A post.

Whoops, I guess we sort of forgot to pick a theme for this week, so I'm just going to do a free post.

I've had a pretty exciting couple of days. I have a friend, Martin, who's from Sweden. He did his first year of university here and then moved back home, so I haven't seen him in almost four years. But this week he came back for a visit! Since he came back, a bunch of my other friends who had dispersed after graduation (but not as far away as Sweden) came back too. It was really nice to get to see everyone and hang out and catch up.

The downside to seeing lots of friends this week is that it's put me even farther behind in my school work, which is a bit of a problem since exams are coming up, but at least there's only a few more weeks of worrying about it and then the semester will be over. I have no idea what I'm doing for the summer yet, but I'm definitely at that point in the year when I'm just looking forward to the break.

Other than that, I don't have a whole lot going on, and I can't think of anything else interesting to tell you, so I'll leave it there.

Things to try

I have to say, this was harder to come up with than I expected. Hmmm... I'd like to try living in a different country, to get out of the bubble that America seems to exist in. I'd like to try quilling because it's just absolutely gorgeous and doesn't require many materials (read: quilling tool, plus paper). Quilling is using a little tool to curl up paper and.. ok, you need a picture to appreciate this.

source

See? Beautiful! I'd also like to learn another language, preferably Spanish or French (since I'm hoping to move to Vancouver at some point, the latter would be very helpful). Maybe someday I'd even be willing to run a Dungeons and Dragons game, but I don't think I'm quite ready for that yet, I'm just a player for now :)

This is a title

I don't think that there's many things in like to try in life, and I had a hard time trying to think of things. there's things like I'd like to try and get a job or I'd like to try and live on my own. But there's other less mundane things I'd like to try too. I'd really love to learn to snow board, it looks like so much, being an ok skier I think I'd at least have the confidence to try it and fail. the only down side to this is I would need to take lessons and they tend to be quite expensive, but on the plus side I do live in Scotland and I'm only a few hours away from ski slops in the winter.

I'm really no good at think of things I'd like to do, I'd rather have someone else suggest something and then decided if I want to do it too. Any way this is going to be a really short post because it's late and I'm really tired. Also I'm sorry I missed last week, I don't really know the days of the week any more.

Do. Or do not.

There are a lot of things I would like to try. Some of them are big adventurous things, like skydiving (all the fun of falling without the pain of crashing!) or riding in a hot air balloon (it just seems so, I don't know, majestic). Others are smaller things. I would really like to try traveling by train, and I also want to learn to decorate cakes and make all the fancy icing flowers and everything.

Something that I really want to try, some day, is beekeeping. Bees are such interesting little creatures and it would be so neat to be able to observe their complicated little social hierarchies. Plus you would get your very own fresh honey on a regular basis, which would be pretty awesome. And it would be a good excuse to have lots of gardens and flowers and things to make sure that the bees were getting enough pollen. I don't know, I just think it would be pretty awesome.

A Couple of Memorable Gifts

I have a couple of memorable gifts. The first is a Christmas quilt made by hand by my Grandma before I was born.

Seen here being commandeered by the cat.

She's made one for all of my siblings too, as well as matching stockings.

It's a family tradition that we put our quilts on our beds for the month of December and curl up with them for Christmas morning, so I have many memories of opening stockings with it draped around my shoulders or, as I grew older, smirking with my sisters while my Dad opened presents from "Santa" that were the very specific things only he would've known to buy himself, hmmmm....

The second one is much more recent, but needs two points of context. For my time as an adult I've been used to a) not having any hope of financial assistance from my family, though maybe a food care package from my sisters if things got really dire, and b) until about a year ago, having my significant other's family intensely dislike me.

A couple of months ago I had to do some sudden repairs on my car and my savings got tied up and unavailable, until at one point I had $3 in my account. Luckily I had some bonds I could cash in, and I used some of the money to go visit my boyfriend as a way to help me de-stress.

While I was there, his mom approached me and let me know she wanted to help; completely unused to this sort of thing, I half-heartedly objected several times before gratefully accepting, then stared at the folded check on the desk like it was an alien. I decided that, hey, at least that would cover my gas there and back... and then opened it up and almost fell out of my chair. It wasn't the money itself that was memorable, but instead the relief it gave me from stressing out about bills, and the feeling of (please read this in the voice of a beauty pageant queen) "you like me, you really like me!"


(As an aside that I just think is amusing, when I wandered up to my boyfriend wide-eyed and told him about it, he immediately apologized that I might've felt embarrassed; when I got home and told my sister about it she was surprised and made as big of a deal out of it as I had. Different upbringings, I guess...)

