Kate and Kayt, the blogloop

[parasitegirl]

News flash:

Blogging fosters self-centered tendencies!

 

These days that sentiment is about as “duh” causing as “Smoking, not as good for you as once advertized” or “The Lysol Douche, not a bright part of American history!”

 

If you’re reading me, or still reading me, or even skimming me, you know that I blog about me…and some other stuff (Japan, Bellydance, Bling) comes along for the ride.

 

Today I get to blog about people blogging about me in hopes of creating an infinite loop of blog. It’s like M.C Esher, only underated instead of overrated.

 

My elementary school friend, Kate, has a blog. I know this because this morning she sent me a link to her blog via Facebook. I have added her blog to my blogfeed. She hadn’t mentioned a blog previously, but she ‘fessed up because she’d blogged about me…somewhat in response to the memories brought up by me blogging about her! Blogloop!

 
She writes about my childhood wit. You should give it a read, she’s a better writer than she gives herself credit for. She’s got a childhood memory of me making a joke about dentures that stemmed from a conversation about her braces (comedy gold! I’m here all week!) I don’t remember this moment, but I do remember her orthodontia work. We both had braces, of course. I don’t think she had the top-pallete breaking device that I had, but Kate did suffer from the least flattering headgear an orthodontist can order you to wear…and she was condemned to wear it during daylight hours. It was the kind that the straps across your head like a hideous hat or horse’s bridal. Think Joan Cusak’s bit part in 16 Candles. Kate didn’t want to wear it. I don’t blame her. She had many fights with her parents about it, and her sporatic wearing of it caused her to have to wear it for far longer than compliance would have. I had headgear as well but mine just went around my neck to my mouth, and only needed to be worn at night. My fear of getting something like Kate had made me a very dedicated headgear wearer.

 

Kate ends her blog about me with this:

 

That was Kayt: funnier and wittier and brighter than I. She had a self-confidence I admire to this day.

 

I may have been the wit, my situational humor has always been my defense and my offense, my “in” and my “out”, but I thought that Kate was the brains.

 

I’ve blogged about how Kate, the brownies, and our team, were mostly underachievers in organized early extraciricular activities…but we were all pretty sharp tacks in the brain department. Our parents were raising smarties. It’s one of the parts of Madison you move to because you want to raise smarties. The thing about the elementary school, middle school, and high school I went to is that there was no shortage of people who where brighter and wittier than you. It took me years and years after high school to realize that I wasn’t a non-so-smartie tolerated by the smart kids….or to accept that a few of the smarties did feel that way, but that’s because they had other issues with me.

 

In elementary school, with Kate, I felt like I was with a peer. Some kids might have found us odd because we were only children who had parents that both worked and thus we needed afterschool daycare. My parents divorced before I was in elementary school, Kate’s came close to divorce for a while. As a child I viewed divorce as just one of those things that happens and is probably best in the long run if things aren’t working well, I didn’t understand the pity some adults gave me. Child Kate probably feared divorce in a way I didn’t grasp back then. We both had people we could point to as more worldly than us, like Lisa or Liz. I don’t think we wanted to achieve that worldliness because of what was attached to it, it seemed scary, but we probably looked up to them a little. I know that we asked questions. Lisa was adopted, swore, had lived in Cali, and had to deal with extra bullshit because she was Asian. I remember the day we walked through the snow and a little old lady smiled and said “I bet you don’t have to deal with this back where you’re from!” Liz had to shoot insulin everyday. Her mother lost limbs, and eventually died, from diabetes.

 

In middle school I lost what Kate identifies as my self-confidence. It fell dramatically. I had it among friends, but I didn’t want to stand out in class. Middle school was scary. In 6^th grade I remembered one of my teachers showing us a film about the (University of Wisconsin, Madison) reces monkey behavioural research….you know it…wire mother/ terry cloth mother and more. That film resonated with me. I didn’t equate my mother to either the wire or the terry cloth forms, but I certainly was stuck in a cage with shit flinging, hair pulling, creatures I was ill adapted for.

 

Some girl threatened to beat up our friend Elena once. Big girls, developed girls were joking, in a seemingly knowledgeable fashion, about sex (although, our girl scout troop had tackled sex-ed very well…and I knew that the girls that joked seemed to have crazy ideas about the body, contraception and contraception!) I went as far under the radar as I could, outside my circle of friends. We met new girls, akward girls like us, like Teresa and others. I saw how smart, shy people were treated, and I didn’t want it to happen to me.

 

Halfway through middle school I decided that the “afraid of the school population” thing wasn’t really working for me and I enrolled in forensic speaking club. I thought that dramatic reading and speech giving would help me get back to my old “talking in front of everyone” self. And it did. I started having first dates with gangly boys sporting bad hairdos. I started cracking my jokes wherever and whenever…knowing that in high school I would have space from the people who scared me.

 

Middle school was also where I met the first girl I thought was waaaaay out of my league when it came to the brains and the worldly thing. Sarah B.

 

Sarah B was my friend. She was quiet, nothing showy about her. She didn’t speak until she was three and then her first word was butterfly. She had stories about living in Africa. AFRICA! Her house was full of objects that I coveted, mostly African scultptures, and they had a bat house in the backyard.

