May is here

April was a bad month. Here's hoping May is better, globally speaking, with way less bad stuff happening.

 The phrase "By their fruits shall you know them" popped into my head this morning, about, oh, about everything that's going on. Actions speak louder than words but also words speak pretty loud, too.

I also find myself thinking of something the minister said last week, about how talking the talk and walking the walk are both important, but that your "walk" needs to back up your "talk," and your "talk" is worse than meaningless if you behave in ways that don't bear it out.

Also, after church, my friend Dessie came up to me (it was a monthly church lunch; we were standing around waiting for it to be ready). Anyway, we got to talking about how what the minister said was like something her father (himself a minister) would have said. And she commented, "You know....you were one of his favorite people here. He always spoke very highly of you."

And that touches me a lot. This was the man who I think was responsible for us not totally falling apart after the split - he was a great encourager, he kept us going, he was involved with the Youth program for a while (several of his great-grandsons were in it). He was someone I respected greatly and whose opinion I thought very highly of, so it means a lot to me to think that he thought highly of me.

You never really know what people think, I guess. And that's the best kind of behind-the-back thing to hear from someone - that someone else thought highly of you and spoke well of you to others. (Though given the kind of man Dr. B. was, I think he only would have talked about someone in a positive when they weren't present).

Also, I think for some of us our self-perceptions can be horribly skewed. (Maybe this is true of all of us). I was already a grad student (and mostly listening to Baroque music) when Radiohead's "Creep" came out, and I had never really noticed the song until very recently, when I heard the Postmodern Jukebox arrangement of it. (There are two versions, my favorite of the two is the soul version by Karen Marie

(Is it my imagination or is the chord progression in that the same as one of the old Fats Domino songs?)

And while the song is REALLY about having a crush/attraction to someone you believe to be out of your league, and sort of following that person around but not getting up the  courage to speak to them. But I - or rather, my past self - relates to it in a larger sense, in the sense of being someone who never really felt like they fit in:

I'm a creep.

I'm a weirdo.

What the hell am I doing here?

I don't belong here....

Yeah, that could have been me from about age 11 to age 20 or so. Oh, not all the time, and mostly only when I was at school (and it was worst when I was in junior high. I think junior high should be abolished....not sure how best to split it up, but the sixth graders, in my experience, are really still middle-school kids, it's seventh and eighth grades where the transformation takes place and you're going to have problems)

Also, the line "You're so very special/I wish I was special." I still feel that some of the time, though more often it's sort of ironically I say it to myself, like when someone demands I change my schedule JUST FOR THEM and I feel like I'm always the one who has to give in, who has to be disappointed...but yeah, sometimes I wish I had someone right here who regularly reminded me I was special to them. And that I could remind was special to me. I sometimes feel like my attachments are too thin or too weak....

And the part where the narrator of the song says, "I don't care if it hurts/I wanna have control/I want the perfect body/I want the perfect soul," well, that's pretty much every perfectionist ever. (And "I want you to miss me/when I'm not around" - the person who feels like they're not noticed, and that's often how I felt, and how I still feel sometimes)

The thing is though, on good days now (most of them), I look at that song and can kind of laugh and go, "Thank God I never have to be a teenager again and go through that." And I also kind of recognize that I was never really as big a creep or a weirdo as I believed I was back then, and probably if you had asked some of my classmates about me, they wouldn't have had anything bad to say.

But the thing is, as accomplished and mature as a person gets in life, I think that past stuff does still kind of hang around, sort of like that old steamer trunk you inherited from a grandparent but can't quite bring yourself to get rid of. And on really bad days, the old feelings come back. I remember two times in recent years feeling the whole "What am I doing here? I don't belong here...." thing:

1. Shortly before we disbanded the youth group, when only two teen girls were attending, and it was hard to get them to talk much or discuss anything. I felt like I was a total failure, and I figured it was because they were both popular, well-made-up, well-dressed girls - sort of the opposite of what I was as a teen, and so they couldn't relate to me well and vice versa. (I don't even know if all that was true about them or if it was just my perception. It could have been totally the reverse and they could have been intimidated because I came across as "too smart" or something....or it could just have been they didn't want to be there and were being forced by their parents)

The sad thing was, before most of the kids in the prior incarnation of the youth group aged out/moved away, the youth group was fairly large and faithful and things generally went well.....but the members were mostly boys. Boys are different; it seems like there are fewer subtexts and if two guys have a problem with each other, it seems more likely to come out openly....whereas with girls it sort of festers, or at least that's my experience. Or maybe I just feel that way from having too  much girl-drama around me as a tween.

2. With a "difficult" class, where people in one row would giggle and pass notes and not pay attention, and I could feel it coming back - "It's me," I would think, "They think I'm weird to care about this, or that I'm dressed oddly, or I just said something that now has an Urban Dictionary meaning*, or any other number of things" And it did make me really insecure in that class and I know I was often off my game. And I shouldn't let stuff like that affect me - but really, part of the way a class works has to do with the people in it and it's not all the professor's influence.

(* In my intro class one semester, this was just when the slang meaning of "basic"was hitting here [as in the weird classist/sexist judgmentalism about certain women who seem to be "aspiring" to be a higher class than they are], I had a couple of co-eds who would giggle every time "basic" was mentioned. It was like some kind of freaky Pee-Wee's Playhouse Magic Word. And of course, as this was the chemistry section, "basic" came up a few times. It got on my nerves but I couldn't tell for sure what was going on so I didn't say anything)

Anyway, the last day of this class, one of the students asked a bizarre, out of left field question that could have been construed as a slightly disrespectful question, and I wondered, "Is this student trying to throw me off, on the last day of class, and why?" And later on, I realized: the question was not unlike some of the goofy questions the boys in Youth Group used to ask, and they did it mainly because they wanted attention. (and in a couple cases, specifically MY attention). And so now I wonder, if some of the inappropriate behavior those students did in my class was attention-seeking - it was not, maybe, an attempt to show their lack of respect for me or the fact that they were being made to take this class, but it was just goofy not-quite-done-with-adolescence people being goofy. But the fact that I didn't suss that out until after the class had ended makes it a problem, because I reacted in ways that maybe weren't as productive as they could have been.

And that's a more charitable explanation and probably also the correct one, but it doesn't give me back the time I spent agonizing over how I could change myself ("I want a perfect soul") for the class to relate to me better.

But the thing is, you never know what's going on in someone else's head unless they tell you. I didn't feel comfortable saying to the class, "You know, when you giggle and pass notes and junk, I interpret it as you're making fun of me, and that there's something about me worthy of being made fun of, and it really bothers me and throws me off my game for teaching." But that's the end effect of what it was. And my original interpretation of it was "They hate me and they hate this class and they're going to make it as difficult for me as possible without actually raising the behavior to something I could chuck them out of class for."

And also, you never know how what you say to someone or how you treat someone will affect them, for good or for bad. That's a little scary, though I think by generally being appropriate and civil you can probably avoid some of the bad problems. Even teasing in an "affectionate" way can be problematic....that's actually kind of common here and I've been told, "In the South, when someone teases you, it means they love you" but given my past history.....I have to remember that real hard when someone is teasing me now, and I am not good at teasing back, my reaction is often more a pained smile and weak laughter and changing the subject....