Aestu wrote:
I got pretty persistently bullied in school.
I attended a Jewish preschool, something my parents and I later saw as a mistake. There were tricycles, but bigger kids would take them and no one did anything about it. I had no patience for prayer and such because I thought it was dumb. I remember saying things offhand and the caretakers would randomly give me weird looks.
I attended the Merryhill chain of private kindergardens. There were milk crates strewn all over the play area. Children were allowed three each, but bullies would take way more and make huge forts and get away with it because their parents were influential. I came up with the idea of taking three crates, putting one on top of another then positioning a third horizontally and pushing it around, gathering all the leaves. I called it a leafmower. Other kids saw this and emulated it. The caretakers didn't like this and after a few months told us to cut it out, so I took two crates and put them side by side and turned a third crate upside down and sat on it, and tented my hands with elbows on the crates, saying I was a businessman. I found this very boring so I stopped doing it.
Many years later, in high school, this kid who hoarded all the milk crates and had also tormented me in preschool by taking the tricycles set a shoebox on fire in a coatroom so he could take a weed break behind the levee. The fire got out of control and burned down half the campus and held liable for the multimillion-dollar damage, destroying his life. I laughed at him.
We also played in the sandbox. Once I got the idea of mixing sand and clay to make a different consistency of sand. We weren't allowed to dig outside the sandbox. I remember the other tots hiding under the playcastle while I went and dug around a crabapple tree's roots. A caretaker walked up and hissed, "Don't you realize you're digging in the Director's backyard?" I still remember how vehement she was about it and thinking it was a really ridiculous thing to say.
I went to a public elementary school. The elementary school had a sandbox made of wood, and the wood was old and rotted; the sand was coarse and dull brown. When it rained the water would gather in drifts and slowly seep out the warped sides. I would dig pits and canals and pyramids in huge model cities. Other kids would come and ask to help; I'd tell them what to do. Some would get upset and try to knock our stuff down, so I would task some kids with security. I remember one kid came off as really stupid, and this girl was helping me make something, so I said, "one day, he will be poor, and you will be a CEO". I still remember the weird look she gave me.
I was very depressed in middle school, so my parents sent me to a reformatory. It was very regimented, and the staff were sadistic. It was a typical nonprofit that didn't maintain student dwellings; there was a broken fire alarm in ours that would go off at random, and we had to run out into the Connecticut snow in our pajamas and wait there for 15 minutes while they slowly checked each room. The indoor pool was unheated and they made us go swimming in the middle of the winter; I was not accustomed to the climate and found this very uncomfortable. There were horse stalls on campus for the rich kids who knew how to ride - I remember this disgustingly fat pair, Max Manning and Alex Nestle (yes those are their real names) who each weighed over 150 pounds at the age of 14 and spoke with heavy lisps. They stole food; I dubbed them "kleptovores". They could, however, ride horses, which was really macabre; I had to muck the stalls while they rode because I didn't possess that skill and the admins disdained my parents.
Of course the admins got paid seven digit salaries and lived in luxury housing and dressed in expensive suits and got their hair cut every day, and built this whole cult of personality around themselves so we were supposed to think it was a privilege to listen to their lame self-righteous speeches. "We're installing computers because we believe in freedom of information, there was once this place called the Soviet Union were no one was free...and...it was very cold..."
If the kids misbehaved they would put us in iso, in what was called a quiet room, a sealed, ceramic-tiled box about the size of a telephone booth, for hours. Even worse, they would make us sit back flush to wall for hours on end, which is agonizingly painful because it causes the ribs to put pressure on the lungs, creating the sensation of suffocation (if you do not believe me try it). I still remember the supervisor sitting there at her desk with that look of silent gratification on her face. Another time, this supervisor shoved me out of the way "get out of the way" as he walked down the flight of stairs. I wished for many years, and to this day, I had pushed him down. I won't deny that to this day I plan on one day repaying them all that suffering in ways far more horrid than any form of physical pain. Flesh heals, but there are the unseen wounds that a man can suffer and never be the same, and I am a very, very creative individual. They shall learn that firsthand.
