365 Facts: #90 (Childhood--Wright College)
In the suburbs, when you want to do something extracurricular outside of school, you tend to turn to the local park district. In the city, one of the places you go is the local community college. For me, that was Wright College, at that time located near Belmont and Austin not far from my house.
(Heh, I'll bet some of you are thinking I was a child genius. Not quite. Read on.)
Like we do out here, we received the college's course catalogs in the mail. However, Wright offered community courses for people of all ages, not just adults or continuing ed. I'm trying to think of what I took first, because I took several different courses there over a few years, between fifth and seventh grades. Some were over the summer, some were during the school year. For the most part, I had fun with all of them.
I think I started off taking a ceramics class. I want to say I did that for two or three summers. The classes probably went once a week for eight weeks. With ceramics, we weren't creating anything; we'd just get a little figure, clean it up, and paint it. But I had fun with it; I still have virtually everything I ever did there. I have these three little bears, for example, and a nice heart-shaped container. This is also how I got a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle; he was supposed to be a magnet, though he never got one attached. Eh. I just went and looked at some of them; I carved dates inside: 7-25-89 and 6-26-90. Since some of us worked on similar projects, we had to carve our initials or other identifying stuff into them so we'd know they were ours. Some of them--two of the bears, which had skinny little parts under their feet--only have JLW on them. The heart has Jen! and the date ('89). The older bear ('90) has my full name around the bottom. Those last two also have my signature smiley face on them. Anyway, I enjoyed ceramics until I decided my teacher was an idiot. Truth be told, now that I'm older, I've realized she was just human and simply forgot or didn't hear me. However, when you're twelve and self-righteous, well, God forbid someone does something wrong. See, the first project or two that we did in 1990, she supplied the stuff. The third project, we got to tell her what we wanted. It took me a while to decide, but I went with a dog. The next week I came in and saw a bunch of different figurines on her desk. (Our classes were in science labs, so her desk was a little higher than a normal teacher's desk.) I saw this cocker spaniel, picked it up, and said, is this my dog? She said, no, you didn't tell me what you wanted. She'd brought these weird generic Christmas sort of things for those of us who supposedly hadn't picked something, or in case something broke. Well, okay, I know I told you a dog, and now I'd repeated that. To me, this should have clued her in to me wanting a dog. But I took the weird Christmas thing, which was kind of flat, and I cleaned it up, and in the process it broke. Since I really didn't want it anyway, I didn't care. I think I threw it away at the end of class. I came back the next week expecting a dog to be there. I mean, hello, what part of "Is this my dog?" suggested I wanted anything else? But no--the teacher had pulled the Christmas thing out of the trash for me to finish. You have to be kidding me. I think I walked out and never went back. Idiot. So, the moral of the story, listen to what people say, and ask questions to make sure you understand. At no point did she say something like, I'm sorry, I didn't hear that you wanted a dog last week; would you like me to bring you one next week, or do you want to keep working on the ugly Christmas thing that even I don't know what it is? So, yeah. I'm still a little bitter over the whole thing. I was never one to skip school, even community college school, so to miss out on the final couple of classes wasn't easy. However, I've never been able to stand idiocy. Once you demonstrate that you're an idiot, that's it. You have no hope. (This would be why I needed to get out of retail.)
Anyway.
At least the ceramics class wasn't the only arts-related class I took, and the other one fared better. I think I took this class in the fall of '89, while I was in seventh grade. (I think I was too busy to do anything like that in eighth grade.) It was just a general arts and crafts class, and we did generic art. I remember drawing a person, I think, maybe using pastels. I have two paperweights made from different clays. One is low and flat and gray; one is small and round and from something more like dough. Both are painted. The low gray one has a bunch of peace signs on it, I believe; the round one got painted white, and then I put my name, '91 (for my graduating class), and the signature smiley. For some reason, I want to say the teacher thought that was clever. We also got to paint little plaques, these small pieces of wood on which you could put a little picture. Mine has a tree and flowers and a sun and birds. It's pretty basic, but it's okay. I think it was kind of a large class, and since this was also held in the science lab, we had these nice large tables on which to work. Plus, we got to sit on stools. For whatever reason, that seemed neat to me. However, the one indelible image from those classes was the anti-smoking poster up on the wall, showing this odd-looking lady smoking a cigarette with the caption "Smoking is very glamorous" under her face. Lovely.
