The first six weeks in Mr Colvin’s science class was a blast. The next six weeks changed my life.

I got my first report card in the second grade, and I don’t even have to be humble because it told everybody how much I rocked. I rocked so much that I didn’t need to worry so much about paying attention in class and doing homework. My next report card wasn’t quite as generous, but it was generous enough. The report cards became more and more sparse in their praise. That was okay, though, because I completely accepted mediocrity. Well, not even mediocrity. All that mattered was that I was passing. My parents, sensing that I wasn’t the sharpest academic tool in the shed, were okay as long as I was passing.

I got a lot of 70s in elementary school. In Delosa, 70 is passing and 69 is not. The mathematical probability that I got that many 70s was, to say the least, low. In retrospect, I was almost certainly being socially promoted. I was a good kid, after all, and I wasn’t stupid. I was just… different. Special. Every sentence that started off explaining how I wasn’t stupid ended with reasons why I was not capable of making the same grades as everyone else (or better).

When I got to Larkhill Intermediate, I intended to continue coasting as I always had. What I didn’t realize was that junior high is a completely different world from grade school. Few of my teachers knew my mother. Since my smart brother was in honors classes, I didn’t have his extended halo over my head. My other brother’s reputation wasn’t particularly helpful until I tried out for the basketball team. The guard rails were gone and I got two F’s on my first report card, one in reading and the other in science. The grade in reading was a 68, which I could bring up without much problem. The science grade was… a 60.

There are parts to this story, only one third am I going to share tonight. All you need to know about the other relevant third is that I went home so obviously devastated that my parents did not see fit to give me any sort of formal punishment. Mr Colvin, the science teacher, could tell that something was wrong the day after report cards came out. I could see him looking at my nearly dispondent self. He slipped a note to me to talk after class. I figured he was going to yell at me or something. No teacher had ever asked to speak with me after class.

Colvin gave me the schpeil about being a smart kid. He said he felt bad about the grade, but that he could tell that I wasn’t going to try to catch up if I didn’t appreciate how far behind I was. But he would make me a deal. If I made a B or better the next six weeks, he would raise the grade to a 65. The idea was preposterous. A B in science? From a teacher that had just destroyed me? Preposterous!

My best friend Clint was in that class with me and we were both the reason that we were doing so poorly in that class. The first six weeks had been so enjoyable because he and I were passing notes and doodling and screwing around. Obviously, that was going to have to change. He had gotten a 70 in the class and I had gotten a 60. He was confused when I was suddenly starting to pay attention in to Mr Colvin and doing my homework. But once I started, he didn’t have anything he could do but follow suit. When the next report card rolled around, my grade was a 95. My lowest grade had been my highest. Clint, in the remaining one third of the whole story that I will not today share, got a 100.

Improving my grades was startlingly easy. So easy, in fact, that I kept thinking that I was just getting lucky. When my parents praised me, I would lie awake some nights fearful of how disappointed they would be when my grades turned back to “normal”. Then, gradually, I learned that normal changed. I had help from my father, but for the most part I discovered that it was simply a matter of doing the homework. I read each chapter for science, but in most of the other classes where my grades were my grades were also improving I didn’t even have to read the chapters. I just did the homework, tried as hard as I could on the tests (which I only occasionally bothered to study for), and before I knew it my grades were getting pretty good. The last two six weeks of my Larkhill schooling, I got straight A’s.

I appreciate what the elementary school teachers were trying to do when they passed me when I didn’t deserve it, but the teacher that most stands out in my life was Mr Colvin, who not only did what needed to be done, but took the time and attention to try to help me undo it.

For some reason I’ve had my mind periodically stuck on… someone… I knew from… somewhere. I’m usually really good with faces and if I don’t recall where I saw it originally I remember once the librarian in the back of my mind searches the archives for a day or two. It’s one of those things where I can think myself to death about and get nowhere, then a day or two later it will magically come to me while I’m thinking about anyone else.

