My older sister got chickenpox three times; the rest of us kids got it once, all at the same time, and I still remember that my brother, the oldest of us, got a really peculiar version with discolored rings around the pox marks and a funny smell. (As in "the rest of us kids refused to sit near him at the dinner table." It was awful.) I still wonder whether that was just an odd set of symptoms, or something else entirely.
But what I remember most about the whole affair is that because of it, we had to cancel a planned family trip to spend a week in the jungle with one of the native tribes there, only accessible by plane. I still remember my mother explaining to me--I was young enough that I thought this was a horrible betrayal of trust, to have to cancel a vacation we'd looked forward to so much--that while we might be uncomfortable with the chickenpox, it could kill the people in this village if any of the adults caught it, especially so far from a hospital.
I never knew anyone in my age group who died of a disease that could be immunized against, but I still remember that weird queasy sense of shock as my mother explained to me that we could be responsible for the deaths of other people just by getting too close to them when sick. Somehow, I do not see myself objecting to having my kids immunized whenever I get around to having children.
I tend to eat alone, at my desk, staring at the computer, whether I'm at work or at home. After reading through this thread, I'm realizing that one reason I do it is for the community: I'd rather risk dribbling mustard on my keyboard, and be able to eat while talking to people in a MUSH, than go sit at some cold table by myself and eat neatly. It's not the same as sharing food with other people, but it's nearer to the family dinners of my childhood than eating properly at a table by myself is.
Bruce E. Durocher II @ 33: Review links, please! I'd especially like to see your take on the Sky Captain movie, since I have such very mixed feelings on that. I suspect I give it too much credit for thebetter movie that it kept hinting was just beneath the surface, scrabbling desperately to be let out.
When I did vote two weeks ago, incidentally, there was a twenty-minute wait. Voting machines constantly full, long line, and this was early afternoon on a college campus well after the lunch rush had ended.
I expected to feel more useless about the whole thing, given how very red state Texas is, and console myself with the thought that at least my votes for more local positions might be relevant. But instead it felt amazingly satisfying to vote for a candidate that I had a stronger opinion on than "lesser of two evils." Sure, my vote for him is utterly irrelevant in the mathematical scheme of things, but that doesn't mean I couldn't care.
I voted two weeks ago, sitting inside a solidly red state, so there's not much for me to do at this point but sit back and wait. My twitchiness is increasing this morning as I drink caffeine, wake up, and get enough brain function to start worrying properly.
I wish I'd volunteered to help at a polling place.
In that excerpt, "stocks gyrate" are two words that don't fill me with a lot of confidence or sanguineness either.
From my parents, in my adolescence when I was having a crisis of faith:
"Better that you learn to think for yourself than learn to agree with us."
It's proven a great comfort during many a religious (or political) disagreement with them since.
Bruce Cohen @ 22 Terrible as this may make me sound... Do you have a link to that post? Now I'm curious.
It would be the "widow's mite", actually. Small coin, classic gospel story, et cetera. Unless Huckabee's speeches are even wackier than I've heard, which I wouldn't be surprised by.
Debbie @ #357, that does make sense to me. We only did a little actual composition in my Latin class, but I really enjoyed the composition we did. Much like what Mary Aileen says, the joy was in being able to do it quietly with pen and paper, rather than having to say things coherently out loud on the spot.
Even in my native language, I'm frequently uncomfortable and full of stammering when I try to speak quickly out loud. Auditory input is so damn ephemeral, and I can't always remember by the time I get to the end of a sentence what I was saying at the beginning. And as someone very fond of long, well-constructed sentences*, it drives me utterly batty to trip over my own words like that. So learning a language where I'm forced to speak it is pure pain, especially when it starts by teaching me how to introduce myself, order from a menu, or what not.
Latin was always so beautifully dry and pinned down. They started off by teaching me how to construct simple "X is Y" sentences, and I loved the language ever after for that. I would love to take up Latin again, and learn how to compose in it; my few attempts at Latin poetry were quite dreadful, but I wanted to do more. It felt like a sort of language I could write poetry in, and I never felt that way about other languages I learned, even ones I spent years on.
* Not necessarily good at them, mind. But fond, yes.
On Latin being taught as a dead language... Well, that's the only reason I've ever had any luck in learning it. I do realize that there's more value in being able to actually speak Latin, or compose in it, than merely being able to translate. But I'm quite horrid at learning living languages, especially once people want me to start talking in them. Latin and Greek are the only foreign languages I've had much success with learning because they were nailed down firmly on the paper, and if I could write them it didn't matter if I couldn't speak them.
I am all for old languages being taught in vivid ways, but if they're taught as living languages, I won't be able to learn them at all. So I'm sort of biased on this point.
Diatryma, I'm terribly brass-oriented myself. After years and years playing in the school band, I went to my first real orchestra performance in college... and was annoyed that all I could hear were a load of undistinguishable strings, instead of the real instruments.
I've since acquired more appreciation for violins and what not, but I still rather feel that they need some good solid trumpets backing them if they're going to twiddle on for more than a minute or so at a time.