I think it's kind of funny that I loved artsy stuff so much that I took several classes outside of school, but when I got to high school I didn't take a single art class. But my high school seemed like it had just one art teacher back then, and I'd heard stories about him and he seemed kind of creepy, so I stuck with band and foods instead of art. However, for those of you who may wonder where my art minor came from, there you go. I was always interested in it and was decent at it, though I'm far better at abstract than anything realistic.
The third class I took was actually athletic. No, really. I took several sessions of swimming lessons. I love to swim. I am like a fish. I despise sand, and open water freaks me out (I should probably recount my near-drowning experiences--yes, plural--sometime, but not now...though, actually, those took place in pools, but never mind). However, give me a pool with chlorine, and bam! I'm happy. I've been known to whore myself out to people I didn't know very well ( party after camp in 2004, anyone?) just for the use of a pool. And, in fact, I ended up taking one class twice just so I could keep swimming. I took three classes over four sessions--I think a beginner, the intermediate twice, and the advanced. I think I had to wait for the advanced course to come up for my age; that's why I did the intermediate twice. I was one of the better swimmers in my classes, say top three or five out of 15-20 kids--not bad for someone unathletic out of the water. I also took these classes in sixth and seventh grades, which was when I started porking up. Right now I'm thinking two things: 1. God, how big would I have been had I *not* been swimming? And 2. How much better would I have been had I been streamlined? The world may never know.
I made a few friends in my swimming classes, but I never kept in touch with them outside of Wright. That's too bad. See, even back then I had social issues. I don't think I knew anyone from my school in my classes; I think the kids came from public school or St. Ferdinand, the Catholic school that was a couple of blocks from Wright (and my school's partner for band). I do remember one girl from my last two swim classes. She was a little weird like I was. I think she was a year younger than me in school, but we got along pretty well. She's the one who influenced me to buy the B-52's album Cosmic Thing. Like, I'd been thinking about getting it, and she had it and liked it, so I got it. (That story is better than this one: I bought the Milli Vanilli tape because DJ on Full House had it. Really. I'd thought about getting it but wasn't sure, then DJ mentioned it, and since she had it, well, then maybe I should have it. Oh, the shame.) I think that girl was also a little creeped out by the showers, too. There was a locker room off the natatorium--yes, it had a big, fancy name, 'cause it was college--and then off the room there were showers and then another room with just lockers. Since we were there just once a week, I think we just grabbed whatever locker was unused that week. At least one of those swim classes was taken during the winter, so I sort of had to change out of my bathing suit before I put my clothes on...and that meant going into the showers. Like hell I'd get naked in front of people. I think there might have been some actual changing rooms in the shower area, but mainly you had to go into a shower, and the shower was always on, and hope you didn't get your clothes wet. Fun. Oh, like I'd take an actual shower. Please. I'd just been in a pool. Didn't that automatically make me clean? (Hey, I was eleven or twelve, and it was before I realized the importance of hygiene...yeah, I basically only took showers a couple of times a week, and swim day was not one of those days. I shudder to think of it now.)
As for swimming itself, I learned a number of strokes. You had your basic freestyle and backstroke, and I think we learned the butterfly, which I hated, and the sidestroke, which I loved. We also got to dive off the deep end of the pool; I enjoyed that a lot. I think there might have been one or two boards, but we mainly dove off platforms like they do in swim meets. Then we'd have to swim to the other, shallow end of the pool. I think the depth ranged from three to eight feet. I think the class was run or sponsored by the Red Cross, so part of our deep-water training was to carry a brick from the bottom of the pool to the surface. I could never do that. I mean, I could grab it and kind of bring it up the ladder, but there was no way I could do it while in the middle of the pool. That made me feel like a failure, like if someone was drowning while I was there, I couldn't save them. And it's not like the brick was super-heavy; I think it may have been 20 pounds. I could probably do it now. I haven't tried in years.
I think I stopped taking lessons because they ran out of classes for kids my age. Plus, by that time I was in eighth grade, and like I said before I was busy with other stuff. Still, for the most part I really enjoyed my time at Wright, and I'm glad my mother had me do it. That's totally something she did right. There, look--I complimented my mother.
