Today’s guest post is by Steve Grooms.
It is bizarre to remember the shame I used to feel about being an oddball. In my youth I thought of myself as an alien plunked down among normal people. My life was an elaborate ruse, me trying to imitate the look and behavior of normal people, trying to sneak by without being discovered.
You might wonder what quality in me convinced me that I was so weird. My deep secret was shhhh! that I was a “daydreamer!”
The word referred to a person who had something like a non-stop flow of stories in his head. Other kids would be sitting beside me in school, frowning with concentration as they confronted the multiplication table, while just a few feet away I was playing a sort of movie in my head in which I was fighting Communists. I couldn’t guess what was going on in the heads of other kids, but I was sure they weren’t thinking strange and inappropriate thoughts like I was.
When I recall them, the stories I used to find so compelling now seem embarrassingly conventional. In a typical story I might dive in front of a hurtling automobile to push some cute girl to safety. She would live but I would die, my head crunched on the grill of a Studebaker. My dying would let everyone in town contemplate how badly they had misunderestimated me. In my script there would be an older cop with a deeply wrinkled face who would observe: “Susie owes her life to Steve’s courage.” (Then—for the life of me I don’t know why—the cop would add, “The poor lad obviously didn’t know how this day would turn out, or he would have worn fresh underwear.”)
I might as well mention my favorite daydream in my teen years. It had me and Annette Funicello up in a tiny pontoon plane deep in the wilderness of Alaska. Uh oh! The engine would crap out, causing us to crash land on some unnamed lake. Annette and I would be unscarred, but all the adults died (ha! that eliminates all those pesky would-be chaperones!). In my fantasy I would have plenty of time to find out if Annette might be a bit frisky if I could talk her out of her mouse ears. And if not, I’d still enjoy the best fishing of my life until we were rescued. This was a fantasy with a built-in backup plan.
Because I was a daydreamer, I saw myself as an outsider. I wasn’t part of the school social culture like one of the popular kids who was a musician or debater or even one of the unsocialized dweebs in flannel shirts who ran the school projectors. I wasn’t a musclebound football player who strutted school corridors with a cheerleader draped on each arm. I was just me, a shy goofball with too much imagination. My image of myself was that of a lonely kid standing in some outer ring, staring wistfully in at kids in the middle of things, all those kids who enjoyed a degree of popularity I could only experience in fantasy.
Memories of this have come back to me recently, along with the stunning perception that many or most of the kids I admired in school also saw themselves as outsiders. Some of those kids were outsiders (in their own eyes) because they lived on farms and took a bus to school. Some were outsiders because they were tall or short. Some came from families struggling to maintain a lower middle class life standard. The Greek and Italian kids fought a subtle racism that most of the town would have denied existed. Some kids were just too damn bright for their own good. Our town was so lily white that Jewish families had to drive 30 miles to Des Moines to attend synagogue, and I know the kids felt like outsiders because of that.
I’ve been reflecting on the consequences of seeing one’s self as an outsider. The girl who was too Greek to be American and too American to be Greek became, in time, a sophisticated observer of both societies. The boy whose intelligence got him tagged as “an egghead” learned to appreciate the irony of the way intellectually limited kids so often taunted smart kids. Most outsiders stopped feeling freakish when they found people like themselves in college and they then could stop judging themselves by the narrow standards of high school.
Now I am amused to note that almost every close friend is a former “outsider” whose sense of life was enriched by loneliness and longing. I harbor no resentments toward kids who had it all their way in high school. They had the confidence and discipline to do difficult things when they were young. I don’t hold it against them that they got their act together a decade or so earlier than I did.
It is probably a good thing that so many youngsters see themselves as outsiders, for their ranks give us our writers, social critics and standup comedians. And it is surely a good thing some kids were insiders, too. They acquired leadership experience early in life, experience that is often difficult for a former outsider to learn. Maybe a healthy, integrated, fully functioning society requires the creative efforts of the naturally confident as well as those who felt condemned to a marginal life on the fringe.
