Better late than never I guess
Here I've been grinning over all these tagged people thinking that I was safe since I'm not really a regular here on joeuser.com, but I do hang out regularly in #joeuser on irc.stardock.com, so Zoomba got me. I started it yesterday once I realized that I was indeed tagged, but I didn't want to spend too much time on it so I didn't finish until today.
I remember being embarrassed a lot when I was younger although I had trouble coming up with some specific incidents. I was not popular as a child, and I've actually forgotten (blocked out?) most of the specifics. My twin sister and I went to Catholic school for 7 years, and just the fact that we were identical twins made us notorious. I was a chubby bookworm who had no notion of what music was cool, or anything else in popular culture. At the time, I actually cared what people thought about me, even when they were mean to me, and I was very sensitive. All I ever wanted was for people to like to me.
Seventh grade was the worst. My best friend (really one of my only friends at school) had moved away and went to a different school. By seventh grade I had lost all hope that anyone would like me and I didn't even trust the nicer kids. I just wanted to be left alone. At lunch, I would have just sat alone reading a book, which would have made me happy. I'd always gotten good grades, particularly in Conduct (yes, we were graded on our behavior), until that year. I got a B. I couldn't understand it. I didn't talk when I wasn't supposed to, or do anything else to cause trouble. I confronted my teacher about this, on the verge of tears, and she told me that it was because she had noticed that I always sat alone at lunch, and that I was short with some of the other kids. So I was being graded on my noncomformity? Well, I wanted that A in conduct, so I started sitting with some of the nicer kids who would mostly ignore me, which is how I wanted it. However, they sat with some of the less nice kids, who did things like had contests to guess girls bra sizes, brought condoms to school to read the directions, and other juneville things that nearly got us all in trouble.
That same year, I had a crush on one of the few guys who didn't torment me. He mostly ignored me. His name is David. Near the end of the school year, our school had a fund raising drive which involved bringing in receipts from Kroger grocery stores. Kroger had promised to donate a percentage of the total dollar amount from the receipts to our school, or something like that. The grade that collected the most receipts would win a rollerskating party at the Riverside Arena. I went as far as to lurk in the lobby of the Kroger's by my parents' house asking people for their receipts as they left. I collected more receipts than anyone else, and our grade won. Everyone knew that I had collected the most receipts, and for once they were nice to me. You can see where this is going, right? Well, I worked up enough courage to ask David to skate couples with me (the dj would play slow romantic songs and you had to have a partner to skate with at this time) which was a victory in itself, even though he turned me down (nicely). Well, two of the worst busy bodies in my grade overheard me asking him, and they told everyone. Eventually, they badgered him into doing it, and he was very nice about it. I was thrilled. It was very nice until someone crashed into us and knocked him over.
The saga continues! As I said, it was near the end of the school year. For however much time was between that skating party and the last full week of school (the last week was always half days), my classmates badgered me and David. They wanted him to ask me to 'go with him'. (Please tell me that teenagers have come up with a better term for being a couple who can't actually go anywhere than this by now!) On one of our last days of our school, we were having our art lesson, one that was less kindergarteny than usual. We were outside drawing bikes that someone had brought in for this purpose. I have a poor sense of perspective and lighting, but I managed a halfway creditable rendition of one of the bikes and my teacher complimented me on it. I've never really been able to accept compliments gracefully, so I replied that my sister's was undoubtably better. She's always been better at drawing than me, although I have to admit that I never put much effort into it while she took classes. Anyway, I asked if I could go look at hers and the teacher said that I could. At some point while we were all still outside, David took me aside and asked me to 'go with him.' I was thrilled, and of course I accepted. Well, a little bit later we were all in line at the paper cutter where our teacher was cutting down our pieces of drawing paper so that they could be displayed in the halls. She asked me what I had decided. I was shocked. I was in the habit of believing teachers to be generally unobservant, because none of them had ever tried to do anything to stop my classmates cruelty, or at the very least said anything to me to indicate that they knew what monsters most of them were. I considered her to be particularly oblivous, for making me sit with my classmates at lunch. "How did you know?!" I blurted out. She, of course, had no clue; she only wanted to know I thought that my sister's drawing was indeed better than mine.
