I’ll Try Again

Excuse me while I continue to ramble on about this damn pre-calc course that I’m doing pretty well in. I’m not gloating, I’m just trying to understand why. I guess I’ve always done pretty well at math, but I don’t really want to. Sounds kinda crazy, but I really haven’t wanted anyone to think I’m a nerd. I’ve been spending my life tying to convince myself that I’m something else. I’ve lied to myself before and it worked, so why not? I had myself so convinced of a lie before that I was lucky I could remember the truth years later when it was safe to know it again.

Math classes didn’t hold my interest for the most part. A couple of teachers made it interesting back in middle school, but that was it. Every teacher I had after that sucked big time. I think about how much I loathed them and then feel guilty when I imagine how much that would hurt their feelings. As much as I felt they were mean, they probably were really caring beneath their tough exterior. It’s just too easy to slip into the me vs. them mentality. And to make it twice as painful for them, they never would have expected such hatred out of quiet little me. I was the quiet kid who never volunteed a word and dodged the eye contact that lead to being called on. I think I nearly mastered looking busy in order to avoid attention. Kids can be so cruel. I wish I could have been more above all that. Well… maybe. I don’t want any wish to come true because wishes would alter reality. I don’t want to alter history like that. I would have said I don’t want to alter the future too, but that’s part of being in the present. Yeah, I think that tanget has gone far enough.

So, back when being labelled a nerd for being good at math or school in general wasn’t cool, I resolved to avoid that label at all costs. I could never be cool, but I didn’t want to be nerdy either. I was picked on a bit by older kids. The two biggest offenders were my brother and sister. My sister did it mostly indirectly by being cool and thereby being the measure to go by – if she picked on me for it, other people surely would. My brother picked on me directly because I was the next in the pecking order. My sister picked on him so he turned around and picked on me. My sister picked on him for being a nerd, so he was the lower end of the measure.

The problem was that because my brother picked on me, I had a hard time feeling cool even around him. I looked up to him because I wanted to be at least like him or better. His friends thought he was cool, and when they were around he picked on me twice as much. I didn’t want to be uncool around them, so I sought their acceptance too. I suppose I thought that if I won their acceptance I would be better able to win his. I never seemed to be able to match wits with him, but I never really realized just how irrational I was being. How could I match wits with a kid three and a half years older and therefore more educated and experienced?? I was striving to be his equal when there was no way I could be.

My sister was always striving to be in the cool crowd and win acceptance from everyone. I’m guess that’s because she’s adopted and not even of the same nationality. When you have had the fact that you don’t even look close to being part of the family staring you in the face every day, you’re going to look for ways to blend in through behavior if not appearance. She is a story in herself, so I won’t even attempt to go into much detail here. In regards to the point of this entry, she managed to hold her own in the cool crowd while making A’s and B’s and managing to still get to bed by 8pm every night.

I’m just now putting all this together after getting back into school and doing well in this class. Now I am envied for what I know and what I can pick up on instead of ridiculed for it. At “Class Night” before my high school class graduated (basically a night where we all go out to a nice dinner,) they read the class “prophecy.” If that was any measure of how well I had succeeded in avoiding the Nerd classification, then I was an utter failure. They put me in with all the other nerds as world-class chess champions. After hearing that, I proceeded going around getting the other nerds to sign my yearbook because they understood me. They liked me, and they respected me because I listened to them without all the judgement. I felt like a bridge between two worlds because I didn’t belong in theirs and I didn’t belong in the other one either. I had a wide array of people sign my yearbook, but while some of them were superficial, it was a lot more notice than other nerds got. Again, I’m not gloating, nor am I implying that I am better than them because of a few signatures. What their yearbooks lacked in quantity of signatures, was made up for in quality.

Anyway, my failing to graduate with the rest of the class escaped notice by probably more than 90% of the class. They just kept on thinking I was a nerd. So that must be what I am after all. I thought they had it all wrong, but, no, it was me. I’m realizing now that there shouldn’t be any shame in it. Just because I’m good at math doesn’t mean I’m not good at anything else. Math is precision and logic and it touches so many aspects of life that skil in it is something to treasure. It shouldn’t be labored through but welcomed for the doors of logic and understanding it opens when it’s applied. The problem is that it doesn’t seem to be taught the way it should often enough. There is as much precision to constructing a sentence as there is to an equation in algebra if you care enough to make it right.

I know I write about high school a lot, but really, that’s a major period in life where we form the basis of our experiences by which we consciously measure the rest of our lives. Everything builds on those memories. Some people don’t experience much until college or their first job or whatever, but we all start somewhere. High School was big for me, as is my first major job – I just haven’t gotten to those stories yet. College so far hasn’t been much more than acedemic experiences.

So… blah, blah, blah. I’m done with this. 🙂