I have more or less reached the end of Things What I Remember From High School.
To some extent that's not quite true. I have scattered odd memories left, like the time a group of us avoided a pep rally in favor of a "club meeting" wherein we watched Dr. Who -- which I didn't know about at the time, but I remember The Scarf. Or the time (technically junior high, and before my Star Trek obsession) a friend and I were teasing a mutual third friend about her devotion to The Hobbit and all things hobbity right down to their fuzzy feet, an incident I deeply regret -- not just because I came to adore hobbits myself, and all of Lord of the Rings, but because there is the sort of teasing that is friendly light-hearted poking between companions, and there is the sort of teasing that is mean-spirited and deeply painful, and we crossed from one to the other without noticing it. To whatever credit it gives us, we did notice once we had pushed her to the point of crying, and we apologised desperately because we hadn't meant it to injure at all, and she did forgive us, but the harm had been done.
(If I knew whether or not she remembers this incident as much as I do -- or even at all -- I would write her an additional letter of apology, because I understand things so much better, and because I regret not just crossing the line but teasing her at all. But I don't.)
I do also regret a moment when I could have stopped something that may have been more along the lines of mean-spirited teasing -- it was two fellow students at PROMYS teasing a third (possibly one of the counselors or junior counselors, so a few years older) about the sparseness of the beard that he was trying to grow. I remember speaking up enough to say that that sort of mockery wasn't cool, but they said it was all in good fun and they were friends, and the boy agreed -- to my memory not the sort of enthusiastic agreement that would indicate that he truly didn't mind it, but the mumbled "yeah what they said" that he might have been using to avoid further retaliation from them --and I believed them (all of them, not just the possibly-victim) let it go. But that is not as deep a regret as the first.
Luckily I do not remember being much in the way of a victim of any sort of bullying or harassment, beyond the junior high shenanigans I mentioned. There may have been some that I was oblivious to, or have blocked out. There definitely was earlier, in early elementary school -- I remember some name-based teasing, and some teasing based on how I responded to being teased, and I remember vividly that "Don't react and they'll get bored and move on" advice often given to the victims of such harassment is neither accurate -- bullies will as often escalate rather than finding a new target -- nor helpful, as it is extremely hard not to react emotionally. And as you may notice, I have opinions on that subject.
But really, aside from the fact that I don't remember large chunks of it, my high school experience wasn't too bad. I don't want to relive it, but it was survivable.
(Obviously)
The next phase of my life would be college -- kind of a default assumption for most of my life, especially given that both my parents had college degrees. (It took me a very long time to realize there were people in the world, even in my community, that did not just automatically go to college right out of high school.)
I had my pick of a lot of places, but was limited to what had accessibility that I needed, given that I was planning on using a (motorised) wheelchair full time. For example, most schools on the East Coast were a no-go; Princeton, for example, had a lot of old buildings with lots of steps and stairs, and while they would have been happy to provide me with accommodations, they couldn't really practically do very much, and large swaths of the campus would have been effectively off limits. (Being me, I considered applying there just so I could turn them down, but then I got so annoyed with the application process that I didn't.) Other places had decent physical accessibility but not much in the way of clueful/helpful administrative support for disabilities; still other places had good disability services but not so great campuses.
But I did pick a place -- Stanford, far enough from home that I wouldn't be constantly running into my mom's friends, close enough that I could come home for Thanksgiving and suchlike -- and started a new adventure.
But that's for next time.
(N.B. I don't know how much I will get written in the next week, but I will come back to -- and continue -- this blog, I promise.)
Saturday, November 29, 2014
In which I talk about sex without talking about sex
Don't worry, there isn't any TMI here. But this is a relevant part of my high school life.
Unlike the rest of the posts, it is built more on what I don't remember than on what I do.
#
When I was very young, my understanding of sex and marriage and suchlike was this:
Girls grew up to marry boys (and at some point boys grew up enough that they didn't have icky boy cooties). Boys grew up to marry girls. Children happened somehow. Kissing was what happened when your parents tucked you in at night or your grandmother came to visit, and was a peck on the cheek or forehead from a relative.
When I was a bit older, my understanding had evolved ... sort of.
Girls still grew up to marry boys. Boys still grew up to marry girls. There was a process called puberty that made the opposite sex attractive rather than cootie-ful. People who were attracted to each other would kiss, often with open mouths (it did not occur to me that there was tongue involvement). This was sometimes called "necking", which sounded more like something giraffes would do, and I would imagine people trying to twine their necks around each other.
(Did I mention the bit where, when I was very young, someone mentioned that if you had pierced ears, which I didn't, and then didn't wear earrings, "they would grow together" -- and that gave me a very odd visual of earlobes growing and extending to fuse together under the chin. I partly blame the Girl Scout song "Do your ears hang low", which is of course a sanitized version of the probable original, but I also had a very weird concept sometimes of what bodies did or could do.)
I got the sex talk, but it confused me -- I didn't understand why anyone would have sex outside of marriage, because you needed to be married to have kids, and the purpose of sex was to make kids, so why would you even do it? and if you did it, why would a resulting pregnancy be a surprise?
#
There are of course a few things missing from this worldview. I was in some ways very sheltered, very naive. It never occurred to me that sexual activity was pleasurable, and that there were reasons to do it that weren't limited to procreation. And I didn't even have a concept of same-sex attraction, among other things, let alone a word for it. (The not-fanfic I mentioned in my last entry was completely platonic. And even when I did start writing sexually explicit fanfic and was writing sex between two males as often as sex between a male and a female, it took a long time to realize that the world in general differentiated between the two.)
During junior high and high school, I did notice that other students were putting a lot of focus on boyfriends or girlfriends (though again I didn't notice any same-sex pairing-offs that might have been happening), but I didn't feel the need for it myself. At the time I assumed it was either the fact that I was too busy -- between the medical stuff going on, schoolwork that tended to be very rigorous since I had a lot of Advanced Placement classes (as well as college classes, math and physics, during my senior year), however much of swim team I was still involved in (I don't remember when I stopped), and so on, I just didn't have time for a relationship -- or the fact that I was younger than my peers by several years and therefore quite possibly a late bloomer.
But looking back, what I notice the most is that I had no interest in anything sexual. Even kissing -- the sort that boyfriends and girlfriends did, not the sort that your grandmother gave you -- wasn't something I wanted.
Even in college, when surely I had made up any age gap from being a "late bloomer", I have no memories at all of sexual or physical attraction. I did get crushes, yes; I did find myself in love; but more often than not, those were towards girls, not boys. And it never had a physical component, being more about a fascination with the person than with their body. In fact, the instances I can label as being in love? All were with people I met online and had seen few if any pictures of.
#
I have words now for the gaps in my experiences. I have an understanding, as well as an acceptance -- that I am not broken, and that the "promises" I was given as a child (that I would grow up and find a man to marry) were just cultural norm and not absolute truth.
This is another time that I wish I had a time machine, or even just a way to talk to my younger self. To enlighten her first of all that it is possible to be attracted to someone of the same sex (even if society doesn't always see it as normal or acceptable), because I think I might have had some crushes in high school that I was not aware of because I hadn't considered the possibility. And to enlighten her second of all that asexuality is a thing, and that some people experience physical attraction and others do not.
(It is a little odd, even now, to be saying this. I know that I identify as a pan-romantic asexual -- someone who does not experience much if any of a sex drive but can be romantically attracted to any gender -- but I do not often say it out loud. This blog here is not quite out loud, but it is attached to my RL identity, and there are people who know me in person that might be reading it. It is like I have two identities, my fannish online identity and my real life birth-name identity, and they overlap but are not the same. My online identity is a lot freer about this sort of thing than my RL identity.)
(On the other hand, visibility is important. And there may be someone who finds this blog one day and says: yes, that was also me, but I did not have a word for it and now I do. Or someone who says: yes, that is me, and I always thought there was something wrong with me.)
(There is plenty that is "wrong" with me, but sexual identity is not one of those things.)
Unlike the rest of the posts, it is built more on what I don't remember than on what I do.
