I had a very odd dream last night. I was back in high school, and one of my English teacher’s would, after the school day was done, turn her classroom into a lounge where the wine and smokes flowed freely (actually, knowing this teacher, she would have liked to have done that). It was some kind of special day where all of the seniors (I guess I was one too) were down in the gym showing a bunch of college scouts their talents. But it wasn’t sports, it was like music, or acting, okay some sports, their best subjects, writing, etc.
But I wasn’t allowed to go down there because I had just completed a series of interviews for some news show that was doing a special on philosophy and religion and how that pertains to relationships, and I had gotten back to school too late to get into the gym. So instead I was sitting in the classroom / lounge smoking and drinking and bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t like everyone else.
“But,” she said to me, “you don’t need the college scouts. You’re already on your way to the top of your field and being famous. Who cares about what everyone else is doing?”
“Because,” I answered, “that’s what kids my age are supposed to be doing.”
This has been a struggle with me for a long time, especially as a kid. I don’t really know why, but something in me has always felt a few steps ahead of the game. No, I’ve never been on a news program to talk about the religion/philosophy of relationships (although that’d be one interesting show from my brain, I think. I’m the one who ascribe’s to Plato’s theory of soulmates–jump down to more in depth classical definition– which then by logical argument means that in true form the homosexuals on earth are actually the only straight people in true form and everyone else in true form is a hermaphrodite, and then I try to combine that with a strong belief in Catholicism and worry about how I’m ever going to be let into heaven if I don’t get married except I can’t get married because my own church won’t let me, which is silly because I don’t think being gay is a choice and if being gay isn’t a choice, and if I also believe that God made me the way I am, then that means that God made me gay so really the church should be okay with me getting married or maybe Calvin had it right when he talked about predetermination / predestination so I’m just fucked and am going to Hell no matter what I do, but it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to lead a good Christian life and find someone to fall in love with anyways because Jesus told us that love is the most important thing–actually, so does Dumbledore, so maybe it does all go back to Harry Potter–or just in case the predetermination theory is wrong I want to be as good and moral as I possibly can, but sorry Father, there’s nothing I can do about they gay thing. I tried.) , and there was never a day when all the seniors at my school were scouted for any / all talents that they had.
My mom would come to pick me up at friends’ houses where I went to play after school, and she’d often find me talking about the latest news with their parents upstairs. This, to me, was way more interesting than playing house or whatever. I asked my mom to order Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai which I had read about in Time Magazine. When I was six. Starting a lifelong interest in memoir writing and cultural politics. I just related much better to everyone older than me.
But I just wanted to be like everyone else. Do things at the same time everyone else because I recognized it not as “this is the most important thing in my entire life!” (high school graduation, drivers’ license, whatever), but as a rite of passage that everyone was supposed to do. At the same time.
I’ve been called “wise” and “an old soul” many, many times. I’m okay with that, but it seems that possessing wisdom stunts me in other areas, or eclipses some of the emotion. Is that what my dream was getting at?
Or, maybe, it was just telling me to pull together some capital and open a lounge called “The Classroom”. Because, that in some odd way just sounds hip. And I think I’d hang out there.
1 Comment
March 24, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Good page!, bro