What were you like as a kid?

So you were this kid?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNptJs54miY

 

Shy.

 

I was an angel.

 

It bothered me a lot. I was, for the most part, a straight-A student and I remember telling my mom that she was going to have to live with me getting Cs in science. I had it figured out that if I did all of the homework and labs, I would get nothing worse than a C, even if I failed every test, which I assumed was inevitable. When it was straight memorization, I did fine, but I just didn't understand it on any level.

After my sophomore year, I took chemistry in Summer school because I figured it would either be easier or, if nothing else, over quickly. On the first test, one of my sister's friends was copying off me and I shot her a couple looks and mouthed, "Stop it." After class she said, "What the fuck is your problem?" and I told her, "You're going to fail, because I guessed on every answer."

I got an A. It sounds stupid, but it really pissed me off.

 

Fun fact: between 1979 and 1999 Pluto, then considered a planet, was actually closer to the sun than Neptune. Not many knew that, even at the time, so in third grade when I pointed this out to my teacher in the form of arguing that my answer on the science test of "Neptune" to the question "what planet is farthest from the sun" was correct, she got pissed off at me and sent me to sit out in the hall.
This episode established the two dominant personality traits of my adulthood: being a pedantic ass who is good at trivia.

 

This reminds me of Chem 1A freshman year; lecture hall of about 600; midterm, kinda buddy from dorms is sitting behind me and cheating off me; we get back to the dorms and he's chuckling, I've always been a go with the flow guy so no big deal;

I got an A-; dude got an A; I ask him "how's that?" he said he was looking at the girl next to me too. Karma though, I he ultimately did not do as well at the end of the term.

 

I was quite a loner and often bullied and ridiculed.

My father was disabled and albino. The few friends we had thought he was our grandfather. My parents had five kids in a 5 1/2 year span. I was in the middle and the oldest boy.

I remember one year a kid in my class pointing at my "new" shirt and exclaiming, "Hey, you got that at our garage sale!" Another girl referred to me as "baggy britches" because my mother swore I would grow into them.

I was 4-foot-10 when I started my junior year. Scrawny and shy, I was an easy target.

I usually had one good friend, and perhaps one or two casual friends. Many were of the same mold, growing up in single-parent homes (my dad died when I was 12) without a lot of parental care.

I trusted nobody and was taken advantage of more than once. I developed a deep resentment of my mother and my classmates, especially the affluent kids. But I had enormous self-confidence. I was always trying (often too hard) to show things I was good at.

I lived on the streets at 19 and eventually returned to get a college degree. I have worked my way up through two dying careers (mainframe computer operations and journalism), and have been back to the bottom more than once.

Of course, a lot of scars remained into adulthood. Some still rear their ugly heads. But I am happily married now to the most wonderful woman I could imagine, we make ends meet, and we bought my first-ever "nice" vehicle last month. And sometime around August, I will become a grandfather.

 

Harley, I have read several of your posts which left me empty with the inability to help.

This one made me happy. Thank you.

 

My friend in high school said they called me "Volcano" in middle school (before we were friends) because I could explode at any moment.

I'm pretty even-keel now.

The bad skin and eyesight stuck though.

<img src="https://scontent-a-lga.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc1/t1/3196_573433408097_6658201_n.jpg">

 

I used to pull crap like that. Some here may have noticed that I am absolutely relentless when I think I'm right. I was probably worse as a kid and had no problem at all arguing with a teacher under those circumstances.

One incident in particular from elementary school stands out. We had a game that was like a spelling bee, but you also had to give the definition of the word. If it had multiple definitions, you just had to provide one of them. Our regular teacher was on maternity leave and her replacement was clueless. Probably 10 years past the time she should have retired. She tried to be strict, but it was not easy with failing eyesight and hearing.

This is how bad I am. I even remember the word, which was "scan." The problem with scan is that it can be its own antonym. One definition of the word is to read over quickly. Another is to examine or scrutinize. I gave one of those as my answer and she said I was wrong. I argued. She got pissed and sent me to my seat. I went to my seat, opened our book to the vocabulary words and read the definition I had given, word-for-word. She should have busted me for being a smug little shit, but instead she backed off and let me back in the game.

