The Confused Weird Kid

You know that weird kid you knew back in school? Well…I was that kid. I didn’t mean to be the weird kid, that was just how it was. Of course, if I’m being honest, I don’t think I ever really grew out of it.

I remember kindergarten being particularly confusing. You see, I was the kid who brought his own Colorforms with him (Batman, if you must know) and would sit in some out-of-the-way part of the room while the boys were playing some war/truck/sports games and the girls were doing some stuff with dolls and kitchen stuff (it was the mid-60s…gender roles were important). The teachers once made me join in with the other kids. It was rough. I didn’t understand the rules. While I wasn’t particularly disruptive, I wasn’t exactly meshing, either. After that, I was left alone with my Colorforms. That pleased me.

While still in kindergarten, one of the projects was to make a handprint in plaster (like you do). Almost all the other kids got it in one go. Me? Three. During the first two, I pushed my hand all the way into the plaster because the teachers told me to put my hand in the plaster. So I did. All the way. They weren’t happy with me at all because they had to continue the next day. In the end it worked out, and I still have that handprint stored somewhere.

I’ve often been confused by things that people seem to understand. Even before kindergarten, when I was four, my mom and a neighbor had me and the neighbor’s four-year-old cut spirals out of construction paper. The neighbor kid did it correctly every single time. Since I’m mentioning this, I obviously didn’t. About halfway through, when the spiral was getting tighter and the already cut bit was getting in my way, I’d cut through the dangling part and then continue on without the obstruction. I didn’t fully comprehend that the goal was to cut out a spiral. I thought the goal was to cut along the line and that, as long as I got all the way to the center by whatever means, was good enough. I was on the line with broken spirals while the neighbor had spirals with very suspect line-following.

Even at that age, it was obvious that I was not “getting it”. I just didn’t understand what, exactly, was being asked of me. For that, I think first grade was the worst. From what I’ve been told, the teacher was annoyed that I’d finish my work so quickly that I’d try talking to the kids around me, disrupting their work. My mom told the teacher to just treat me like she’d treat her kid. I didn’t know this.

Tell me if this wouldn’t be confusing: the teacher gives an assignment…say listing the numbers from 0 to 100 by fives. The other kids do math. They add 5 to 0, get five (hopefully), and write down the answer. They then add 5 to 5, and so on. It was quite laborious. I chose instead to write a column of numbers on my paper, skipping two spots, and then writing 1 1 2 2 3 3 and so forth. Once I reached ten I went back to the top of the column and to the right of those numbers I alternated 0 and 5. I was finished in about a minute. According to the rules as they had been presented, I was done. But teacher then had me do tens. I’d finish that. She had me do… well, you get the idea. I was doing three-to-five assignments for every one the class as a whole was doing–even when there wasn’t some cute shortcut. I always felt like I wasn’t understanding something that everyone else did. Apparently, she’d eventually run out of stuff for me to do. I cleaned a lot of erasers and more than once I was sent outside to play alone on the playground.

When standardized testing came along that year, I took a ton of them. The rest of the class spent half a day with them. I spent three or four (they weren’t consecutive so I’m a little fuzzy on it). I’ve since learned that they were planning to skip me ahead by a grade or more. Fortunately, circumstances and my parents intervened. I was confused enough without being way younger than everyone else.

And so it went through the school years. I didn’t comprehend swear words until I was in my teens (I made up for it), and it took even longer to understand what they all meant. When I was briefly on an organized football team when I was 12-ish, I didn’t understand anything that was going on. They wouldn’t tell me anything: no playbook, no glossary of terms, nothing. I was just supposed to know. And as for that interpersonal romantic relationship thing…honestly, that’s still an enigma wrapped up in a conundrum as far as I’m concerned.

To be fair, if I’d learned how to ask questions, or to say, “I don’t know,” it might have been easier. I didn’t learn those skills until my senior year in college. Instead, I’d learn as much as I could so that I wouldn’t have to ask the teacher to explain. There’s a lot to learn. Sometimes, without a having a teacher’s guidance, I understood wrong and had to correct that later. Oh joy.

To this day, though, I’m still that kid playing alone in the classroom with his own toys. Because of that, the Internet and living in the future has been a boon to me. Having one’s mind in cyberspace is such a relief. Learning how to think like—and give instructions to—a computer is a great goodness; and writing scratches a similar itch. While I still might be confused by a great many things, a significant part of the world is now influenced by people I understand. Being old-ish, with a few careers behind me, I no longer need to keep current on the latest bleeding-edge things…but the landscape is oh-so familiar to me. (Amazon.com may be the bestest thing ever—shopping without having to physically go out to shop. Bliss.)

And since some of you might be wondering—no, I don’t know conclusively if I have some degree of Asperger’s syndrome. Clinical tests I’ve taken strongly indicate such, but I’ve never followed through based on the results. It would just be a label and wouldn’t otherwise add or detract from my life, so I don’t worry about it. While I’m probably not the best judge, I think I’ve learned to mask many of the traits fairly well.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t give props to my friend, Finn*. Following his lead, I was able to learn how to interact with people, how to communicate. The lessons I learned almost never fail me…though there are times when they turn up missing. That actually happened unexpectedly a few years ago. I was in the car with Dale when she wanted to drop by Mary’s new apartment. (I’ve known Dale and Mary for more than a decade and have spent much time with them.) This caught me totally off-guard. When we arrived and met up with Mary, I just shut down. I was quiet. Though I was listening, I mostly just interacted with the cat. That hadn’t happened to me in a very long time. It sort of threw me for a loop that I could still close myself off to that degree even with people I’m close to.

So…yeah. I’ve found the world to be a very confusing place. I recall a line from the television series, Firefly, when River Tam says: “She understands. She doesn’t comprehend.” I understood and comprehended that perfectly.

* Names have been changed.