#
When I was very young, my understanding of sex and marriage and suchlike was this:
Girls grew up to marry boys (and at some point boys grew up enough that they didn't have icky boy cooties). Boys grew up to marry girls. Children happened somehow. Kissing was what happened when your parents tucked you in at night or your grandmother came to visit, and was a peck on the cheek or forehead from a relative.
When I was a bit older, my understanding had evolved ... sort of.
Girls still grew up to marry boys. Boys still grew up to marry girls. There was a process called puberty that made the opposite sex attractive rather than cootie-ful. People who were attracted to each other would kiss, often with open mouths (it did not occur to me that there was tongue involvement). This was sometimes called "necking", which sounded more like something giraffes would do, and I would imagine people trying to twine their necks around each other.
(Did I mention the bit where, when I was very young, someone mentioned that if you had pierced ears, which I didn't, and then didn't wear earrings, "they would grow together" -- and that gave me a very odd visual of earlobes growing and extending to fuse together under the chin. I partly blame the Girl Scout song "Do your ears hang low", which is of course a sanitized version of the probable original, but I also had a very weird concept sometimes of what bodies did or could do.)
I got the sex talk, but it confused me -- I didn't understand why anyone would have sex outside of marriage, because you needed to be married to have kids, and the purpose of sex was to make kids, so why would you even do it? and if you did it, why would a resulting pregnancy be a surprise?
#
There are of course a few things missing from this worldview. I was in some ways very sheltered, very naive. It never occurred to me that sexual activity was pleasurable, and that there were reasons to do it that weren't limited to procreation. And I didn't even have a concept of same-sex attraction, among other things, let alone a word for it. (The not-fanfic I mentioned in my last entry was completely platonic. And even when I did start writing sexually explicit fanfic and was writing sex between two males as often as sex between a male and a female, it took a long time to realize that the world in general differentiated between the two.)
During junior high and high school, I did notice that other students were putting a lot of focus on boyfriends or girlfriends (though again I didn't notice any same-sex pairing-offs that might have been happening), but I didn't feel the need for it myself. At the time I assumed it was either the fact that I was too busy -- between the medical stuff going on, schoolwork that tended to be very rigorous since I had a lot of Advanced Placement classes (as well as college classes, math and physics, during my senior year), however much of swim team I was still involved in (I don't remember when I stopped), and so on, I just didn't have time for a relationship -- or the fact that I was younger than my peers by several years and therefore quite possibly a late bloomer.
But looking back, what I notice the most is that I had no interest in anything sexual. Even kissing -- the sort that boyfriends and girlfriends did, not the sort that your grandmother gave you -- wasn't something I wanted.
Even in college, when surely I had made up any age gap from being a "late bloomer", I have no memories at all of sexual or physical attraction. I did get crushes, yes; I did find myself in love; but more often than not, those were towards girls, not boys. And it never had a physical component, being more about a fascination with the person than with their body. In fact, the instances I can label as being in love? All were with people I met online and had seen few if any pictures of.
#
I have words now for the gaps in my experiences. I have an understanding, as well as an acceptance -- that I am not broken, and that the "promises" I was given as a child (that I would grow up and find a man to marry) were just cultural norm and not absolute truth.
This is another time that I wish I had a time machine, or even just a way to talk to my younger self. To enlighten her first of all that it is possible to be attracted to someone of the same sex (even if society doesn't always see it as normal or acceptable), because I think I might have had some crushes in high school that I was not aware of because I hadn't considered the possibility. And to enlighten her second of all that asexuality is a thing, and that some people experience physical attraction and others do not.
(It is a little odd, even now, to be saying this. I know that I identify as a pan-romantic asexual -- someone who does not experience much if any of a sex drive but can be romantically attracted to any gender -- but I do not often say it out loud. This blog here is not quite out loud, but it is attached to my RL identity, and there are people who know me in person that might be reading it. It is like I have two identities, my fannish online identity and my real life birth-name identity, and they overlap but are not the same. My online identity is a lot freer about this sort of thing than my RL identity.)
(On the other hand, visibility is important. And there may be someone who finds this blog one day and says: yes, that was also me, but I did not have a word for it and now I do. Or someone who says: yes, that is me, and I always thought there was something wrong with me.)
(There is plenty that is "wrong" with me, but sexual identity is not one of those things.)
Friday, November 28, 2014
Fandom
Sometime in late Junior High or early High School, I discovered -- and fell deeply in love with -- Star Trek. I was very much into science fiction in general, and also fantasy, especially when it came to books --
(and there was also a period where I got obsessed with Stephen King, which ended when I spent a few weeks being deeply terrified of my closet door being slightly open, and then six months terrified of random rabid dog attacks)
-- but TV-wise, Star Trek was my one true love.
At that point, there was only the original series (generally abbreviated TOS) and the next generation (generally abbreviated TNG), but I couldn't get enough of either. TNG was easier to watch (and rewatch) because it was running on network tv every day; I remember that I wasn't allowed to watch it unless I had finished that day's homework, which made quite an incentive for finishing said homework. (Some of those memories are particular to the year I took calculus.) It got to the point where I had seen enough episodes enough times that, given a short clip -- sometimes as short as a single camera shot or a line of dialogue, sometimes a bit longer if it was just a stock shot of the Enterprise -- I could instantly name the title, season and episode number, and plot summary. And could provide any two of those three pieces of information if given the third.
(I have since, quite recently in fact, rewatched TNG, and my knowledge has faded over time. There were some episodes that I recognized, others that took a bit before it clicked, and still others that I don't remember having seen. But it's been a while.)
I don't have memories of watching TOS episodes, but I must have, for two reasons. One is that I had a strong obsession with Vulcans -- Spock in particular, and Saavik secondarily, though the Saavik of some of the book novelizations rather than the movies, but all things Vulcan -- and that would not have come from just TNG. I apparently went through a phase where I claimed to be half-Vulcan; I remember wanting to be part Vulcan, but my mom remembers me being more adamant about it. In retrospect, I think a lot of it was the emotional control. High school is a turbulent time in general, physically and emotionally and socially, and beyond that I had medical uncertanties and tests and chemotherapy and then the diagnosis of a rare and untreatable condition, and I ... I don't remember being any more stressed than I would have considered normal, nor do I remember being depressed -- and in fact so many people kept asking me if I wanted to talk about what I was going through (no, not really) and reassuring me that it was all right to be angry (which I wasn't) or depressed (which I wasn't) that I sometimes felt like I was doing things wrong -- but I would not be surprised if the half-Vulcan thing was a way for me to escape some of the emotions that I wasn't aware I had and didn't really want to deal with.
Plus, they're just awesome.
The other reason is that ... well, let me back up, for the benefit of those reading this blog that are not in my head. Within fandom (which is generally The Group Of People Who Like A Thing, and I will not at this time admit to the fact that it surprised me to realize that anybody else liked Star Trek at all, let alone enough for there to be a fandom purely devoted to Star Trek) there is the concept of fanfiction, or writing stories using the existing characters. So, for example, one might write further adventures of the NCC-1701 crew, like another episode or one of the novelizations; or one might write about what Kirk and Spock do in their spare time; or whatever. There are a lot of variations.
I was familiar with the novelizations, but the concept of fanfic had not occurred to me at all. (I think partly because I didn't realize we were "allowed" to. And there is a lot of legal kerfluffle over fanfic, especially when it comes to stuff involving money, but I won't get into that, and anyway, almost everyone agrees that writing fanfic is an acceptable pasttime. And many people invent it on their own before they find fandom and find out that other people do it too.
I didn't write fanfic as such. I wrote pseudo-fanfic. It was sort of "fanfic with the serial numbers filed off", because it was basically fanfic with the names changed and a few odd details changed. My Pern not-fanfic, for example, still involved dragonriders bonding to telepathic dragons, except the places they lived weren't called Weyrs and the characters were my own and the planet was not called Pern. And I wrote a lot in that little universe, never full stories but kind of the word equivalent of doodles. Same thing with the Redwall not-fanfic that I wrote, with their talking animals.