This paragraph does not recount an embarrassing episode, but I feel the need to finish the drama. That year, we had taken some sort of standardized test, I think that it was the Iowa Basic Test, and my sister and I had scored in the 99th percentile or something like that. High enough to shock my mother, because while our grades had always been good, they did not reflect this level of excellence. I've blamed it on boredom and rushing through my school work so that I could read a book, besides my general unhappiness at school. At any rate, my mom asked us if we wanted to switch to public schools, which had an Accelerated program for the smarter students. My sister and I jumped on the option to get away from a place where we had only known torment, and after more tests, we were accepted into the accelerated program. I didn't see David very often. He went to the same school for eight grade, and to an all boys Catholic high school. He never called me unless I called him first or to cancel plans that we had made at my instigation, but at some point I decided that I loved him. Perhaps my feelings were real, but I don't think that I ever really knew him well enough to love him rather than the picture of him I built up in my imagination. I slowly came to the painful realization that he didn't really care for me, and I broke up with him before my senior year in high school. Even then, I had hoped for him to protest, but he didn't, and that was crushing. Once, when we were driving home from a date, I asked him why he had asked me to 'go with him.' After regaining control of the car and avoiding the ditch (at this point I don't remember if I was exaggerating about him nearly running off the road, but this is the way I've always told the story), he said that it was because I wasn't stuck up like the other girls. To this day, I do not have any closure. He never tried to kiss me, and as I said earlier, he practically ignored me if I didn't initiate contact. But he had seemed sincere when he answered me that day in the car, and I used to catch him looking at me when we went to a movie or a school play. He used to hold the door for me, and when we did talk, it was always very comfortably. For his sixteenth birthday, I surprised him by waiting outside his house for him to come home from work, with 16 helium balloons. He'd had a really hard day at work, and his face lit up with happiness when he saw me, and he actually hugged me. Sometimes I wonder if he really did like me, maybe not love me, but was he really just so socially inept that he put everything else before me? He works for Delta Air Lines now and I often see him when I go to Detroit Metro Airport, and I always want to ask him if I ever meant anything to him. I'm long past caring what the answer is, but I still would like one.
I had much better luck in public school than I had in Catholic school. There were more kids, and it seemed to me that my classmates in the accelerated program were, overall, nicer than the ones at the Catholic school. I did have to take electives, though, and I didn't find all of my classmates from those classes as pleasant. In my Clay class (pottery, etc) I sat at a table with two other girls and two guys, none of whom were in accelerated classes. None of them got good grades, and from our discussions it seemed that they were mostly interested in drugs and sex. They quickly found out that I was somewhat of a prude, and one day one of them shaped a bunch of clay into a rather accurate, if slightly crude, model of the male reproductive system and left it at my place. I was horribly embarrased, but he smushed it before the teacher turned around at my cry of disgust so he didn't get in trouble. They were still better than my classmates from Catholic school, and one of the girls told me at the end of the year that I had inspired her to be a stronger, better person, since I had repeatedly told her that her boyfriend treated her like dirt and that she shouldn't take it. I don't know if she was sincere or not, but I hope that she was because no one deserves to be treated like her boyfriend treated her.
In high school, I made very good friends who I am still close with today. They are very funny people, and we laugh a lot. Once during freshman year, we were having a Halloween party and we made caramel apples with those kits you can buy at the store. Well, I was eating mine when one of my friends made some off the wall remark and I started laughing, and besides nearly choking I had caramel apple come out my nose. It was really gross. Well, if that wasn't embarrassing enough, the first time I introduced David to my friends, one of them told him that story. Caramel apple was also not the last solid food to come out my nose; one of my friends made me laugh when I was eating pizza later that year.
One more because the first paragraph wasn't really a specific incident. You know the routine Bill Cosby does about all kids having brain damage, because whenever you ask them something, they reply "I don't know?" I remember doing stuff for no apparent reason. Kids don't always have reasons or motivations. Well, my grandmother lives in a ranch house with 4 bedrooms and two bathrooms and a finished basement with a lavatory. The two bathrooms on the ground floor are back to back, and there is a window at the very top with clouded glass. My mother's youngest sister, Susie, is 13 years younger than her, so she was still living at home with my Grandma and Grandpa when my sister and I were young. Mom and Dad used to leave us with Grandma and Grandpa when they would go away for weekends. On one such occasion, in the early morning, I was in one of the bathrooms and I saw through the window at the top that there was someone in the other bathroom. I don't remember why, but I decided to climb up on the laundry hamper to look through the window. My Aunt Susie, who had been in the other bathroom, caught me at it and said something to me that sent me scurrying for the guest bedroom. For some reason, I always think of that incident when I am thinking about when I have been embarrassed. I also think of this event when I hear Bill Cosby talk about brain damage, because at the time I really had no reason or motivation to climb up on the laundry hamper to look through the window. The window was there, the hamper was there, and I was there. I simply followed an impulse.
IIs there anyone left to tag? I shall tag my fellow GC2 team members because Boogiebac and Mormegil haven't posted memes yet even though they've been tagged and if I drag CodeCritter into it, maybe they'll do it too.