Proverbs 13, Verse 3
"Self-control means controlling the tongue!
A quick retort can ruin everything."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
I think I'm beginning to feel a certain amount of empathy for my math teachers, even my earliest and possibly most enigmatic math teacher; my father. I'm feeling their pain. I'm getting where they were coming from.
I am, in short, a very poor student.
And I always was, it was always that way. I just wore glasses and tucked my shirt in and this threw teachers. They didn't know what to make of it. Single digit scores on math tests, and yet looks like Paul Pfieffer.
Does. Not. Compute.
And so I spent a significant portion of my academic life not computing. In all senses of that word. I slid, skated, glided, sailed and slunk by without accomplishing much of, well, anything really in school. Sure, I wrote a lot of stories and won some public speaking contests. I got a story called "When Yellow Geese Eat Chairs" published in a national magazine when I was in middle school and got five dollars out of it. But my homework was done on the bus on the way to school, if at all, and I once convinced a teacher that I didn't do a Spanish project because my grandmother had died.
She, at that point, hadn't.
Not only was I apathetic about school work and, occasionally, brutally dishonest, I also learned at a painfully slow speed. Not to say that I was "slow", but it took me a while to figure things out. Like that fucking Major Molineux story. Who knew "Toby" and "Kunta" were the same person?
Actually, looking back on it, maybe I've just gotten slower-- maybe I really was fine in school (besides math, obviously) and my synapses and my pistons and my o-rings are just now starting to falter. Maybe fatherhood has made me stupider. It certainly isn't making me any brighter.
So my learning curve is getting broader, or wider, or more concave. I don't know. Obtuse. At any rate, it takes me longer to figure things out, to make connections, to get the main idea. Would you repeat that? What do you mean by that? Every anecdote, I find, must be a twice-told tale which, for people who don't mind talking, isn't very bothersome, I guess. I find that I'm in meetings furiously scribbling down everything the dumb fuck in front of me is saying for fear that I won't be able to tease out what's really important, and, convinced that I know absolutely nothing, I must assimilate everything.
And so I learn nothing. Or, if I do, it just takes a painfully long time.
One thing I am learning, very very slowly, is to watch my mouth. Especially when I'm angry and/or passionate, because what I say and how I say it is often unfiltered and unappreciated. And I get it, I understand. And part of me agrees-- I wouldn't appreciate it if someone talked to me the way I talk to people sometimes, but sometimes I just don't see any other way to make people care.
Which, of course, you can't do.
You can't make somebody care about their job or their Spanish homework or their yard if they don't, even though you'd really like it if they did. And that's something I'm learning very, very slowly. I expended so much energy when I was younger taking pen to paper with vitriol leaking out of my inkwell, insisting with every ounce of fury my vocabulary could muster, that people care about what I care about.
But it doesn't work. It didn't, and it doesn't.
No one ever gave me a satisfactory reason as to why I should care about math, so I didn't. If they had a crystal ball and said, "Gee, you know, in 2013 you're going to be writing grants with complicated budgets and you're going to have to understand audited financials and P&L statements and 990s and maybe it would be good if you fucking knew how to add and subtract" I might have taken some notice.
But probably not.
Because, maybe underneath it all, I am a shrewd youth, and may rise in the world, with or without the help of my kinsman, Major Molineux.
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