Oh Yeah, I'm Your Daddy!

Persistence of Memory

All the writing that I've done dealing with me being little has stirred up the muck at the bottom of my brain a little. I usually just can't remember stuff from when I was a little kid... Things, events, people - nothing seems to leave lasting impressions. I did remember that at some point when we were still in California, I acted as a mascot for Jody's inner-school 'Spirit' team. I think it was the last day of her junior (?) high school & they had like a track & field day. I wore a blue & white jersey w/the number 0 on it. Mostly sat on the sidelines & cheered people on. Their team was called, predictably enough, the Sweathogs. Remember Welcome Back, Kotter?

The other day Rob was bummed out. He'd spent part of his morning thinking about his own childhood & school days. Rob carries grudges. He was one of those socially-retarded kids, hyperactive... His parents were so isolated that he never got any great exposure to the outside world. The elementary school he went to was the only one in their area, & all the kids from elementary school went to the same junior high & then high school, so no one ever got to redeem their personalities. What you started out as was what people always knew you as. If you were a spaz in first grade, you were a spaz as a senior in high school. Rob was just desperately lonely as a kid, so he had this kind of overbearing personality. Never knew how to just be cool & go with the flow. He was also an emotional, sensitive kid, not to mention the product of an overweening mother (not that anything's changed in that arena) in an area primarily populated by the northeastern equivalent of rednecks & hillbillies. He got picked on & beaten up unmercifully for being an over-emotional spaz, and he's never gotten over it. His parents also never encouraged him to fight back because they lived in a sue-happy region. The one schoolbus fight Rob got into almost landed him in juvenile detention. So in his introspection, he was thinking not only about the brutality he was dealt, but how he believed it was partially his fault. As a result, Rob's still a defensive social retard. Can't take him out in public. It's usually a disaster. He never learned how to interact.

Now me, I was also picked on unmercifully throughout school. You can't be a fat bookworm kid & not get picked on. I remember being upset by some of it & getting suggestions like throwing dog bones at my tormentors from Jody. Although this seems like it may have had possibilities, I realized it would make things worse - I'd be the fat bookworm kid who ate dog food for lunch. Having a name like 'Janelle' was certainly not helpful - I was 'Janelly Belly'... or 'Janelly with the big fat belly', or even worse, 'Smelly Janelly with the big fat belly!'. It got even worse when I started getting pimples at 9, and boobs at 10. (Sometimes when I see a kid's name & it's particularly outlandish, I just feel bad for them. Especially if it rhymes with any nasty character trait that can be picked out. One of my co-workers named her new daughter Passion... yeesh). My parents were much different than Rob's folks. If I came home crying because someone tormented me, I usually got yelled at for being such a pussy. If I came home with a black eye, my mom would want to know how many of my opponent's teeth I knocked out. My parents were more socially outgoing than Rob's folks - and most of their friends were the Northwest's version of rednecks & hillbillies - truckers, trucker's wives, trucker's kids, lumber folks, ex-Vietnam vets... I learned to be emotionally tough & fast with a snappy comeback early. But somehow, I ended up still able to interact somewhat appropriately with people. I have a very good grasp on how to interact inappropriately with other people, too ;)

I can't remember the last time someone insulted me & the hurt actually stuck to me. (I do get pissed off when someone calls me a retard, not because I feel like I'm a retard but because if they're calling me a retard, they're prone to call anyone a retard). Usually, I'm like, "Hey, I was a fat kid - you're going to have to do a lot better than that". Sometimes it surprises me how sensitive most women are. The other night at work, I had asked one of our steady extras what time they were going home. She called & Harley (my latest relief trainee) answered the phone. Instead of just giving him the answer, they sat on the phone & flirted for about 5 minutes. I finally grabbed the phone from Harley & asked her, in my gruff fakey 'I'm really annoyed' voice, 'What time are you going home?' She told me & that was that, I gave the phone back to Harley. So when she came back to bank out, she was acting all pissy (which, for this girl, is nothing new). Come to find out, the tone of my voice when I asked her what time she was leaving pissed her off & hurt her feelings (her comment to Harley was 'she doesn't have to treat me like that'), whatever. So I took the time to go out of my way to apologize to her. Yanno, if you can't take someone playfully snapping at you, and you can't take it every time a guest you deal with is pissy or in a bad mood, you don't need to be working in the hospitality industry. There are too many pissy people, guests & co-workers in the business, out on the Strip to be butt-hurt every time one of them snaps at you. She can't be as sensitive as she portrays anyway - she's already been reported twice by different people for making racist remarks. I have a simple solution... I can message people & force them to reply by return message before the message will go away. Next time I need to ask Senso-Girl anything, I can just make her reply to my original message. She won't have any need to even pick up a phone.

I don't know if it's just the product of my upbringing or if it's part of my continual depression... having emotions made of Teflon. Nothing ever sticks. Apparently, my memory is made of the same substance.