Were you an innie or an outie or maybe something else? What has that meant in your life?
Trail Baboon 
Rise and Shine Baboons!
I thought I was an Outie, but now my then-friends tell me I was an Innie. I remember being pretty unhappy, but my then-friends thought I was happy. Maybe an Academy Award was due. I will admit that re-uniting with my then-friends over the past 8 years has been pretty wonderful. They were, then and now, wonderful people.
It is so confusing and just confirms to me that Middle and High School really are forms of Hell in which one is chronically disoriented.
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so thats changed for you now? any words of advice?
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I’m still confused! Only advice is just get through it–it is never pretty.
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If we’d been in high school together, Jacque, I’m pretty sure I would have been too shy to talk to you. You would have looked like an Innie to me. Most kids did. Just as I was leaving high school I began to catch on to the fact I was looking up to kids who were often looking up to me, with everyone too messed up and shy to acknowledge it.
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you are not who you think you are
you are not who others think you are
you are who you think others think you are
iwas paid a huge complient in 9 th grade by greg kutcher
how do ge along with everyne?
huh?
you get along with football players and music guys
with smart guys and dweebs everyone.
\i don’t know
didn’t you ever notice that you are the only togh guy to handg out with the football guys and the only smart guy to hang out with the tough guys the only person who sits and talks with he nerds. you re talking to me and asking why i want to be a musical composer for band music and if i really read the sunday paper cover to cover every sunday morning. no one else ever does that.
i went away realizing i truely was blessed. i hadn’t realized tha ti was a chameleon and i liked it. i stll get along with many different kinds of folks and while i steer clear of some i do enjoy a wide variety of interests.
i have been criticized for not finding an area to specialize in and focus on it. instead i have chosen to be a mile wide and an inch deep.
as i see my kids friends growing up i see a lot of kids who are very aare of the eyes of the world which are uon them. facebook makes this ampliifed. remember the kid who used to do stuff so he could write it down in his journal? i think facebook and tvand the internet are making th world a smaller place to the point that we can all hang in our own little world and have a social netwrk life without leaving the comfoort zone reason for concern for sure.
thnaks steve for the morning nudge t get the brain working early this morning. looking forward to the weekend.
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What a wonderful perception and compliment your teacher paid you, tim! I think “chameleon” doesn’t do you justice, for a chameleon just changes so as to avoid notice and what you could do was much more active and affirming.
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tim, I think the secret to doing well in many social settings is being genuinely interested in others. Not just asking questions, but actually being interested in the answers. Some people are more interesting than others, no doubt about that, but everyone has a story to tell. You seem to have that curiosity about others and people respond to that.
Edith mentioned knowing people interested only in telling their story, and not having the patience for her to tell hers, I’m sure we all know people like that. I’m convinced that these are very lonely people, because no one wants to be around them.
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I agree, PJ. Curiosity is what makes the world go ’round, in my book.
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Wow, I never thought that those people could be very lonely…good thought, that.
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I was an outie…sort of. In sixth grade I signed up for an acting class/play production at a local park. Because I was tall (and there was only one boy in the class – so he had to play Aslan), I was cast as Peter in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Thus began a brief, and not-so-illustrious acting career. But frankly, the acting was a side note – what being involved in that group did was provide me with an “in crowd” outside of school. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t one of the popular kids in junior high – I had a few close friends, and that was enough. And at 3:00 I’d leave it all behind for play practice. By high school I had learned the lesson well that it didn’t matter if I was part of this or that group, I just needed to be with a group of kindred spirits. So, no, I wasn’t part of the “popular crowd,” but I was part of the large group of nerdy kids who made up the other “in crowd” I went to a high school with the first college prep magnet program in Mpls – so there were lots of fellow nerdy kids – which also made fitting in at school much much easier than at the average school. There was also a program for the orthopedically handicapped, one for teen moms, a large population of Native American kids, kids who took professional-level dance and kids who would hung out all day in the auto shop. So even though there was an “in crowd” (at least sort of), it was also a school where you just had to find your own tribe, and it was relatively easy to move between tribes if that suited you. Truly a unique school and some good life lessons in why “fitting in” is relative.