They had rapid turnover because some staff signed on thinking it would be neat to work with kids, but they couldn't stand the evil administrators and high-pressure environment. The kids were mostly rich New England Jewish kids, ages 5-16; the youngest were referred to as "the serial killers of the future". Very few were dangerous or aggressive; more often they were basically normal kids with minor problems of varying severity and parents who cbf being parents. We were not allowed to have writing implements of any kind, and eventually they decreed I was not allowed to be given books because I had "informational difficulties". After two unproductive years I was withdrawn to high school.
My freshman year of high school was at a colony along the Nevada/California border run by the Quakers. The next year the campus went bankrupt so I went to public school.
I refused to recognize any of the rules of high school. The cafeteria was supposed to be only for poor colored students and hoods and such, but I sat there anyway because I wanted to. This raised their ire. There was a performance in the auditorium and some kids told me only seniors could sit on some benches. I said too bad and didn't move. They tried to move me but I just rooted myself and eventually they gave up. There was a large decorative rock near the quad, where only the "cool kids", athletes, cheerleaders, rich kids, etc, could hang out. I sat on this rock because it was one of the few unoccupied sitting surfaces on campus. People asked me what I was doing. I would say either "I am fishing", or "I am warming an egg." The puns were lost on most.
I rode a bike to school. Once someone cut my brakes and I didn't realize it until I was on the road. There was this pack of idiots led by some twerp in a fedora who busted up our M:TG meets; I told him to leave; when he didn't leave us alone I started hitting him and was later told I broke his nose.
The faculty hated me too. When I walked through the quad people chanted my name, and on the other hand I got bullied a great deal by the students, which made me a liability. I never refused an opportunity to make a teacher look stupid or petty. We weren't allowed to ride our bikes through the wide outdoor semi-enclosed halls, but the campus was situated between the levee the bike trail rang along, which ran the length of Sacramento County between the college I attended and the fish hatchery I liked to visit, and the street, so I would ride along the trail, come down off the levee, speed through the campus after hours, and this fat dude on a golf cart would yell at me to dismount and I ignored him.
The campus actively solicited and received donations of computers, but they would trash literally all of them because the techs couldn't work them into the system and were worried about viruses, security and maintenance. My buddies and I would dig through the dumpster and pick out the best pieces to sell on eBay - 56k modems, floppy drives, ATX power supplies, 10/100 network cards, 486 CPUs, etc. We sat there in the blazing Central Valley sun picking at hulks with screwdrivers dividing up the loot like vultures over a corpse. The faculty hated this, too, although we were very neat about it, cleaned up after, and did not endanger our safety or that of others.
After a long series of incidents and assorted controversy, the vice-principal yelled at my mother, "We have 1500 students on campus and not one is like Ethan. He does not belong here." I wasn't present for this, but she related the incident quite vividly. It was kind of amusing. A minor incident where I "threatened" another student escalated into three police officers twisting my arm behind my back so long it turned blue before cuffing me and taking me to Juvenile Hall for "terrorist threats". I kicked out the cruiser window, so they put me in another cruiser (they later discreetly wrote this charge off when it was revealed how outrageous their behavior had been). When it went to a hearing three days later, the judge said, "The only thing I hate more than a punk is a bully. This is ridiculous. Case dismissed." The campus, to avoid a lawsuit, agreed to give me a diploma under the condition I never set foot on campus again. I spent the next year and a half in early college and getting paid to help with a historical research project. And so my senior year of high school was the happiest time of my life.
TLDR version: I got bullied a lot, it warped my personality.
2/10
I like how you mentioned completely irrelevant things to try and show how much smarter you were than your peers; the "Leafmover" sounds very impressive.
I also failed to read any legitimate examples of bullying in your biography. Things Azelma mentioned are examples of bullying. You didn't get you fair share of time on the tricycle and had your brakes cut once, probably because you were (and still are) an egotistical rebel. So don't blame "bullying" on your personality, when clearly you just have some sort of disorder.
But really, thanks for the life story, Ethan.
