Blame Earl Grey. I used to love Earl Grey tea until R mentioned that it tasted like soap to him. I haven't been able to drink it since. Or maybe blame the military. I lived in Huntsville, AL; Denver, CO; Albuquerque, NM [three different houses]; USAFA, CO; Black Forest, CO; Stillwater , OK - BEFORE I entered kindergarten. I could keep listing places that they moved us, but you get the point. Better yet, blame D.L. King. I wouldn't touch a Bloody Mary until she insisted I try one last time we were at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, and now I drink a couple a year.
What am I talking about? I have no idea how others think and feel. I know this because things I like other people hate, things I've never been tempted to try other people love, and there's a million ways to do everything, and all of them are right - except the way I do it, which is always wrong, something kids at every school in every state told me.
Even people who judge me harshly, hold political ideas that confound me, or religious views that seem only to be expressed in words of hate and anger, even they, I assume, love. I'm in no position to measure the depth or sincerity of their feelings much less compare them to something else I'm not sure about. So I don't feel qualified to address this week's topic. Lest you think me a saint, or incredibly woo-woo spacey new age touchy-feely kumbyya addled, let me assure that I'm not. I can be as petty, catty, and mean-spirited as the next person. Or, at least, I think I am. Maybe I'm worse. Maybe I'm not. The thing is - I don't know. We each only have one POV on the world, and as I mentioned, mine has been unanimously declared wrong.
Aw, Kathleen, I feel the same way you do. I remember my first class after I started back to college at 26. It was Philosophy, it was Charleston, SC and it was the year the Citadel started allowing women into the Corps of Cadets. The professor asked, "How many of you think women should be allowed to attend the Citadel?" (Which is, by the way, a public university, not private.) My hand shot up immediately. I was sitting front and center and it took a moment to note an uncomfortable silence in the room. I turned around... and mine was the only hand raised. It wasn't the first time I was the only dissenting opinion and it won't be the last. But no one will ever convince me I'm wrong. :-)
ReplyDeleteYou're not alone. We all love and think differently, some of us are just really, really different.
Kristina - I would have had my hand rasied too.
ReplyDeleteI finally learned to have fun with it, but I wish I'd started earlier. Why not carry lunch in a red plastic bucket, wear cheap kiddie sunglasses indoors, and get out a coloring book during physics?
I think you have to be a little quirky to write this genre in the first place. Its not a past time most people would choose. Which just makes it more fun.
ReplyDeleteGarce
It's taken me more than five decades to realize that my personal answers are right for me - regardless of what anyone else thinks!
ReplyDeleteA couple Bloody Marys a year? I drink a couple a day--if it's a Blood Mary day. But then you definitely have me beat on the vodka martinis. This was a post about drinking, wasn't it?
ReplyDeleteOh, OK.
I don't think you're always wrong. I don't even think you're usually wrong. But then, I'm quite often wrong.
And Kristina, your comment cracked me up! And my hand would have been up there with yours. Perhaps Garce is right, we're all a bunch of misfits--and geeks--I had to add geeks--but that's what makes us cool. And we are.