And one of the not-fanfic universes that I had was not only distinctly based off Star Trek, it was distinctly based off of TOS in particular. Because there was a starship that went around exploring the galaxy and discovering new civilizations, and that starship always had a Kirk-equivalent captain who was handsome and charming and adventurous, and a Spock-equivalent first officer who was stoic and alien and generally dry and unemotional on the surface with deep reservoirs of stuff he never showed, and a Bones-equivalent doctor who was cranky and grouchy and gruffly protective of his crew, and the three were BFFs before BFF was a term.
The only difference was that in my version of the universe, the captain was disabled.
Not with what I had (although I do recall a story I wrote once where someone with my condition was applying to the not-Federation Academy), but with far better technology. Because I figured that in a future where they can replicate food out of thin air and travel faster than light, they can damn well have better adaptive technology. My favorite variations were a walking frame (with an exoskeleton that allowed the captain, in that version having a form of paralysis from an injury on an expedition, to walk perfectly normally, using a neural interface that bypassed the need for a joystick control, and without any awkward lurching) and a wheelchair that had both sit-to-stand capability (so that he could stand to greet alien dignitaries) and thruster technology (for going up stairs or across rocky terrain.)
The rant on Star Trek and disabilities will wait for another time, but I am in retrospect very proud of myself for having that variation, pleased that in my version of the universe it was possible to be both disabled and successful, and amused as all get-out at the implication that I saw Kirk and Spock and McCoy as an inseparable threesome (not in a sex sense, just in a friendship sense).
Late in high school I got access to email, and discovered Usenet and mailing lists. The list I have the most memories of was vulcan-l, wherein I discovered I was not the only person thoroughly obsessed with Vulcans. Usenet I remember less of, but again there was the feeling of "here are my people". Because yes, my parents supported my interests, but I didn't really know anybody else that liked the same things, and all of a sudden there they were.
And then I went to college, and fandom stuff got even more fun and exciting. (Plus, the internet became more internetty.) But there are still a few more things left about high school.
I will, though, admit that while I don't know that I have my Spock shirt still (because it no longer fits, alas), I do still somewhere have the giant Spock clock that hung on my walls for several years.
And I still think Vulcans are awesome.
(and there was also a period where I got obsessed with Stephen King, which ended when I spent a few weeks being deeply terrified of my closet door being slightly open, and then six months terrified of random rabid dog attacks)
-- but TV-wise, Star Trek was my one true love.
At that point, there was only the original series (generally abbreviated TOS) and the next generation (generally abbreviated TNG), but I couldn't get enough of either. TNG was easier to watch (and rewatch) because it was running on network tv every day; I remember that I wasn't allowed to watch it unless I had finished that day's homework, which made quite an incentive for finishing said homework. (Some of those memories are particular to the year I took calculus.) It got to the point where I had seen enough episodes enough times that, given a short clip -- sometimes as short as a single camera shot or a line of dialogue, sometimes a bit longer if it was just a stock shot of the Enterprise -- I could instantly name the title, season and episode number, and plot summary. And could provide any two of those three pieces of information if given the third.
(I have since, quite recently in fact, rewatched TNG, and my knowledge has faded over time. There were some episodes that I recognized, others that took a bit before it clicked, and still others that I don't remember having seen. But it's been a while.)
I don't have memories of watching TOS episodes, but I must have, for two reasons. One is that I had a strong obsession with Vulcans -- Spock in particular, and Saavik secondarily, though the Saavik of some of the book novelizations rather than the movies, but all things Vulcan -- and that would not have come from just TNG. I apparently went through a phase where I claimed to be half-Vulcan; I remember wanting to be part Vulcan, but my mom remembers me being more adamant about it. In retrospect, I think a lot of it was the emotional control. High school is a turbulent time in general, physically and emotionally and socially, and beyond that I had medical uncertanties and tests and chemotherapy and then the diagnosis of a rare and untreatable condition, and I ... I don't remember being any more stressed than I would have considered normal, nor do I remember being depressed -- and in fact so many people kept asking me if I wanted to talk about what I was going through (no, not really) and reassuring me that it was all right to be angry (which I wasn't) or depressed (which I wasn't) that I sometimes felt like I was doing things wrong -- but I would not be surprised if the half-Vulcan thing was a way for me to escape some of the emotions that I wasn't aware I had and didn't really want to deal with.
Plus, they're just awesome.
The other reason is that ... well, let me back up, for the benefit of those reading this blog that are not in my head. Within fandom (which is generally The Group Of People Who Like A Thing, and I will not at this time admit to the fact that it surprised me to realize that anybody else liked Star Trek at all, let alone enough for there to be a fandom purely devoted to Star Trek) there is the concept of fanfiction, or writing stories using the existing characters. So, for example, one might write further adventures of the NCC-1701 crew, like another episode or one of the novelizations; or one might write about what Kirk and Spock do in their spare time; or whatever. There are a lot of variations.
I was familiar with the novelizations, but the concept of fanfic had not occurred to me at all. (I think partly because I didn't realize we were "allowed" to. And there is a lot of legal kerfluffle over fanfic, especially when it comes to stuff involving money, but I won't get into that, and anyway, almost everyone agrees that writing fanfic is an acceptable pasttime. And many people invent it on their own before they find fandom and find out that other people do it too.
I didn't write fanfic as such. I wrote pseudo-fanfic. It was sort of "fanfic with the serial numbers filed off", because it was basically fanfic with the names changed and a few odd details changed. My Pern not-fanfic, for example, still involved dragonriders bonding to telepathic dragons, except the places they lived weren't called Weyrs and the characters were my own and the planet was not called Pern. And I wrote a lot in that little universe, never full stories but kind of the word equivalent of doodles. Same thing with the Redwall not-fanfic that I wrote, with their talking animals.
And one of the not-fanfic universes that I had was not only distinctly based off Star Trek, it was distinctly based off of TOS in particular. Because there was a starship that went around exploring the galaxy and discovering new civilizations, and that starship always had a Kirk-equivalent captain who was handsome and charming and adventurous, and a Spock-equivalent first officer who was stoic and alien and generally dry and unemotional on the surface with deep reservoirs of stuff he never showed, and a Bones-equivalent doctor who was cranky and grouchy and gruffly protective of his crew, and the three were BFFs before BFF was a term.
The only difference was that in my version of the universe, the captain was disabled.
Not with what I had (although I do recall a story I wrote once where someone with my condition was applying to the not-Federation Academy), but with far better technology. Because I figured that in a future where they can replicate food out of thin air and travel faster than light, they can damn well have better adaptive technology. My favorite variations were a walking frame (with an exoskeleton that allowed the captain, in that version having a form of paralysis from an injury on an expedition, to walk perfectly normally, using a neural interface that bypassed the need for a joystick control, and without any awkward lurching) and a wheelchair that had both sit-to-stand capability (so that he could stand to greet alien dignitaries) and thruster technology (for going up stairs or across rocky terrain.)
The rant on Star Trek and disabilities will wait for another time, but I am in retrospect very proud of myself for having that variation, pleased that in my version of the universe it was possible to be both disabled and successful, and amused as all get-out at the implication that I saw Kirk and Spock and McCoy as an inseparable threesome (not in a sex sense, just in a friendship sense).
Late in high school I got access to email, and discovered Usenet and mailing lists. The list I have the most memories of was vulcan-l, wherein I discovered I was not the only person thoroughly obsessed with Vulcans. Usenet I remember less of, but again there was the feeling of "here are my people". Because yes, my parents supported my interests, but I didn't really know anybody else that liked the same things, and all of a sudden there they were.
And then I went to college, and fandom stuff got even more fun and exciting. (Plus, the internet became more internetty.) But there are still a few more things left about high school.
I will, though, admit that while I don't know that I have my Spock shirt still (because it no longer fits, alas), I do still somewhere have the giant Spock clock that hung on my walls for several years.
And I still think Vulcans are awesome.
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Pets
Growing up, I didn't have much in the way of pets. We had parakeets (or maybe budgies, I don't quite remember) when I was very small, but nothing to replace them, and I don't really remember much about them aside from the annoyance of having to change out the newspaper at the bottom of the cage.