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One of the reasons I wrote this blog question is I’m wondering how things have changed since I was in Jr high and high school. I’m pretty sure there are more groups available to kids now. We just had three or four, which left a LOT of kids out. But I think your experience suggests there are more ways of having a group now, so fewer kids are made to suffer as Outies. (But, hey, that has compensations!)
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I could write a long time on this topic and with a great deal of passion.
I left the classroom in 1991 and can attest that there were still about as many outsiders, some by choice, some by shyness, some by lack of social skills, some by whatever rules determine these things.
Schools employ almost exclusively adults for whom schools worked, especially the coaches, music directors, etc. I was a distinct outsider and saw school as the outsiders do. Because so many of my colleagues were my ex-teachers, they knew that about me and dismissed my concern for such kids. A lot of suicides in HS, or more often 2-3 years later, go under the wire, because so many adults dismiss such kids as “losers” or the cause of their own problems etc.
I would like to say I helped such kids, but no, I tired but seldom made a connection.
My experience was that very few HS students feel as if they are insiders. Thing of popular are all of the variations on “Revenge of the Nerds or “Mean Girls.” They are popular because the majority of people felt outcast in HS.
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I have noticed that a lot of teachers do seem to favor popular students and ignore the less popular ones. I think your observation, Clyde, about teachers doing this because many of them came from the popular student groupings in their high schools is a good one. I didn’t feel too oppressed by the popular students, but it did have a negative effect on my development of social skills because I did feet a little left out by not being among the popular ones. My children were not among the top popular students and they didn’t like the way some of these students who seemed to think they were special behaved and some of the unfair anvantages that were given to the most popular students.
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I think as a substitute teacher I was a little help to some of the less popular students because I didn’t use a heavy hand when they didn’t have the best behavior which some other teacher would be quick to correct. Also, I didn’t always give the popular kids the special things they expected.
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I’d bet dollars to donuts that mine was a rare high school, in part because it blended so many programs together – the college prep program I was in, a school-within-the-school open program and the program for handicapped students all were blended into an existing high school after 2 other high schools were closed – so there was also all sorts of opportunity to create new communities and groups because of that blending and merging. It was a unique place and time. It may not be that way there now – though I hope that part of the school culture we created remained.
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Three former students haunt me.
Donna, a short and large girl who was from an isolated Finnish family 40 miles north of town. Had a sweet sweet smile, which she rarely showed. It was hard to get her to talk. She was not teased I do not think, just ignored. Decent student. I had her in speech, which was agony for her. I wonder if she found a niche in life. Middle school PE teacher told me she loved kick ball because she could really kick the ball, which she would, very hard at the popular girls.
Crystal, another fireplug of a girl. She was a straight C student in every regard. Wanted so badly to excel at something, but there was no talent or smarts or looks or anything. Again, not teased and a had a circle of friends. But just could not find a place to excel. I had her in two classes and worked with her to get B’s. Suppose I should have given her A’s, but she would have known a sop when she saw one. I do know about her; she is a cousin of a colleague. Her adult life has been the same as her HS life.
Daryl, who had a large chip on his shoulder. Very bright; I suspect abused. Loner of the first order. Also, a good athlete. I had him in Jr. High football and tried to encourage him to continue, but he did not. I had him in three classes, in which he just floated, though they were of the more challenging level. I tired several times to build a bridge to him, to make contact. I once loaned him “Ender’s Game,” which is about an outcast. Three months later he gave it back to me with all the pages swollen with water, said it had been left in the trunk of his car which leaked, with only a hint of an apology. He is the perfect example of how hard it it to get to some of the loners, teased, outcast, what they will do to stay in their familiar niche.
