Tag Archives: High School

About a Dress!

17 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by in Politics

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So, Harry Styles put on a dress or three in a piece for Vogue Magazine.

Apparently, it’s the end of the world!

Or at least the manly parts of it.

So says Candace Owens.

It’s cool though, because the internets needed a good laugh.

Enter the cavalry…

It’s all kinda ludicrous.

The reaction, I mean.

And by ‘kinda’ I kinda mean ‘definitely.’

No, definitely. I definitely mean ‘definitely.’

Anyway, I’m gonna ignore the larger battle here, because better social justice warriors than I are on this thing already. I’m just going to comment on one thing that seems to escape a few folks here. It might even escape a few of Harry’s defenders. It definitely escapes Candace and Ben, as most things seem to do. They totally forgot about the jocks from my high school.

Totally!

Once every year, the jocks from my old high school would dress up in cheer-leader outfits and perform a kind of burlesque for the rest of us. It was one of the few assemblies I genuinely enjoyed. Hell, it was one of the few things that actually got me out to one of those assemblies to begin with. Dog knows, I hated assemblies!

Still do, actually.

I don’t remember much detail. I can’t remember if it was a cheer or a dance that they did, or if it was a little of each. One thing I am sure of is that these guys were not exploring their feminine side.

Far from it!

The point of these bro-leader performances was clearly to underscore the masculinity of the young male athletes doing them by juxtaposing their ostensibly feminine performance with all the manliness they could muster. The cheer-leader outfits didn’t belong on them. The dance moves were not meant for them. Everything about their approach was meant to enhance this impression. Far from breaking down gender-roles, these performances were meant to re-affirm those very roles, to show us once and for all that men were men, even if you put them in a cheerleader outfit. What made the show so funny was precisely the incongruity of the whole thing. These young men were not cheer-leaders. They were not girls, and they would not become women. They would soon become men.

…manly men.

That was point was driven home with every botched move they made.

No exceptions.

Don’t get me wrong. I laughed. Not at them; with them. At 15 I was down for this message. For all my contrarian thoughts at the time, this perfectly conventional message resonated for me; men were men and women were women, and Hell, this time, we could even laugh at the whole thing. I didn’t get the politics of the performance at the time. I doubt they did either. It was just funny.

Anyway, I think about this whenever somebody seems to assume the only reason a man would put on a dress is to muddy the waters between manliness and femininity. Sometimes, men put on a dress to become a woman, yes, and sometimes they do it (as these young Bro-leaders did) to affirm the difference between men and women. Frankly, I don’t think Harry Styles fits into either of these profiles.

The Vogue article in question speaks a lot of fashion and of Harry’s eagerness to play around with the possibilities of dressing up. No great agenda there, and you certainly don’t see Harry minxing it up in the photos. He’s in a dress, yes, but neither his pose nor his overall demeanor suggests any serious effort to feminize himself. The dresses do seem a little incongruous on his body. He isn’t exaggerating that effect, but it is certainly there. Seems to me that Harry has his own reasons for donning a dress, and those reasons may not have much to do with the culture wars some people are trying to fight over this.

It is at least possible that Styles was counting on some folks to bite at the bait of seeing a man in a dress and generate controversy. Of course it is also possible that some of those folks who bit at the story of Harry in a dress may have been counting on the rest of us to get mad at them and add fuel to that same controversy.

…oops!

Ah well! The whole thing makes for quite a sordid story.

Might lead to dancing.

Stolen Virtues and Teen Angst: Fond Memories of the ‘Nuke Table’

04 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in Childhood

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0001Something today set my mind down an old alley, so to speak, a memory I had all but left behind for good. I couldn’t help but smile as I remembered “The Nuke Table” from Mrs. Lenning’s old classroom during my Freshman year at Boulder City High School in southern Nevada. The Nuke Table was largely my doing, …or perhaps I should say that it was a transgression for which I was largely the main culprit. It was a large, sturdy wooden table that served as my seat more often than a writing surface, at least if you mean by ‘writing surface’ one on which you would put put a notebook, a paper, or a test before commencing to write.

The table itself? Well that I was happy to write on.

And between Drama, Speech, and many lunch hours in which Mrs. Lenning graciously allowed myself and others to hang-out and goof off in her room, I managed to write on that table an awful lot.

…it was mostly just the one sentence!

The sentence began in fashion folks would have found quite familiar in the early eighties. I wrote “Nuke the…” From here of course one would normally insert something like ‘seals’, ‘whales’, or even ‘gay-baby-whales’ in a macabre joke that had already become quite old. To grasp the fascination with this trope you have to wrap your mind around both the fear of nuclear war and the extreme irritation at sundry environmental causes common to the times. I suspect many today will manage the latter easily enough, but the scale former problem may be a bit foreign to those fortunate enough to have been born after the ‘collapse’ of state-sponsored communism. All these nuke jokes helped to allay fears over the one, by setting them full horror on the other.

Simple scapegoating; good fun for everyone.