My sister ended up being allergic to pretty much anything with fur, hence the lack of pets. There were probably other reasons too, but that was the biggest one.
I remember house-sitting for our neighbor across the street, who had four (or so) cats. I would sometimes (with their permission) take a book over and just hang out over there, and one of the cats was this sweet snuggly little girl that liked to lie with me and purr.
I remember wanting to be a veterinarian when I grew up, so that I could have animal contact. (The fact that for one thing, vets don't really get to cuddle with their patients, and for another, most animals at the vet are cranky and/or terrified at best, injured or sick or dying at worst, didn't seem to have occurred to me.)
I remember wanting to have a huge house when I was older, so that I could have all sorts of different animals -- cats and dogs and birds and rabbits and whatever else I could manage. I had visions of one room for each set of animals, which in reality would work okay for things in cages, but have you ever tried keeping a cat in a single room?
#
At some point in late junior high or early high school, I ended up getting some fish as a pet. Not the "single goldfish in a tank" sort of thing, but a largeish aquarium with multiple kinds of fish living in it. Most of the fish did't have names, but I remember naming one of the first ones I got -- Aras, because the turned-up nose reminded me a little of a rather annoying and snobbish Sara at school, but the fish was so much prettier.
An aquarium full of fish is quite attractive -- well, as long as it's maintained well and kept clean -- but I did discover one thing: fish are not particularly cuddly. And so it didn't really help with the desire to have something I could cuddle with.
I sometimes wonder whether, if I had thought of the possibility, my parents would have let me have a snake as a pet. Not a big snake of course, something like a corn snake or two, but snakes are a lot more interactive than fish. They are not fluffy, but they can be held. (I am, obviously, not the sort of person who is afraid of snakes. I mean, I have a healthy respect for the venomous sort, but snakes in general are fascinating. And not slimy, just cool and smooth.)
#
I am going to temporarily fast forward out of this chapter of my life to cover the rest of pet-stuff. I'm not quite done with high school (there are at least two, possibly three, more things left that I have to talk about from that era) but I might as well stick with the theme.
So.
College: I still had no pets. Partly because they are discouraged in dorms, partly because when I was on break I was still living with my parents, who needed to keep the house fur-free for my sister. However, I did at that time encounter the concept of a service dog -- not plausible for while I lived at home, but a possibility for once I moved out.
Shortly after college: I discovered the idea of a snake as a pet. I had been able to handle some snakes at our local science center, one a corn snake and one a ball python, and I sort of fell in love. Plus, they would not trigger my sister's allergies, so were a safe option, and I could take complete care of them.
I spent several years researching, and also trying to find a good source for just the right ones. I had narrowed it down to those two types, leaning towards corn snakes because they were smaller and a little more adorable. Except then I found a craigslist-type ad for someone looking to rehome a yearling ball python, and I arranged a visit to check it out.
I remember holding the snake, who -- true to its name -- was curled up in a tight ball. And I just sat there and held it, not forcing anything from it, just holding and sort of stroking gently with my thumbs, as I talked to the owner, and slowly he uncurled and started exploring. And I think that impressed the owner, because it showed that the snake was comfortable with me, and it also showed that I wasn't trying to wrestle him out of his comfort zone before he was ready.
We settled on a price, and I told her that I would think about it overnight to make sure and then call her the next day with my final decision. And I thought about it, and thought hard, and had mostly decided that I would pass up the option in favor of waiting for a corn snake, but I decided to sleep on it.
That was September 10, 2001.
I ended up getting the snake, out of some weird need for ... I can't even explain it, sort of a confirmation of life? I don't know. I just remember that the events of September 11 turned my hesitation against getting that particular snake into a determination to need it.
He ended up not being the smartest of snakes, but very sweet, and I think my mom fell in love with him almost more than I did. When I stopped being able to take care of him, he went to live with her. (At that point I had aides helping me with personal and household tasks, but they generally were terrified of snakes, and didn't want to even see him in his tank, much less help with his care.
#
There are more aspects of the pet saga in my life, but I will save those for another time.
My sister ended up being allergic to pretty much anything with fur, hence the lack of pets. There were probably other reasons too, but that was the biggest one.
I remember house-sitting for our neighbor across the street, who had four (or so) cats. I would sometimes (with their permission) take a book over and just hang out over there, and one of the cats was this sweet snuggly little girl that liked to lie with me and purr.
I remember wanting to be a veterinarian when I grew up, so that I could have animal contact. (The fact that for one thing, vets don't really get to cuddle with their patients, and for another, most animals at the vet are cranky and/or terrified at best, injured or sick or dying at worst, didn't seem to have occurred to me.)
I remember wanting to have a huge house when I was older, so that I could have all sorts of different animals -- cats and dogs and birds and rabbits and whatever else I could manage. I had visions of one room for each set of animals, which in reality would work okay for things in cages, but have you ever tried keeping a cat in a single room?
#
At some point in late junior high or early high school, I ended up getting some fish as a pet. Not the "single goldfish in a tank" sort of thing, but a largeish aquarium with multiple kinds of fish living in it. Most of the fish did't have names, but I remember naming one of the first ones I got -- Aras, because the turned-up nose reminded me a little of a rather annoying and snobbish Sara at school, but the fish was so much prettier.
An aquarium full of fish is quite attractive -- well, as long as it's maintained well and kept clean -- but I did discover one thing: fish are not particularly cuddly. And so it didn't really help with the desire to have something I could cuddle with.
I sometimes wonder whether, if I had thought of the possibility, my parents would have let me have a snake as a pet. Not a big snake of course, something like a corn snake or two, but snakes are a lot more interactive than fish. They are not fluffy, but they can be held. (I am, obviously, not the sort of person who is afraid of snakes. I mean, I have a healthy respect for the venomous sort, but snakes in general are fascinating. And not slimy, just cool and smooth.)
#
I am going to temporarily fast forward out of this chapter of my life to cover the rest of pet-stuff. I'm not quite done with high school (there are at least two, possibly three, more things left that I have to talk about from that era) but I might as well stick with the theme.
So.
College: I still had no pets. Partly because they are discouraged in dorms, partly because when I was on break I was still living with my parents, who needed to keep the house fur-free for my sister. However, I did at that time encounter the concept of a service dog -- not plausible for while I lived at home, but a possibility for once I moved out.
Shortly after college: I discovered the idea of a snake as a pet. I had been able to handle some snakes at our local science center, one a corn snake and one a ball python, and I sort of fell in love. Plus, they would not trigger my sister's allergies, so were a safe option, and I could take complete care of them.
I spent several years researching, and also trying to find a good source for just the right ones. I had narrowed it down to those two types, leaning towards corn snakes because they were smaller and a little more adorable. Except then I found a craigslist-type ad for someone looking to rehome a yearling ball python, and I arranged a visit to check it out.
I remember holding the snake, who -- true to its name -- was curled up in a tight ball. And I just sat there and held it, not forcing anything from it, just holding and sort of stroking gently with my thumbs, as I talked to the owner, and slowly he uncurled and started exploring. And I think that impressed the owner, because it showed that the snake was comfortable with me, and it also showed that I wasn't trying to wrestle him out of his comfort zone before he was ready.
We settled on a price, and I told her that I would think about it overnight to make sure and then call her the next day with my final decision. And I thought about it, and thought hard, and had mostly decided that I would pass up the option in favor of waiting for a corn snake, but I decided to sleep on it.
That was September 10, 2001.
I ended up getting the snake, out of some weird need for ... I can't even explain it, sort of a confirmation of life? I don't know. I just remember that the events of September 11 turned my hesitation against getting that particular snake into a determination to need it.
He ended up not being the smartest of snakes, but very sweet, and I think my mom fell in love with him almost more than I did. When I stopped being able to take care of him, he went to live with her. (At that point I had aides helping me with personal and household tasks, but they generally were terrified of snakes, and didn't want to even see him in his tank, much less help with his care.
#
There are more aspects of the pet saga in my life, but I will save those for another time.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Math
So I have pretty much always been a math geek. That is the short version of this entry.