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You really have a lot to say, Clyde, about this topic. It hurts to read your descriptions of students because I can feel how much it meant to you to make things better for them, and that is rarely possible. There must have been a few lucky students who could appreciate what you were doing for them.
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I am an innie who can pass as an outie when she needs to but who is shy and who would rather cross to the other side of the street when she sees someone she knows instead of chat with them. It was pretty nice at my recent 35 year class reunion, though, that everyone was glad to see me and we all just talked and were close and convivial and happy. I was and still am a great day dreamer.
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It is one of the positive functions of a profession that it makes you an Innie at something. The poor kids in high school basically don’t have anything they can feel proud about. When you are established in a job or profession, at least you have the confidence of knowing you are a darn good bricklayer or pastor or whatever.
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My experience and the experience of friends in what are considered the real professions (teaching is considered by very few a real profession) is that as Wilde said (I think it was Wilde) “Professions are a conspiracy against the laity.” In many ways the official and unofficial professional organizations are very good at protecting the status quo. One more way I swam upstream was that I was always innovating.
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Good morning to all,
My social skills were not at all well developed when I was in high school so I wasn’t an innie. I remember giving a good answer to a question in a class taught by a well liked basketball coach and hearing the coach say “who is he?” to some of the popular kids right in front of the class. I think they mumbled something to the effect that they knew me and I was okay. My biggest problem was having absolutely no social skills when it came to getting to know girls and feeling bad about that.
In some cases the popular kids tended to have an over inflated image of themselves and didn’t do as well as some might think they should later in life. Later in life I found out I am not as shy as I thought I was in high school. However, I am still not the smoothest person in social situations. I have learned not to be bothered if I have a little difficulty being social.
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Oops! I thought you were referring to introverts and extroverts in your blog question, Steve. I guess that is my professional training getting in the way of my reading. I am an introvert who can pass as an extrovert when needed. I was in no way in the popular group in school and I am still an outsider in my community, but one more by choice than anything else.
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Outie to the core as a kid. I was lucky to find a handful of equally geeky friends in high school and then to discover science fiction fandom. I’m part of the writerly contingent at cons now, so I’ve actually become an Innie! Someone once accused my writing group of being a “clique” (we’re a performance group, so we only let others read with us by invitation). Since we’d all been high school rejects, we laughed ourselves sick over that one.
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🙂
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Most of my growing up was as an “outie” but for completely different reasons. We moved A LOT when I was a kid. I rarely finished two years in the same school and often changed in the middle of the school year. So I was always the new kid and always the “outie”. I remember that all this moving wasn’t fun for me as a child, but as an adult I can look back and see traits that I now possess that I consider to be really positive (I can make small talk with anybody, I can easily entertain myself, I don’t worry too much about going into something blind).
We did finally settle down and I spent the last three years of high school in the same place – then I was a theatre and dramatic interp geek, so I can also say for awhile I was an “innie”.
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Part of my problems with developing social skills came from my Dad taking a job out of town which resulted in my displacement to a high school in that town for two years and then returning to our former home town during my last two years in high school. There was some good things that came from switching towns for two years, but it did have negative effect on my development of social skills. I lost contact with friends that I grew with in my home town and didn’t get very well connected with some of them when I returned to my home town. I was able to get more involved in sports at the school I attended for only two years before I returned to my home town. It was a smaller school and I was needed on the teams even though I wasn’t too highly skilled at sports.
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I was on the outer edge of the Innies. We had our own little group, and if it was a big enough event or party, we’d get invited, but definitely not in the most “popular” circle. Our high school was pretty big and combined the two junior highs, so there were already plenty of groups and cliques going on. I started hanging around, though, with one really popular girl my senior year, and she’s the one person who has remained close all through my adulthood – been to visit her in Santa Fe, and she’s been here. I’ll see a bunch of these people in October at our 45th year reunion.
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I am fascinated by the discrepancies between how we perceive ourselves and how others see us, both then and now.
