This was supposed to be included in my post from earlier in the week, Holding A Grudge, but I did not get it added by my self-inflicted deadline. (Future employers, please DON’T take note of that.)
A bit sad; A bit depressing; All true… One Less Soul
As I drift from hopeless day
to hopeless day,
I cannot help but realize
The world would be a lot better
If I wasn’t here.
There would be one less body
taking up a desk
and filling up the hallways.
One less person
fighting for the computer
or begging for a ride home;
Just one less
copy of a test to hand out,
correct,
and pass back.
I’d be one less
person to shop for at Christmas,
birthday on the calendar,
and phone number on the monthly bill.
One less
owner of a sunflower ponytail holder,
weakling following the strong,
follower of the masses,
and one less person talking,
yet saying nothing…
If I were gone
Nobody would care
I would just be one less
ugly face for people to turn away from.
But most of all
One less soul wasting paper
writing crappy poems.
–JLF (circa 1994)
Some pictures from my very brief painting phase in high school art class. I never liked paint much. Even though you hold the brush, it still sorta goes anywhere it wants to. I have always preferred pencils and markers and stuff. Things that are a more controlled extension of my hand.
Ya, I have control issues.
With no further ado, I present to you my crappy collection of high school art.
Mother Nature is weeping at the destruction we have done to our earth. She is a part of ground, the trees, the clouds.
This was from my “Save the Earth” phase.
I had T-shirt that said it.
I got it on my class ring.
I did reports on it for school.
I took Environmental Science (and I hate science).
I watched Captain Planet.
Not that I still don’t want it saved, but now I have other priorities. Actually, after 20 years, there is now actually a convenient location for me to recycle at! Imagine that!
A wolf who is so cool, he howls at his own moon.
This was sort of supposed to be like “Live Your Own Life”, “Do Your Own Thing”, etc.
It was me as a teenager trying to embrace that I would never be in the popular crowd. I would never wear turtlenecks under my sweatshirts or have expensive jeans or my own car to drive to school.
If you take it literally, then you will realize that the Earth only has one moon, and then, well, it just loses all meaning then…
*NOTE: This blog post is going to suck. I am using my blog to do a little deep psychological cleansing. If you have a weak stomach (or just don’t give a sh*t about things that happened to me over 25 years ago), skip this one. I will understand. Actually, I won’t know the difference. This is just some sh*t I had to get off my chest. It has been weighing me down for a while.
A long while…
I am working on it…
I can hold a grudge. I was bullied in school, and I am still bitter about it. It is something I still can’t let go of.
Today I noticed that the documentary “Bully” was available to watch on streaming Netflix. I told my husband, “Oh, throw that in the cue. I want to watch it.”
One beat of time passed.
“You know what, nevermind. I lived that. I don’t want to watch it again.”
Bully is the documentary that the Weinstein Company argued with the MPAA over the final rating of the film. The MPAA originally rated it “R” for language. You know, the language kids hear and use every day at school. You know, the whole point of the documentary. (The film was slightly altered to eventually earn a PG-13 rating.)
And that is about all I know about the documentary.
Once I hit middle school, my life was hell.
Sixth grade. All of these cliques formed. I didn’t even know that that word existed until that year. I never had many friends in school. But suddenly that became a terrible curse, instead of just an inconvenience.
I was teased. That is how it was referred to around 25 years ago.
Yes, I can hold a grudge.
I will not discuss what I was teased about, because, well, I am not there yet. It wasn’t anything that deserved all the attention that it got.
I had my own nickname.
The other assholes kids would say it to me in class. In the halls. On the bus.
Oh, don’t get me started on the bus. It was its own particular brand of HELL.
There are several openings in my county for school bus drivers. Why are they not being filled? Maybe everyone has memories of bad experiences on the bus like I had.
Imagine getting on the bus in the morning, and all the kids visibly slide to the edges of the seats, closest to the aisle. Most of the seats have just one student in them. You walk toward the back of the bus. When you are brave enough to ask if you can sit by someone, they all respond with “This seat is saved”. By this time, the bus driver has already put the bus into motion again. You have to hold on to the edges of the seats to not be dumped on the floor by the sway of the bus. The bus driver starts barking at you to “Sit down”. But you can’t. You can only stand there, holding on to the seats. You can’t even manage to be thankful that there is only one more stop before you get to school.
In that moment, you just want to die.
There is one particular girl I always thought was the ring leader of that. Although, she wasn’t really smart enough for that. Maybe I just blamed her because she had an ugly f*cking face.