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I remember CAM(e)L, which I think stood for California Mathematics L*mumble* (League, maybe?) which was a totally optional after-school thing that was sort of mini math tests -- research tells me there were six over the course of a school year, but there were of course practice tests, possibly taken from previous years' real tests -- and I loved them.
I remember the Math Team, an after-school program that went to matches in the area and, er, took math tests, basically, as a competition between schools. I don't remember details, but it was a combination of different sorts of math, and anyone who got a perfect score in that competition got an extra prize, which was generally math-related. I managed it once -- not entirely legitimately, because there was a geometry problem that I couldn't figure out so I just eyeballed it and said "eh it looks approximately as long as x" and put that down as the answer and, despite the fact that drawings were generally not to scale (and so eyeballing was not reliable), that was correct. I got a calculus textbook of my very own. I loved it.
I remember doing ARML, the American Regional Mathematics League; we trained at Stanford on weekends, and then went to UNLV for the tournament. It was more varied than the math team stuff, having individual components and group components and also relay components (where each person had a different problem, and the answer to the second person's problem depended on the answer from the first person's problem, and the answer to the third person's problem depended on the answer from the second person's problem, and so on, and if anyone in the chain couldn't finish or screwed up their calculations then no one got points). I remember there were a lot of Asian males on our team, which didn't seem surprising. I also remember being amused that the Las Vegas airport had slot machines in it, and none of us were legally old enough to gamble.
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In one of my math classes, the teacher -- a completely kick-ass woman who was a strict and rather formidable teacher but very awesome, especially when it came to encouraging students (and girls in particular) in math -- told us about a summer program, PROMYS, that was a six-week summer camp in Boston entirely for math.
I, of course, begged my parents to let me go. Which they did.
The six weeks were devoted to number theory; returning students could take additional seminars in other areas of mathematics, such as combinatorics or abstract algebra.
I remember learning about other number bases, and actually fully comprehending for the first time the base-10 number system we use. I mean, I knew how to do base 10; you learn early, with blocks and such as physical representation of ones and tens and hundreds, and you know that ten ones make ten and ten tens make a hundred, and you know that if you subtract 75 from 93 you borrow a 1 from the second column to give you 13 in the first column that you can subtract 5 from, and I could do math but I didn't really understand it. And then you get base 2 and base 8 and base 16, and suddenly the written representation "10" gets divorced from the number ten, because 10 in base 8 is eight, and ten in base 8 is 12, and it's no longer ones and tens and hundreds but ones (really the base number to the 0th power, but that's always one) and base and base-squared and base-cubed. So 325 in base ten is five ones plus two tens plus three ten-squareds. And it sounds dorky as a thing to get excited about but I loved it.
I remember writing out proofs of things like "a x 0 = 0 for any value of a" or "a x 1 = a for any value of a", things which are generally presented as basic axioms except that we were using more basic, more fundamental truths to prove them. And I loved it.
I remember the joke about the horse with an infinite number of legs, done in proof form: A horse has four legs, which is an even number. But a horse has two forelegs (four-legs) and two hind legs, making ten legs, which is an odd number of legs for a horse to have. And the only "number" that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, a horse has an infinite number of legs.
I remember the sky at night -- a sort of murky red haze, like living on another planet -- and I remember the thunderstorms and the rains. Here, where I grew up and live now, we don't ever get summer rain, and the rain we get is icy cold and unpleasant. There, summer rain was warm and delightful, and I remember going outside (I was using a manual wheelchair at that time, which wouldn't be damaged by getting wet) and spinning in circles and laughing because it felt so good.
I remember the Fourth of July, and the naive assumption that we could get a decent spot without camping out for three days prior. Fireworks in Boston are a tad bit more crowded than they are here, and we ended up basically on the sidewalk of a city street, with the music from the Boston Pops orchestra piped in through loudspeakers, and we could only see the highest fireworks above the buildings around us.
I remember getting a flare-up of FOP in my right shoulder right around "midterms", leaving me unable to write and thus unable to take the test. That frustrated me more than the flare-up itself.
I remember the flight home, where I got upgraded randomly to first class, but I was so sleep deprived from the camp that I slept through most of the flight, leaving sticky drool on my face and shirt.
I woke up in time to eat the chocolate chip cookie, though.
#
One of the required classes in high school was physics, but the physics teacher at the time was, shall we say, undesirable. He thought that women had no place in science; he thought that physics was something that no high school student would actually be interested in, and only ever took because they had to; and so on. At least, that was his reputation, and it didn't sound fun.
But there was a way out.
This being a university town, we had an agreement with the local university: high school students could have the option of taking college classes (for credit!) as long as those classes weren't offered by the high school. So one could not, for example, take first-year French at the university, because the high school offered that, but fifth-year French was not offered by the high school so could be taken by advanced French students.
More relevantly to this anecdote, one could not take ordinary physics, even if one did not like the attitudes of the only teacher available, but one could take calculus-based physics.
This required taking (and passing) calculus in one's junior year, which in turn required a summer of independent study, because the standard progression of math classes called for calculus in senior year at the earliest, and so in order to take calculus as a junior, one had to jump ahead.
So I did that.
There were several AP calculus classes offered at the high school. This is partly because there are two AP calculus exams: calculus AB, which covers a set amount of material, and calculus BC, which covers that amount of material plus some extra, and therefore goes at a faster pace. The class I was in -- calculus BC, taught by the awesome math teacher who introduced me to PROMYS, whom I still consider one of my favorite teachers -- was hard and fast-paced, and the school offered a calculus AB class in the same period that students could drop to if they were having trouble. As a result, the class size dwindled over the academic year.
I loved it. (Are we sensing a theme?)
I even remember one time when the teacher asked if anyone knew the answer to a problem, and my hand shot up -- I was so very much a Hermione, except that the Harry Potter books hadn't been written yet and so there was no such comparison to be made -- and she made a comment along the lines of yes, I know you know the answer; you may as well stop putting your hand up every time, and I'll call on you if no one else knows it. Because, well, yes, I did always know the answer. Because I loved math.
Now, taking calculus early was primarily for the purpose of taking the calculus-based physics. (Which was a four-quarter series, so I took the first quarter over the summer, and kind of floundered at first because it was a university course and I was in high school and not used to that level of rigor; I flunked the first exam, though I am still a little resentful that the make-up exam offered didn't allow for partial credit, because one of the questions I had right until one of the last steps where I left off a square root sign, so it was mostly right but never mind that. I pulled my grade up to a B, and got A's for the other three quarters.)
But it also allowed for taking post-calculus math at the university. Linear algebra, differential equations, and vector analysis. I had no explicit reason to take those, except that it was more math, more stuff to learn.
I remember one of these classes, where the instructor would write the top three scores (without names, just numbers) on the board, as well as some other information. And there was one exam, dealing with matrices, that I found pretty straightforward: do A in X situation, do B in Y situation, just plug and play. I got the exam back with a 98, and a smileyface, and I was pleased.
And then he went to the board to write the top three scores.
98. 78. 78.
I had literally scored far higher than anyone in the class. And I was in high school, and young for my grade.
I practically floated out of the classroom that day.
(I also remember overhearing one student asking the professor in a worried voice whether the 98 would seriously affect the curve. And I just floated, though I was also glad there weren't names attached, because I probably would have gotten beaten up for the grade I got.)
#
So yeah. I loved math.
And then I went to college, and during orientation I approached one of the math faculty and basically said "I've taken calculus and these other classes, what do you recommend I take next?" And he said "Nothing," because of course AP classes and university classes meant I had fulfilled the math requirement, "and don't come after my job." Which left me a little baffled, because I'd assumed that a math person would go "oh yay someone excited about math" rather than "stay away from me", but hey, at least I didn't have to take any classes from him.
But college is another chapter, and I'm not quite done with high school yet.
#
I remember CAM(e)L, which I think stood for California Mathematics L*mumble* (League, maybe?) which was a totally optional after-school thing that was sort of mini math tests -- research tells me there were six over the course of a school year, but there were of course practice tests, possibly taken from previous years' real tests -- and I loved them.