As a younger child, I fit in pretty well with other kids. Had lots of play mates, and generally didn’t spend any time contemplating how I might stand out in any way; thought of myself as pretty normal.
Because I had skipped a grade, I was a year younger than my classmates in high school, and this set me apart. I was small for my age, physically slow at maturing and had a horrible case of acne that lasted several years, all obstacles to being well integrated into a group of self conscious teens. Add to that a complete lack of stylish clothes and strict parents that would not allow me to participate in most extracurricular activities, and I had a pretty miserable time in high school.
Unlike most American schools where high school classes are often large, my high school graduation class had only fifteen kids, eleven boys and four girls, so we all knew each other pretty well by the time we graduated. I would most certainly never have been voted most likely to do anything, although truth be told, we didn’t have such elections. But, because we knew each other so well, I think there was a certain amount of acceptance and respect based on whatever unique qualities we each had or attributed to each other.
Quite a few of my high school class mates have remained life long friends, and most live within a short distance of each other. We have had a couple of spontaneous class reunions occasioned by my visits to Denmark, and it has been great fun sharing old memories and learning how we all had misconceptions about each other.
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As I once told you in conversation, PJ, my interest in this topic has a lot to do with one kid I knew in high school, Conrad. I thought he was really cool and wished–from a great distance–that I could approach him. But I could’t. When we signed senior yearbooks for each other, we knew we’d never likely see each other again. I wrote some witty crap that was my way of disguising the respect I had for Conrad. When I got my book back from him and read what he’d written, I was thunderstruck. He spilled his heart, telling me how much he thought of ME and regretting that we hadn’t been able to be close friends.
I’ve got his mailing address now. Next week I’m going to give him a phone call, some 50 years late.
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Well, as “they” say, better late than never. Go for it Steve.
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Steve, I congratulate you on this follow through – it’s never too late to form a friendship, esp. in the electronic age.
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Outie. I’ve had some times of being in an “innie” – usually in a very small group that is itself an “outie” type group – but the theme of my life is kinda all about being an outsider. Being an introvert doesn’t help me become an “innie” and I also seem to have a knack for having “friends” who so monopolize conversations and also put words in my mouth (that aren’t the words I would choose) that an evening with friends can be a very “outie” experience. One of these days maybe I’ll find my niche and be an innie somewhere.
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It might be here.
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Maybe!
🙂
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After WWII housing and employment were a very large issue, a story very poorly taught or shown on public TV. Also, so many of the returning military, like my uncle and father, were very mad at the world and wanted to get away from people. My parents and we three children lived in tar-paper shacks north of Isabella cheek-by-jowl with an uncle and his three spoiled rotten children, his English wife (what this must have been like for her!), my mother’s awful mother and her three youngest sons. My father and uncle were lumberjacks of course. My mother always remembers the bed bugs.
The point of this is that my mother always says this was a terrible experience for me because the three nasty cousins, whose adult lives have been mess after mess, were terrible to me. For instance I was very late learning to walk because they would push me down if I tried. My mother I am sure was trying to cope with a demon or two of her own, such as that awful mother of hers who was a running stream of nasty personal comments. My mother thinks this had a large impact on my social development and made me so often a loner.
I am not sure about that. I remember none of it. My first memory is of the day we moved into our own house in Two Harbors. But I do now I was terrified of school, once I got there, because it was my first encounter with kids my own age, and so many of then was overwhelming.
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I didn’t have contact with any men right after they returned from WW 2, and have mostly heard the patriotic stories told today about the great things these men did. I haven’t heard much about the problems of men returning from WW 2, but I don’t doubt that the war was a very negative event in many ways for those men.
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Supposedly my Dad came home from WWII and spent the next year in his room. When he came out he spent the next 10-15 years bumming around, working for six months, then quitting and doing whatever he wanted. He didn’t start talking about WWII until the 90s and even then he couldn’t do it without breaking down. It was a very negative event in his life in many ways.
