on people and paperclips

Weekend before last, I watched the re-make of the movie Carrie - I'd seen the original back in the mid-90's living in Joplin, and read the book sometime while in High School (our middle school library didn't have Stephen King).

Most people's high school experience doesn't involve psychokenesis, vats of pigs blood, or religious whack-job parents. But I know a hell of a lot of people who, in their heart of hearts, understand Carrie and her desire to be "normal."

High school is a tough place. We let teenagers, these fluid, transitional, hormonal not-children-yet-not-adults run wild, and while it's usually "all in good fun" and "kids will be kids" type stuff....I always had the feeling that just a slight tweak in the system would result in something more appropriate to Lord of the Flies.

Not that high school was the first place I ever felt like I was different, or the first time I felt that "most people" just were never going to understand me, but it was the first place where I was expected to "get along" because "you're basically adults" and that's how the real world is.

A friend of mine once made a statement along the lines of "Other people relate to me about as well as they relate to a paperclip." And that's stuck in my head. Because a lot of the time, it feels like a lot of people find me so far outside of the way they imagine the world to be that I might as well be a paperclip - the kind of thing you ignore, or leave in a desk drawer, and only look for when you need something.

There have always been small pockets of the universe where I did just fine - where I fit in, and where people generally overlooked a lot of oddness. Missouri Scholars Academy, math team, the Slounge...

As a real adult, I find the same things are still true. I'm just usually less willing to try to put on a mask to fit in most places.

Mommy groups, for the most part, are epic fail. "We have kids the same age" is about as good at finding people with similar interests as "we go to the same high school." Add into that Alexander's medical issues, and most of them just look nervous, and then back away slowly.

Frankly, women are by far the worst, because so many of them try so damn hard to fit into the mold of the perfect wife, and so many have been told their whole lives that women are supposed to be a certain way, and I'm not. My last mani-pedi was colored by the technican doing my nails asking where I worked, and when she heard it was an auto company, her assumption was that I must be a secretary...

...because, you know, that's all women are good for.

The Slounge was funny that way. For a campus that was 80-90% male....the Slounge was nearly 50% female. In no small part this was because the Slounge was a meritocracy - if you could play cards or DnD/LARP/WhiteWolf games, carry on bizarre technical conversations, and had a pulse, you were in.

When I was a kid, my dad was in the Jaycees. Back then, you had to be a male under 30 to join. There was, additionally, a "Jaycees wives club" where the women got together, gossiped, and ran their own little club that often got drafted to help do things the menfolk were doing. And even though the Jaycees are now integrated, I still see that same sort of behavior in a lot of social circles.

One of our social groups appears, for all intents and purposes, to have an unofficial wives club. I've posted previously (in highly filtered posts) about how odd it seems to be to fit in better with the guys - and while I'm usually baby wrangling now, I'm still more comfortable (and more welcome) in the midst of the conversations the guys are having than in the discussions the wives have.

Anyway. Lots of background, but it all boils down to a lot of things happening in the last few weeks leaving me feeling like I don't fit anywhere, and continuing to pretend to be something I'm not in order to try to fit in seems like a waste of time and energy.