But not for me. I turned that theme into one big glorious run-on sentence, adding one more dependent clause after another with every lunch hour. You had to read the whole sentence to determine just exactly who was to feel the wrath of the atomic age as I would have directed it. The target of the nukes changed from one day to the next as I added more information about just who should be nuked, but of course that was part of the fun. Others added their two cents here and there, but for me this table had become something of a personal project.

How I got by with this? Well, you’d have to ask Mrs. Lenning.

The thing is, the joke really wasn’t as innocent as I would have pretended at the time. No, I don’t mean that I actually wanted someone killed, much less blasted away along with anyone foolish enough to live within a short drive of them, but I certainly was working a pointed theme, and that theme was hippies and a range of left wing types I had come to associate with them. Tongue-in-cheek as the whole thing was to me, I did show some real resentment with that pen of mine.

Gee! Someone else who hated hippies?

Go figure!

The thing is that I didn’t hate hippies, not really. I had some fond memories of the off-beat personalities that used to wander through our house in Apple Valley, California just four or five years before. I had a few bad memories too, but enough good ones to know better than to vent that kind hatred at people I was actually happy to have had in my life. Dad was a college professor when we lived in California, retired military, and politically conservative. So, how we came to be adopted by the local counter-culture is beyond me? But that we did. And our house became a regular stopping point for many of the folks living off the grid, so to speak, just a ways out from town. This was something of a mixed blessing of course, but  a blessing it was.

…well, except when I was sitting on The Nuke Table in Boulder City, Nevada, pen in hand.

Truth-be-told, I think I took to capping on hippies a lot that year. For whatever reason, I had little good to say about such folks at that point in my life. This was despite my hair, which was as long as I could get it before my parents lost their patience; despite my growing habit of walking barefoot on the hot summer ground; despite the jumble of ‘spiritual’ thoughts then ambling through my brain, and despite a love of personal freedom firmly rooted in liberal tradition. It was despite the fact that virtually all of my friends were stoners, which was as close to a ‘hippie’ as the social categories of my own high school could get me. The point is that for all the contempt I had begun to express for the long-haired people in my past, their influence was all over me.

And I was smart enough to have known that.

And maybe that was the problem. If I hadn’t learned a thing or two from the counter-culture of the previous generation, it wouldn’t have mattered. Hippies had not earned a virtual nuclear attack in my virtual universe because they were so very different from me, but rather because they were so very similar. For one reason or another, at that particular time in life, I needed to distinguish myself from the long-haired freaks I still remembered with a smile. That phase didn’t last long, and somehow the excesses of the nuke-table were enough to purge a lot of it from my thinking.

Perhaps that is why Mrs. Lenning let me have the Nuke Table, at least for a time.

I miss her.

…and the Nuke Table.

This is Really Gross: You Probably Shouldn’t Read It!

10 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in General

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Very Bad!

I may have mentioned in the ‘About’ section of this blog that I count an episode of projectile vomiting among my greatest accomplishments?

Okay, that’s gross right? Yeah, but it’s not going to stop me from giving you a long-winded and over-dramatic account of the whole thing. Best leave this post now if you have any sense whatsoever!

I dabbled in Speech and debate a little when I first got into college. My school had a great debate team at the time, all owing to the coach, but that coach was the absolute worst driver you ever met in your life. It was really amazing. If he wasn’t speeding up, he was slowing down (I mean foot on the break, because by then we were closing rapidly in on somebody’s rear bumper) and if he wasn’t drifting steadily left he was drifting steadily right. To make matters worse, the man had a very small vehicle, and he would often engage in serious discussion or coaching as he drove. So, while riding along you had to concentrate WHILE holding down your lunch and praying to the gods that you would make it to your actual destination.

It was awful!

Still Worse!

One day I had agreed to help in the tab room for a High School Debate Tournament. I caught a ride down to campus that Saturday morning and waited to get picked up for the trip out to the high school. I had some time to kill, so I ate breakfast, …well the sort of breakfast I ate back then. It was a Super Big Gulp of Pepsi and a row of donut gems from a 7-11. I horked them down in no time because I was suddenly very hungry. Along comes the coach and stuffs me in the back seat of his vehicle, then shoves a pile of paperwork into my lap and tells me to read names to another student in the front seat. The coach hadn’t done his preparation yet, and so he was trying to get things in order as we drove over to the tournament. …yes, reading in the car will normally do me in. Reading with that driver was bound to be REALLY BAD. And then it dawns on me that slamming a Super Big Gulp and a row of donut gems might have been a mistake.

…definitely was a mistake.

The Coach was in rare form. He read documents of his own while double checking the other student’s paperwork as he drove. We veered toward this wall and that car, screeched to a halt just before hitting that bumper, all the while checking paperwork.

And of course, the donut gems want to come back up pretty much whole at this point.

Then we started to smell gas. It was overwhelming! Turns out the guy directly ahead of us on the Freeway had some sort of a leak, so the coach decides to catch up to warn him. Now, his worse-than-usual driving was compounded by his impression of Starsky and Hutch, and the man still expected me to read names to the other student. The other driver seemed to be in a hurry, so the effort to catch him involved a lot of weaving through traffic. …with gas fumes coming into the vehicle, me turning very green, and “…uh, Jeremy Ditweiler, yeah that’s with an e i.”

