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Or, as the case may be, if you were party to the group of ne’er-do-wells and reprobates standing in a group along the Lakeshore Park jogging trail that laughed and pointed at me as I jogged past (I suspect for reason of my having tucked my t-shirt into my shorts in a particularly dorky, unsporting way), then I shall explain to you the reason for my particular manner of dress: it is in accordance with sage advice I received from a girl named Tanya, or Tonya (spelled something like that) that I have followed religiously ever since receiving it. This is the advice I received during the two week “Running Unit” in 7th grade gym glass. By way of necessary background information, during my middle school years running was not my forte. In fact, I was probably the slowest runner in the 7th grade. The two week “Running Unit” consisted of the class repeatedly running the mile for time, and in case you’ve never had the experience, coming in last every time is an acutely embarrassing experience. But running the mile wasn’t just bad at the finish line, by then I‘d be too addled by exertion and oxygen shortage to fully appreciate the horror of my situation. The worst part of running the mile occurred during the first one hundred yards or so, as I watched the glitter-speckled Care Bear decal ironed onto the back of the gym shirt belonging to the slowest girl in class pull steadily ahead of me, and finding, not acceptance, but only scorn in the eyes of Hugs-a-lot Bear as I realized that I would never in a million years catch her - there is no such heart-sinking experience as that in all the world. I believe that on this particular day I ran somewhere around an eighteen minute mile. In fact, I was so slow that the gym teacher forgot I was even running, and by the time I crawled my flushed, sweating body across the finish line, the class had already begun to head back to the locker rooms, crowded in a group around the gym teacher. Somebody pointed out my labored progress, however, and the gym teacher couldn’t refrain from calling out my time for the benefit of all the other students. “18 minutes, 14 seconds!” or something like that, then they all turned and continued walking toward the locker rooms. I trailed behind. Yeah, pretty embarrassing, but then Tanya broke out of the group and waited for me. At the time, I expected derision from her, but it turns out that she had some heart-felt and helpful advice to share with me. “Don’t wear your t-shirt down over your butt like that,” she told me, “because it makes you look like a girl.” Then I tucked my shirt in and we walked together to the locker-rooms area in a friendly silence. I’m not exactly sure if this is entirely true, especially nowadays because, I mean, I’m not really even shaped like a girl. And I display other secondary sexual characteristics that, no matter how feminine wearing a shirt untucked over my butt could be, should allow people to readily characterize me as a male. Regardless, I’ve always valued the friendship that burgeoned between Tanya and myself and so I continue to follow her advice. I never hung out with Tanya after school or anything, or even talked to her between classes, but I think her last name started with an “M” or something because we were usually seated next to each other in the classes that we shared. I remember that she used to turn around in her chair and tell me that she was going to be president of the United States. I don’t remember how we’d get onto the topic, but she said it a couple of times. I always agreed with her, after all, she had a lot of confidence and had gone out of her way to solve one of my problems: knowing that I did not look like a girl, so long as I did not wear a t-shirt over my butt, had been somewhat of a boon to my faltering middle school self-confidence. I don’t think that she fit in very well at school either, although for different reasons than I. I don’t think that Tanya had the opportunity of standard middle-class suburban advantages, (although I didn’t know how to recognize these things at the time) and she was certainly not as sheltered. I remember that during the two week “Swimming Unit,” which consisted mostly of the students treading water in a long line down the side of the pool, one hand on the gutter; as I kicked down in the dark warm chlorine mist next to her (again, the alphabetical thing) some other girls farther down the line started making up juvenile, patty-cake like poems about boys and their newly-discovered affinity for them. Tanya attempted to participate by insisting that they add lyrics containing carnival-strength sexual vulgarities that totally shocked the other girls. Her contribution was not appreciated. It didn’t escape anyone’s attention that Tanya was out-of-place among the suburban milk-calves bred to fill office cubicles with the same consistency as an auto-line or chain store-sold household goods. Tanya was like… like, one of those burros that roam wild on government land, facing all the hazards of the wilderness, like coyotes and poachers and an inconsistent food supply - the burros that the government is always trying to sell for fifty bucks, but because the burros are all wild there’s a danger that people will re-sell them for dog food because the wild burros won‘t submit to the mundane burro tasks that humans usually expect of them (as related to Tanya, the analogy may or may not apply all the way though). What’s worse, her wild burro presence made the milk-calves realize they were milk-calves, and who wants to be a milk-calf? It was in response to this threat that she unintentionally posed, I believe, that somebody fabricated that rumor about her doing something (an accusation I won’t even dignify by repeating here) in American Studies (a class that I didn’t share with her) that got her kicked out of class. One morning Tanya came to class and was slow to turn around and talk to me. When she did, she first talked with her lips over her teeth. Eventually she tired of this and showed me the huge gap in her teeth. She explained that the previous evening her boyfriend and father had gotten liquored up (I’m not sure if together or separately) and were about to start fighting out on the front yard of her father’s house. She ran out to break up the fight just as her father swung a drunken blind haymaker. His fist came out of Tanya’s mouth with shards of front teeth embedded in the knuckle. She made the point of telling me that she didn’t cry when it happened, toughness being really important to her, but she also confessed to me that she really felt self-conscious about the way she looked. She asked me if she looked bad. I said no, but then suggested that she could probably just go home until she could see the dentist, and that for this sort of thing, a dentist would probably get her in sometime during that day. Then she looked at me like I didn’t get it, which I suppose I didn’t - her family moved again and she changed schools a few years later and she still had that gap in her teeth. It was really tragic, because the broken teeth changed her outward personality and stifled some of the outsider’s confidence that I had first admired about her. Maybe she figured she wouldn’t be able to ever make a serious run at the presidency with only 0.5 front teeth. Someday though I hope she still takes a shot at it. I’ll keep my promise and vote for her. The last time I saw her was a few years after she changed schools. I guess she hadn’t moved too far, because I saw her in line at a different school building where all the students of a certain age had to report for a test or a physical or something like some sort of silly and entirely pointless King Herrod-style public school census. She recognized me and grabbed my arm and said, “Hey, aren’t you that kid Brian Morris?” I said that I was and she responded, “I remember you!” I told her that I remembered her also. I’m way better at running now. I run all the time. I just needed some time to get used to exercising my body in a non-gym class environment, sans some judgmental asshole in short, tight, polyester shorts blowing a whistle in my ear repeatedly and shouting about how bad at sports I was. (Yes, I am blaming public school physical education for the sedentary lifestyle I lived in my youth, which I was reviled for among the school authority figures of the day and public health programs, and I have sundry powerful and convincing reasons establishing this causal relationship that I will explain to you, my gentle reader, another day). Regardless, in 7th grade, running just wasn’t my thing, I was more into tropical fish, and D&D, you know, healthy, cool stuff like that - and these are the kind of things you don’t even need legs for, you can do them just as easily in a patented Hover-Round mobility device, which you may qualify under Medicaid to receive with absolutely no cost to you. Brian 3:56 PM Comments: Post a Comment

