If Jer Was an Angry School Marm

As part of his drama camp, The Boy studied different art movements–cubism, expressionism, mannerism, etc.  They used these different styles as inspiration for their sets & costumes and spent part of their days devoted to painting and sculpting (and bedazzling fabric!).

Here are two pieces my son painted:

Rock-n-Roll Rooster

Angry Nerd

The second is my favorite.  I keep telling Jer that it looks nothing like him, but he disagrees.

Sure, he has dark hair parted on that side… and thick eyebrows like that… and a largish nose… and black glasses–but he never wears ruffled turtlenecks or red lipstick!

I framed them today and hung them in the den.  Angry Nerd makes me giggle every time I pass it.

Sportsmanship

The Boy spends his summers going to a wide variety of camps and activities.  This year was no exception.  He spent the majority of weeks at Karate camp–taking lessons, visiting museums, swimming twice a week, hitting the beach, and making new friends.

Before that he went to Lacrosse camp, confirming his love for the sport and discovering a previously hidden well of competitiveness beneath his artsy/goofy outer coating.

Each summer he has also tried something new and different–something he typically shies away from.  I enforce this “rule” to keep him from settling into ruts and to try and keep him well-rounded.  This year he tried two new things: Tennis and Acting.

The first tennis lesson was eye-opening… for me.  He was the only boy in the group, and one of two with any coordination whatsoever.  It was painful watching the rest of the students trip, hit each other with the ball, accidentally throw their racquets, and generally miss every ball that came their way.  My boy wasn’t graceful or natural at the sport, but he could swing and hit the ball 90% of the time, which is why he was paired with the only other semi-good player in the class when the class broke up into separate matches so they could practice the basics they had learned.

The girl he was paired with was an adorable little blonde about the same age.  She was a picture-perfect tennis star from head to toe–complete with her bobbing blonde ponytail and her little pink tennis skirt.  She had a wicked forehand, and a lot of speed.

My boy took position across the net from her, proceeded to twirl his racquet loosely in his hand like the veteran pros I’ve watched on TV, his weight shifting back & forth in his ready stance.  He stared her down over the net, waiting for her to serve.

“You’re gonna DIE!” my dear, sweet, never-wants-conflict little boy hollered at her.  Thank you, lacrosse!

My mouth fell open and I slowly turned toward the little tennis-angel’s mom, cringing inside and preparing to apologize.

Before I could say anything, her mother laughed with genuine amusement and said “Boys!  You gotta love ‘em!”

He and I had a nice talk on the way home about good sportsmanship & how to trash-talk without threatening bodily harm.

“Come play with the zombies,” they said.

“We can play zombies for hours, Girlfriend!” they said.

“You’ve got to get Call of Duty: World at War so we can play zombies,” they said.

“Hey, Girlfriend, you got World at War yet?  It’s soooo much better than Horde,” they said.

So, I got it.

…And let me tell you, those Nazi zombies have got NOTHING on Gears of War II’s Horde Mode.

There’s a regular group of people I play with on xbox live.  I met them through the online multiplayer matches of Gears of War II, and we’ve since tackled a wide variety of other games–including competitive UNO.  They’re all guys, naturally, and a lively bunch at that.  One of them dubbed me “Girlfriend” the first time we played, earning a spot on my friends list by shouting “RUUUUN, girl, RUN!” in his crackling, gravelly voice when I was the last one alive out of our 5-person team and up to my hips in blood-thirsty Horde with no prayer of making it out alive.

They’re good players–some REALLY good, some fantastically good–but most of all, they are zany and fun and we work together well as a team… and die quite epically/comically just as often as we succeed.

When the crew bought Call of Duty 4, I had to wait several months before I could splurge and buy it for myself. I spent months trudging through rounds of its buggy and incredibly imbalanced multiplayer matches–players who have had the game longer and played more rounds get an automatic aiming & damage bonus, thus eliminating actual skill from mattering in the match-ups–all so I could play with “my boys” and keep up with their achievement hunting.  One shot from a “veteran” player would kill me–regardless of how accurate or inaccurately their aim–where it would take me 2-3 shots (even if I hit them in the head!) to slow them down.

