98/365: 1979-1980
Image by bloody marty mix
Monday, 01 September 2008.
40 Years in 40 Days [ view the entire set ]
An examination and remembrance of a life at 40.
For the 40 days leading up to my 40th birthday, I intend to use my 365 Days project to document and remember my life and lay bare what defines me. 40 years, 40 qualities, 40 days.
Year 12: 1979-1980
In the spring of my 6th grade year, I tried out for the following year’s 7th grade cheerleading squad. I did so primarily because I wanted to be able to go to all the basketball games, but I was not completely unmoved by the promise of popularity. The social ecosystem had begun to take solid form, with clusters of kids congealing around such ephemera as perceived family income (not necessarily actual), wardrobe choices, grades, and of course, the less mutable attractiveness. There was considerable overlap in these groups out of practical necessity. It was a very small school. Each grade had fewer than 100 students (usually much fewer), and it was not possible to field a credible basketball team without band geeks, or put on a theater production without jocks. Still, there was a social hierarchy, and I was not entirely benefitting from it.
As it turns out, being a cheerleader didn’t give me an automatic in with the top of the social food chain, and that suited me fine. The more time I spent around them, the less I wanted to be a part of that full-time. Toward the end of the year, the popular crowd literally sent an emissary (no, I am not kidding) to ask if I wanted to switch groups and be in their group of friends. I was so offended by the painfully inorganic ritual, and what it probably meant about how these people operated, that I said no. The emissary, who was a girl I actually liked quite a lot, seemed shocked. I don’t think any of them expected I would turn down what must have seemed to them a very generous offer. I wonder if any of them, even to this day, would understand how absurd it was. So, I continued to be a floater… a middle-dweller, occupying the space between the jocks and the brains, translating the languages of one for the other. It was a spot in which I was very comfortable, and one in which I’ve opted to stay.
In the previous year, we’d purchased an unfinished house just north of town, and we spent the following months doing much of the finishing work ourselves. We put in walls and insulation, laid flooring, painted and spackled, and when we were done, we had a little, square, two-story, chalet-style house. My little brother and I finally had our own separate bedrooms. They were small, but they were ours. Our parents bedroom was upstairs in the A-frame portion of the house. The bedroom walls sloped in sharply to a point along the center of the room. It was only possible to stand completely upright in an area about 4-5 feet across. The house had a forced-air, natural gas heating system, but it was rarely used. Right in the middle of the open downstairs living/kitchen area sat a large wood-burning stove, and we kept its fire burning non-stop from late September through early May. The stove was propped up on a brick bed, and I quickly learned that standing on the edge of the bricks, with my toes hanging off and my backside warming against the heat, was a peaceful vantage point from which to view the various goings-on in the house.
Who am I?
I am a cultural dichotomy.
People who meet me as an adult are often completely baffled when they discover that I used to be a cheerleader. I have always been, to varying degrees, a counterculture kind of person. That’s probably less obviously true of me now that it has been in the past. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve just had less energy to care about whether I looked suitably edgy enough. But, anyone who knows me well, knows that I have a hearty streak of disdain for most social norms, and that I am as much a nerd as any of my ten thousand acquaintances who work in IT, and as much of a misanthrope as any black-eyeliner abusing, angsty teenager.
And so it always flips people out when they discover that I love sports, and American Idol, and America’s Next Top Model, and any number of other trashy, pedestrian, un-intellectual, and even anti-intellectual pursuits. I had a boss once who said he had to completely rework his understanding of who I was after I told him I enjoyed bowling. Later, after I told him I’d dated a coworker who was generally understood to be the baddest bad boy, he had to start all over once again. I think if I’d told him that I had football season tickets and that my secret heros are all drag queens, his head might have melted from the strain.
This sort of complexity shouldn’t be hard to understand or anticipate, but for some reason it always makes people uncomfortable. But then, I’m OK with that, too.
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