Meow.

These cat ears used to belong to one of my best friends in high school. They were one of her "signature" accessories, which she wore to school on a fairly regular basis.

The summer that I was 16, my boyfriend cheated on me and then lied about it and it was all around not a very nice day when I found out. I called my friend to talk to her about it, and we decided that the best thing to do about it was to go out for ice cream. So I picked her up and drove us to Dairy Queen, but she said that before we went in she had something to give me. She reached into her bag and pulled out her cat ears and gave (approximately) the following speech:

"I've been involved in theatre for a really long time, and one thing I've learned is that being the centre of attention always cheers me up. The best way to do that is to wear something ridiculous and sparkly so that you know everyone's paying attention to you for a good reason. And because I want you to be able to have that feeling right now, I want you to have my cat ears."

That was almost six years ago and I still wear them sometimes if I'm feeling down, even though I've kind of fallen out of touch with my friend. They're really special to me because it was such a heart-felt gift, and I know that they were something she really loved and meant a lot to her before she gave them to me, so it was really special.

Gifts I'll Never Let Go Of

I only ever received two memorable gifts, though only one actually sticks out. The one that I think about when I think about a memorable gift is this necklace that my mother gave me a couple years back, I think it was for Christmas, but part of me thinks it was my birthday. So it's not really memorable in the sense that I remember receiving it, I didn't even start wearing the necklace until much later. It's this very small silver heart-shaped pendant with an angel carved into the front and the words "Guardian Angel Protect Me" engraved into the back on a thin silver chain.

Usually I never take it off, but due to a lot of x-rays and travel that requires me to remove jewelry I've left it off for a bit. It's a little like a good luck charm for me, I never feel comfortable without it. While the memory of receiving it is fuzzy, the gift still means a lot to me.

The other gift I really don't remember getting. It's my stuffed bear, Teddy. He was my first stuffed animal and I've had him since before I can remember. At this point in life he's a bit banged up his head twists all the way around and I don't know if it could do that originally, as if he became part owl over the years. One of his limbs is a little askew on account of it falling off a very long time ago and needing to be reattached. Teddy has been through a lot with me. I'm not ashamed to say that I still keep him close by, he's very important to me and holds a lot of memories. I sort of hope that one day if I have kids they can grow up with him.

Those are the most memorable gifts I have. They both are very close to me and mean a lot, they are strong connections to the past and to my family, iPods and computers, while somewhat necessary to communicate to many, do school work and are a part of everyday use just really don't compare to the sentimental values those two objects hold for me.

Different kinds of bullies

I was home schooled until 6th grade, or about 11 years old, and while that was great for my intellectual development, it wasn't good for my social development. Don't get me wrong, I never would've been an extrovert or social butterfly, and who knows, maybe if I'd gone to school earlier I would've been bullied even more. I know that there are some great homeschooling networks, but since we lived in a small mountain town, I didn't get a whole lot of socialization.

The groups that we did go to on occasion were generally nice and no one bullied me there, but the three or so people I hung out with most often could be pretty cruel to me. Two were siblings and would often team up against me and make fun of me, and the other was older and forced me to do stuff she wanted to do and... er, did inappropriate things to me. Though that's more accurately termed as abuse, not necessarily bullying.

Anywho. By the time I went into a small charter school in 6th grade, I was extremely introverted. I'm pretty sure I barely talked that entire year. There was one person in particular that bullied me for all three years of middle school, and it started right off the bat by telling me that my friends where saying horrible things about me while also trying to convince them to stop hanging out with me. I'm not entirely sure if it was malevolent or just chance, but as she got me removed from a group of friends somehow she'd always end up following me to the next group and doing the same thing.

This was a small school, with only a few people coming or going a year, so I started to run out of people to be friends with. I tried my best to fit in with the popular folks, but that really just isn't my style and caused me to be even more awkward because I was trying to be someone else. In 8th grade I made friends  with two other people that were bullied constantly, and I think it's telling how each of us reacted.

I tried desperately to fit in, to wear the right clothes, have the right hair, and talk the right way.

The boy of our group revelled in being the "bad" guy; he made advances at girls that he knew didn't like him, somehow made everything he said sound lecherous, and often acted snobby when he went to go be by himself. I hung out with him outside of school once, and he was a perfectly normal guy, but the moment we were back in school his voice and body language changed dramatically (and he of course tried to say that we had been on a date). In the very beginning I engaged in saying mean things to him along with other people, but after a couple of weeks I realized that not only did it not help my own social standing, but it was cruel and not something I should be a part of.