It’s been four days and I am still nowhere. She had brown hair that she usually kept in a pony tail. Brown eyes (I am usually not very good with eyes). She wore minimal make-up and was rather tomboyish. Not much in the way of breasts. She could mostly be described as being the friend of a friend or someone that was in some social circle I happened to be in for a while. I don’t remember ever having a long conversation with her. She smiled a lot, but it was a weak sort of smile. A silent serenity. It was a boy’s smile. Though she looked very much like a woman, there was a masculine quality about her. Particularly in her smile, which came across as “heeey buuuuddy!”. She was attractive enough, but I wasn’t specifically attracted to her.

I think I knew her from high school. For some reason “cross country” comes to mind or running of some sort. Maybe she ran in college, though. Or maybe she was just an avid jogger. I didn’t really have much of a social network at my high school, though, which makes the high school connection seem odd. Alternately I might have known her while I was in high school and she went to another one where she was a runner of some sort. Runner, runner, runner, that’s what I remember though I have no recollection of actually seeing her run.

My high school yearbook is stashed away in Colosse. If I had it handy, I’d be scanning the 800 or so people in my graduating class (and maybe the 850 people in the next lower graduating class). Part of me is glad I don’t have it handy because it would lead to the waste of some time. On the other hand, if it’s going to be bugging me for the next few days it might be quicker just to actually look it up.

Most frustrating of all I can’t remember why she has even crossed my mind or why it matters.

Does this happen to y’all?

Addendum: I’m definitely going to have to crack open the yearbook. This past weekend I saw some NCAA tournament basketball. Mom pointed out that one of the players for one of the big schools is a graduate from my own Mayne High School. Futher, his not-common last name is really familiar and matches or is close to the last name of a bully that I went to school with. While the age difference wouldn’t suggest that they are brothers, my classmate was extremely talented and could have made it a lot further if he weren’t so short.

In regards to a previous post, Peter commented:

Getting back to the original issue, one thing to keep in mind is that changing your behavior/appearance/whatever to eliminate undesirable characteristics might not do much in terms of attracting women so long as you’re in the same social environment. For example, if an overweight guy manages to lose a lot of weight his dating prospects may not really improve among the women who knew him when he was fat, as they’ll still think of him as the fat guy.

It can actually be more complicated than that sometimes.

One thing that heavy guys see a fair amount of that gives them hope is older married couples with a heavy guy and a slender wife. What they often don’t realize is that when they first got married, it’s often the case that he was in better shape. Whenever that’s not the case, though, in almost every single instance that I’ve known it to occur, the guy was at least in better shape before they met. That’s the kind of thing that when you think about it shouldn’t matter, yet it seems to and when you think about it, it makes a certain amount of sense.

Take a guy that was morbidly obese from ages 5 to 25 but lost it all by 30, more often than not you’re looking at a guy that is less successful with women than a guy that was in good shape from 5-25 that let himself go and became overweight by 30.

A guy that has been overweight for most of his life will often think of himself as such after he’s lost the weight. Even if he notices some improvement, instinctually he will think that women see him as they have seen him for most of his life. He’s less likely to ask girls out and even when he does, he is up against a pretty big learning curve never having been successful before. Once I learned to shower regularly and lost 70 pounds or so (and gained two inches in height) in high school, I was still way behind a whole lot of my peers. I didn’t know how to talk to girls, didn’t know how to ask them out, and didn’t know the 100,000 ways I could accidentally repel them.

That’s not to say that losing the weight didn’t make a difference. It did. But it didn’t make as much difference as one might expect. I was still the same awkward kid, just in a smaller frame. Eventually I got caught up somewhat on the socialities of girls and women and I began to improve considerably… though I was still behind a whole lot of my peers. Then, even when a fair amount of the weight came back on, the improvements actually stuck regardless of the fact that I was heavier than I needed to be.

It’s kind of depressing to think about it. It’s actually something of a demotivator when it comes to trying to get into shape a little later in life. If I were told at 15 that losing the weight would still leave me behind my peers, I might not have lost it. I’m certainly glad that I did, of course, but sometimes to lose weight you’ll have to think that it’ll make all the difference in the world. Particularly if you’re losing it for social rather than health reasons.

