The Thing About 6th Grade

Have I ever explained about 6th grade?

You see, I actually started kindergarten when I was 4 years old. My mother thought it was a good idea at the time because I was already reading. When I was six, we moved from Florida to New Orleans and I transferred into this fundamentalist private Christian school — not that the old school wasn’t the same; I mean, I don’t know because I was too young, but I do know it was a private Christian school then too.

Anyway, the new school was using this program called The Pace System where everyone is given workbooks and you are put in little tiny cubicles along the wall and you work at your own pace; if you have a question, you put a little flag up to signal the monitor to come to your cubicle to help you. If it’s a really tough problem, you put a different colored flag up to request to go up to the teacher’s desk. When you finish your assigned number of pages per workbook for the day, you take your workbook to the grading tables and use your own red pen to check your own work; then you go back to your desk and correct the wrong answers and go back to the grading tables, etc.

O.K. Here’s the deal.

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Psychological Beating

Last night I came home to discover I’d left the basement light on all day.  Normally I would beat myself up about it, but as I stomped down the stairs with a load of laundry, I actually considered myself rather lucky.

After all, I live alone so there isn’t anyone to lecture me about having left the light on all day.  There isn’t anyone to make me feel stupid for having left the light on all day.  After all, it’s not like I did it on purpose.  I am the sort of person who’s rather environmentally conscious, maybe more than average.  I didn’t do it on purpose; if it happens again, it won’t have been on purpose then either.   I can’t go back in time and stop it from happening.  In the end, I’m the one who literally has to pay for it when the electric bill comes.

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Man! I Feel Like A Woman!

Last week, I came across Melonie Murray’s list of 13 things she believes every woman should know. I have to admit that I agree with her that every woman should know how to preform a self-breast exam, how to calmly and correctly deal with sexual harassment, how to write a resume, and especially how to have “me” time. I noticed she didn’t mention anything about having at least one class in self-defense or balancing your checkbook, but she thinks every woman should know how to clip coupons and mail in rebates, which sounds minimally sexist to me.

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Feeling Frumpily Grumpy

I had a bit of a meltdown yesterday afternoon when my mother phoned. She practically started the conversation with “You know what you should do; you should take some classes at night at the local university.” Well, I’d pretty much had it with everyone in my life telling me what I should be doing with my time. For two weeks, all I’ve heard from doctors, therapists and parents is what I should be doing and I’m 36 years old and I’m feeling stressed out and overwhelmed and I feel like I’m barely treading water as it is. I can’t figure out how to do it all and afford it all and then have time to relax, which apparently I’m also supposed to be able to do.

I really would like my therapist and my doctors and my parents and my boss to all get together and figure out my schedule so I can go to work, go to therapy, exercise plus do aqua aerobics, go to doctors’ appointments, take night classes in something they approve of, clean my house, run errands including going to the dump, take care of the extra stuff that needs to be done with the house, keep up with the surprise things that come up, pay my bills, get 8 or more restful hours of sleep a night, and make new friends.

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The Things Our Parents Taught Us

I hate to play Monopoly. I’m just not fond of how the game ends. For me, it’s not fun whether I win or lose. There’s just something about the total destruction of everyone in the game so one person can have it all that sucks all the fun out of it for me.

Or it could have been that moment in my childhood when my mother pulled me aside and told me to stop trouncing my friend in Monopoly because “it’s just not fun for your friends to lose.”

I’ve been thinking lately about how I am the sum of my past experiences and how I am a product of my upbringing in many ways. Despite being 36 years old, I seem to be just now uncovering a lot of hidden gems from my childhood and youth that shaped who I am.

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