I remember the Math Team, an after-school program that went to matches in the area and, er, took math tests, basically, as a competition between schools. I don't remember details, but it was a combination of different sorts of math, and anyone who got a perfect score in that competition got an extra prize, which was generally math-related. I managed it once -- not entirely legitimately, because there was a geometry problem that I couldn't figure out so I just eyeballed it and said "eh it looks approximately as long as x" and put that down as the answer and, despite the fact that drawings were generally not to scale (and so eyeballing was not reliable), that was correct. I got a calculus textbook of my very own. I loved it.
I remember doing ARML, the American Regional Mathematics League; we trained at Stanford on weekends, and then went to UNLV for the tournament. It was more varied than the math team stuff, having individual components and group components and also relay components (where each person had a different problem, and the answer to the second person's problem depended on the answer from the first person's problem, and the answer to the third person's problem depended on the answer from the second person's problem, and so on, and if anyone in the chain couldn't finish or screwed up their calculations then no one got points). I remember there were a lot of Asian males on our team, which didn't seem surprising. I also remember being amused that the Las Vegas airport had slot machines in it, and none of us were legally old enough to gamble.
#
In one of my math classes, the teacher -- a completely kick-ass woman who was a strict and rather formidable teacher but very awesome, especially when it came to encouraging students (and girls in particular) in math -- told us about a summer program, PROMYS, that was a six-week summer camp in Boston entirely for math.
I, of course, begged my parents to let me go. Which they did.
The six weeks were devoted to number theory; returning students could take additional seminars in other areas of mathematics, such as combinatorics or abstract algebra.
I remember learning about other number bases, and actually fully comprehending for the first time the base-10 number system we use. I mean, I knew how to do base 10; you learn early, with blocks and such as physical representation of ones and tens and hundreds, and you know that ten ones make ten and ten tens make a hundred, and you know that if you subtract 75 from 93 you borrow a 1 from the second column to give you 13 in the first column that you can subtract 5 from, and I could do math but I didn't really understand it. And then you get base 2 and base 8 and base 16, and suddenly the written representation "10" gets divorced from the number ten, because 10 in base 8 is eight, and ten in base 8 is 12, and it's no longer ones and tens and hundreds but ones (really the base number to the 0th power, but that's always one) and base and base-squared and base-cubed. So 325 in base ten is five ones plus two tens plus three ten-squareds. And it sounds dorky as a thing to get excited about but I loved it.
I remember writing out proofs of things like "a x 0 = 0 for any value of a" or "a x 1 = a for any value of a", things which are generally presented as basic axioms except that we were using more basic, more fundamental truths to prove them. And I loved it.
I remember the joke about the horse with an infinite number of legs, done in proof form: A horse has four legs, which is an even number. But a horse has two forelegs (four-legs) and two hind legs, making ten legs, which is an odd number of legs for a horse to have. And the only "number" that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, a horse has an infinite number of legs.
I remember the sky at night -- a sort of murky red haze, like living on another planet -- and I remember the thunderstorms and the rains. Here, where I grew up and live now, we don't ever get summer rain, and the rain we get is icy cold and unpleasant. There, summer rain was warm and delightful, and I remember going outside (I was using a manual wheelchair at that time, which wouldn't be damaged by getting wet) and spinning in circles and laughing because it felt so good.
I remember the Fourth of July, and the naive assumption that we could get a decent spot without camping out for three days prior. Fireworks in Boston are a tad bit more crowded than they are here, and we ended up basically on the sidewalk of a city street, with the music from the Boston Pops orchestra piped in through loudspeakers, and we could only see the highest fireworks above the buildings around us.
I remember getting a flare-up of FOP in my right shoulder right around "midterms", leaving me unable to write and thus unable to take the test. That frustrated me more than the flare-up itself.
I remember the flight home, where I got upgraded randomly to first class, but I was so sleep deprived from the camp that I slept through most of the flight, leaving sticky drool on my face and shirt.
I woke up in time to eat the chocolate chip cookie, though.
#
One of the required classes in high school was physics, but the physics teacher at the time was, shall we say, undesirable. He thought that women had no place in science; he thought that physics was something that no high school student would actually be interested in, and only ever took because they had to; and so on. At least, that was his reputation, and it didn't sound fun.
But there was a way out.
This being a university town, we had an agreement with the local university: high school students could have the option of taking college classes (for credit!) as long as those classes weren't offered by the high school. So one could not, for example, take first-year French at the university, because the high school offered that, but fifth-year French was not offered by the high school so could be taken by advanced French students.
More relevantly to this anecdote, one could not take ordinary physics, even if one did not like the attitudes of the only teacher available, but one could take calculus-based physics.
This required taking (and passing) calculus in one's junior year, which in turn required a summer of independent study, because the standard progression of math classes called for calculus in senior year at the earliest, and so in order to take calculus as a junior, one had to jump ahead.
So I did that.
There were several AP calculus classes offered at the high school. This is partly because there are two AP calculus exams: calculus AB, which covers a set amount of material, and calculus BC, which covers that amount of material plus some extra, and therefore goes at a faster pace. The class I was in -- calculus BC, taught by the awesome math teacher who introduced me to PROMYS, whom I still consider one of my favorite teachers -- was hard and fast-paced, and the school offered a calculus AB class in the same period that students could drop to if they were having trouble. As a result, the class size dwindled over the academic year.
I loved it. (Are we sensing a theme?)
I even remember one time when the teacher asked if anyone knew the answer to a problem, and my hand shot up -- I was so very much a Hermione, except that the Harry Potter books hadn't been written yet and so there was no such comparison to be made -- and she made a comment along the lines of yes, I know you know the answer; you may as well stop putting your hand up every time, and I'll call on you if no one else knows it. Because, well, yes, I did always know the answer. Because I loved math.
Now, taking calculus early was primarily for the purpose of taking the calculus-based physics. (Which was a four-quarter series, so I took the first quarter over the summer, and kind of floundered at first because it was a university course and I was in high school and not used to that level of rigor; I flunked the first exam, though I am still a little resentful that the make-up exam offered didn't allow for partial credit, because one of the questions I had right until one of the last steps where I left off a square root sign, so it was mostly right but never mind that. I pulled my grade up to a B, and got A's for the other three quarters.)
But it also allowed for taking post-calculus math at the university. Linear algebra, differential equations, and vector analysis. I had no explicit reason to take those, except that it was more math, more stuff to learn.
I remember one of these classes, where the instructor would write the top three scores (without names, just numbers) on the board, as well as some other information. And there was one exam, dealing with matrices, that I found pretty straightforward: do A in X situation, do B in Y situation, just plug and play. I got the exam back with a 98, and a smileyface, and I was pleased.
And then he went to the board to write the top three scores.
98. 78. 78.
I had literally scored far higher than anyone in the class. And I was in high school, and young for my grade.
I practically floated out of the classroom that day.
(I also remember overhearing one student asking the professor in a worried voice whether the 98 would seriously affect the curve. And I just floated, though I was also glad there weren't names attached, because I probably would have gotten beaten up for the grade I got.)
#
So yeah. I loved math.
And then I went to college, and during orientation I approached one of the math faculty and basically said "I've taken calculus and these other classes, what do you recommend I take next?" And he said "Nothing," because of course AP classes and university classes meant I had fulfilled the math requirement, "and don't come after my job." Which left me a little baffled, because I'd assumed that a math person would go "oh yay someone excited about math" rather than "stay away from me", but hey, at least I didn't have to take any classes from him.
But college is another chapter, and I'm not quite done with high school yet.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Academics
Some more academic memories from high school:
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Taking music theory as a sophomore (10th grader -- our school district divided things up so that Junior High was grades 7-9 and High School was 10-12) when everybody else in the class was a junior or senior. I had a good reason fro doing it early, at least: the music teacher, who was awesome beyond belief, was retiring after that year. I wanted to take the class from him because I didn't know who his replacement would be or how much they would know.
I remember doing a report on the violin, on its history and construction, for some sort of major research paper.