(Heh, I'll bet some of you are thinking I was a child genius. Not quite. Read on.)
Like we do out here, we received the college's course catalogs in the mail. However, Wright offered community courses for people of all ages, not just adults or continuing ed. I'm trying to think of what I took first, because I took several different courses there over a few years, between fifth and seventh grades. Some were over the summer, some were during the school year. For the most part, I had fun with all of them.
I think I started off taking a ceramics class. I want to say I did that for two or three summers. The classes probably went once a week for eight weeks. With ceramics, we weren't creating anything; we'd just get a little figure, clean it up, and paint it. But I had fun with it; I still have virtually everything I ever did there. I have these three little bears, for example, and a nice heart-shaped container. This is also how I got a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle; he was supposed to be a magnet, though he never got one attached. Eh. I just went and looked at some of them; I carved dates inside: 7-25-89 and 6-26-90. Since some of us worked on similar projects, we had to carve our initials or other identifying stuff into them so we'd know they were ours. Some of them--two of the bears, which had skinny little parts under their feet--only have JLW on them. The heart has Jen! and the date ('89). The older bear ('90) has my full name around the bottom. Those last two also have my signature smiley face on them. Anyway, I enjoyed ceramics until I decided my teacher was an idiot. Truth be told, now that I'm older, I've realized she was just human and simply forgot or didn't hear me. However, when you're twelve and self-righteous, well, God forbid someone does something wrong. See, the first project or two that we did in 1990, she supplied the stuff. The third project, we got to tell her what we wanted. It took me a while to decide, but I went with a dog. The next week I came in and saw a bunch of different figurines on her desk. (Our classes were in science labs, so her desk was a little higher than a normal teacher's desk.) I saw this cocker spaniel, picked it up, and said, is this my dog? She said, no, you didn't tell me what you wanted. She'd brought these weird generic Christmas sort of things for those of us who supposedly hadn't picked something, or in case something broke. Well, okay, I know I told you a dog, and now I'd repeated that. To me, this should have clued her in to me wanting a dog. But I took the weird Christmas thing, which was kind of flat, and I cleaned it up, and in the process it broke. Since I really didn't want it anyway, I didn't care. I think I threw it away at the end of class. I came back the next week expecting a dog to be there. I mean, hello, what part of "Is this my dog?" suggested I wanted anything else? But no--the teacher had pulled the Christmas thing out of the trash for me to finish. You have to be kidding me. I think I walked out and never went back. Idiot. So, the moral of the story, listen to what people say, and ask questions to make sure you understand. At no point did she say something like, I'm sorry, I didn't hear that you wanted a dog last week; would you like me to bring you one next week, or do you want to keep working on the ugly Christmas thing that even I don't know what it is? So, yeah. I'm still a little bitter over the whole thing. I was never one to skip school, even community college school, so to miss out on the final couple of classes wasn't easy. However, I've never been able to stand idiocy. Once you demonstrate that you're an idiot, that's it. You have no hope. (This would be why I needed to get out of retail.)
Anyway.
At least the ceramics class wasn't the only arts-related class I took, and the other one fared better. I think I took this class in the fall of '89, while I was in seventh grade. (I think I was too busy to do anything like that in eighth grade.) It was just a general arts and crafts class, and we did generic art. I remember drawing a person, I think, maybe using pastels. I have two paperweights made from different clays. One is low and flat and gray; one is small and round and from something more like dough. Both are painted. The low gray one has a bunch of peace signs on it, I believe; the round one got painted white, and then I put my name, '91 (for my graduating class), and the signature smiley. For some reason, I want to say the teacher thought that was clever. We also got to paint little plaques, these small pieces of wood on which you could put a little picture. Mine has a tree and flowers and a sun and birds. It's pretty basic, but it's okay. I think it was kind of a large class, and since this was also held in the science lab, we had these nice large tables on which to work. Plus, we got to sit on stools. For whatever reason, that seemed neat to me. However, the one indelible image from those classes was the anti-smoking poster up on the wall, showing this odd-looking lady smoking a cigarette with the caption "Smoking is very glamorous" under her face. Lovely.