I broke down every morning before school and begged my mom to not make me go to school. She always made me go. There are several photos she took during that time, of me before school in some outfit she wanted a picture of. In all of them I had red rings around my eyes from crying.
I won’t scan them in and display them here. Too depressing to display how much they all got to me visually, even though I am writing about it.
If only they had had Internet home school then. I would have been an ideal candidate.
My nickname, in part (the part that didn’t specifically include my name) was published in the school newspaper. No one seemed to find this disturbing. Except for me.
Two boys in my class had to do a skit in English class. They did it as Hans and Franz from Saturday Night Live (yes, that was popular then). They used my nickname in the skit. To her credit, the teacher did actually ask me if that one bothered me. But that was actually so funny that I couldn’t complain. And they were two guys who usually didn’t bother me too much.
Others’ were worse.
There were more events in middle school. So traumatic that I have blocked them from memory. The few above are the ones that stick with me.
Once I got to high school, almost everyone had given up that sh*t, unless they were particularly juvenile.
And there was one boy, who never gave up teasing me. I hated him. I wanted him dead. It’s a good thing at the time that I didn’t realize that high school kids actually could do such things to each other. He said terrible things to me in class. Obscene things. It wasn’t fair.
Why couldn’t one of the cute boys I ACTUALLY LIKED say obscene things to me in class!
When I found out years later that he had died in a car accident, I shed no tears for him. I was actually a little happy about it.
I know. That makes me a truly terrible person. But in his death, I knew I would never have to look upon his evil face again.
Now he has a skateboard park named after him.
If I had killed my self due to all his tormenting, I am sure I would not have received such an honor.
And sometimes I did contemplate that.
And my mom will remind me of things I said or did at that time, things I have blocked out. Like one time when she was doing the dishes and I apparently threatened to cut my wrist with a knife.
Which begs the next question: If your kid does that, why wouldn’t you get them some help?
And another question: Teacher, if a kid in your class choses to do a report for your class on suicide, shouldn’t you take them aside and make sure they are OK? (It may have been for Psychology class, but still…)
Have you ever seen the movie “Never Been Kissed”? I find the high school flashbacks in that movie really relatable. My not-so-secret crush never invited me to prom and threw eggs at me, as happens in the movie. But when it was time to vote for who would ride on the Homecoming float, sometimes they would vote for unpopular people, just so they could ride it and be laughed at. Obviously it was meant to be an honor for the most popular girls. One year they did vote two sisters in who were not popular. They wisely declined from riding. One year I heard that I ranked quite high in votes as well. Thank you, assholes.
We were all stuck inside those walls together, sharing experiences. We all knew so much about each other. Why couldn’t we have embraced that? Why did we have to use that to cut each other down?
I had a dream, years after I was out of college. I dreamed I was in the Waldenbooks store at my local mall. (FYI—at the time I worked for a company connected to Waldenbooks.) In the dream, there were lots of people in there from high school. Some of the people I hated the most.
I began yelling at them, and telling them off. Telling them what I thought of them. I pushed bookshelves over on top of them, to hurt them physically as they had hurt me emotionally. And when I woke up…
I felt good. I felt like a little of the weight had lifted.
A little while later, I had a similar dream, where I was in the local grocery store. I was face-to-face with one of the guys I hated the most. A guy that my asbestos friend did hate the most. I yelled at him and told him off.
I also felt better after that dream. But, eventually, that relief passed. And now I write this post. To try and achieve some of that relief. To try to wash away some of the extreme hatred I have had for these people for decades. People who, I am sure, don’t remember me at all. They don’t remember they teased me. They don’t remember that I existed.
Some of these people have tried to be my friend on Facebook. I laugh at them and ignore their friend requests.
I will admit that I am not even sure I remember all of these events accurately, because time and hate have most likely warped them in my head.
I have SO MUCH HATE for these people. The ones who were the worst.
I still struggle with self-esteem issues to this day because of their name calling. Because of them snatching my stuff because it seemed amusing to them.
Will I be going to my 20 year reunion next year?
I not be thinkin’ so.
I definitely need to still work on it…
And all the bullying laws around today aren’t going to keep these things from happening. I was a quiet person (Oh, don’t ever call me “shy”. UGH! What is with adults and their mother f*cking labels!). I would never have reported that stuff to anyone.
Hell, at my job I had a girl make fun of a physical attribute I have, and I didn’t report her to Human Resources. But I totally wish I had. To this day. Ten years later.
God, I can’t imagine what kids today go through…
With cell phones and social media, they can’t even get away from bullying when they get home! At least after school I could nap on my couch to Ducktales and hide from it all.