Finally, the third person that was bullied at my school was another girl. She went mostly the same path I did - trying to fit in and often resorting to hanging out with younger students to avoid people in our own grade. The difference was that she also became a bully and physically bullied me. It took me a really long time to realize it, because all of her words said that she was my friend, but friends don't throw pointy things at your face, knock you over onto concrete, or try to smash your face in with a basketball.

The basketball incident was when it finally dawned on me and I spent the evening crying with my parents, saying I didn't want to go back to school - if even the other bullied kids were doing this to me, what hope did I really have? - and my mom talked to my teacher. I overheard part of his conversation with the girl, and I couldn't help but feel bad for him as he was a first year teacher that had two sobbing 13 year old girls on his hands.

Things got much better when I went to high school; I found new groups of friends, often very extroverted friends, that were just fine having a quieter person in their group. Though one did end up kind of bullying me teaming up with another girl to loudly complain about how quiet and passive I was, high school passed pretty smoothly and college was where I really found my confidence and became proud of being smart and geeky.


As I look back on this rather long post, hindsight is showing that the people that bullied me probably had a lot of issues of their own, and insecurity about their own social standing. As evidenced by the other kids I saw being bullied, those that feel powerless often try to find power over others in other ways, and can become bullies themselves.

All of that to say, I have no idea how anyone could start to get rid of bullying in schools. There are so many reasons why it happens, and just about any blanket rule would leave lots of loopholes.

Bullying happened to me too

I never realised I was bullied until I left school. I never felt like I was bullied, I knew people didn’t like me and I had been the victim of being physical bulling but it never actually occurred to me that I was being bullied. It was just a part of going to school that I had to put up with.

I was never popular when I was at school right the way through from primary to secondary, but I guess pretty much all the bullying I experienced happened in secondary. When I was in second year, about 13 years old, I was commonly described as a “goth” because I like alternative music and wore skinny jeans and a lot of black. This mainly cause a problems because the large majority of my school were neds (The wiki article isn’t great in my opinion but it should give you rough idea), so anyone who is different from them is a target for them, I knew people who “swapped sides” so speak in order to avoid the bullying. I never changed because I always thought, “This is me, why should I change?”

Bullying wise I’ve been spat on, had chewing gum in my hair, all kinds of things thrown in my direction, sly comments, water poured over me in home ec and probably a lot more but I just can’t remember anymore. Writing this out makes me wonder how I never knew I was bullied...

The most direct kind of bullying I remember ever happening to me happened during, I think, my third year. In Scotland everyone has to take RME (Religious and Moral Education, which obviously didn’t work) and most people don’t want to be there. Unfortunately for me two of the most disruptive neds in my year happened to be in the same class as me and a few of my “goth” friends. I remember dreading going to that class because none of the teachers were any good at controlling or keeping their pupils safe. There is no story to this attack other than that I was sitting in class talking to my friend when he jumped off the table behind me and kicked me in the back. Everyone saw. The teacher saw. But nothing was ever done. I feel this speaks more about my schools attitude to this kind of behavior, like there was no point in doing anything because they’d do it anyway. I mean one winter a large group of were standing outside and we were having balls of ice with stones and all sorts in them thrown at us, I remember sitting for ages waiting to see the head teacher about it and then being told to just go to class.

Now that I’ve left school I haven’t actually experienced any bullying and it’s pretty great. I know it sounds stupid but being able to sit in a room and not having to worry about what people think or checking that all my belongs are with me or being scared that something is going to be thrown at me is pretty great. It makes life easier.

Bullying Stinks

There was generally not a lot of bullying in my elementary school. It was a really small school, so there was a pretty low student to teacher ratio. Also most of  the teachers were really good about maintaining a safe and positive atmosphere, and most students' parents were pretty involved in the school community, which helped. That's not to say people never got picked on, but it was the sort of casual thing that shifted around and was directed at whoever said something dumb/wore something ugly/cheated at a game or something like that and was forgotten by the next day.

The one exception to this was this one girl in our class whose personal hygiene was not so great. Her, uh, distinct odour got her stuck with the nickname "fish" for years, poor dear. I was never involved with the bullying, it was mostly the boys that did it, but I also never stood up for her or went to a teacher about it or anything either, which I feel bad about now that I'm older.

