OK, do I have the energy to do this tonight? Truly not sure. Probably not. That’s why I’m going to do it anyway. If I don’t have the energy to do it right, I’ll just do it a different way. That’s the secret to this kind of relationship, kids — the one between yourself and your personal narrative mythological aviary, that is — if you have to do it, you’ll know you have to do it; and if it isn’t fun, there’s no point; and fun sometimes hurts, but not always; and you can crumple up and throw away whatever parts you want to, it’s nobody’s business but your own; and — well, etc, etc. That’s the secret to any kind of relationship, kids: there’s not just one simple secret.

pigeon

my colonial

Ah, this is a nice one, because it’s about being pleasantly surprised by someone’s capabilities. It’s about how everyone will surprise you if you get to know them enough and/or give them enough time, and pay attention and don’t be an oblivious oaf.

Intent thug raid, summa my fur rends sand dye you star right note stew wee shudder you sing home of phones — zit twas zach kine dove seek riddle anguish, shoe no?

Holy hell, that was harder than I remember it being. Here’s the translation, in case I suck at this now: In tenth grade, some of my friends and I used to write notes to each other using homophones — it was a kind of secret language, you know?

This was mostly in French class (dude—why didn't we write notes in, oh I don’t know, French!?) which was one of the epicenters of my blossoming into a proper teenager who could make small talk, wear jeans and madras plaid shirts, have real hair, and, most importantly, have friends.

Me and my two main guy friends were the authors of most of these homophonic coded notes, and this didn’t surprise me, because we were the more nerdy ones — but, by this time, thanks mostly to being in plays and having cars and just having survived middle school, we were also kind of cool, in a limited way within a limited social set. I mean, not cool as far as the cool kids would have adjudged, but we weren’t, like, TV-show cliché nerds. We were alt nerds. One of my other sort-of friends called us the Noncomformists Club. Anyway, it was totally in line with what I would have expected of us, that I would have introduced this note-writing technique and these guys would have embraced it and been able to do it.

But then there was one of the girls in the burgeoning friend group, let’s call her DD. I’ma just come right out and say it, she didn’t come across as someone who was in the same league as the rest of us in the IQ department. Not that she was dumb or anything, just, you know, she didn’t have the same kind of computery, mathy, science-fictiony, vocabulary-y sort of demeanor as the “brainy” kids that me and the boys used to be seen as, and still were kind of seen as in 10th grade, even though we did social things and got in trouble now. DD was just a tad bit more, you know, bovine in a way.

Had I known then what I at least somewhat know now about how hard it is to be a teenage girl, I would have tried to be a better friend to her. Not that I was a bad friend to her, but I just didn’t care enough. I was selfishly unaware of the kind of vortexes and energy fields I was standing next to when I was standing next to the kind of careful, scared smile a girl like DD would put on in the face of constant judgment about body, looks, behavior, relationships to boys, power dynamics, popularity, and all that stuff.

So this one time in French class I was privy to a homophonic note DD had written to one of us; maybe I was between her and him and took the liberty of reading it before passing it along. Now I’m going to break my pattern that I’ve followed so far of not using people’s real names in these posts, because in order to understand the brilliance of her note, you have to know that she wrote “My Colonial” for his name, which was “Michael O’Neal.”

I never would have thought of that. Because we always called him Mike! So not only did she expand his name in order to be able to work with it more effectively, she also deftly split up the syllables — that’s one of the tricks, you know — you can’t get too hung up trying to reproduce each word individually; that limits your options. You have to be flexible and ignore word breaks and go with just the sounds. So she did all that and she did it in a way that rendered his name — adorably, endearingly — in the possessive.

What the actual fuck.

I don’t even remember what the rest of the note said, except that it covered the full length of a piece of notebook paper. Why did this not-exactly-dumb girl kick our asses at our own game?

It left me with that peculiar tingle that bubbles up like a science experiment when you mix admiration and insecurity, jealousy and delight.

Now, however many years later, it’s just delight — mixed with, again, a wistfulness born of my inability to go back in time and not be a dumb boy. I guess this is what they mean by “youth is wasted on the young.” I wouldn’t want to go back and try to be, like, DD’s boyfriend or anything. Not a savior of some kind either. I would just go back and be curious, and less of a spastic werewolf. Haha, wouldn’t we all, though. God, humans are weird. Why, why, why do we have to go through such a protracted period of being slimy, smelly weird worms before we even approach the capacity for — but I guess I should just speak for myself. Capacity for what, though? Not “genuine connection” because I did have that, have had that, in all the ages I’ve been, just in different ways.

I don’t know. Maybe having the perspective of adult, parent, teacher — maybe I just have a keener sense for what adolescents are up against. How alive and vulnerable they are, and how it’s just their dumb luck that they so often come across as conniving and kind of evil. Or clueless. It is my careful, considered judgment that, for the most part, they are not. So much of what we demand of them is just so utterly absurd and unfair. We treat them as if they’re malicious idiots, because we have more power but still don’t know what the hell to do about anything. We make it our kids’ and students’ fault that we’re shitty parents and teachers. We lay at their feet the responsibility for all the atrocities we’re failing daily to protect them from.

Butt ties oppose sigh shh adjusts peek form eyes elf.