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Oct. 31st, 2004 06:52 pmWe visited Canberra this weekend for my high school reunion. I despised Weston Creek High and am glad it's been closed for years, saving me the necessity of burning it down and pissing on the ashes. I was constantly bullied there - luckily I was seldom physically attacked during my high school years, just incessantly verbally abused. This sort of harassment must be very costly in terms of students' health and performance, but was tolerated and seen as normal; it's only recently begun to be addressed in Australian schools. (To be fair to WC, it was no different at James Fenimore Cooper Junior High in the US, Camberwell High in Melbourne, or Wanniassa High in Canberra - don't get me started on the last. I got on my bike one lunchtime, rode home, and refused to return.)
I was nervous about attending the reunion despite the offer of mutual defence by an old classmate, but I came to realise that my anxiety was my usual social phobia*, not the re-emergence of my adolescent experiences. It was absolutely smashing to recognise some old friends (and grab their email etc addresses) after 20 years. But I recognised very few people - I didn't go about the soiree thinking "Are you the baboon** who pulled my hair? Are you the baboon who called me a "stupid dog" out of the blue on the stairwell?" The bullies, and a very great deal of my two years at WC, have simply become irrelevant. What I hope happens now is that the old pals, the positive part of my experience, become part of my present life. That would mean I'd salvaged the best part of it while letting the rest simply fall away.
Canberra is as beautiful as always. I always long to move there whenever I visit.
The cats seemed oddly shaken up by being left alone overnight - they didn't meet us at the door with their usual enthusiasm, and kept flinching away. They also hadn't eaten all the dry food I'd left for them, which really surprised me. Anyway, after about half an hour they were back to normal. They really don't like having their routines disrupted.
I make a point of reading the local newspapers wherever we go. The Canberra Sunday Times seems reasonably respectable. With Beltane / Hallowe'en coming up, they ran an article on a local "witches' meet-up", with a nice colour photo. It was the usual mix of limp jokes and pop culture references, but did clearly get across the conclusion that these folks are nothing to fear. Coincidentally, there was also a snippet on the pardoning of 81 witches executed in the Scottish town of Prestonpans during the 16th and 17th Centuries. It's easy to joke that the pardons are rather too late to do any good; but it's good for any community to acknowledge past injustices, with the hope of preventing them happening again.
___
* I haven't had a formal diagnosis of this, but it's pretty clear that's the problem. I plan to see a new psychiatrist about it shortly.
** The brutes are expert bullies, so I like to think of the human variety as baboons.
I was nervous about attending the reunion despite the offer of mutual defence by an old classmate, but I came to realise that my anxiety was my usual social phobia*, not the re-emergence of my adolescent experiences. It was absolutely smashing to recognise some old friends (and grab their email etc addresses) after 20 years. But I recognised very few people - I didn't go about the soiree thinking "Are you the baboon** who pulled my hair? Are you the baboon who called me a "stupid dog" out of the blue on the stairwell?" The bullies, and a very great deal of my two years at WC, have simply become irrelevant. What I hope happens now is that the old pals, the positive part of my experience, become part of my present life. That would mean I'd salvaged the best part of it while letting the rest simply fall away.
Canberra is as beautiful as always. I always long to move there whenever I visit.
The cats seemed oddly shaken up by being left alone overnight - they didn't meet us at the door with their usual enthusiasm, and kept flinching away. They also hadn't eaten all the dry food I'd left for them, which really surprised me. Anyway, after about half an hour they were back to normal. They really don't like having their routines disrupted.
I make a point of reading the local newspapers wherever we go. The Canberra Sunday Times seems reasonably respectable. With Beltane / Hallowe'en coming up, they ran an article on a local "witches' meet-up", with a nice colour photo. It was the usual mix of limp jokes and pop culture references, but did clearly get across the conclusion that these folks are nothing to fear. Coincidentally, there was also a snippet on the pardoning of 81 witches executed in the Scottish town of Prestonpans during the 16th and 17th Centuries. It's easy to joke that the pardons are rather too late to do any good; but it's good for any community to acknowledge past injustices, with the hope of preventing them happening again.
___
* I haven't had a formal diagnosis of this, but it's pretty clear that's the problem. I plan to see a new psychiatrist about it shortly.
** The brutes are expert bullies, so I like to think of the human variety as baboons.