The same is often true for women. The one formerly fat girl that I dated was half-crazy with insecurity. I know a couple guys that managed to marry quite well for themselves (in the appearance department) because the girl they married used to have a serious weight problem.

And as mentioned at the top of this post, the inverse is also often in effect. Girls I know that started gaining weight well after college often project a confidence and social adeptness that helps guys overlook the excess baggage. The fat former frat boys that I know managed to marry some real hot women.

My family is close to another family named the Lamonts that was raised in a quite healthy household. No soft drinks around, little or no chocolate, all four food groups at every meal, no fast food, and so on. Once the girls left the house, though, they all started putting on the Freshman Fifteen and beyond. Some lost the weight, one didn’t until very recently. I remember thinking to myself that one can really go overboard with raising health-conscious kids because they can rebel as soon as they leave the house. As I get older, I see that to matter less and less. The fact that they were thin and attractive in high school mattered more than I would have expected.

My mother married for the first time in Carolina. Her husband was a classmate at Carolina State University studying to be an aeronautical engineer. As was not uncommonly the case, after they got married she quit her job and supported him through school.

Their marriage was a difficult one from the get-go because of her husband’s alcohol problems. When Mom proposed that they move to California, she talked of “new beginnings.” In fact, she wanted to get further away from her family because that would make leaving him a lot easier from a social standpoint.

They divorced. Mom regretted a lot about that marriage, but one of her biggest regrets was how he got out of it with a masters degree in engineering while she was still a lowly secretary. She had no real career ambitions and hated working, so it irked her all the more that she had to spend so much time clock-punching. Worse, because he was too much of a drunk to hold on to a job, couldn’t even get alimony out of the arrangement.

She met my father while they both worked for McClellan Forrester, a defense contractor. She said early on that if there was one thing that she would never do again, it was pay to send another husband through school. Dad was perfectly fine with that because he didn’t have any aspirations of going to graduate school.

Then California A&M University came calling. They were starting a new military economics major that was available only to folks with engineering degrees. Because he had experience in the defense industry, they would cut him slack and he could do something else (I don’t remember what) in lieu of a thesis. Dad was tired of working on fighter planes and was looking to get into administration and this was his golden opportunity.

He talked to McClellan-Forrester about their tuition reimbursement program. As luck would have it, they’d just discontinued it. Not only had they just discontinued it, they were asking employees to back-pay previous reimbursements that they’ve gotten. There was no legal way for McClellan-Forrester to do this, but all they had to do was lay out the threat of laying terminating their employment.

McClellan-Forrester was in a position of great power at the time. They were a defense contractor and their employees were exempt from the draft. Any employee that happened to lose their jobs that happened to be the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) age was likely not going to be unemployed in the United States for very long. The few coworkers that Dad knew that had tuition reimbursements were scrambling to find the money to give back to their employer in order to stay on their good side.

With hat in hand, Dad came home and explained the situation to Mom. he refused to ask her to support him through school, but it was pretty obvious what he was getting at. She agreed and because he was getting a degree in a military-related field, Dad remained exempt from the draft.

After Dad got his degree he got a job with the Department of Defense almost immediately. The DoD knew just as well as MF that they were in a position of power, so they only agreed to pay him as much as they would if he hadn’t gotten the extra degree. It was still worth going back to school, though, because at this point things were desperate enough that you needed a masters degree to get a bachelors degree job.

Mom was able to milk Dad’s guilt for years. As soon as he got his job with the government, she was able to quit work and be a full-time housewife in a house with no kids. The way she saw it, they both got a pretty sweet gig.

I spent this past weekend in Delosa with my folks. Dad had found a few pictures that he was anxious to show me. Most of them were pictures of my ex-girlfriend Julie and I, but a few were of me and another girl named Andrea Carmine. “When were these taken?” I asked Dad.

“I don’t know. There are notes on the back. How’s she doing, anyway?”

Sure enough, on the back of each of the pictures were notes and commentary. “Pretending not to notice that a fake waterfall was fake sure was fun!!” “I call this picture The Giant and the Dwarf because you’re a giant and I’m a dwarf!!” “If vampires can’t have their picture taken, are you a vampire when you’re smiling because you never have your picture taken when you’re smiling!!” She always had to explain every joke that swept through her head.