I think it's kind of funny that I loved artsy stuff so much that I took several classes outside of school, but when I got to high school I didn't take a single art class. But my high school seemed like it had just one art teacher back then, and I'd heard stories about him and he seemed kind of creepy, so I stuck with band and foods instead of art. However, for those of you who may wonder where my art minor came from, there you go. I was always interested in it and was decent at it, though I'm far better at abstract than anything realistic.
The third class I took was actually athletic. No, really. I took several sessions of swimming lessons. I love to swim. I am like a fish. I despise sand, and open water freaks me out (I should probably recount my near-drowning experiences--yes, plural--sometime, but not now...though, actually, those took place in pools, but never mind). However, give me a pool with chlorine, and bam! I'm happy. I've been known to whore myself out to people I didn't know very well ( party after camp in 2004, anyone?) just for the use of a pool. And, in fact, I ended up taking one class twice just so I could keep swimming. I took three classes over four sessions--I think a beginner, the intermediate twice, and the advanced. I think I had to wait for the advanced course to come up for my age; that's why I did the intermediate twice. I was one of the better swimmers in my classes, say top three or five out of 15-20 kids--not bad for someone unathletic out of the water. I also took these classes in sixth and seventh grades, which was when I started porking up. Right now I'm thinking two things: 1. God, how big would I have been had I *not* been swimming? And 2. How much better would I have been had I been streamlined? The world may never know.
I made a few friends in my swimming classes, but I never kept in touch with them outside of Wright. That's too bad. See, even back then I had social issues. I don't think I knew anyone from my school in my classes; I think the kids came from public school or St. Ferdinand, the Catholic school that was a couple of blocks from Wright (and my school's partner for band). I do remember one girl from my last two swim classes. She was a little weird like I was. I think she was a year younger than me in school, but we got along pretty well. She's the one who influenced me to buy the B-52's album Cosmic Thing. Like, I'd been thinking about getting it, and she had it and liked it, so I got it. (That story is better than this one: I bought the Milli Vanilli tape because DJ on Full House had it. Really. I'd thought about getting it but wasn't sure, then DJ mentioned it, and since she had it, well, then maybe I should have it. Oh, the shame.) I think that girl was also a little creeped out by the showers, too. There was a locker room off the natatorium--yes, it had a big, fancy name, 'cause it was college--and then off the room there were showers and then another room with just lockers. Since we were there just once a week, I think we just grabbed whatever locker was unused that week. At least one of those swim classes was taken during the winter, so I sort of had to change out of my bathing suit before I put my clothes on...and that meant going into the showers. Like hell I'd get naked in front of people. I think there might have been some actual changing rooms in the shower area, but mainly you had to go into a shower, and the shower was always on, and hope you didn't get your clothes wet. Fun. Oh, like I'd take an actual shower. Please. I'd just been in a pool. Didn't that automatically make me clean? (Hey, I was eleven or twelve, and it was before I realized the importance of hygiene...yeah, I basically only took showers a couple of times a week, and swim day was not one of those days. I shudder to think of it now.)
As for swimming itself, I learned a number of strokes. You had your basic freestyle and backstroke, and I think we learned the butterfly, which I hated, and the sidestroke, which I loved. We also got to dive off the deep end of the pool; I enjoyed that a lot. I think there might have been one or two boards, but we mainly dove off platforms like they do in swim meets. Then we'd have to swim to the other, shallow end of the pool. I think the depth ranged from three to eight feet. I think the class was run or sponsored by the Red Cross, so part of our deep-water training was to carry a brick from the bottom of the pool to the surface. I could never do that. I mean, I could grab it and kind of bring it up the ladder, but there was no way I could do it while in the middle of the pool. That made me feel like a failure, like if someone was drowning while I was there, I couldn't save them. And it's not like the brick was super-heavy; I think it may have been 20 pounds. I could probably do it now. I haven't tried in years.
I think I stopped taking lessons because they ran out of classes for kids my age. Plus, by that time I was in eighth grade, and like I said before I was busy with other stuff. Still, for the most part I really enjoyed my time at Wright, and I'm glad my mother had me do it. That's totally something she did right. There, look--I complimented my mother.