Eventually I leveled up enough that my shots started to count, but it was a long slow process involving a lot of swearing and grumbling on my part.

So when they all got Call of Duty: World at War, I couldn’t possibly justify spending nearly $50 on a game that was a rehash of the same game that had frustrated me so deeply–even if it did come with a zombie mode that was supposed to rival GoW2’s Horde mode.  I listened to them whine for months about how I needed to get it and how much fun they were having playing Nazi Zombies together and how I was missing out and how each new map pack made it more fun than before.

I admit it bothered me at first, but then I realized I could continue to lure them back to Gears of War 2 and Halo if I alternated pouting or remarked that I’d found some new xbox live friends to play with.  (Girls are a rare thing on xbox live, and I’m not above working that advantage whenever necessary to get what I want.)

…But then Gamestop had to go and run a sale on used copies of the game and I was looking for something different to play… so I snagged a copy.

Ugh. The game is riddled with sloppy coding–rocks you can’t jump over right next to larger rocks you CAN jump over, branches and twigs that keep you from advancing with your team, AI team members that stand there and watch while you’re alternately gutted and shot point-blank by the swarm of Japanese soldiers they ignored when they ran past, etc. I can’t count how many times I’ve tried to throw an enemy grenade back (like the prompts on the screen tell me to!) only to have the klutzy programming throw one of my own grenades instead and KABOOM! I’m down.

Another gripe is the priority order for what the action key does.  For instance: my teammate goes down (probably from a grenade he couldn’t throw back), and I run to him to revive him.  I hit the x-button to start the revival process, but instead of reviving him like the indicators on the screen said it would, the x-button promptly exchanges my assault rifle for the pistol that was laying on the ground near my downed teammate.  I hit x again to try and get my gun back OR revive the teammate, but instead it swaps for the flame-thrower that was laying on his other side.  Now not only is my teammate yelling at me that they’re “about to expire, please hurry” (read: “DAMMIT!  I’m gonna DIE, Girlfriend!  Stop f’ing around with your guns!”), but the few seconds in which neither of us was shooting at the enemy has allowed them to run past our fellow computer-driven soldiers (see my comment above about the horrific AI) and bayonet me.  So, there we lay together… waiting for the next teammate to come exchange guns/accidentally reload/possibly revive us.

And I haven’t even gotten to the zombies yet…

Fine, I thought, the co-op and solo campaign have issues–the zombie levels will be worth it!  Yeah, right.  I haven’t found them worthwhile yet.

My first experience with them was boring as hell.  I stood and rebuilt a window (which you get points for!) by facing it and holding in that beloved x-button.  The zombies come to the window and tear the boards off, but because I’m standing there holding the x-button in, every board they tear off magically flies back up and reattaches itself to the window again.  You can stand there and do that forever.

I know because I stood there and held my x button for at least 20 minutes while my 3 other teammates alternately revived/downed each other with grenades so they could exploit a glitch that would allow them to get a third gun. …not that you’d need a third gun through the first 20 “waves” of mindless zombies when you can just hold x at the window and shoot them through the boards while rebuilding the window barricades at the same time.  It was a real yawner.

I’ve played a couple more times, and we ran a bit more after we got past wave 20, but it gets so monotonous.  Run to some spot in the map, shoot-shoot-shoot, teleport to the other side of the map.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

Overall, the game sucks, but I will push through the solo missions and rack up my achievements there–mostly because it’s the least glitchy mode (no gun-swapping-instead-of-reviving fiascos to end my missions prematurely) and will give me some gamer points.

If I want to play something with intense shoot-outs, increasingly challenging waves of bad guys, and fun team work, I’m  putting in Gears of War II or Left for Dead (especially with it’s new survival mode!).

CoD: WaW just doesn’t even come close to measuring up to either of those and certainly isn’t worth the $40+ price tag.

Nnnnnn-naive!

This weekend The Boy’s best friend from Maryland came and stayed with us for 3 days and 3 nights (for the sake of respecting his privacy, I’m going to call him “D-boy”).  The Boy and D-boy have known each other for a few years now, and even though they’re 100 miles apart, they still talk fairly regularly on the phone, still attend each other’s birthdays whenever possible, and still just “click” whenever they’re in the same room together.