If I were to have made a list of everything that I could have wanted in a girlfriend, she would have met nearly every bullet point. She had the figure that I craved at the time. She had nice, straight blond hair. She rarely wore jewelry or make-up. She was a spark-plug of energy. She was extremely easy to talk to and had a way of making me open up and smiling. There was nothing in the way of scars, excess weight, obvious disfigurements, or nail polish. My parents loved her. There was just one thing…

Andrea was a freshman when I was a sophomore and we met in theater class. I’d developed something of a crush on her friend Tanya. As I sometimes tried to do when I developed a crush from afar, I made friends with one of her friends and tried to meet her that way. I called it “pivoting”. It was the closest thing that I had to a tactic at the time and it was bolstered by the fact that I seemed to be attracted to shy girls that seemed to have at least one outgoing friend.

One of the stranger things about it all is that prior to putting my plan into action, I never once considered simply grabbing at the shorter-hung fruit… the more accessible one. I saw Andrea as nothing more than a means to an end.

Once everything was in motion, nothing worked out quite like I thought it would. I discovered that not only was Andrea Tanya’s only real friend in the class, but she just about dominated her friends. It was difficult to talk to Tanya without Andrea turning the conversation away from Tanya and back on to me or on to herself. Tanya didn’t seem to mind since she was a pretty quiet person, but it thwarted my plans.

Also thwarting my plan was that Andrea and I became really good friends really quickly. Within a short period of time, Tanya was being frozen out altogether as Andrea and I bonded. Tanya was the ultimate goal, but not only did Andrea steer conversation away from Tanya and I, I enjoyed talking to Andrea a lot more than I enjoyed talking to Tanya. I also enjoyed simply having a female friend where there was nothing else involved. She was teaching me that females are just people, too.

Classmates, who didn’t like either me or Andrea, took notice of the two of us and decided that we should be a couple and goaded the two of us. It seemed less like “you two would make a cute couple” and more like “you two losers belong together”. The class was dominated by jocks and cheerleaders. It escalated when Andrea and I did an emotional duet where she had aborted my kid and we were putting the pieces back together. Our chemistry together was great and even people that didn’t seem to loathe us started asking questions.

Then for the next round of duets I got to work with Tanya. It’s a long story, but the end result was that it became perfectly clear that Tanya was not interested in me and that was fine because after working with her I no longer liked her on any level. By that time there was a fourth person in our group named Laren. Laren always had an acerbic tongue, a cute way of rolling her eyes at anything and everything that lacked sufficient cynicism, and bug spray that she put in her hair. She was just crazy enough that I had begun to dig her a lot. I eventually did ask her out. She declined and extricated herself from our little grouplet.

Since I didn’t want to talk to Tanya anymore and Laren was gone, it was just Andrea and I again. Our friendship lasted up until my senior year when I went off to college, but nothing else ever happened. The strangest thing wasn’t that nothing happened, but rather that despite all the talk of those around us and despite how close we were it took her dating my friend before I even asked myself why that was. For a little horndog like myself, that was very unusual. I’d either want to be with someone or there’d be some very specific reason why I wouldn’t.

Clint and I discussed the matter. Though he got to know her a little bit as well through me, he’d never thought about making a move, either. As I thought about it, the thought of kissing her made my stomach feel quite queasy. I couldn’t figure out why, though, since she met all those all-important criteria. “Something about her face,” Clint noted. I nodded in agreement.

We took a picture of her that I had with me and started blocking out portions of her face. Mouth? No. Hair? No. Eyes? Holy moley… it was totally her eyes. Even then I couldn’t explain what exactly was wrong with her eyes. They were not of any unusual color or shape. The only unusual thing about them was that they almost had a Japanese double-eyelid quality about them, but I didn’t have any issues with Asian girls.

As I looked at the pictures over this past weekend, I asked myself “What is it about those eyes?”

All these years later, I still don’t have an answer.

