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attackfish) wrote2008-08-11 12:40 pm
Chameleons and Stigma
Despite the fact that I’ve been throwing little asides about ![[info]](https://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ivanoma mistaking me for a high school student and thereby emphasizing the fact that I’m not, the most intriguing part about the internet for me is the ability to disguise things about myself obvious in real life such as health, physicality, and ethnicity, but in my case, especially age. I don’t do this to lie, and I never imply that I’m anything other than what I am. I simply use this facet of the internet to control the first impressions people form of me.
I’ve always been very involved in the organizations that influence my life, abnormally so. When I was in high school, I showed up as one of only three students to the PTSA. PTAs are for elementary and middle schools. In high schools, students are supposed to have a say too. However, despite my school system’s lofty ideals about students having some say, none of the adults truly trusted any of us to think at all. If any of the S’s in PTSA actually show up, or even worse, try to speak, they’re told condescendingly that they’re only allowed to speak on student concerns. When the chairman of my high school’s PTSA tried to pull that on one of my few compatriots, I raised my hand and asked “Seeing as this is a meeting that deals solely with the educational issues of a high school, aren’t all concerns necessarily student concerns?” (well, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m outspoken) and the adults cooed at me when they told me to sit down and shut up.
The problem was, no matter how thoughtful, articulate, and dedicated I was, my youth was the first and therefore the only thing most adults saw. When I first created a web profile no one had to know I was fifteen, or that I was oxygen dependant, or short and extremely physically unimposing, or even that I was a girl. All they had to know was that I was businesslike, intelligent, gracious, and a good jeweler and metal worker. (if anyone’s interested, I’m on deviantART under the same username). People treated me like an adult because I presented myself maturely. No one treated me like an idiot kid.
This anonymity makes the internet a dangerous place, as our teachers and parents were always telling us, but it also makes it freeing. That freedom is addicting, and is more than any other reason why I keep coming back.
Of course, I ruined all of my artistic credibility by writing Harry Potter fanfic and silly blog posts, but I could always create another profile somewhere under a different name. You’d never know it was me.
attacked by fish (haha)
I was an avid reader as a young Navy brat. I moved Too ofen to make friends at first and was permanently ingrained with this habit by 10 years old. Cosequently, I developed very good reading skills and a close relationship with my sister who was only13 months younger(excepting the high school years of coarse) I had few friends but I was one of the few who exchanged birthday and holiday cards wth the school librarian.(no joke) I played D&D and AD&D with my father and chess with my baby brother who beat his chess coach and the entire rest of the team byage 14(he surprised us allwhen he was nine by asking for an atlas and a globe for Christmas)
I suppose that my point in saying all this is that there was no insult intended when I suggested you might be in high school. It simply was that I only had evidence from your journal that you had at least got that far. Your talk of classes and exams left me with two possible conclusions. you were in high school or college...I did not wish to ask outright(internet protocal, I could have been a wierdo for all you know) So, I admit, I fished......And was made to know in no uncertain terms that you were in college. When I fish I'm happy to get a carp...YOU let me have the shark.
Re: attacked by fish (haha)
Re: attacked by fish (haha)
While the maturity level of children (as well as the writing skills of everyone) varies greatly, I disagree that the ability to write well sets in during the mid school years if ever. Structure, vocabulary, wit, and to a certain extent, style do, but character development, an ability to express nuances, and the ability to spot and eliminate cliches in one's own writing come a bit later, late high school and early college at the earliest. Of course, for some otherwise decent authors, these skills never develop, just as some people never develop the ability to string words together in a coherent sentence.
As an articulate middle schooler and able essay writer, I wrote terrible stories, because my main characters were underdeveloped mary sues. I used back story and situational describers instead of character traits, and they always acted in the moral upright way after appropriately agonizing over it. They overcame great evil and dressed the way I would have if my mother hadn't dressed me in skort sets. She stopped doing that when I went to high school, thank God. My plots were long strings of cliches, and though abstractly, I understood moral dilemmas and situations in which two good smart people could disagree as to what was right, I couldn't write those situations.
This is mostly because of the way the human brain matures, a process which becomes complete at around age twenty-five. No amount of younger than usual maturity can change the fact that young teens and pre teens tend to write badly. It's also partly practice. Since the people who end up writing well as adults usually have been telling stories since childhood and writing since they first learned how, I guess that most of us need ten or more years to refine writing techniques.
From what you've said, I think your nephew may be a sociopath. As someone with severe allergies, including fatal anaphylactic responses, asthma, and violent seizures, however, I have found that people without similar problems tend to be blase about mine. Waiters tell me that there isn't anything I can't eat in a specific dish without knowing whether there is or not and then treating my resulting seizure as if it were an inconvenience to them that I planned solely to annoy them, for instance, or classmates who claim they washed the lotion of their hands when I ask, but really didn't and then look innocent when I have an asthma attack. A lack of empathy and moral sense seems to be distressingly common.
Re: attacked by fish (haha)
(Anonymous) 2008-08-21 03:34 pm (UTC)(link)Re: attacked by fish (haha)
I am the tech support in my house, and all I learned in keyboarding was that I wanted Microsoft Publisher.