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There were so many men like that, and I know it’s trite, but “Saving Private Ryan” exposed some of that. I had an uncle who had demons he would never talk about, had been on Iwo Jima. The last years of his live, with Parkinson’s Disease, he would have horrible flashbacks, so we know more than we would have.
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I had a circle of friends, and I’m sure we were not popular, not being athletic types. I do remember that in junior high there was one girl in the popular crowd who was always nice to everyone regardless of their status, and because of her my school was probably a kinder gentler place than many. Her father had died when she was about ten or eleven, and her mother remarried. Perhaps she felt like a bit of an outsider in an era when intact families were more the norm, even though she was a cheerleader and always the first one chosen for the team sports.
I don’t go to the class reunions. There are people I wouldn’t mind seeing, but at reunions there’s just too many people at once, and I always think the ones that show up will probably be the ones I don’t remember at all.
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Linda, that’s what name tags are for. They’re probably all wondering what became of you.
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It sounds like you’ve been to one of them. Sometimes one is all you need.
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One of the growing areas of interest in fibromyalgia is in the social realm. There is almost certainly a social area in the physical brain. Lots of FM people, like me, withdraw from social contact, especially in flair-up, such as I have now. It is proposed as a study topic to see to what extent there is a physiological basis for chosen social isolation in FM sufferers and then in others.
Just as a side light before I go out on my bike (I’m late starting with the grand kids here), I force myself to be socially active to some extent, such as being on here.
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Glad you do, Clyde.
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Me too, Clyde, keep it up.
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I’d like to revive the theme of outsiders being sensitive and thoughtful. One day it occurred to me that I would have a hard time coming up with the name of a really interesting writer who had been a big insider early in life. That special writer’s eye that reveals so much is one of the rewards for living on the edge of life. Try to think of Garrison Keillor if he had been popular, athletic and glamorous in high school. What would that person, now grown up, have to write about? What insights would we get from him now?
One of the most interesting things about Barack Obama–who really is an interesting guy–is this insider/outsider business. When he was a young man he hit a rebellious period when he was highly aware of the price paid by African Americans in our culture. He did a short stint as an angry young man. Then somehow he pulled out by noticing that he was an outsider to blacks as well as to whites, which was confusing but ultimately liberating. He essentially chose to define himself in his own terms, rejecting the conventional white/black business.
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Interesting to think about HDT that way.
Reading three biographies of Thoreau because there is no single good one. Each takes its own tack on the very complicated man, who was a loner, by choice and choice of the village but very social when he chose to be. His Walden hut was actually only a mile or two from the village to which he went almost every day and he had many visitors, encouraged them. But at Harvard he lived in the library and engaged in one of the social activities. I feel a lot of kinship to him, although I too think he was an interesting unrealistic crank.
One tale I just read. When asked to join the many philosophical societies popular in his day, he refused because he said his interests were really more scientific. When asked to join a few scientific organizations, he refused because he said his interests were really more scientific. That’s how to put yourself between the cracks.
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Obvious error perhaps; should say:
When asked to join a few scientific organizations, he refused because he said his interests were really more philosophical.
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Clyde, when I tried to come up with an insider who was a good writer I went right to the comedians. Dave Barry probably had a helluva good time in high school. But I couldn’t think of a writer with an incisive eye for society who was an obvious insider in school. I’m sure there must be some.
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Interesting question, Steve.
Trying to think of a writer who was not an outcast. Problem is that, as I said above, almost everyone thinks they were. Calvin Trillin said that he was not an outcast, growing up in Kansas City, but he crossed social barriers easily. Thurber, whose biography I just read, despite what he says, was in the in-crowd in HS, because he was funny. He grew up in a very odd home. I think John Updike would not consider himself an outcast. Reading Sholom Alecheim’s autobiography. He revels in the loving support of his family and village in Russia. Hemingway bragged about always being one of the boys. But it is easy to name the outcasts or who, like Fitzgerald thought they were, or who felt ill-at-ease in groups.