The Observer:

In a book to be published tomorrow, Tim Gill, a former government adviser who led a major review into children’s play, argues that mollycoddling children by labelling ‘unpleasant behaviour’ as bullying is stopping them from building the skills they need to protect themselves. ‘I have spoken to teachers and educational psychologists who say that parents and children are labelling as bullying what are actually minor fallings-out,’ said Gill, the former director of the then Children’s Play Council, who is currently advising the Conservative Party’s childhood review.

‘Children are not always nice to each other, but people are not always nice to each other. The world is not like that. One of the things in danger of being lost is children spending time with other children out of sight of adults; growing a sense of consequence for their actions without someone leaping in,’ he told The Observer

Gill related an incident in which his own daughter complained that she was being bullied after three boys teased her about a game she was playing in the park. ‘What struck me was the use of the word bullying to describe that,’ he said. ‘Bullying is where the victimisation is sustained and there is a power imbalance. I do not mean we should allow unbridled cruelty, just that one option is asking, “Can you sort it out yourself?” ‘

I think a lot of what Gill has to say makes a lot of sense, but no one is going to tell me that bullying among kids is too aggressively monitored. One of the scariest things about middle school was the knowledge that the school did not have our back. That meant that even verbal taunting was not a threat free of the fear of physical harm. It informed Bob Vis’s libertarian views by giving him a distrust for institutions and it lead me to help people to cheat to barter for my protection. Energy that should have been devoted to learning and productive socializing was instead spent in crisis management making sure that people would not take my stuff or physically assault me. And these were not “lessons in life” that would help me later on because they were problems particular to the situation. They likely hurt my social development more than helped it. Same with Bob.

The notion that kids can “sort it out amongst themselves” assumes two individuals that want to sort it out. A majority of the time this really is not the case. The taunting and harassment is not means to an end… it is the end in itself. Or in the alternative it is the means to dominance, which really can’t be accomplished any other way.

I don’t know if bullying is worse now than it was 30 years ago or better. On one hand, there was the decision made in education circles to start deciding that bullies are misunderstood rather than thugs so they should be spared the rod and there is a general aversion to punishment (and the lawsuits that sometimes follow). On the other hand, there are institutional improvements such as alternative schools, the “boys will be boys” mentality has been replaced, drugs are sometimes used to sedate bullies, and I think that ever since Columbine there has been an effort to taking bullying more seriously.

So I don’t know whether things are better or worse than they used to be and how things rated when I was going to school. I also don’t have any clear answers as to what administrators ought to do. But Gill seems to yearn for the day when kids learned to suck it up and be tough and that is a dangerous attitude. That which does not kill you will sometimes will leave you weaker rather than stronger for it. Kids need to spend more time in school learning and less time dodging their classmates.

When I made the decision to go to Southern Tech University instead of the more conventional choice of the University of Delosa, I knew that one of the things I was missing out on Big Time College Football. I visited by brothers periodically in Ephesus almost always timed for a good college football games. Going to the annual showdowns between Delosa and the University of Louisiana was an annual tradition. Southern Tech didn’t have that. They had a team that had been great in the past but was struggling by the time I had gotten there. I was never a big follower of high school football, so despite the fun of going to Delosa Crimson Panther games, I didn’t figure that I was missing out on much.

By the time I graduated from college, I had gone to two or three games. The Southern Tech Wolf Pack had fallen on particularly hard times. They were rarely of anything approaching national championship caliber, but even less lofty goals like a conference championship or even a bowl game seemed out of reach. Any time we were playing a teach I had heard of we got trounced and when we played competitively it was against teams that one could take little pride in defeating. And while my brothers were surrounded by football fanatics, few of my friends cared.

Curiously, it was only after I left that I started following college sports more generally and the Wolf Pack specifically. Some of it is that the school was suddenly fielding decent and wildly entertaining teams. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost, but rarely were they boring.

