The Goose

Okay, so I haven't updated in forever. I know. Bad blogger. I've been seriously preoccupied. With what? Oh, I'll get into that later. Not today, but soon.

I was telling the Dude today about my high school years. He already knows all about it, but I brought up this goose I used to carry around with me in my OAC year (That's grade 13 to an non-Ontario folks, though it's a thing of the past now).

See, it might have been a duck, but I called it a goose. I was called "duck" by a number of boys in school for years, so I was more inclined to believe it was actually a goose. It went on for years, the teasing, though stopped for reasons that still remain vague to me. There may have been a variety of reasons.

In grade 11, my grandfather died and my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer within weeks of each other. In grade 12, my mother died and I moved in with my father at grandma's house, where I lived with his substance abuse problems full time and was randomly kicked out several times. Then in OAC we moved out of grandma's and she died soon after. Around this point I was dumped for the first time. And that's just the stuff I can write publicly about. It was a rough three years.

When I attended a friend's birthday party in OAC, she was given this stuffed goose and I for some reason felt drawn to it. My friend was good. She pretty much allowed me to adopt the thing when parting with it at the end of the night seemed to upset me.

This goose became a sort of talisman/security blanket/compulsion with me. I had to carry it around. I took it to class. He sat upright on the corner of my desk. He came with me to lunch. He was in my hands on the bus. I never left for school without it.

Did I lose my mind a bit? I wouldn't say that. But I think something in me was broken, damaged and in need of comforting. A little regression maybe. People questioned me about the thing, yes, but actually, I don't remember getting too much flack for it. Teachers looked the other way after laughing weakly at my confusing behaviour. Popular kids who had been hurtful to me years earlier said nothing. My friends accepted the goose as par for the course and life went on.

I don't know why I brought it up today, but my oldest friend posted this picture on Facebook of me and another friend of ours in high school, and there was the goose.

I showed it to the Dude, who I think never fully believed me. Photo evidence of a burgeoning teenage breakdown, held in check from a benign addiction to a stuffed animal. We do what we can to stay okay. Some kids would have started drinking. Others would have done drugs. I carted a goose around. I'm comfortable with that.

10 years ago.

So, I have been taking photos of my garden with the Dude's spiffy camera, but I don't know how to get the pictures off said camera. So all I can say at present is that the garden is green and growing and you'll have to trust me that I haven't killed everything off brown-thumb style and am covering my tracks.

The other day the Dude and I were talking about what sports our old high schools had and I hadn't thought that we had certain teams and he was sure we did. So, out came the yearbooks and of course this led to browsing them for memories.

And I had forgotten just how much I hadn't enjoyed high school. But not to worry, it all came back to me as I was flipping pages and becoming increasingly sad. Well, perhaps "sad" is the wrong word. It's more of a muted sense of isolation, inadequacy and stress.

In the 10 years since graduation no other place or era of my life has managed to generate the same response from me.

In college I made only a few friends, but they're friends I've not only managed to keep, but have become even closer to over the years. And there was no bullying, no distinct cool people looking down their noses at anyone, and everybody was free from being the person that everyone thought they were based on perceptions formed from five years ago.

There were times then I felt left out or lonely, but I'm introverted and that's my lot in life sometimes. I never felt open contempt for who I was, and that was the stark difference.

When I was in high school, I started out with a group of friends from elementary school. One dropped me completely and the others never truly seemed to want me around by the end of grade 10. Perhaps we'd grown apart, perhaps newcomers to our circle changed the dynamic and I no longer fit in. Maybe both, maybe something else.

Within days of grade 11 starting, I had a whole new set of friends. It had been gradually coming on in grade 10, and after being ignored most of the summer, it seemed our old connection was dead. And my new friends were odd people, so in a sense I was home.

But having some key friends doesn't prevent you from being harassed. Boys started quacking at me, an old teasing tactic from grade 6-8. I'm bow-legged and my knees and feet aren't aligned straight. I walk a little off-kilter with my toes pointed out, like a duck.