As for comedians, Will Ferrell always says he grew up in a very good and loving family and did well and was popular in HS.
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In grad school I took a class just devoted to HDT, and it was one of the best classes I took. Fascinating character. But you have to pay attention, for he will try to fool you.
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He came from a poor loving and close family, with whom he had very positive support despite his eccentricities. But they were bold rebels, for instance they were strong abolishionists, all actively so, except Henry, until the Dred Scott case. Then he got fully involved in smuggling escaped slaves to Canada.
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It took me a minute to figure out HDT… I was feeling like an outcast.
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It took me a bit, too, so you don’t have to feel like an outcast anymore.
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I was thinking it was about HDTV….I was about to say, there’s a class in grad school about that?
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Like Plainjane, I considered myself an outie because I skipped a grade (first). Being a boy with an affection for sports, this put me in direct competition with kids a year older than me, except for Little League and other age-group determined baseball leagues. As a result, I struggled to succeed even modestly on school sports teams. I always wondered what might have happened had I stayed with my grade. One negative result would have probably been not meeting my wife-to-be in our senior year. But I felt had I just been that one year more physically mature, “I coulda been a contendah.” I’m one of those guys who would’ve pitched for the Twins for free when I was younger.
Academics wasn’t nearly as hard to overcome, but I still felt as if I was some sort of imposter early on until I got used to the idea that I was just as smart and capable as my peers, and got better grades than most.
Another outie categorization is not being raised in a religion. Everyone else was, of course, and that defined a person quite substantially in suburban St. Louis Park in the 1960s and 70s. We had a large Jewish population, most kids were Protestant (Lutheran) and there was a sizable minority of Catholics. When the usual question of ‘what church do you go to?’ came up, I was always ashamed to say ‘we don’t go to church’, because I knew that branded me as a major outie, because no one could identify with that, and they immediately felt like they had to stay away from me for some vague reason, like ‘He’s not human!’ (Oh the thoughts that go through a 10 yr old’s mind.)
Not being a terribly social person also brands one as an outie in society, where most people naturally congregate in groups of all sorts to give them a feeling of safety and belonging and community. I’m better at that now, but still only have a few good friends with whom I keep in touch with, and a group of golf buddies that I socialize with mainly on the golf course. But I’ll probably never feel like I’m an innie, even with that group.
On the positive side, I haven’t wasted time gossiping, doing mindlessly entertaining things like barhopping or parties, or spending hours and hours of time merely maintaining contacts. This has given me plenty of time to be introspective, and feed my thirst for knowledge, which I think is a good thing for me. And who knows, one day I may come up with an idea that changes the world in a positive way, or contribute my brainpower to achieving that end.
On the whole, no regrets, just a bunch of what ifs.
Chris
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I can relate to religion, or lack thereof, setting you apart from your peers, Chris. In the small town where I grew up (2,300 people), 99% of the people were Lutheran. In Denmark that meant going to church for baptisms, confirmations (a coming of age ritual there, celebrated with a big family dinner and lots of gifts), weddings, funerals as well as Christmas Eve, not the every Sunday kind of tradition that is in the States. But even so, with an Irish Catholic mother and a self-proclaimed atheist father, I stuck out. This was especially true when I returned to the local school, after a three year absence during which I had attended a Catholic boarding school. A clique of three popular girls had it in for me. Having gone to a boarding school, I had to be stuck up and they saw it as their mission to take me down a notch or two. They’d lay in wait for me on my way home from school, and beat the living daylights out of me; then I’d get in trouble at home for dirty and torn clothes, being too wild. Bullying is not a new phenomenon, I experienced it first hand for a grueling year in 1953.
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Wow, what a hard year. Glad you survived it, PJ.
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Nice explanation Chris. I too, to a minor extent, was an outsider coming from a non-church home, but I was an outsider in so many other ways it did not matter.
Best decision my parents made for me was holding me back a year. I just was not mature enough. I would have not been able to play football in that class, for one thing, and playing football in HS and college did put me in a group where I fit.