I find that I am not alone in this. One guy that I knew passingly in college, Al Cavanaugh, found me on a blog I used to write. Since then we’ve been in correspondence and we would make a point of going to at least one or two football and basketball games a year. Al went to the University of Delosa Law School and is a Red Panthers fan for the most part, but like me he has taken an interest in Wolf Pack sports. Being that he lives in Colosse, the Wolf Pack games are much easier (not to mention cheaper) to attend. An advantage to following the football team of a non-football school is that while you miss out on the high-charged atmosphere of 80,000 screaming fans, you don’t have to deal with the headaches of being in a stadium with 80,000 screaming fans.

BusinessWeek’s Vivek Wadhwa thinks that fears that we’re falling behind in the sciences are misplaced. First a snide observation, but I’ll follow it up with some actual thoughts:

The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, “In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.” President George W. Bush addressed the issue in his 2006 State of the Union address. “We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations,” he said.

You ever get the sense that for a lot of people (myself included, I must admit) it’s not so much about their being too few science/math majors but rather there being too many liberal arts majors? I half consider talk like this to be the public policy equivalent of “Quit your band, cut your hair, and get a real job!”

So, there isn’t a lack of interest in science and engineering in the U.S., or a deficiency in the supply of engineers. However, there may sometimes be short-term shortages of engineers with specific technical skills in certain industry segments or in various parts of the country. The National Science Foundation data show that of the students who graduated from 1993 to 2001, 20% of the bachelor’s holders went on to complete master’s degrees in fields other than science and engineering and an additional 45% were working in other fields. Of those who completed master’s degrees, 7% continued their education and 31% were working in fields other than science and engineering.

There isn’t a problem with the capability of U.S. children. Even if there were a deficiency in math and science education, there are so many graduates today that there would be enough who are above average and fully qualified for the relatively small number of science and engineering jobs. Science and engineering graduates just don’t see enough opportunity in these professions to continue further study or to take employment.

This confirms my biases, so it absolutely must be true. Perhaps it’s because of the type of people I hang out with and maybe where I went to school, but I see a whole lot of mathematical, scientific, and engineering talent being underutilized. At the least, I see a whole lot more of that than I see companies unable to staff their payroll.

I think that part of the issue is big companies complaining that they don’t have the very specific skills that they need, rather than that their aren’t enough math people out there. The cause of this is not too many people majoring in Comparative Folk Dancing (though too many are) but rather the fluctuation in demand. My brother majored in aeronautical engineering despite being warned by everybody not to because there was such a surplus. By the time he graduated enough of his peers had listened that he was quite in demand… and a new generation of future engineers were being told to start majoring in aeronautical engineering… and round and round we go.

Some of this is unavoidable. Who knows what we’ll need five years from now? Things are always, always, always changing. But some of it is the expectation on the part of employers that they get their employees already trained and ready to start on the first day. For a variety of reasons (not all unreasonable) they don’t want to train. In some cases, they’d rather import talent from abroad that already knows exactly what they need to know.

I have many not-very-nice things to say about my former employer Bregna, but one of the things that they did that I really respected was that they were looking for good people (as they defined it, anyhow) rather than people that had all the right skills. It helped that they primarily used an obsolete programming language and that this was determined in part by necessity, but even so they had the right idea. They’re not requesting people have just the right experience with Fortran… they’re requesting that people have demonstrated that they have the ability to learn it.

As someone with a lot of experience in a lot of different areas but always falling short of the “__ years experience required in _______” threshold, this is an issue of importance to me. I’m biased, but I think that employees like me are great. I’m a utility infielder with the demonstrated ability to learn just about anything given the time. But alas, people like me (even ones that are smarter, more ambitious, and more reliable) are frequently overlooked.

I wish that undergraduate majors were a lot more broad than they are. In my mind, graduate school ought to be the area for specialization. This is something that I think the medical field does right. Clancy came out of medical school with a broad education and from that she chose her specialization (which turned out to be broad, too, but by her own choice).

Like most youngsters, when I was a little kid I wanted to be a big kid. Big kids at St. Jude’s Episcopal School had Ms. Mencker as their teacher. She taught kindergarten at a school that only went up to kindergarten, so her students were just as big as big kids could be. Except my brothers, who were really big kids of course but that escaped my attention because they wanted to be even bigger kids. So they weren’t really big kids in my mind, even though they were bigger than the big kids in Ms. Mencker’s class. Cut me some slack, my mind was only capable of managing pre-school thoughts at the time.