I remember a listening exercise where he had us right down what impressions we got from listening to a piece of music. I was totally convinced I had recognized it as Tschaikovsky's Peter and the Wolf, so my descriptions were all related to that story. Turned out to be Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Luckily it wasn't a graded assignment, nor even one where we shared our impressions with the class, because I was quite proud at having "recognized" it.
I remember him asking if any of us had seen any operas performed live, and my hand went up -- Tosca, and La Traviata, "and Phantom of the Opera of course", to which he sort of flusteredly had to correct me on the difference between operas and musicals, and the fact that even though Phantom has parts of several (fake) operas within it it wasn't really an opera.
I remember the AP test -- because this was an Advanced Placement course -- and having to pick out and transcribe the bass line from a given clip of music.
I remember a composition assignment where I had written the melody on one piece of paper, and then was transcribing it to a different piece of paper (within the same notebook) as I came up with the melodies. We could bring unfinished fragments to him to play on the piano to make sure they worked, and he gave me a very stern (or so it seemed) lecture about how I should do the melody first rather than just letting it happen, and I was very awkwardly embarrassed because I had, it just wasn't on that sheet of paper.
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I remember auditioning for the Madrigal Choir, and not getting in -- probably a good thing overall, since there was a regular choir to fall back to, and the Madrigals had extra engagements as well as having to make their own Renaissance-y costumes -- and having one of the auditioners earnestly explain to me that it wasn't at all because of my disability, it was just that my voice wasn't mature enough yet.
I have, for the record, never developed vibrato -- something I was always told would come when I matured, except it never did -- but I like to think my tone has gotten better. Less breathy, anyway.
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I remember the person who was chosen to replace the awesome retiring music teacher, and my dislike for her. She was a nice enough person, but very prim and proper -- there are conductors who use their whole body to conduct, and there are conductors who just sit cross-legged on their chair and make very dainty gestures, and she was one of the latter. And she dissed "On My Own" from Les Mis, Because Eponine was being all whiny.
(I will admit to having a skewed version of Les Mis at that age -- it was a compete and epic tragedy that Marius didn't love Eponine back, for example, because obviously he should have, just by virtue of her loving him -- but no, you do not openly mock Les Mis.)
(She did, however, let us do the Phantom of the Opera overture in blacklight wearing white gloves, which was kind of awesome. so I forgive her.)
(Mostly.)
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I remember taking AP Politics, and the chance to do basically a student version of city council. It was a volunteer thing, but I was fascinated to know how stuff worked, so I volunteered. (Except I lied to my mom -- sorry, mom! I promise it wasn't a frequent thing! -- to the point of telling her it was required, because I was afraid she wouldn't let me do it.)
I remember that we got to choose what role we took, and I had treasurer as my first choice, because I loved math and that was the mathiest thing available; but I also remember that when it came time to shadow the person who did the real version of the job, he grumbled about how it was probably a last choice thing that I got stuck with, and I got all tongue tied trying to explain how I felt about math, even budgetary math.
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I remember the computer programming course I took, and I love the teacher I had because she treated it more like independent study, everyone at their own pace. There was of course a minimum amount of progression required to pass, but what it meant for me was that I was able to tear through material as fast as I could understand it, without waiting for other people to catch up.
I remember one assignment that stymied me -- we had learned about if/then sequences, and also about for loops, separately, but there was an assignment to print out baseball inning sequences (which was mostly a for loop and printing "nth inning" but with "seventh inning stretch" added) with a single for loop. At first the only way I could do it was to do two for loops: one for 1-7, break out to print about the stretch, and one for 7-end. It took me a while, and a lot of prodding, to figure out that I could nest the two: have a single for loop iterating over all the innings, and then an if-then statement that only triggered on the seventh inning.
I remember tearing through Pascal, and moving on to C, and discovering that I loved programming. I'd forgotten about turtle logo; I'd forgotten about the books I had that involved doing simple code bits in BASIC to solve puzzles that let you progress through the story; so it was more of a rediscovery than a first time, but it stayed with me.
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I remember AP English, where the teacher had us writing an essay every Friday during the class. The topic was never given in advance; it was meant to prepare us for the AP test, where we would have a short amount of time to write an essay on a given topic. And it was graded according to the AP scale: 0-5, which only the best essays got a 5.
The first Friday of the year was our first essay, and almost everyone got a 0. We didn't know how to write essays, in my case really at all, let alone in the 50 minutes allotted to each class period. But we learned, and we got better, and by the end of the year most of us were getting 5s.
It was the best English class I ever had, I think.
#
Taking music theory as a sophomore (10th grader -- our school district divided things up so that Junior High was grades 7-9 and High School was 10-12) when everybody else in the class was a junior or senior. I had a good reason fro doing it early, at least: the music teacher, who was awesome beyond belief, was retiring after that year. I wanted to take the class from him because I didn't know who his replacement would be or how much they would know.
I remember doing a report on the violin, on its history and construction, for some sort of major research paper.
I remember a listening exercise where he had us right down what impressions we got from listening to a piece of music. I was totally convinced I had recognized it as Tschaikovsky's Peter and the Wolf, so my descriptions were all related to that story. Turned out to be Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Luckily it wasn't a graded assignment, nor even one where we shared our impressions with the class, because I was quite proud at having "recognized" it.
I remember him asking if any of us had seen any operas performed live, and my hand went up -- Tosca, and La Traviata, "and Phantom of the Opera of course", to which he sort of flusteredly had to correct me on the difference between operas and musicals, and the fact that even though Phantom has parts of several (fake) operas within it it wasn't really an opera.
I remember the AP test -- because this was an Advanced Placement course -- and having to pick out and transcribe the bass line from a given clip of music.
I remember a composition assignment where I had written the melody on one piece of paper, and then was transcribing it to a different piece of paper (within the same notebook) as I came up with the melodies. We could bring unfinished fragments to him to play on the piano to make sure they worked, and he gave me a very stern (or so it seemed) lecture about how I should do the melody first rather than just letting it happen, and I was very awkwardly embarrassed because I had, it just wasn't on that sheet of paper.
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I remember auditioning for the Madrigal Choir, and not getting in -- probably a good thing overall, since there was a regular choir to fall back to, and the Madrigals had extra engagements as well as having to make their own Renaissance-y costumes -- and having one of the auditioners earnestly explain to me that it wasn't at all because of my disability, it was just that my voice wasn't mature enough yet.
I have, for the record, never developed vibrato -- something I was always told would come when I matured, except it never did -- but I like to think my tone has gotten better. Less breathy, anyway.
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I remember the person who was chosen to replace the awesome retiring music teacher, and my dislike for her. She was a nice enough person, but very prim and proper -- there are conductors who use their whole body to conduct, and there are conductors who just sit cross-legged on their chair and make very dainty gestures, and she was one of the latter. And she dissed "On My Own" from Les Mis, Because Eponine was being all whiny.
(I will admit to having a skewed version of Les Mis at that age -- it was a compete and epic tragedy that Marius didn't love Eponine back, for example, because obviously he should have, just by virtue of her loving him -- but no, you do not openly mock Les Mis.)
(She did, however, let us do the Phantom of the Opera overture in blacklight wearing white gloves, which was kind of awesome. so I forgive her.)
(Mostly.)
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I remember taking AP Politics, and the chance to do basically a student version of city council. It was a volunteer thing, but I was fascinated to know how stuff worked, so I volunteered. (Except I lied to my mom -- sorry, mom! I promise it wasn't a frequent thing! -- to the point of telling her it was required, because I was afraid she wouldn't let me do it.)
I remember that we got to choose what role we took, and I had treasurer as my first choice, because I loved math and that was the mathiest thing available; but I also remember that when it came time to shadow the person who did the real version of the job, he grumbled about how it was probably a last choice thing that I got stuck with, and I got all tongue tied trying to explain how I felt about math, even budgetary math.
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I remember the computer programming course I took, and I love the teacher I had because she treated it more like independent study, everyone at their own pace. There was of course a minimum amount of progression required to pass, but what it meant for me was that I was able to tear through material as fast as I could understand it, without waiting for other people to catch up.