So a chunk of grade 11 was spent being quacked at by boys I grew up with, and eventually by boys I didn't even know. Everyone knows this type, a sort who jumps on a bullying bandwagon: they're not terribly intelligent or good-looking, perhaps they come from money and they have a misplaced sense of their own importance which translates into a really snide arrogance.

If not for the fact my mom had cancer at the time and I had to go home each day and see her sick body and try to sleep at night, occasionally listening to her vomit from chemo, I might have had an easier time handling the additional stress of social nonsense. But such as it was, in addition to the teenage angst, it was a troubling time.

I flipped through the pages of my last years of school and reflected on how I was only ever merely there at that school, and never a part of it. I'd show up, sometimes get made fun of, fall asleep in my classes, talk to my friends, do my time and leave. I left for a semester and while I was gone my mom died. And amidst the strangers in my class I felt a sense of community, something that I know I wouldn't have felt at my "real" school, not surrounded mostly by people who looked at me and saw a loser.

I had friends at my old school, but when the people who don't like you seem to outnumber the people who do, or at least when it feels that way, being surrounded by people who either like you or don't know you is a bit more comforting.

I think that's what being taunted by your classmates does to you. And it came back in waves as I turned the pages. And so I closed the book. I immediately felt better. It's amazing how easy it is to go back there, emotionally, but it's thrilling how simple it is to make it go away.

I love getting older. And I guess I'm thankful my glory days weren't in high school because life has only gone up since leaving. So, maybe it was nice to take the time to appreciate that.

Kids are graduating high school right now. It's been 10 years since my grad. The Dude and I were browsing tuxes for the wedding today and I saw a teen looking for a prom suit. Sometimes that sort of thing makes me feel old. This time it made me feel grateful.

Lady of the Flies

The Dude and I can be very disorganized and lazy people. Such as getting groceries. We're out and we've been out for awhile. So we order in, and I eat candy for lunch. It's getting a little out of hand. I feel like I'm too old to be like this, and yet here we are.

I recently read an article about being a nerd in high school. It raised an interesting theory on why intelligence gets you so far in real life but not in high school. Basically, it's because high school is not real life, but a prison for teenagers to keep them occupied while grownups do their thing.

In one way I disagreed because I was wondering where getting an education played into all of this. But then I remembered the education I received in school and how little I retained and then I reconsidered the article's point. The only thing I'm using in my life now is my English classes. Mostly the grammar, and looking at today's kids, I guess I was pretty lucky to get any grammatical instruction.

Most of my real education has been from either college, my job or what I seek out myself in various areas of interest. And so many highly successful people have real world experience and did not need a formal education.

So why the constructs of high school, when it means so little? I mean, even once I was in college I looked back and was able to see how meaningless it all had been. In college I was essentially training for a career. In high school I was merely trying to get good grades and remember enough for tests so that I could go to college. It was a means to an end, and that was it.

I had my friends and then I had my real work, which was not school related. I drew. I would draw for hours a day, every day. I rarely did my homework, unless it had to be handed in to be graded. Unless I was getting marked on it, it took too much time away from what was more important to me. And even though I never became a paid artist of any kind, I look back on those years as well spent.

What does a teenager do when they don't have real work of their own to focus on? I think we've all witnessed the answer. They either vie for popularity, try to perfect their school performance, or say fuck it and experiment with drugs or some other such rebellion. All of these things lead to some level of misery. If not the cattiness of the popular crowd, then the shunning or harassment from them on the other end.

I wouldn't be a teenager again for anything. I'm a nerdy person. That didn't go over well in high school. It's doing lovely things for me now, but when I was 16, not so much. The article suggested that people who were popular cared less about being intelligent than well liked. I saw some truth to that. People skills are like anything else that requires a lot of time and effort to get good at. My best friend in high school could have been really popular if she wanted to, but she never bothered. Actually, she both dove into her school work and said fuck it at the same time. Either way, I think she shunned popularity before it started shunning her.