Whenever I brought it up, they’d just say “you will in time” or somesuch, they just didn’t get it. So I found another way of telling Mom that I wanted to be a big kid: I told her that I wanted to be in Ms. Mencker’s class. My logic was that Mom would give me what I wanted since it didn’t cost money and then I would magically be a bigger kid. I’d found a loophole in the system! Unfortunately, Mom denied my request but did file it away for future use.

When I was about ready for kindergarten, my teachers privately expressed concern with my parents that I was behind the other students. I would stare blankly when I was supposed to be finger painting, I ate inordinate amounts of glue, and other stuff like that. They wanted to hold me back a year and figured that the best way to do this would be for me to attend kindergarten at St. Jude’s (and perhaps by coincidence, pay an extra year of tuition) and then attend it again at West Oak Elementary, the local public school.

When I asked how come I was not going to West Oak like everyone else, Mom said that she was granting me my wish: I was going to get Ms. Mencker just like I had asked.

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When I was in the second grade, standardized testing was becoming all the rage. At the time, Delosa elementary students were taking the California Achievement Test Test (The word “Test” being in there twice because it was called the CAT Test). Ms. Nolan, the counselor at West Oak Elementary was concerned because I was now staring off into the distance during mathematic lessons and still eating more glue than my teachers would prefer.

So Ms. Nolan called my mother in for a conference and outlined her concerns. She said that she was worried that my self-esteem would be hurt by failing the test and that I should refrain from taking it. It would also go in my Permanent Record, which was bad. And perhaps by coincidence, West Oak Elementary would look better on the standardized test scores, though I’m not sure that she was very upfront about that.

Mom said she would take it into consideration and looked further into it. As it turned out, the deferment Mom was being asked to sign would have put me in a special group that would have required my taking special instruction classes for the rest of my tenure at West Oak Elementary. If I deferred from taking the class a second time, I would be put in a special category that would, at the completion of my 12th grade year I wouldn’t receive a diploma but would instead get a “Certification of Attendance” which is more like a GED. So if I didn’t take it in the second grade and the fourth grade, or even if I didn’t take it in the second grade and was sick that week in the 10th grade, I would likely have to start my college career out at the local community college.

When Mom brought this to the attention of Ms. Nolan, Ms. Nolan said that this was true but that it was probably for the best. Quite bluntly, Mom said that deferment was basically for the mentally handicapped kids and I was not a handicapped kid. Nolan condescendingly responded that of course I was not stupid and of course I was a very talented and smart young man, but that it would be best if I were put with other kids that were uniquely smart and talented like I was. In short, she was saying that I was “short bus special” and Mom needed to come to terms with that. Mom declined, I took the test, and as it turned out my self-esteem was not hurt because my Permanent Record was so secret that even Mom and I couldn’t find out about it (this law was changed shortly afterwards and my folks were given access to all of my later standardized tests).

—-

Flash forward about five years or so and Delosa no longer takes the CAT Test but has now switched to something called the Delosa Assessment of Knowledge (DAK). Students who didn’t pass the DAK were relegated to remedial reading in the 8th grade while other students got to opt out of reading and take an elective. I failed the DAK and ended up in a class with hoodlums, misfits, and the folks I would have gotten to know at West Oaks Elementary had Mom not opted for me to take the CAT Test.

Mom was quite distressed when the reading teacher asked for a student-teacher conference. I’d failed the DAK and she was probably going to ask that I not take it the next go-around. Mom got all of her evidence in order and went to see Ms. Cordoza. Turned out it was quite the opposite. Despite reading being my worst subject, I was blowing the other kids out of the water. In fact, I was positively bored and was drawing and writing comic books, which in turn was distracting the other students. Whereas other teachers were bothered by my looking blankly out into space, Cordoza apparently would have liked me to do more of it. Cordoza asked if she could have me teach other students or, if there wasn’t anything I could do for that, go play around in the computer lab across the hall.