 

It is called testing well. Once when I was about 12, we moved during the school year. My very first day, they were having a test in social studies. The teacher said I could go ahead and take it, but he wouldn't count it against me since I wasn't there for the lessons. With a mix of a little knowledge and a lot of guesswork, I got one of the highest grades in the class. One of the many ways I was a really dumb smart kid. Not exactly the best way to make friends in the new school.

 

My parents never talked down to me (kiddie talk, etc etc). As a result of this, my grandparents and aunts/uncles told me, I was pretty much speaking grownup English, complete sentences and everything, from the time I was about 2.

I also have very good, and very accurate, memories of things that took place when I was VERY young, 3 or younger. I think mainly it was that I had developed a verbal vocabulary early enough I was able to remember things in specific detail, while most other kids mainly just remember "I was happy" or "I was scared."

Both my parents were journalists, my dad a news editor at a midsize metro and my mom had been a ME for several smalltown dailies before they got married, so every day when he came home for lunch with the noon edition, they sat around and dissected all the stories at the lunch table, whether this was a good headline, bad headline and so on.

Starting when I was about 2, every time we went anywhere in the car, I was peppering them with questions, "what does this sign say, what does that sign say," etc etc. And of course they did the bedtime story deal too. Well, one thing led to another, and before I was 3, I was already reading at a pretty nice clip.

I remember sitting in the backyard as Dad was planning out a summer vacation trip, and he opened up the 1962 state map (when I was 3). I asked him what the number on the map cover meant, and he said "1962 is this year, 1961 was last year," and traced it back to 1958 when I was born, so I already had kind of a vague understanding of time.

(I asked him when he was born, and he said, "1925," and I said, "so that's like almost 100 years ago?" (my math skills were not quite keeping pace with my reading) and he said, "Not quite. But your mom was born in 1930. Why don't we go ask her if SHE was born almost a hundred years ago." Ohhhh, Dad. )

Soon enough I started sitting in on the lunchtime newspaper dissection sessions, and I could at least read the headlines, so they had to start explaining them to me. Then I started to dig into the stories as well and they had to start explaining THEM, too.

I knew who JFK was because he was on teevee almost every day so it wasn't too long before I could start figuring out headlines referring to him. (Also since our family was Irish Catholic Kennedy had near-demigod status in our house.)

Even as a toddler I never had any problem contextualizing stuff; if I read a paragraph with some words I didn't understand I could usually figure out what they meant in a snap. As a result my reading comprehension skyrocketed.

When the daily newspapers got to be less of a challenge, I started to tear into my parents' bookcase -- they had the living room filled with books, mostly their college textbooks from a decade earlier. SOME of them of course I didn't get -- the algebra and trigonometry was kind of tough -- but most of the history and literature ones I could bulldoze right through.

Needless to say, kindergarten was not exactly a massive intellectual challenge. It was mostly fun but learning the ABCs and how to count to 10 was a bit below my grade level. In those days they didn't really try to teach kindergartners to read; mainly it was just books with ducks and puppies and stuff.

I would sit in the back of the room and eat my crackers and milk and read the afternoon paper while everyone else was trying to figure out the difference between ducks and puppies.

However, on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when my mom suddenly knocked on the kindergarten classroom door and quickly whispered something to my teacher, and the teacher got wide-eyed in horror and said, "oh my god," I understood why my mother wanted us to go home right away.

In first grade I was reading about astronomy (first grade didn't really have any such thing as a 'science class' at that point). In the winter term the 8th grade science class was covering astronomy as well and the teachers sent me up to sit in with their class for 3-4 weeks. I got an A-minus on the unit test (my penmanship wasn't really up to snuff on the test papers).

As far as what KIND of a kid I was: I was actually a very nice kid, kind to animals, said all my prayers, went to confession, all that good stuff.

I always had somewhat of a smartass attitude, but I didn't really start turning mean until I was in middle school or thereabouts.