Petty Gits and Pretty Wits
Jul. 16th, 2009 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanModCloth, a really great online clothes shop, is running a contest for bloggers. The winner gets a $100 voucher and a guest spot blogging there! Which would be approximately the greatest thing ever. It's called the Terrific Transformations Contest and will stay open until the 22nd, if any of you are interested. Here's my entry
Right. I actually wrote an entirely separate essay for this, about how being (realising I’m, coming out as, living the life of someone who’s) bisexual has changed me. But that was less of a transformation than a slow evolution. I’ve always been more of a one for evolution and development, for suddenly noticing that I’m different after months of slow change, than for a single moment of transformation. If I was undead, I wouldn’t be a vampire, turned in one dramatic moment and coming back as something myself, but not. I’d be a zombie: basically the same, but slowly rotting until I was something quite different.
Only, you know, hopefully in reverse.
Anyway, I think one moment that did change me was an extremely petty one, back at school.
I was hanging out with a bunch of my friends on a set of wide stairs, because it was January and the teachers who tried to send us outside for ‘fresh air’ only went out themselves for the nicotine-laced variety. A couple of kids from Year Nine were rushing about at the bottom of the stairs; we knew them vaguely, and laughed along. One of them was actually the little brother of one of my best friends and we got along quite well in our own right. He was cute, in a jailbait way, and I was funny. (Shame how the wit declines with age - like the breasts, it starts to droop.) Which is where the title of this story comes from.
That was when the prefect on duty – on duty my arse, he’d been outside sexually harassing the Year Tens until they made it clear they were a lot more hardcore – came back in. Two minutes later, the deputy head came out of his office.
This deputy head was the pettiest person to ever live. The school uniformly hated him, including the teachers. My geography teacher once devoted fifteen minutes to the “mutiny in the ranks” over how this man had spent ten of thousands of pounds on a little whiteboard to go in every classroom, with “Today We Are Learning To....” on it. Pointless, and showing bad grammar. The English teachers hated it most of all: my sister’s English teacher spent the first lesson back correcting it with the class.
When we finished our GCSEs, on the very last exam, we were meant to leave twenty minutes before the last bell. This man made us sit in our seats for those twenty minutes and listen to Coldplay. He was indeed a demon in polyester-suit form.
So, he came out and started yelling about all the noise we’d been making. It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s met me in RL to learn that I was making the noise. But when he asked the prefect on duty, the git blamed my friend’s little brother. He had a grudge. Possibly based on the fact that the sole girl in that large family was one of the sexually harassed Year Tens who mocked his tiny manhood.
Anyway, I was pissed off and I made the right decision: I told the deputy head this. Not the part about the tiny manhood, but about it being me, not the kid, who’d been making noise. Definitely one of the decisions I’m proud of, because detention with this man was sheer unbridled hell. At least the PE teachers had you write essays on What Is The Matrix and The Sex Life Of Tennis Balls and things.
The git promptly gave us both detention. Totally unfair and ridiculous. Either he believed me, and so gave me but not the kid detention; or he didn’t believe me and stuck with punishing the kid. Only that would have spoilt his chance to do his life’s work: making teenagers miserable.
But the two of us were there, sitting across a classroom from each other. This was meant to stop us talking; it actually led to us chucking notes at each other’s heads every time he turned around. It was pretty hilarious. Shame he spent most of the detention staring at us like we were Wembley tickets to blandness in rock form, so we couldn’t escape, and telling us all about proper respect. I left a little of my soul in that room.
And at the end he held me back to say he admired me for standing up for what was right.
I made a face.
Twat. He was the kind who believed that schools should teach their pupils moral behaviour. I can get behind that, actually, except he’d actually shown me that sometimes you do the right thing and it makes things worse, without actually helping the person you meant to help.
That is true. But I’d still do it again.
I can remember leaving the detention and thinking hotly that he’d given me the opposite of a moral lesson, while still being self-righteous. But I didn’t regret telling him it was me; not at all. So I thought about that. And this small episode taught me some important things, and crystallised some other things I’d already sort of known. Crystallised is exactly the right verb: the hot lava of the angry idealism that belongs to teenagers becoming something clear and hard and precious.
I learnt:
Pious people cannot be trusted. They will not realise this themselves.
Doing the right thing yourself does not automatically lead to the right thing happening in the world.
Doing the right thing actually is its own reward: or at least, I won’t regret it for a moment.
If you're treated unfairly, you can at least have fun with the rest of the oppressed!
Three months later, I left the school. On Muck-Up Day me and my friends, including the kid’s big brother, did something very shocking and borderline illegal in the deputy head’s office. (After doing the definitely illegal thing of picking his lock.)
But that’s anothercriminal prosecution transformation story.