I wasn’t planning to post today, but dang, this got me fired up.
Last week a 9 year-old boy’s parents in Caro, Michigan sent him to school with decorated birthday cupcakes for the whole class. The decoration? A green plastic toy army soldier on each cupcake.
The Offending Cupcake Photo: Facebook/WTOL11
My first reaction? “What a great fast and easy and cheap way to decorate cupcakes for a birthday! You can get a whole bag of those soldiers at the dollar store for, like, a buck!”
The story states that the principal felt it was “‘insensitive’ considering recent gun-related tragedies”, including the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary.
WTF?
What does a green plastic toy of a WWII (or maybe even WWI?) army soldier with a gun presumably protecting our country have to do with mentally unstable people breaking laws with guns?
I first saw this on a local news station’s Facebook newsfeed. This was my comment:
I think I would expect the school to over-react to these. But I would probably take them in anyway just to p*ss off the school. And since when is an image of a soldier defending our country offensive!
We don’t want guns in schools–Totally Agree.
We don’t want mentally unstable kids planning to bring guns into schools–Agree.
We need to teach younger kids that talking about bringing guns to school isn’t a funny joke–Agree.
We have to teach our kids what is acceptable and what is not. We have to teach them context and satire and parody. Even the FCC has problems with these concepts sometimes. I am still trying to teach my husband not to make bomb jokes at airport security or drug jokes at the Canadian border.
If these were my son’s birthday treats, I would be very angry. I would have to make a point that both M’s grandfathers were both in the Army (one in WWII and one in Vietnam) and fought proudly for this great country we live in. By the way, a country where we have freedom of speech. And the freedom to bear arms.
And, another point I would make, is that the military, guns and all, is a necessary and noble career choice. Would these cupcakes be allowed on career day?
And don’t anyone try to turn this into a political debate. (Remember, this is my blog and I have ultimate veto power over comments!) Sure, the President has brought banning assault rifles into the forefront of the media. But Sandy Hook happened, and people in his party concerned about this issue rightfully told him now was the time to approach it. I get that. Just like when 9-11 happened, George W. Bush used it as an excuse to finish a war his father started (whoops, I am being overly preachy now). But I got that too. You have to strike while the iron is hot, so they would say.
I would be offended if someone brought in cupcakes with Spongebob on them. I hate that guy! But I wouldn’t remove him.
So, in conclusion, enjoy America, learn that sometimes a toy is just a toy, and don’t judge cupcakes so harshly that were probably made by a very tired mom at 11PM at night after a long day of work, who didn’t have the time or energy to put little eyes and cookie mouths on the cupcakes to turn them into politically correct teddy bears.
At the moment it happened, the first shooting stars were crossing the sky – they were beginning to stream across like strings of jewels flung from another planet – and everyone was watching them. The smaller children were exclaiming in delight, while the older ones stood silent and enthralled. Here on the hill, where the valley people often came to watch the glittering night unfold, you could see the whole magic sweep around you, and you felt close to everything in the heavens. Other people, you knew, were standing on other hills on other worlds, watching even as you watched.
–Unknown (to me)*
Do you know what this quote is from? Oh, of course I KNOW.
I found it in a book I randomly took off the shelf in the middle school library. The paragraph above was the beginning of the book. I thought is sounded so awesome, that I copied it down. And I thought it was so great that I have kept it for all these years.
What book was that?
I don’t know. I didn’t write down the title.
What was the rest of the book about?
I tried to read it, but the rest of the book didn’t live up to that paragraph. So I stopped reading it. Like on page three.
So, you see, in my old age I can see the err of my youth. Even though I still do not intend to ever read the whole book, it would be a nice piece of mind to know WHAT THE BOOK WAS CALLED!!!
Something else kind of bone-headed I have done pertaining to this quote? I have never made another copy of the quote (until now). It is written in red ink on a piece of typing paper (yes, that is what it used to be called in the old days) & then folded up till it was 12th of it’s normal size. Not the easiest to find when you are searching through old boxes of wanna-be witchcraft non-precious gemstones and two filing cabinets containing everything you have written in your life, including elementary school reports.
So, by putting it on my blog, I accomplish two things at once.
1. Maybe someone out there will know what the quote is from (If I find out, I will totally give proper credit on this post).
2. I now have another copy of this quote that I can semi-easily find when I want it.
UPDATE!: * This has been identified first in the comments by Dane Jackson as being from “The Forgotten Door” by Alexander Key. Thank you to everyone for reading and helping me!
I'm not stalking you. 