Xopher, if you haven't read any Konigsburg before, I'd recommend starting with either: From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankinweiler, which is probably her most famous book, and delightfully clever in places, about two children who decide to run away to a museum; or The View from Saturday, a more serious work about a set of schoolchildren who don't quite fit with the others, and form a team for an academic bowl.
I would be reading my copy of The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place right now to see how it ends if I hadn't managed to misplace it somehow. But I have sufficient confidence in that author to strongly recommend that book on the strength of its first third alone.
Xopher @ 148,
I haven't finished reading the book, though I've owned it for a while. But I strongly doubt the girl is being "set up" to learn a lesson. (For one, the book starts with her leaving camp halfway through rather than put up with more of it, and the "I would prefer not to" is in flashbacks.) Have you read other works by Konisberg? She's an author I admire greatly, and part of that is because of how well she deals with complex matters of non-conformity.
...and now I think I'm going to go pull out the book, to find out how it ends. Because I do want to know how she and her equally non-conformist uncles deal with the problems they're being faced with as people want them to quietly act just like everyone else.
A.J. Luxton, Spaceship Zero was a real show? I'm boggled! I saw the RPG, flipped through, and chuckled at what I thought was a very clever setting aproach where the authors based an entire setting around a hypothetical TV show, as justification for all the in-setting wackiness. Sort of how Cartoon Action Hour has setting books for 80s cartoons that never existed.
You didn't happen to live in Clearwater Florida, did you?
Nope. San Dimas, California. Only for the one semester, but it was bad enough. My usual school was in another country, and sufficiently isolated from US culture--and even the culture of the country it was in, to some extent--that it got to have its own microculture that simply didn't tolerate that kind of teasing or bullying. California was...different. Especially since I had moved from an environment where no one had much in the way of disposable income and it was just the way things worked, to one where you were socially inferior if you couldn't compete as a consumer. Finding out that my parents' comfortable middle class income was, in that area, technically below the poverty line--and even worse, that people considered this a mark against me--was one of the nastiest realizations I've ever had.
There is a church my parents used to go to when they lived there that I couldn't attend for years for similar reasons. The teasing was much milder, but I was so shocked to encounter it inside a Sunday School environment that I would start crying just thinking of going to that church. My parents were understanding enough to let me just stay home instead, and I'm still grateful. And, sadly, still holding a grudge against that church.
Caroline @ 224, Your club experience reminds me of the first time I ran into the opposite situation. After going to a small, friendly, no-bullying-allowed school for years, I spent a semester in a public high school in the United States. And it took me weeks to realize that the girls who asked me where I got my so awesome jacket or what I was reading or any of a hundred other things weren't being friendly, they were making fun of me. It was just hilarious to them that I'd cheerfully admit I bought my clothes in thrift stores, that I hadn't seen any of the latest movies or television shows, that I didn't know what the curse words meant...
I insisted on home-schooling for a year after that semester, even though we went back to the place with that marvelous supportive school I'd been happy at for years, because it completely broke my confidence. It's been more than a decade since then, and I still have trouble trusting new people until I've known them for a while because I'm never sure if they're being friendly, or just humoring me and really making fun of me when I'm not around. Or if they're making fun of me right there and I can't tell. All this from what's apparently garden-variety relatively innocuous social viciousness in a single school.
I keep hearing about how awful schools are in the United States, and one reason it makes me so angry is because I know it's not inevitable. I've gone to schools where vicious bullying wasn't approved of by anyone, from parents to administrators to teachers to the other kids, and so it didn't happen. Mean kids were the ones who no one would talk to, at least until they stopped being mean and apologized. I continue to boggle at a culture that assumes vicious behavior in childhood is inevitable and natural and not to be interfered with.
I have a hard time discussing the Narnia books with any sort of distance, because they're so tied up with my memories of childhood. My family had no television, and no English-speaking neighbors, for several years, so family time in the evening was reading books out loud together. (Or, once we got older, all sitting around comfortably reading our own books.) We went through the entire Narnia series at least three tiems, and The Hobbit once or twice. So when people offer (quite reasonable) criticism of the books, I start clutching them and twitching. Except maybe for The Silver Chair, where I was annoyed at the protagonists all the way through, and The Last Battle, which was terribly dark. "And they all died at the end, but in a good way!" just wasn't satisfying to me as a child.
However, I have long given credit to The Last Battle for this: it was the first place I ever read that people who weren't Christians could be good and honorable people who would make it into Heaven without ever converting, and it came from an author of such impeachable reputation in my family that I felt I was allowed to believe it. To a kid having trouble with certain unpleasant extrapolations from the "only Christians in Heaven" concept, it was a revelation and an amazingly hopeful concept. I can still trace a lot of my later choices in how to respond to other religions than the one I was raised in back to that part of that one book.
I was taught the best no-sting way to chop onions was to chop them with the cutting board in the sink, under running water. But this doesn't work well if you're dicing, only for largish chunks. Swimming goggles may be the best solution.
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