Most of my experience with bullying was in junior high. There was one guy in my class who bullied me a lot for three years straight. A few of his friends were in on it too sometimes, including two who were on my bus and used to make fun of me there, but he was definitely the worst one and the ringleader of it all. There were a lot of day-to-day incidents like name-calling and him going through my stuff and things like that, but the worst was in French class. Our teacher always made us do presentations in pairs that could be about anything, but we had to use a certain number of verbs conjugated in whatever tense we were working on, and sometimes he and his partner would put mean jokes about me in their presentations in front of the whole class. The worst part was that the teacher never did anything about it, and so I didn't see any point in going to a teacher or anyone about it, since he obviously knew it was a problem and just didn't seem to care.

Junior high was also the only time I can ever remember really being a bully, too. One of my friends had been acting bitchy for a while, so my best friend and I decided we needed to do something mean to her... junior high logic really does not make sense to me now. Anyway, we took one of those survey-questionnaire things that people fill out about themselves... you know, the kind of things people used to do facebook notes with all the time? Except at this point they went around through email. So we made a fake email account in her name, took one of those surveys and filled it out as if it was from her, but made all the answers really mean and embarrassing things, and then sent it out to everyone we knew. The next day she called everyone it had gone out to, telling them it wasn't really her, and asking them not to read it if they hadn't already. I remember how guilty I felt as soon as she called me and I heard how upset she was - and I think that was the moment I decided to try my best to be a nice person.

In high school the bullying stopped almost completely. The nice thing about going to a big school is that all the social cliques are big enough to live in their own little worlds, so I could more or less surround myself with people I liked and never had to deal with the people I didn't. The fact that most of my classes were IB probably helped to since most of my bullies weren't the type to be in IB classes. I really only had one experience with bullying in all of high school. A guy I knew broke up with his girlfriend because he wanted to be with me - although the major flaw in this plan was that I had absolutely no interest in dating him. I'm really not sure how he overlooked that very important detail. I almost feel like he used me as an excuse to get out of the relationship or something. Anyway, his girlfriend didn't seem to care that I wasn't interested (and I can't really blame her for that, even if she was wrong - I mean, I'd be pretty pissed too, if I were her). It also just happened that she went on my bus. So for a few weeks after that she and her friends would sit as close to me as possible and trash talk me the whole way home. I didn't really care that much since I hadn't even done anything and nothing they were saying was true, but I was upset about it for the first little while because I was concerned that it would start rumours and get spread around to more people. That didn't end up happening though, so basically it was the least effective bullying ever. All in all, high school was a pretty good time, and there was not a whole lot of bullying. Although there was some major public bullying directed toward the only openly gay student at the school, and it got pretty awful sometimes. Basically it all culminated when another guy threw a chair at him on Halloween because he was dressed up as a flapper. I wasn't there for this, but he got caught by a teacher and from then on all the teachers kept a close eye on things and as far as I know most of the bullying died down after that

And that is pretty much all of the bullying events I have ever had any experience in. That sort of thing seemed to get left behind pretty much completely at university, I guess people finally grew up.

I have a long history with bullying, this is going to be a while

So bullying has been a major part of my life for a very long time, it's normally something I don't like to talk about. But I have no objections about talking about it here.

I never experienced bullying until I moved to the States and I didn't understand it at first. I had come from an environment where everyone I knew was a different nationality, they moved a lot, I moved a lot, we all had different backgrounds but that was what allowed us to make friends quickly and easily, the kids when I moved to the US had all been born in the same hospital and their parents had all been friends since high school. Those kids were my nightmare for a long time, as a consequence of growing up overseas I spoke differently, bits of Korean and Arabic would come through in my speech, I had a lot of different habits too, It was really easy to point me out in the class. I know I made friends differently than they did, when people come and go all the time it's tough to adjust to a place where you're stuck with them. The teachers had my IQ tested because I didn't know the words to the Barney songs they would sing, but it wasn't that I didn't know the words it was that I watched Barney in Korean so of course I wasn't going to sing the English version (I was seven/six-ish when I moved here).

So I got bullied a lot after moving here. The kids treated me differently and the teachers didn't know what to do with a student from overseas. Some kids who lived on my road actually threw rocks at me on the way home. I don't know if being from a different country was why I was bullied but I certainly don't remember anyone else being a victim of it. They were a pretty tight group and all seemed to be in on all the jokes played on me.

I was so glad when I left that school. But I still had to take the same bus as a lot of them even though I tried to go to a different school than the majority. I always sat near the front of the bus because I couldn't stand being near the students I had once been in class with. It didn't stop the younger grades, majorly they're siblings and friends from bullying me as well, mostly they would pile all their bags on the empty seats so I wouldn't have anywhere to sit and would be forced to sit back with the kids from my grade I had been trying so hard to avoid.