(Okay, I made up the name, but you get the idea.)

About half way there I realize with absolute certainty that everything I slammed before getting picked up IS coming back up sooner or later, probably sooner. The donut gems are so determined that I feel sure they will find their way back to the wrapper and replace themselves on the shelf at the 7-11. All with the prospect of a full day’s work ahead of me.

…more names.

We never do catch the gas-spilling driver. It takes about 30 minutes total time on the road before we pull into the High School parking lot. It takes a couple more minutes to get out because we aren’t done yet with the paperwork. I could have killed to breathe fresh air, and the coach insisted we finish whatever the Hell task it was we were doing. The other student weighed at least 400 pounds (though I believe it was closer to 600, …honestly), and it took him forever to get out of the tiny car. Then we fumble with the broken seat and finally push it forward, all just so I could scramble out in a state of panic. For some reason I didn’t mention this to anyone, …but I was in my own little private Hell at that point.

(The story is just going to get worse from here folks, you really might want to click on one of those links in my Blogroll and go find an author with better taste than I have.)

So, I finally stepped out into the fresh air, and I got about 2 steps before the urge to purge overtook me. It wasn’t much. I was very discreet and I don’t think any of the many folks around us realized just why I leaned down next to that little bush.

(Note how I brag about my discretion at the time as if I had any credibility on the subject while telling THIS story. That’s called ‘irony’ folks. Can you say; ‘Irony’?)

I knew that little mini-purge was just a taste of things to come, …literally. I could feel the misery building within me as I debated what to do next. Out here would be better than on the floor in the building, but best of all would be in a garbage can or a bathroom stall. I stood there for a moment and assessed the situation. “It’s not coming yet,” I thought, “I may have a chance…”

I  power-walked into the High School, trying to hit that perfect balance that enhances speed without jarring things too much. I thought I was going to lose it with every fricking step. Every single step seemed to court disaster, and with enough witnesses to make it a truly humiliating experience. The walk seemed to take forever.

And then did it! I actually made it into the High School. I grew very nervous at this point because I didn’t want the upcoming event to occur on the carpet. But at least a final resting place for the donut gems ought to be on the horizon.I just kept dreaming about a trash can or a toilet stall.

So, why was this bathroom locked? That one too? And where are the others?

It turns out that all the bathrooms were locked AND all the garbage cans had been hauled off somewhere. That’s right; it was a Saturday, and someone forgot to tell the cleaning staff that there would be hundreds of people in the building this weekend. So, NONE of the bathrooms were open and the garbage cans were all GONE. I walked/ran from one bathroom to the other, and one after another they all proved to be locked. ALL OF THEM!

At this point I felt like I was dying, because I knew the food was coming back up any moment. I will never get back outside in time; the donut gems are coming back and they are bringing Hell with them.

Then I got lucky.

I tried the teacher’s bathroom door for the second time, and (praise be!) this time it was open. With an immense sigh of relief, I walked/ran into it. At last I could find a place to let go of my burdens. My ever so heavy burdens! Sweet Jesus, I have never been so happy to find a bathroom in all my life. I think I actually prayed for the damn thing, and at the time I must have counted it as proof positive that there is indeed a God in Heaven, because He had just provided me a bathroom in my moment of need.

But then…

With one foot in the door I experienced a violent spasm. It felt like my stomach had just lowered its shoulders and launched into my heart and lungs like the biggest lineman on your favorite football team. (I don’t do sports metaphors often so you have to cut me some slack with the imagery here.) Anyway, the point is that bad things were happening in my belly and I wasn’t going to get another step before seeing those donut gems one more time. The bathroom was empty, so I was okay there, but the obvious targets were closed to me. A single toilet rested behind a closed stall door to my left, and the garbage can was covered a few steps off to the right. No time to open it. Disappointment gripped my soul. All that effort and I was going to fail within sight of my goal. But then…

Hope!

A sink stood on the other side of the bathroom. Nothing between me and that beautiful, sparkling clean receptacle. One last chance to send my meal somewhere besides the floor, and believe me, I took it. I aimed the upcoming surge toward the sink, and I ran up on the back end of it as I went.

Success!

The launch literally began in the doorway across the room, but I’m telling you not one drop spilled on the floor. I got it all in the sink. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t done it myself. Right there on that very day!

Yeah that’s right. I am the projectile vomiting king of the world I tell ya! I could not have been more proud.

That was still a miserable day, cause I had the worst headache after that, and I remained dizzy for several hours. I do recall hearing gossip about the filthy sink in the teacher’s bathroom, but I saw no reason to enlighten anyone. I couldn’t even look at the debate coach, because that would have fallen far short of killing him, which is what the bastard deserved. Oh, but that one moment was glorious. I so narrowly avoided disaster and somehow managed the impossible. Heck a part of me wanted to go back and measure the distance as I felt quite certain it was some sort of record, an athletic accomplishment of sorts. It may have been a disgusting glory, but some days you just take what you can get.

***

My dear reader, did you actually stick with me through this entire abomination? That’s disgusting! You should be ashamed of yourself.