The Boy and I made the trek down to pick D-boy up on Thursday night and on the 2-hr ride home they chattered away like crazy, attempting to discuss what 9-year-old boys consider adult topics and attempting to sound adult about them while they did it.  This was highly entertaining (and eye-opening) for me, and really tested my ability to refrain from laughing hysterically at their views on school, the President, and which Youtube videos are gross/hilarious/inappropriate.

It was during their discussion of Youtube videos that I got a glimpse of just how naive I’ve kept my son when it comes to things like bad language, situational violence, and anything remotely sexual.  I should add here that I don’t actively cull all violence, language, and nudity–he knows nudity through art (paintings, drawings, sculpture, etc) and natural situations like breast-feeding mothers or changing babies’ diapers; I swear like a sailor when mad, a habit I’ve never been able to break; and we play video games like Gears of War, Call of Duty, Halo–and I LOVE prat falls & sucker-punches in my comedies.

I think out of those three though, I tend to be more limiting on violence than I am on language or nudity/sexuality–mostly because I tend to think of language, nudity and sexuality as a natural part of existence, of being a well-rounded human.  I do not want him growing up feeling ashamed of his body or unable to look beyond the nudity of the Venus de Milo when we visit the Louvre someday.

I also believe quite firmly that there are some situations where no other words will do than swear words, but he’s been taught that they are words to use carefully and responsibly and that he cannot use them until he is an adult and can understand the full ramifications of choosing to use them (or not).  Of course, I have no illusions that he doesn’t try out a bad word here or there with the boys on the playground–he is going into 5th grade now and boys will be boys…

All that said–and because I have the technical know-how–The Boy’s internet access is filtered.  He is not allowed to roam willy-nilly on the ‘net, watching whatever he wants or reading about whatever he wants.  Unfortunately most of his friends do not have parents who know how to filter things… so they talk about all these videos he’s never seen and these songs he doesn’t know and these “totally gross things” that people do to each other–things they’re too embarrassed to describe out loud.  Usually, when they realize The Boy has no comprehension of what they’re talking about, they roll with it and don’t feel the need to elaborate on something they know they shouldn’t have watched in the first place.  Most of them also don’t realize that my son babbles to me about most everything–especially about computer things because I make my living building websites.

This time I was there for the conversation, and it went something like this…

D-boy: “I don’t know if your mom lets you watch youtube, but there’s this cartoon thing on there that is funny!  They do these stick-figure skits and one of them has them getting hit on the head with a cheeseburger…”

The Boy: “Oh, yeah, I can’t get to youtube but my mom will load up the video if I ask her to and if she thinks it’s okay for me to watch…”

D-boy: “This one has some inappropriate language in it, but not REALLY bad stuff–not like the H-O word or the F-word or anything like that.”

The Boy: “The H-word isn’t that big a deal–I’ve seen and READ stuff with the H-word in it.”

D-Boy: “No–I’m not talking about H-E-L-L… I mean the H-O-something-something-something word.”

(The Boy ponders this for a minute while I sit in the front seat also trying to figure out what word he’s talking about…)

The Boy: “Ummmm… I don’t know a swear word that begins with H-O….”

D-Boy: “H-O-O…something…..”

Me: “K-E-R…?”

D-Boy: “YES!”

The Boy (confused): “That’s a bad word?”

D-Boy: “…well, do you know what that is?”

The Boy: “Nope!”

D-Boy: “Well, it’s probably for the best… it’s gross.”

The Boy: “Then don’t tell me!”

Me: “YOU know what that word is, D-Boy?”

D-Boy: “Yeah… I know a lot of words from being around my dad…”

Me: “Oh…”

D-Boy: “He sometimes yells at people when he’s driving.  He calls them names and stuff.  Like sometimes he screams ‘Get off the road Mildred & the Blue-hairs!’…

The Boy: “…Mildred?  What’s a Mildred?”

D-Boy: “I dunno.  I think it’s a mean name for an old lady…?”