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House of Noh!

Friday, August 13, 2004

If, by chance, you were wondering why I always tuck in my shirt unless, untucked, it doesn’t fall past mid-buttock level. Or, as the case may be, if you were party to the group of ne’er-do-wells and reprobates standing in a group along the Lakeshore Park jogging trail that laughed and pointed at me as I jogged past (I suspect for reason of my having tucked my t-shirt into my shorts in a particularly dorky, unsporting way), then I shall explain to you the reason for my particular manner of dress: it is in accordance with sage advice I received from a girl named Tanya, or Tonya (spelled something like that) that I have followed religiously ever since receiving it. This is the advice I received during the two week “Running Unit” in 7th grade gym glass. By way of necessary background information, during my middle school years running was not my forte. In fact, I was probably the slowest runner in the 7th grade. The two week “Running Unit” consisted of the class repeatedly running the mile for time, and in case you’ve never had the experience, coming in last every time is an acutely embarrassing experience. But running the mile wasn’t just bad at the finish line, by then I‘d be too addled by exertion and oxygen shortage to fully appreciate the horror of my situation. The worst part of running the mile occurred during the first one hundred yards or so, as I watched the glitter-speckled Care Bear decal ironed onto the back of the gym shirt belonging to the slowest girl in class pull steadily ahead of me, and finding, not acceptance, but only scorn in the eyes of Hugs-a-lot Bear as I realized that I would never in a million years catch her - there is no such heart-sinking experience as that in all the world. I believe that on this particular day I ran somewhere around an eighteen minute mile. In fact, I was so slow that the gym teacher forgot I was even running, and by the time I crawled my flushed, sweating body across the finish line, the class had already begun to head back to the locker rooms, crowded in a group around the gym teacher. Somebody pointed out my labored progress, however, and the gym teacher couldn’t refrain from calling out my time for the benefit of all the other students. “18 minutes, 14 seconds!” or something like that, then they all turned and continued walking toward the locker rooms. I trailed behind. Yeah, pretty embarrassing, but then Tanya broke out of the group and waited for me. At the time, I expected derision from her, but it turns out that she had some heart-felt and helpful advice to share with me. “Don’t wear your t-shirt down over your butt like that,” she told me, “because it makes you look like a girl.” Then I tucked my shirt in and we walked together to the locker-rooms area in a friendly silence. I’m not exactly sure if this is entirely true, especially nowadays because, I mean, I’m not really even shaped like a girl. And I display other secondary sexual characteristics that, no matter how feminine wearing a shirt untucked over my butt could be, should allow people to readily characterize me as a male. Regardless, I’ve always valued the friendship that burgeoned between Tanya and myself and so I continue to follow her advice. I never hung out with Tanya after school or anything, or even talked to her between classes, but I think her last name started with an “M” or something because we were usually seated next to each other in the classes that we shared. I remember that she used to turn around in her chair and tell me that she was going to be president of the United States. I don’t remember how we’d get onto the topic, but she said it a couple of times. I always agreed with her, after all, she had a lot of confidence and had gone out of her way to solve one of my problems: knowing that I did not look like a girl, so long as I did not wear a t-shirt over my butt, had been somewhat of a boon to my faltering middle school self-confidence. I don’t think that she fit in very well at school either, although for different reasons than I. I don’t think that Tanya had the opportunity of standard middle-class suburban advantages, (although I didn’t know how to recognize these things at the time) and she was certainly not as sheltered. I remember that during the two week “Swimming Unit,” which consisted mostly of the students treading water in a long line down the side of the pool, one hand on the gutter; as I kicked down in the dark warm chlorine mist next to her (again, the alphabetical thing) some other girls