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I have encounter, as a subsritiute teacher, some popular student who were great people. They didn’t expect any special treatment, were very helpful, and were well liked by everyone who knew them.
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Agreed. This discussion should not paint popular kids as bad. I used to try to show the successful and good kids what it was like for the others. The kids who go through school a success are focused on what they are doing and just sort of overlook they floaters, the shy, the angry, for which I do not blame them. The bullies and teasers in high school can be vicious but they area very small minority. They can do a lot of harm.
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My sister’s (adopted) son Evan is 14, and just starting high school in a place where he knows almost no one. He is ADHD, spent middle school in a private school for kids with learning disabilities, and has just had his first two weeks in a public school, ever. He was so nervous before the first day that he actually asked his mom what it was like for her when she changed schools (we moved around quite a bit till she was in 3rd grade). He seems to be trying on various personas, as she watches him choose what to wear, how to walk, fix his hair, etc. It’s rather poignant.
I kind of wish there was a way he could repeat a grade – ADD kids are often quite immature socially AND academically. But it’s rare these days, it seems, because it was determined to be such a stigma that often reverberates in adult life. Clyde, it sounds like you didn’t experience that.
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I was held out a year before I started school, which is very different.
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I’ve alwayst thought of myself as an outie. I was a little like Anna in HS. I had friends from every social status and I didn’t think too much about it. I was in the college prep classes, as well as band, choir, chamber singers, DaCapo singers and theater, but I was never athletic. In our HS, it was the athletic kids who were the most popular. I had a few good friends who were also outies. I was “in” with the outies. School was not a problem for me, though. I enjoyed it.
Like a few of you, I wasn’t raised in a religious family. We just didn’t go to church. I felt the social pressure when we moved from Owatonna to Faribault just as I entered 7th grade. “Where are you from?” and “What church do you go to?” I went home and told Mom I wanted to belong to a church, so she let me pick one. I picked the Methodist church only because an older girl who I knew well and looked up to went there. Mom brought me in to town every Sunday and I got confirmed. I quit going there during college.
A few years after graduation I jumped on the opportunity to go out with the guy who had been the captain of our HS football team our Sr. year. Bad choice. He was very good looking – the archetypal hero figure. But he was unbelievably abusive. He threw lit cigarettes at me and trashed my apartment (among other things). Man. Talk about low.
I went through a period of almost obsessive extroversion in the ’80s. I had a big circle of friends – some of whom are still an important part of my life. They got me back into playing music and singing and it was a real release for me. I’m grateful for that time because it showed me that I’m likeable and I can relate to others even if I don’t articulate well.
Recent years have been harder. I’m on the very cool Rock Bend committee but, truth be told, I don’t hang around with them outside of Rock Bend too much. They’re cool and I love them all, but I’ve returned to a more introspective time of my life and the socializing gets to be too much for me sometimes.
This is a really intriguing topic, Steve. BTW, I’m in Cornucopia, at the Village Inn. They have wi-fi but no TV. The wind is blowing COOL off the lake – it feels really good.
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I hope all the baboons who are going have a terrific time in Cornucopia and at the Big Top.
Krista, please check in and let us know what you’re up to. Careful on that ladder to the sleeping loft!
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No running water this morning!
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SomewhatOT: Husband and I celebrated our 32 anniversary a day early tonight with dinner at Murray’s in Minneapolis. A day early because our Crowd Cut coupon expired today! The place was packed. I asked the waitress if they were always this busy. No, she said, and pointed to the coupon. Apparently lots of people were utilizing their coupon for a fancy dinner at a tolerable price before it expired. The food was excellent, but it’s not a place I’m likely to go back to. Their prices are out of our budget. Guess we’ll never be “innies” at Murray’s.
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did you have the butterknife steak? i remember watchng johnny carson many years ago and there was a gy on who knew the best everthing in the world, best pizza, sals in nyc best steak was murrays in minneapolis, never had it but i’ll bet its good.
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