clothes. I’ve been told I make an interesting sight.
The best time I’ve had in years was at the funeral of a childhood friend who was a suicide. Another close friend got their leg snapped wrestling afterwards. My wife has told me I’m not allowed to tell people that story or show them pictures of the leg the first time I meet them.
I remember things people say in conversations, and reference or refer back to them apparently after the other person has forgotten them or I’ve crossed a societal boundary about how much we’re supposed to remember about others.
When I went to see the Murder Junkies I did not see what the big deal was when Dino Sachs had a girl stick his drumsticks up his ass.
Mantids are awesome!! I used to order egg sacs for the garden and we’d catch a half grown one for the terrarium. All summer the kids would catch flies for it, one time I found a gigantic grasshopper bigger than the mantis, and that was a helluva show. When I retire and catch up on all my hobby ideas I’d like to breed mantids, there’s a huge variety and people sell and trade them. Sadly they only live one season.
Yes, my son is nature boy still, just became Eagle Scout and plans to study bio at a school close to wild areas, probably at UVM in VT which gave him a lot of merit money. His city friends here thinks he’s a freak because he’d rather climb a cliff than hang out in Manhattan. Back on topic.
We’ve never had those types of programs, I don’t know much about how things came about, I just remember my parents picked me up from kindergarten one day and told me I was going to start primary school early, when asked why, I was told it was because I already knew how to read. A few weeks later, I was again advanced another grade. But only for a few weeks. I’ve never really asked why, all I remember is I actually made friends as a first year, but didn’t really feel I fit in with the older kids.
To me, learning has always been easy and fun. The whole school system, attendance, homework, authority figures and the social order felt tacked on and an unnecessary burden. I was wrong of course, but it was hard connecting my experience to that of others when I felt like so much of my time was wasted. Not having peers can do that to you.
I went to an academic magnet high-school featuring an all-honors-level curriculum. My particular graduating class was notably motivated to academic success; lots of above 4.0 GPAs (because AP classes factor extra) and scholarships. My buddy Matt–who was punk af–came up with the terms “anti-valedictorian” and “anti-salutatorian” for he and I. Our GPAs would have been upper-middle ranked at any other school. There, we were rock-bottom.
I’d like to claim credit, but I remember taking him camping in the Adirondacks at 6 mo old (not his 1st trip either, we though we were hardcore) and when he was outside in his bucket under the trees his normal fussyness vanished and he found his bliss. His infant fussyness went away but not his love of nature. This snowy afternoon he took a train to the burbs to meet an almost girlfriend for a hike! She’s his dream girl, a competitive climber.
Yeah, I spent every other semester on [academic] probation (did anyone say coastng?) and still had close to a. 4.0 thanks to weighted/AP classes. I’m very curious and motivated when interested, just not good at learning what I’m supposed to when I’m supposed to. Also, data point for IQ score not being a predictor of success.
I was smart/young/white enough never to get charged by the cops. But I left the living nightmare of school as soon as I could. At the end of it, didn’t make much difference anyway. Think I was there for about a week or so in the last year of it.
FYI Jews don’t recognize “the problem of evil” because free will. That concept is a Christian thing where they never did settle between free will or predestination.
PM me if you want to know more, I don’t want to derail this thread.
