I love this kind of thing.

It never fails to get a laugh out of me if it’s witty enough.

I think it’s partly because I am words over pictures person and never like having to read supposedly international instructions in order to use something. So comedy like this is a tension breaker for me.

Rubber duck, you're the one...

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Yup, more navel gazing self analysis. I figure if I am going to feel down like this, might as well use it.

I think, on the whole, it is a good thing that I am beginning to realize in what ways I was not the easiest kid to get along with. Certainly, it would be easier to just go on believing I was a perfectly innocent and marvelous child who did absolutely nothing to deserve or even contribute to the bad things that happened to me and all my isolation and loneliness and so forth and so on. And a certain field of naive psychology might say I am better off not thinking about things which might make me sad like this.

But that’s simply not how I operate. Things are rarely black and white in life, and I am a firm believer that you are always better off understanding the full true picture, blemishes and all, rather than clinging to a cartoon image of your life which is nicer but riddled with cognitive dissonance because deep down, you know there is more to the story than that.

So with the clarity of hindsight, I can see that I was quite a handful for an adult to handle when I was a kid. I didn’t behave at all like other children my age, and if you tried to treat me like you would another kid that age, I would quite honestly take it as an insult, because to me, they were treating me like an idiot and that was a thing up with which I would not put.

I was thinking about this earlier in relation to why I never liked Mister Rogers. I like him now, and have enormous respect for the goodness and wisdom he taught children for so many years. But I didn’t like him at all as a kid. He reminded way too much of exactly the kind of adult that I couldn’t stand, the kind that talks slow and melodically and is super nice in a creepy kind of way and just did not behave like a normal person at all. Those people bothered me a lot more than, say, clowns. Clowns, I could at least grasp that they had a role, a job, something they were trying to do. The Mister Rogers type adults just freaked me out.

After all, my parents never treated me like that. Sure, they were gentle with me (mostly) and didn’t try to make me do calculus in my crib or anything, and my mother spoke to me sweetly, but not like that. Not in that weird fake slow motion placating way that I still, frankly, can’t stand. Treat kids like kids, but treat them with a little respect, you know what I mean?

So right off, as a kid, I was hard to deal with because whatever techniques an adult would normally use on a kid my age would be met with confusion, withdrawal, or even rudeness and sarcasm and contempt if it was intrusive enough. God, I had attitude.

And the more I think about it, the more I come back to the explanation that my preschool childhood simply did not prepare me for school. I only had one person to relate to most of the time, and that was my babysitter Betty. She could handle me. She was a tough no-nonsense working class gal from the other side of the tracks, and she did not take any crap from me. She had easily enough personality and will to handle anything I might dish out. That kept me in line (and kept me from being a brat, which given my IQ and attitude could easily have happened), but it did not prepare me for getting along with kids my age. And what do you know, I always got along better with adults, especially ones who were tough like Betty. My favorite teachers were often ones everyone else hated and thought were assholes or bitches.

But I needed that kind of resistance.

And the big thing is, I never went to kindergarten. When it was time for me to go, there were too many applicants, and I was ridiculously intelligent and could already read and so on, so they figured “Well, this kid doesn’t need the help!” and I did not get to go.

And they were right, I certainly didn’t need to learn my ABCs or anything of that sort. But I was in desperate need of social education, as it turns out. Who knows, in the more relaxed atmosphere of a kindergarten, with the right teachers who knew how to handle a little bundle of fire and sparks like I was, I might have found a way to get along with the other kids and found a niche, instead of being that fat kid nobody likes who thinks he is SO SMART my whole life.

I don’t blame myself for causing my own problems as a kid. Hey, I was just a kid, I didn’t know any better. The real blame goes on a system that simply did not know how to handle me and most of the time was perfectly content to just ignore me and concentrate on the kids who “needed more help”.

Turns out, I needed a lot of help. Just, not in the classroom. In the schoolyard.