farther down the line started making up juvenile, patty-cake like poems about boys and their newly-discovered affinity for them. Tanya attempted to participate by insisting that they add lyrics containing carnival-strength sexual vulgarities that totally shocked the other girls. Her contribution was not appreciated. It didn’t escape anyone’s attention that Tanya was out-of-place among the suburban milk-calves bred to fill office cubicles with the same consistency as an auto-line or chain store-sold household goods. Tanya was like… like, one of those burros that roam wild on government land, facing all the hazards of the wilderness, like coyotes and poachers and an inconsistent food supply - the burros that the government is always trying to sell for fifty bucks, but because the burros are all wild there’s a danger that people will re-sell them for dog food because the wild burros won‘t submit to the mundane burro tasks that humans usually expect of them (as related to Tanya, the analogy may or may not apply all the way though). What’s worse, her wild burro presence made the milk-calves realize they were milk-calves, and who wants to be a milk-calf? It was in response to this threat that she unintentionally posed, I believe, that somebody fabricated that rumor about her doing something (an accusation I won’t even dignify by repeating here) in American Studies (a class that I didn’t share with her) that got her kicked out of class. One morning Tanya came to class and was slow to turn around and talk to me. When she did, she first talked with her lips over her teeth. Eventually she tired of this and showed me the huge gap in her teeth. She explained that the previous evening her boyfriend and father had gotten liquored up (I’m not sure if together or separately) and were about to start fighting out on the front yard of her father’s house. She ran out to break up the fight just as her father swung a drunken blind haymaker. His fist came out of Tanya’s mouth with shards of front teeth embedded in the knuckle. She made the point of telling me that she didn’t cry when it happened, toughness being really important to her, but she also confessed to me that she really felt self-conscious about the way she looked. She asked me if she looked bad. I said no, but then suggested that she could probably just go home until she could see the dentist, and that for this sort of thing, a dentist would probably get her in sometime during that day. Then she looked at me like I didn’t get it, which I suppose I didn’t - her family moved again and she changed schools a few years later and she still had that gap in her teeth. It was really tragic, because the broken teeth changed her outward personality and stifled some of the outsider’s confidence that I had first admired about her. Maybe she figured she wouldn’t be able to ever make a serious run at the presidency with only 0.5 front teeth. Someday though I hope she still takes a shot at it. I’ll keep my promise and vote for her. The last time I saw her was a few years after she changed schools. I guess she hadn’t moved too far, because I saw her in line at a different school building where all the students of a certain age had to report for a test or a physical or something like some sort of silly and entirely pointless King Herrod-style public school census. She recognized me and grabbed my arm and said, “Hey, aren’t you that kid Brian Morris?” I said that I was and she responded, “I remember you!” I told her that I remembered her also. I’m way better at running now. I run all the time. I just needed some time to get used to exercising my body in a non-gym class environment, sans some judgmental asshole in short, tight, polyester shorts blowing a whistle in my ear repeatedly and shouting about how bad at sports I was. (Yes, I am blaming public school physical education for the sedentary lifestyle I lived in my youth, which I was reviled for among the school authority figures of the day and public health programs, and I have sundry powerful and convincing reasons establishing this causal relationship that I will explain to you, my gentle reader, another day). Regardless, in 7th grade, running just wasn’t my thing, I was more into tropical fish, and D&D, you know, healthy, cool stuff like that - and these are the kind of things you don’t even need legs for, you can do them just as easily in a patented Hover-Round mobility device, which you may qualify under Medicaid to receive with absolutely no cost to you.

Brian 3:56 PM

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Friday, August 13, 2004