report_card raze i was digging in the basement, looking for old photo albums, when i found a grade twelve report card with a comment from the english teacher who just about managed to make me hate one of the first things i can remember enjoying. it was in the way she drained all the romance and mystery from the language. instead of appreciating each student's individual voice, she wanted us all to write in the same bland way. and even when you wrote something the way she said she wanted you to, she'd still find something wrong with it most of the time. i think the only writing she appreciated had no personality at all. i have this vision, however wrong it might be, of her sitting around at night reading the junk mail most people throw away, treating it like it's faulkner or hemingway. after a while i didn't try anymore. on a test about "macbeth" i'd write random things about children's television shows, going out of my way to fail. or i wouldn't turn in assignments at all. she wasn't going to like whatever i wrote anyway. somehow i still passed the class and got my credit. over the years i'd forgotten this comment from her on a report card existed. she wrote: "has ability but does not appear to be motivated." i read that, laughed, and said to the teacher who wasn't there and wouldn't remember me if she was, "you think?" then i made it my main quote/headline on facebook. can't say she never gave me anything. 161219 ... unhinged when i was in middle school i carried around a stuffed elmo doll at school (don't ask me why) and one day in art class, a girl in the class asked me if she could see the doll. the art teacher went nuts. she commented on my report card that i was disruptive to the class. i was extremely quiet and internal as a kid. i was afraid to show that report card to my parents. my dad just laughed and said 'you?! what happened in that class? why would your teacher say that about YOU?' when i told him the story about the elmo doll he surprised me and said the teacher was overreacting. funny how deep these things cut even decades later 161220 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I've been told I don't follow instructions well. I believe that. The example my 1st or 2nd grade teacher gave was that when the class was writing/illustrating a short report about bears, I insisted on drawing a pink bear, even though the assignment was limited to "real bears". I found this when I was cleaning my room, and my mom and I had a laugh over it ("pink bears! Oh no!) though as a kid I was generally more annoying than cute. In grade 3 I got into an argument over the cursive Z; apparently it had no right to exist, not looking enough like a "normal" Z. Hm. Everybody in this world - the establishment and the rebellious child alike - seeks to define what is normal: zigzag rather than curly Zs is a bit more untenable than bears in neutral colours, but still. 161222 what's it to you? who go blather from