I remember one assignment that stymied me -- we had learned about if/then sequences, and also about for loops, separately, but there was an assignment to print out baseball inning sequences (which was mostly a for loop and printing "nth inning" but with "seventh inning stretch" added) with a single for loop. At first the only way I could do it was to do two for loops: one for 1-7, break out to print about the stretch, and one for 7-end. It took me a while, and a lot of prodding, to figure out that I could nest the two: have a single for loop iterating over all the innings, and then an if-then statement that only triggered on the seventh inning.
I remember tearing through Pascal, and moving on to C, and discovering that I loved programming. I'd forgotten about turtle logo; I'd forgotten about the books I had that involved doing simple code bits in BASIC to solve puzzles that let you progress through the story; so it was more of a rediscovery than a first time, but it stayed with me.
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I remember AP English, where the teacher had us writing an essay every Friday during the class. The topic was never given in advance; it was meant to prepare us for the AP test, where we would have a short amount of time to write an essay on a given topic. And it was graded according to the AP scale: 0-5, which only the best essays got a 5.
The first Friday of the year was our first essay, and almost everyone got a 0. We didn't know how to write essays, in my case really at all, let alone in the 50 minutes allotted to each class period. But we learned, and we got better, and by the end of the year most of us were getting 5s.
It was the best English class I ever had, I think.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
In which I discover musicals
Growing up, I was a pretty strange kid musicwise. I didn't care about popular music, or even the music of my parents' generation. My thing was classical music. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, that sort of thing. Mostly instrumental, mostly orchestral (or, because of my violin lessons, violin concertos). This worked out pretty well for me, since CDs of classical music were on the cheap side. Popular stuff could run $16 for a single; classical music was in the cheap bin, mostly $5 stuff.
(For the record, I still do like classical music a lot. I just have a broader spectrum of stuff that I listened to.)
I should also point out that I wasn't too fond of opera. The plots tended to be slow (seriously, do you really need a twenty minute aria about how you have been stabbed with a sword and are therefore dying?), and they were rarely in English, and while live opera did have subtitles, CDs didn't, and anyway operas were long. I also wasn't fond of the large choral pieces like Handel's Messiah or similar, because they would say the same thing over and over again. Literally. It was like reading a book, except every sentence had to be said twenty times.
But somewhere along the line, I discovered Broadway musicals.
It might have been in London, where we saw a few (okay, it was technically West End, not Broadway, but the musicals were the same). It might have been later. I know there was one trip to Boston where we saw Phantom of the Opera -- I don't remember when, I just remember seeing it. (And I remember my dad getting a bad case of food poisoning from some clams the night before. But let's not go into that.)
My Phantom obsession started in Boston, I'm pretty sure. I got a stereo at some point, and I remember testing it in the store using the Phantom overture (which is a good thing to test with because it's nice and loud, but I was all awkward and embarrassed because, goodness, people might find out I liked it! Obviously I was the only person in the world who liked Phantom). I remember playing the CDs over and over again. I remember one summer when I was at camp and borrowed cassettes from a friend and practically wore them out over the six weeks.
And I found others. Les Miserables, obviously. (I started out with the Original London Cast recording, and there is one song -- "I Saw Him Once" that doesn't show up on other recordings that, now, always reminds me of physics homework done during the summer before senior year.) My sister also introduced me to the Secret Garden musical, and to Chess, although the latter bothered me because -- gasp -- it used bad words.
(I was brought up with the understanding that one must never say the f-word or s-word or d-word, and I was very good about following that. Partly because it was a Rule, and Rules must be followed; because if my mom heard something bad she would flick a finger against our lips, just barely hard enough to sting. I don't actually remember any time that happened, but I do remember one time I said something smart-mouthed and ducked out of the way of the finger-flick. At any rate, I never used swear words until I got into college, to the point where I remember one of my friends at one of the language camps commenting on the fact that I used something as swear-ish-y as "pissed off". So a musical that had lyrics like "Refugee, total shit--That is how I've always seen us." ... well, it was a tad shocking. Though it did become one of my oft-listened-to favorites.)
It wasn't that I liked all musicals. Brigadoon, which my high school put on and I was in the pit orchestra for, didn't stick; I mainly remember the stage fog (which, being heavier than air, liked to creep its way down into the pit) and the ew factor of the two main leads kissing (they were boyfriend and girlfriend in real life, so the kisses were not just stage kisses but full-on slobbery real kisses). Bye Bye Birdie and Carousel, also high school productions but ones I wasn't involved with, also didn't stay with me, the first because it wasn't my sort of music and the second because it was too depressing. Oklahoma was good but scared the crap out of me, so I didn't either watch or listen to it a lot.
But overall, as a genre, I loved musicals. They were generally in English, they didn't have a lot of boring repetition, and they were fun to sing along to. And the ones I really truly loved (Phantom, Les Mis, and Secret Garden,at least for high school; others came later, in college, but that's another chapter of this saga) I listened to over and over and over again.
I was probably pretty annoying about it, really. But I had fun.
(For the record, I still do like classical music a lot. I just have a broader spectrum of stuff that I listened to.)
I should also point out that I wasn't too fond of opera. The plots tended to be slow (seriously, do you really need a twenty minute aria about how you have been stabbed with a sword and are therefore dying?), and they were rarely in English, and while live opera did have subtitles, CDs didn't, and anyway operas were long. I also wasn't fond of the large choral pieces like Handel's Messiah or similar, because they would say the same thing over and over again. Literally. It was like reading a book, except every sentence had to be said twenty times.
But somewhere along the line, I discovered Broadway musicals.
It might have been in London, where we saw a few (okay, it was technically West End, not Broadway, but the musicals were the same). It might have been later. I know there was one trip to Boston where we saw Phantom of the Opera -- I don't remember when, I just remember seeing it. (And I remember my dad getting a bad case of food poisoning from some clams the night before. But let's not go into that.)
My Phantom obsession started in Boston, I'm pretty sure. I got a stereo at some point, and I remember testing it in the store using the Phantom overture (which is a good thing to test with because it's nice and loud, but I was all awkward and embarrassed because, goodness, people might find out I liked it! Obviously I was the only person in the world who liked Phantom). I remember playing the CDs over and over again. I remember one summer when I was at camp and borrowed cassettes from a friend and practically wore them out over the six weeks.
And I found others. Les Miserables, obviously. (I started out with the Original London Cast recording, and there is one song -- "I Saw Him Once" that doesn't show up on other recordings that, now, always reminds me of physics homework done during the summer before senior year.) My sister also introduced me to the Secret Garden musical, and to Chess, although the latter bothered me because -- gasp -- it used bad words.
(I was brought up with the understanding that one must never say the f-word or s-word or d-word, and I was very good about following that. Partly because it was a Rule, and Rules must be followed; because if my mom heard something bad she would flick a finger against our lips, just barely hard enough to sting. I don't actually remember any time that happened, but I do remember one time I said something smart-mouthed and ducked out of the way of the finger-flick. At any rate, I never used swear words until I got into college, to the point where I remember one of my friends at one of the language camps commenting on the fact that I used something as swear-ish-y as "pissed off". So a musical that had lyrics like "Refugee, total shit--That is how I've always seen us." ... well, it was a tad shocking. Though it did become one of my oft-listened-to favorites.)
It wasn't that I liked all musicals. Brigadoon, which my high school put on and I was in the pit orchestra for, didn't stick; I mainly remember the stage fog (which, being heavier than air, liked to creep its way down into the pit) and the ew factor of the two main leads kissing (they were boyfriend and girlfriend in real life, so the kisses were not just stage kisses but full-on slobbery real kisses). Bye Bye Birdie and Carousel, also high school productions but ones I wasn't involved with, also didn't stay with me, the first because it wasn't my sort of music and the second because it was too depressing. Oklahoma was good but scared the crap out of me, so I didn't either watch or listen to it a lot.
But overall, as a genre, I loved musicals. They were generally in English, they didn't have a lot of boring repetition, and they were fun to sing along to. And the ones I really truly loved (Phantom, Les Mis, and Secret Garden,at least for high school; others came later, in college, but that's another chapter of this saga) I listened to over and over and over again.
I was probably pretty annoying about it, really. But I had fun.
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