 

Her father did some sort of international land-rights law and both her parents were very involved with Amnesty International…like “often housing international political refugees” involved. She had a bratty little sister who was more girly than us, and confirmed my feelings that I was very much designed to be an only child. I wonder where Sarah is now, but her last name is all too common to trace well.

 

It was in high school that I really started feeling like I didn’t have the brains.

 

In high school, I rolled with powerful brains. The Thwipsters as they once called themselves, were a group of smart kids who literally created a plan to bring together all random friends of friends in social outings they could so that they could emerge as a self-supportive social group instead of a scattered band of easy to ostrasize individuals. I wasn’t a friend of a friend. They found me on a bus before high school started and took me with them. Retro-ironic before their time, promised me that we’d play Hungry-Hungry-Hippos…but we listened to Violent Femmes instead, smarted off, and quoted Monty Python at me (I did not know Python from Adam…although I did know Douglas Adams…a little).

 

If I open my yearbooks I will find them in every academic club, every socially aware group, and as a majority of the faces under “National Merit Scholars”…those that didn’t tune-in, toke-up, and burn-out.

 

When I rolled with them, I always felt out-classed in the smarts department. I clung to the idea that my social skills, however slim they where, was some of what they got from me and my humor topped that off. I downplayed the idea that I might be desired just because I was a female in a predominantly male group, but at nights I feared I was just that…smart-enough girl meat. Briefly, when I joined the group, there were lots of awkward group talks about how the logistics of inner group dating, PDA, and break-ups should be handled…which was not a fun thing for me to go through as a few made the point that these issues weren’t issues before I came along…although later they would prove their ability to create dating drama without my help. HA! They were so much to me, but they also had a horrid passion for breaking down the group into roles and functions and analyzing the shit out of things…it makes my meta-blogging look tame.

 

I remember talking for hours on the phone with an early freshman almost-boyfriend, Ben K, and being overwhelmed by his information on surrealist painters, Dada-artists and authors, and music compositions and math. I felt outclassed, but lucky for the random bits of knowledge I could gobble-up by just being around them. They were a formative part of my education.

 

Kate and I had lost touch by then and I’d lost touch with most of my elementary school friends. Luckily, I had friends outside of the Thwipsters so I found some sort of balance in my brain worries.

 

If I try to think of whom I befriended in my first few years of high school, and I started to in the above paragraph, it’s overwhelming. I’m in awe of how quickly we all made friendships then, but I understand it intellectually. But now, Facebook is astounding me by giving me the opportunity to reconnect with so many of those people. For some of us, it has given up the chance to reflect on who we were to each other.

 

Which brings me back to Kate, who thought I was wittier, funnier, and brighter than her. I look forward to reading more of her blog and perhaps I’ll write about Casey, her childhood dog that ate everything. Really, I should write about how no movie terrified us more than…and I don’t think I have ever admitted this aloud because it is an ironic hipster classic…Buckaroo Bonzai. Seriously. Buckaroo Bonzai scared us to our cores…and I don’t know why.

 

But Kate, if I’m so goddamned bright, why did I move to a country where my humor and wit doesn’t translate?

 

Comments

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

I am so, so envious of the opportunity you Madison kids had to feel like something other than the biggest brain in the room...and to potentially use a little bit of brainpower in your classes as well. Seriously. It leads to better (and happier) college students and I think more well-adjusted adults.

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

I think if I'd grown up in a small place where I was the major brain, I would have shutdown like I did at the start of middleschool...and done everything to plot my escape.

Dean Mommy was in her yearbook as most intelligent girl, one of her boyfriends was most intelligent boy...people suggested ivy leagues for him and typing school for her...but her escape from Monrovia plans were not going to be sidelined by some goddamned typing school.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Somewhere in there I intentionally dumbed-down a lot...modified my vocabulary, made it obvious I wasn't paying attention in class, etc. Because it was Carptown, it still would've taken veterinary-strength tranquilizers to knock me down to an occasional A-, but I put a lot of work into not acting like a genius. This is all completely maladaptive in the "getting the fuck out of town" portion of the exercise, of course.

I do think we're very lucky to have missed the secretarial-school-for-girls generation. I would've seriously Silvia Plath'ed myself by now.

From Kate L

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I think the answer to that question is obvious. For the challenge. You'd mastered the States and needed to take your show on the road.

[naomikritzer]

Thwipsters. Damn. I'd totally forgotten that word.

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

While I do have some fond memories of those times, I find that it's best to block the overt discussions/analysis on group-dynamics-and-individual-roles-within-the-group that went on...and that might include the "group name".

In odd Thwipster footnotes: I ended up at the School of the Museam of Fine Arts in Boston for a semester, the same semester that Aaron M really started dating. (I was in town visiting my Mom at program at Harvard for his first dating experience, and then at the SMFA for his second girlfriend). While my broke, art-school self did scrounge some free Harvard mess hall meals at that time, I'd like to think that my untrained therapist role more than paid for those calories.

Poor guy was there for the night that I found out my then Madison based boyfriend had slept with someone else...all Aaron could think to do was give me a lot of candy and show me the Archie McPhee catalog. It stop my tears, as I realized that my tears distressed him and that I was in no mood to soothe a distressed Aaron on top of everything.