Cordoza could not believe that I had failed the DAK and actually looked up my test scores, which were apparently just shy of passing. At the end of that year I took the DAK again… and failed it again.

—

Over eight years later, I graduated from Southern Tech University with honors. When I got the piece of paper, Mom asked if she could borrow it to have it framed. She did frame it for me, for which I am grateful. What she also did was photocopy it and send a copy of it to Ms. Nolan, for which I am also grateful.

I am not a particularly heavy drinker. Having grown up with a mother that sometimes veered into borderline alcoholism, the notion of being in a perpetual drunk state scares the living crap out of me. Further, I don’t really like the taste of any alcoholic drink except maybe sissy wine coolers. So by and large I consider my alcohol-drinking habits to be pretty normal. When it comes to people that I’ve lived with, however, it’s very abnormal. All three of my college roommates Hubert, Dennis, and Saresh were non-drinkers. My post-college roommates Karl and Dennis (same guy) were non-drinkers. My wife? Non-drinker.

I respect non-drinkers on the whole. Society would be so much better off if there were more of them. But as the drinker in a crowd of non-drinkers or in mixed company, it can be decidedly inconvenient.

My friends Kyle and Clint, my college roommate Hubert, and I were all at one point part of a small little production company. We were contemplating special features on a DVD and decided that it might be funny if we all got piss drunk and filmed ourselves. We’d make it an easter egg or something. Kyle, Clint, and I were drinkers, but Hubert was not. Hugh wanted to be included, though, and this presented a bit of a problem. He wanted to pretend to be drunk, which we were all quite unsure about.

I don’t remember a whole lot from that night. One of the things that I do remember, however, was when I spontaneously decided that I would become a spokesman for Delosa’s Finest Beer. I held the bottle of DFB in my hand and said, “Delosa’s Finest… great f***ing beer!!” Then Clint did the same thing. Hubert wanted to join in, but I said, in front of the camera, “You can’t, man, you don’t drink!!!!” That kinda teed him off because he was pretending to be a drinker. Kyle then got in front of the camera and we did a “great f***ing beer!!” together. A couple minutes later Hubert stole the camera and did his own rendition of my Shakespearesque line. His faux-stumbling looked far too deliberate. His fake-slur was awful. Dead silence. Then, in the back behind the camera you can hear Clint exclaim, “Oh my god, he killed our ad campaign!” That brought back the laughter and we commenced acting stupid in a non-deliberate, believable manner. Except Hubert, who started to pout.

All of the material was likely entirely unusable, but we wanted the ad campaign portion of it. Unfortunately, Hubert said that the tape had accidentally been taped over so we never got to see it.

In another case involving Hubert, Dennis, and Karl, we came up with this game to play a drinking game with F-Zero, a challenging and unforgiving Nintendo game. The thing about F-Zero was that unlike other racing games, one of the challenges was just to survive the course. There were 100,000 ways to fall off the track or run out of energy if you were sober. The idea was that we would make a reverse-drinking game out of it. In most drinking games the loser has to chug, but in this case the winner would. That would make it easier for someone else to win next time and they would drink. By the end everyone is drunk and going two miles an hour try desperately not to veer off the track.

The entire game, though, requires that everyone drink. Hugh absolutely failed to understand this and kept trying to come up with ways that he could play (“I’ll drink Diet Coke instead!”). Dennis, meanwhile, accused us of rigging the rules just to exclude him. Karl said he would play and drink, but we were a bit cautious about serving him the first alcohol he’d ever had in his life when we didn’t know if a sober person would be there if he had a reaction. Unfortunately, drunken F-Zero was basically banned from the dorm because of all the ill-will. Dave, Clint, and I played it one New Years. I played it on a couple other occasions with a girl that I was sorta dating, though it wasn’t as fun with two people, and every now and again some of us would have access to the dorm when no one else was there and we’d play. The second Hugh came in, though, one of us would dart (stumble) to the TV and turn it off so he would think that we were just drinking rather than playing some sort of game that he would have to be left out of.

Of course, having non-drinkers can be awfully handy at times. Before he turned 21, Kyle was our constant designated driver. When he turned 21, he celebrated by we mourned.