So I just smiled and turned up the Ratatat

Ear Candy: "Seventeen Years" by Ratatat

One thing I have learned from my father is that it is easier to study someone as a text book instructs you to rather than getting to know a person. [SIDE NOTE: My father is a very "left-brain thhinker", he is a doctor, a former chemist and former math and science teacher. He likes things to be smiple and "by the book."] When my mom died, my dad bought a bunch of books on parenting teenagers, so that he could "better understand me".Of course I see the logic in reading a book about "teens like me", rather than talking to me or spending time getting to know the teen that is me. He then opts to pay a therapist to talk to me once a week so that she too can classify me and make me into a simple vocab list that my doctor daddy can understand. And he is happy with this, so long as one of those vocab words isn't "average".

A moment brought to you by Erin's Inner Monologue:
I exist in three ways: as I see myself, as I wish I was, and as others see me. And most others see me as a "text book example"; a statistic.

I am a butterfly, wings spread and pinned to a cork board with some creep, who will most likely take his cousin to his senior prom, studying me. Perhaps this is a smidgen of an exaggeration, as my daddy took a real date to his senior prom... But either way, I am judged by a cross section of the population that was "studied" and written about by a group of doctors so out of touch with the nation's youth that one would think they had never been young, but rather been born out of one of the test tubes they are so fond of. Do test tube babies grow up resenting the scientists? Or the test tubes? I am not judged on my own merits.

Yet another, ever-memorable, moment brought to you by Erin's Inner Monologue:
I love telling people what I think, but often I wonder if they really care. Which is why I write... Sometimes it feels like I have more thoughts in my head than I know what to do with, and I have to trap them somehow, before I lose them.

Mrs. Butler is always encouraging me; encouraging me to write, encouraging me to express myself by any means necessary, encouraging me to be creative, and of course, encouraging me to date her college students. (And which three of those four I am engaging in at this moment is your guess...) I hope that everyone has at least one teacher who becomes more than just homework and grade points, because sometimes the encouragement that comes from the most unexpected places is the most helpful.

Going back to my earlier themes of perception, for so long I have been "the bitchy one", and I am not sure that is really an entirely fair perception. True, I have a bit of an edge, and in many ways I think I have earned it. But overall, I think I am a pretty laid-back, chill person, although I do have many undeniable quirks. One of the best "inadvertant compliments" I have gotten recently was from a friend of mine who told me that often, he couldn't handle me when he was high. Now, this could be considered an insult, and initially, that is how I took it too. But then he continued on with what he was saying, and I couldn't help but smile. He said that when he is in a less-than-sober state, everything is magnified, and that because normally I am such a nice person, that when magnified, it can be overwhelming, even fake seeming, even though when in a state of sobreity he knows I am genuine. I didn't know what to say, so I just smiled and turned up the Ratatat.

I try to be nice, and I have grown so much as a person, even in just the last six months. Hopefully, I have grown into someone people feel that they can relate to. Everything is a learning experience, and although it has taken me this long to realize this, but the fact that I am learning day to day, in my opinion, shows the true depth of my character.

Yet ANOTHER, short yet sweet moment brought to you by Erin's Inner Monologue:
Do you ever feel more profound in your head than you do on paper? I do.

But because I am a very determined person, I am determined to show people everything about me that I fear they overlook. I want the me that I see, and the me that everyone else sees to be one and the same. But isn't that the goal of everyone? To be not who everyone wants them to be, but rather to have the person that everyone wants them to be to be exactly who they are?

If you read this and it makes you think, I love you.

~E