Right. I actually wrote an entirely separate essay for this, about how being (realising I’m, coming out as, living the life of someone who’s) bisexual has changed me. But that was less of a transformation than a slow evolution. I’ve always been more of a one for evolution and development, for suddenly noticing that I’m different after months of slow change, than for a single moment of transformation. If I was undead, I wouldn’t be a vampire, turned in one dramatic moment and coming back as something myself, but not. I’d be a zombie: basically the same, but slowly rotting until I was something quite different.
Only, you know, hopefully in reverse.
Anyway, I think one moment that did change me was an extremely petty one, back at school.
I was hanging out with a bunch of my friends on a set of wide stairs, because it was January and the teachers who tried to send us outside for ‘fresh air’ only went out themselves for the nicotine-laced variety. A couple of kids from Year Nine were rushing about at the bottom of the stairs; we knew them vaguely, and laughed along. One of them was actually the little brother of one of my best friends and we got along quite well in our own right. He was cute, in a jailbait way, and I was funny. (Shame how the wit declines with age - like the breasts, it starts to droop.) Which is where the title of this story comes from.
That was when the prefect on duty – on duty my arse, he’d been outside sexually harassing the Year Tens until they made it clear they were a lot more hardcore – came back in. Two minutes later, the deputy head came out of his office.
This deputy head was the pettiest person to ever live. The school uniformly hated him, including the teachers. My geography teacher once devoted fifteen minutes to the “mutiny in the ranks” over how this man had spent ten of thousands of pounds on a little whiteboard to go in every classroom, with “Today We Are Learning To....” on it. Pointless, and showing bad grammar. The English teachers hated it most of all: my sister’s English teacher spent the first lesson back correcting it with the class.
When we finished our GCSEs, on the very last exam, we were meant to leave twenty minutes before the last bell. This man made us sit in our seats for those twenty minutes and listen to Coldplay. He was indeed a demon in polyester-suit form.
So, he came out and started yelling about all the noise we’d been making. It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s met me in RL to learn that I was making the noise. But when he asked the prefect on duty, the git blamed my friend’s little brother. He had a grudge. Possibly based on the fact that the sole girl in that large family was one of the sexually harassed Year Tens who mocked his tiny manhood.
Anyway, I was pissed off and I made the right decision: I told the deputy head this. Not the part about the tiny manhood, but about it being me, not the kid, who’d been making noise. Definitely one of the decisions I’m proud of, because detention with this man was sheer unbridled hell. At least the PE teachers had you write essays on What Is The Matrix and The Sex Life Of Tennis Balls and things.
The git promptly gave us both detention. Totally unfair and ridiculous. Either he believed me, and so gave me but not the kid detention; or he didn’t believe me and stuck with punishing the kid. Only that would have spoilt his chance to do his life’s work: making teenagers miserable.
But the two of us were there, sitting across a classroom from each other. This was meant to stop us talking; it actually led to us chucking notes at each other’s heads every time he turned around. It was pretty hilarious. Shame he spent most of the detention staring at us like we were Wembley tickets to blandness in rock form, so we couldn’t escape, and telling us all about proper respect. I left a little of my soul in that room.
And at the end he held me back to say he admired me for standing up for what was right.
I made a face.
Twat. He was the kind who believed that schools should teach their pupils moral behaviour. I can get behind that, actually, except he’d actually shown me that sometimes you do the right thing and it makes things worse, without actually helping the person you meant to help.
That is true. But I’d still do it again.
I can remember leaving the detention and thinking hotly that he’d given me the opposite of a moral lesson, while still being self-righteous. But I didn’t regret telling him it was me; not at all. So I thought about that. And this small episode taught me some important things, and crystallised some other things I’d already sort of known. Crystallised is exactly the right verb: the hot lava of the angry idealism that belongs to teenagers becoming something clear and hard and precious.
I learnt:
Pious people cannot be trusted. They will not realise this themselves.
Doing the right thing yourself does not automatically lead to the right thing happening in the world.
Doing the right thing actually is its own reward: or at least, I won’t regret it for a moment.
If you're treated unfairly, you can at least have fun with the rest of the oppressed!
Three months later, I left the school. On Muck-Up Day me and my friends, including the kid’s big brother, did something very shocking and borderline illegal in the deputy head’s office. (After doing the definitely illegal thing of picking his lock.)
But that’s another
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 08:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-22 12:24 pm (UTC)A truly evil deputy head.
At least the PE teachers had you write essays on What Is The Matrix and The Sex Life Of Tennis Balls and things.
Or, in my school's case, "How To Teach Italian".
Awesomeness, loki. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-07-27 04:26 am (UTC)He was indeed a twat! And I'll tell you one day, but not til after the statute of limitations has passed. ;)
no subject
Date: 2009-07-27 04:28 am (UTC)