Me? Well, I was in the popular crowd in grades 6-8. Frankly, I'm not so sure how that even happened, considering how oddly I behaved. Then once high school started in grade 9, things went down hill. Being a little weird was a liability.

I got to thinking a bit about this when recently a young man tried to stop me while I was crossing the street. He pointed out to me that I walked funny with my toes out and that it would cause me problems. Well, seeing as I was made fun of for that very thing in school, I was well aware of that fact. And his comments would have been enough to greatly upset me back in the day. Now, with the world wide open and full of things that really matter, and people whose opinions I give a damn about?

Chilly response, cold shoulder and no eye contact.

The things I wish I'd known 10 years ago. But if nothing else, teenage prison builds character, or something like that. And it's not like surviving Lord Of The Flies, though I think that's really what the teachers are there for.

Ms. Dress-up

I am a dress whore. I am dress greedy. I have two dresses en route and am already coveting two more, which had I waited two days to order new dresses, I would have made drastically different selections:

Isn't this cute?

Like the sort of thing you'd wear on a picnic.

And...

This dress was out of stock forever.
Of course now that I'd given up on it, it's back up for grabs.

Everyone I know always comments on the fact I am sans pants. Sometimes it's just an observation that I am only ever seen in dresses. Other times it's teasing and mild grief. Mostly it's considered unusual. And I suppose it is. Most women these days enjoy pants.

When I was a little girl, I had a friend who wore dresses every day. I never wore them. Somehow I took it as an affront to my notion of feminism (Yes, I have always been a feminist, even at 8 years old) that a girl would want to wear pants. Of course, that was simplistic feminism (Hey, I was only 8, give me a break), the kind that sends the message we're as good as boys and hence should be doing what they're doing, rather than celebrating what we do differently and making our own choices based on what we actually want.

I gave my little friend the same grief I occasionally get, confused by her lack of pants, and the freedom I associated with them. But she waved me off. She liked dresses, they made her happy, end of story. Nearly 20 years later, I see her point. Sure, in a dress I can't do cartwheels downtown Toronto, nor can I sit with my legs splayed open on the subway, but somehow this doesn't concern me too much. I never could do cartwheels anyway.

I rarely ever wore my kilt in high school. Girls won the right to wear pants while I was in grade nine. In grade 10, I started rocking the pants. I may have worn the kilt a whopping one dozen times for the remainder of my high school career, and I did OAC (grade 13). Mostly I used my kilt as an aide to change into my jeans in the hallway. ***

Incidentally, I've kept the kilt. It definitely does not fit anymore, at least not like it should. Such is life. I bought it on the smaller side to begin with when I was 13 (I'm not sure why I did that to myself), and the need to fit into it I think probably had a big hand in why I was able to continue to do it up until I graduated. Frankly, it was a bloody miracle. I try it on from time to time, to gauge my bodily changes and weight gain. It's like wearing a mother-effing corset.

Had I been the sort of person then that I am now, I would have said to hell with the pants and bought a more practical size that would have gone the distance. Then at least now I'd have a backup cliche Halloween costume each year I get lazy.


*** Going to a Catholic high school means changing into your street clothes as soon as possible after school. Washrooms fill fast. To do away with crowds and waiting around, you change in the hallways. You put your kilt on, take off your school pants, and then put on your jeans. If you're a boy and possess no kilt, either A. haul ass to the bathroom, or B. get comfortable with everyone seeing your underwear. You'd be surprised how many boys chose B. There's an image of purple polka-dot briefs I will never be able to erase from my memory.

PS, I came across this recently and it's a giant dose of WTF, particularly the end of the story. This mother has some serious mental issues. Good luck figuring out life, kid. With a mom like that, you're going to need it.