I’m feeling rather anti-social today. It’s a feeling that’s been bubbling about my psyche for the past several days and now I think it’s coming to full steam. I’m not mad at the world, I’m not depressed, I’m not anti-people; I’m just not in the mood to deal with others right now.
Curiously and thankfully, Earl does not fit into the anti-social equation. I have my own little world that I like to live in sometimes and Earl fits nicely into it. Aside from family members, a couple of friends and a few co-workers, not many people are allowed to look inside my own little world, probably because I’m basically a loner. In kindergarten, my teacher Mrs. Mosher (her philosophy was “no child is really different from any other child”) had two things to say about me: I’m a loner and I was probably developmentally disabled.
Well, she was correct on one account. I am a loner. I enjoy being by myself, without intrusion from ringing telephones, flashing lights, radios, IMs or uninvited voices. As far as being developmentally disabled, well, Mrs. Mosher just didn’t “get” me. I didn’t color in the lines. (Who has time for that? While color when you can create three dimensional objects by folding the paper?) I didn’t fold my papers neatly and put them into my book bag (Like my mother had never seen a worksheet with the numbers 1 through 10 on them before.) and I couldn’t tie my shoes (when a good looking classmate named Robbie is sitting in the next chair and is willing to tie my shoes for me, well, you figure it out.) Nevertheless, I passed kindergarten and I pretty much aced the rest of elementary school. It’s because my other early years teachers, Miss Kania, Mrs. Hayden (especially) and Mrs. Delaney, they all “got” me. They left me alone to do my own thing. They challenged me. Mrs. Hayden really got me because she forbad all the other kids in the class to run the Bell & Howell movie projector, leaving me the chosen one for the task. Neener. Neener. Neener.
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’ve been busy building a little Media Center for our great room. The project has been frustrating because I’ve been trying to use Windows on the computer I built. It’s just not fitting into my grand scheme. I’m coming very close to obsessing on this Media Center. As I’m on call this week, if I’m not sleeping or cowering in fear of my pager going off, I’m thinking about this computer in the basement that I’ve named “scrambler” (named to fit its Windows-like personality and to fit within my computer network naming convention, others are trabant, tempest, tagada, himalaya; the little computer is called “merry-mixer”, its eventually going to be in the kitchen.).
Earl has such patience.