I never told anyone about what was happening and if I did I would beg the person not to tell. Partly it was because the times I did tell someone what was happening it would get brushed off by the teachers or I would end up in trouble for being a "tattle-tale" and partly because I got used to it. This one time a friend of mine did go to some authorities for me and about half the bus reprimanded. The one thing that bothered me the most though, was the mother of the pair of twins who had bullied me the most those years. She was the one who apologized to me for their behavior. She didn't even think her kids had to take any responsibility for their actions, I think those twins should have apologized not her. Anyways, I don't think either of those two are still in school anymore along with a lot of kids from my old school.

I don't get bullied all that often anymore. I may not have a lot of friends and people will take any opportunity they can to sit as far away from me as possible, but I'm made fun of anymore. And it doesn't bother me that people avoid me, I'm as uncomfortable around them as they are around me, I know I don't fit in here, I don't read Twilight or watch Jersey Shore, I don't care about going to the mall and I don't think a license to drive a car or social situations are the most important things to happen in life. And I know that half of them drink and smoke, but I'm really just not into it.

I'm not trying to say I'm better than anyone, I'm not trying to say I'm more intellectual or anything, I know I'm not and I know that a lot of them are very intelligent and good people. I just don't take the same things seriously or put the same value on certain activities. So I don't blame them for not wanting to sit with me and I don't particularly want to listen to their conversations. I'm certain that half of it is because people think I'm a slob, that's due to an under-bite that makes it very awkward and difficult for me to eat, especially in public, that'll be fixed soon so I will be able to eat neatly and not appear to be gross.

That's been my experience with being bullied. There was a brief period of time where I did become the bully. It was when I had made a friend in middle school where I was bullied on the bus but escaped it in the classroom. However that friend was very unpopular, he was noted for being a teacher's pet, suck-up, poor hygiene, etc. I found out I was being made fun of again behind my back and people would come up to me and make rude comments about me being friends with him. I was really desperate to escape that, I didn't want to go through another school being the one everyone hated. So I distanced myself as far as possible from that friend and ended up making comments about him behind his back.

It only lasted a couple weeks but I feel horribly about it. I realized what I had become and stopped. I didn't go back to trying to be his friend. I did have a reason to be mad at him at the time and I'm still mad at him for it. While we were still hanging out my cat had become very sick and passed away and everyday he would come up to me and ask in the most insensitive tone if he had died yet, I'm surprised I didn't stay the bully even longer than a couple weeks.

That's it. I was bullied practically my entire time spent living here, and I became a bully because I was afraid of becoming the victim again. Right now I'm mostly just ignored and I can't wait to go away to college, I see it as a new beginning. Hopefully I'll go from being ignored to being someone people won't mind being around. I hope I don't come across wrong in this, I feel that when I talk about being bullied people think I try to put myself above others, I really don't mean to come across that way if I am.

Where I stretch the definition of "role model"

It's been hard for me to think of role models, since they've changed so much over the years, and even just a year ago I probably would have had different answers.

I'm going to second Sarah and say that Felicia Day is one of my role models, though for different reasons (as seen in my comment on that post). I really like that she is unabashedly herself - even when that means geeky and occasionally awkward. She's willing to go out on a limb and try something new (she made a web series about the world of MMORPGs called The Guild, and if you're familiar with that niche, you really ought to check it out) and work hard on it even if there's no guarantee that it'll work out.

On a similar note, my role model for professional life has been a teacher/employer of mine from college. She was one of the few female professors in the physical sciences, and was very articulate, understanding, and thoughtful. She could always come up to a well-reasoned explanation no matter what question we came up with ("when you look into someone's eyes and see your reflection, why is it smaller?") and gently helped our class along to find answers ourselves instead of just handing them to us.

And yes, of course, John and Hank are my role models as well. I love how they're able to be goofy and silly some times, and philosophical and thoughtful at others without it seeming strange. I'm inspired by their passion to make the world a better place, even just a little bit at a time, and do what they love even if it's off the beaten path.

Finally, and this is probably a little weird, one of my role models is the internet. Not all of it, of course - 4chan doesn't particularly inspire greatness in me - but some of the aspects of the internet at large such as creativity, independence, and critical thinking. There's no single site or blog that covers all of these, and I draw inspiration from lots of different places, so I guess I'll just cite the internet as a whole.