Also, to reiterate, thanks, Meara: [link]

"Hi! Here are our heteronormative guidelines! Squeeze on in!"

Yeah, that sucks. I also would like to go on the record as saying no one who ever tried to intervene about my shyness helped my shyness in any way shape or form.

As the parent of a kid who has had a rough year keeping up with his homework, I still try to get him to finish his work and turn it in, even if it results in no grade.

msbelle, bah.

I was shy enough that I'd cry if sent out to recess in first grade and thus spent recess inside with my teacher. (I cried a lot. My teacher was a yeller, but I cured her of that because everytime she raised her voice at Manny, who never listened, I burst into tears. She told us years later it made her a better teacher.) Finally the teacher and my mom paired me up with another painfully shy girl and made us go outside together. It was fine after that. Pretty sure it was a manifestation of me hating change (which I still struggle with) since the recess with the whole 1st-4th graders was a total different ballgame than kinder recess. I'm glad they did intervene.

T was even shyer than me, and I'm afraid I pushed her around a little. Basically being really bossy. But we stayed friends until middle school or so and then just drifter apart. She ended up being a cheerleader in high school.

So I'm coming to the conclusion Lady Gaga likes a) acting out murders and b) being as naked as possible.

Everything with mac seems fine now. I may try to sneak the drawing of me with a knife in me to work next week so I can scan it.

I would like to go to bed. him, nsm.

Therapy hopefully allowed him to get some of his mad out. ( I'm guessing here, though the drawing is upsetting, it was a means of saying I AM ANGRY AT YOU in the most rudimentary form, communicating it without you know, actually throwing down.)

oh sure, that is exactly what it is. Just like the note he wrote me over a year ago that said I smelled like poop. I want to frame it, but I am not sure where it got to.

Heh. I remember once tearing up a love note my mom had written to me in front of her (I had saved it because it always made me feel good) when I was somewhere between 12 and 14. I was SO MAD I couldn't even yell at her, so I destroyed something she'd given me out of love. So transparent, that.

Hours later she found me sobbing in my room, frantically trying to tape it back together again.

I wonder whatever happened to that. I probably still have it somewhere.

....I have no idea what I was SO MAD at her about. Those were really emotionally bad years. Even at my worst in the past decade or so, and there were some really really bad doldrums, I never want to repeat that age. Ever.

I'm trying to imagine my mother writing me a love note when I was young. She'll send me kinda schmoopy emails once in a blue moon these days (okay, once on my birthday, and migraine-related sympathy), but growing up? In my late teens I finally asked her if she'd ever been proud of me. She looked surprised at the question, and not in an "Of course so!" sort of a way.