They both looked at me expectantly.  I know ’cause I could see their little cherub faces waiting for an explanation when I glanced into the rearview mirror.

Me: “Um… well, based on the context I’m guessing he was trying to say they were too old to drive…?  Sometimes older women have blue-ish colored hair and Mildred is an old-fashioned name…”

Me (added hastily): “But Mildred is not necessarily an insult!”

(brief pause while everyone sort of recovers from that one)

D-Boy: “Anyway… so this video doesn’t have any of those words in it, so maybe your mom would let you watch it–oh! and it also doesn’t have the worst ones like the N-word…”

The Boy (interrupts): “Oh!  There was this boy at school last year who told me about that word at recess… he kept saying ‘It’s like the word TIGGER–but with an N!’”

D-Boy: (cracks up laughing)

The Boy (continues): “…and I said ‘Nnnnnn-tigger?…or Tiggernnnnn?’…and they laughed at me!  I felt so stupid!”

I managed to suppress my laughter.  D-Boy didn’t even try.

They went back to playing Bakugan, and I went back to my own thoughts.  It was interesting to realize that my son probably hadn’t ever heard that word in our house, music, movies, or even public situations/events we’ve attended.  It was also interesting that I’d never even thought about it before–it never occurred to me that he wouldn’t have been exposed to that type of negativity or use of language, or even heard it as part of the pop culture of rap/gangsters.  The people I’ve had in our lives, the music we enjoy, the things we watch don’t even venture close to a point of view or line of thinking that would bring words like that into his vocabulary.

It also made me a little sad, once I thought all that through, that he now knows that word.

Imposter

“All these years later, he still had moments when he sensed the gaze of those [other] doctors and felt himself to be an imposter, about to be unmasked by a single mistake.”
– Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

There’s this feeling that comes over me sometimes–a feeling that I am unable to find the words for exactly.  The words I know are simply inadequate at capturing the odd mixture of fear, panic, awe, wonder, and disbelief I feel when the ghost of my Struggling-and-Confused Midwest Self rubs uncomfortably against the consciousness of my Present-Day Poised Professional Self.  I think about the barefoot summers, the nights spent crying… the remote ideas of there being Other Places in the World, but never imagining I’d ever be in those places, let-alone interacting with those people… and I remember how there was a constant fear of being caught, of coming up short, of being inadequate, of being found out.

We lived with secrets at my house–constant secrets.  There was the secret of where the money really went, the secret of which utilities were shut off (cold showers? or dinners by flashlight again?), the secret of where dad spent his afternoons (and with whom), the secret of who gave my brother/sister/me the bruises, the secret of why I didn’t finish college, the secret of where the money for food came from, the secret of what my father stole from work (and the secrets he knew that kept the company from pressing charges), the secret of why my mother’s friends never talked to her again, and–biggest of all–the secret of how I escaped my father and that lifestyle and somehow ended up living a rather normal and successful life.

…Actually, that’s the secret that troubles me sometimes.  I’m not really certain how I got from there to here.  I guess I made choices and put enough physical distance between us that he couldn’t possibly reach me.  I guess I had my breakdown, my crisis of identity, faith, and meaning of life early on, and still came out the other side.

I guess I ended up fine.

But sometimes a police car falls in behind me in traffic and some irrational part of my brain goes berserk with alarm, echoing the phrases he used to say out loud:  ”SHIT!  They’ve found me.  Everyone ACT NORMAL FOR GOD’S SAKE!  Pretend like you all have seat belts on!  OhshitOhshitOhshitOhshit!”

And I glance nervously in my rearview mirror and catch sight of my son pouring over a book, that lopsided grin of his pasted on his little round face (and his seat belt securely fastened)… and I remember that I am normal–or as normal as I can be.  I remember that I’ve worked hard to be where I am, that I’ve tried to do right by the Boy, tried to do right by myself.

Still… I wouldn’t be surprised if someone official turned up someday, maybe at work, and notified me that I didn’t belong among the suits and officials–that I was banned from Capitol Hill and the other finer areas of the city.

Someone somewhere must know whose daughter I am, right?