Ticking
School was horrible really.
There was this one kid, I can’t even remember his name, but he was built like a tank and had bright red hair…
… actually, I think his name was Ian…
Some school kids play football, others play card games and smoke, but it happened that the kids at my school had a particular game they like to play at lunchtime.
Think of it as a human form of buckaroo. You know, the game where you have to load a donkey, an item at a time until it refuses to take any more… except you have to replace the donkey with a random classmate, and the items with punches to the arm.
To be fair, the kids tended not to play this game with anyone that looked like they would punch back straight away… so I haven’t had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of this game. Nor did I ever participate. I was too busy playing cards and smoking.
But I did watch it once.
Ian, despite his size was pretty timid and quiet. He had never been in any sort of trouble, and had never displayed any violent tendencies. This made him ideal for lunchtime torment.
The game started with a few hesitant and fleeting punches to his arm whilst he sat at a desk, eating his sandwiches. He didn’t even flinch, let alone say anything.
The kids took turns, getting a little more blatant and nasty each time, but still Ian didn’t retaliate. This went on for some time. So long in fact, that it was still continuing after I returned for a cigarette break.
Not soon after however, this one particularly loud and tiny kid decided it was his turn. I remember him being pretty obnoxious, probably the sort that would wait long enough to take his turn only when he thought there was minimal chance of retaliation.
He walked straight up to Ian and punched him hard on the top of the arm.
Ian picked up the desk he was sitting it at and launched it at his attacker. Buckaroo.
I remember walking off, heading back to class thinking about what had happened. I mean, it was obviously a form of bullying, and I can’t condone it in anyway, but if those kids hadn’t been hitting Ian, or if I had tried to step in, he never would have hit back… He became a celebrity, not only in our school, but other local schools too… and he seemed happier than he was before.
Despite the fact that he had been innocently attacked. It was Ian that spent the next few months on perpetual detention… Apparently you can’t break someone’s jaw without having to face consequences… and that’s where I had a chance to speak to him, having been caught smoking.
I asked him why it took him so long to retaliate, why he had let them do it for so long.
‘I really need to get wound up before I hurt someone’, he said.
Philippa on
I was never much for fighting back, myself. I’m still hoping that I’ll be able to track down everyone I didn’t like from school and clandestinely ruin their grown-up lives, wrecking relationships, tarnishing reputations and killing careers. And just so they’ll have some inkling that the disaster their lives have become is not mere fate, I’ll periodically call them and just laugh ominously.
Yes. That’ll do nicely.
The truth is, from my own experiences anyway, that mostly those sort of people mess their own adult-lives up. You jsut can’t go around being so obnoxious outside school.
That said, I still have a few people on my list… and if I ever bump into them again there is going to be some sort of… event… I’m not saying that I’ll resort to violence, but something will probably happen.
I think bullies are unhappy people. there
isn’t anything one can do to them that they
haven’t already done to themselves.
Honestly I’ve always taken a contrarian view on this whole “Pity the bullies.” idea. I tend to think people either convince themselves that the people that made them unhappy were unhappy themselves as a defense mechanism to help themselves keep a modicum of self-esteem and dignity or other people try to convince them of it because they’re trying to be sympathetic and in many cases they have lingering guilt from having been unkind to the bullied kids themselves.
I went to school in a fairly rich town (though I was dirt poor) and most of the kids I had issues with went on to really nice colleges and probably are very successful. (It’s also worth noting that most all of them were getting excellent grades and quite a few were with me in the Gifted program.) I’m quite confident that they’ll have lives ripe for wrecking when the time comes.
OK, you’ve made a sound argument, count me in… who do we start with?
My former best friend, Anna N.
(gets out his schematics)
Ian sounds like a great bloke.
“Apparently you can’t break someone’s jaw without having to face consequences… ”
Actually you can get away with alot.
In year 7, I decked a kid for telling me that I had to see a teacher about my swearing and desk pushing over display. I think I hit him a few times.
Also year 7, I threw a stick (repetitive story telling makes it out to be a small tree) at a teacher, hitting them in the head.
A few other incedents from that year.
Not one detention or suspension, tho I was forced to apologise to the kid I hit.
I don’t even remember the principle wanting to see me.
Year 7 was the year I found out that being smart is ok, but being alot smarter just alienates you from every one else, hence my venting of frustration and anger.
I wasn’t the only kid in my class who had this problem, one other was smarter, but less extravegant in the displays and another was much less intelligent and on par with me.
I just blame it on ADHD so I sound normal.
When I re-tell the story of ‘Ben throwing something at a teacher’, it will be a mighty oak, ripped from the ground with your bare hands.
EW, you smoke?
I was wondering that.
Disgusting.
Now I wonder if the money I paid for my book is going to fund his dirty habits.
Not even a fun dirty habit, sheesh, it could at least be an exciting dirty habit, like streaking, or rmodifying hymn to be subtly evil.
I did indeed.
Having worked in mental health, I now understand that for me, smoking was probably a form of self-medication, used to cope with the rather unhappy times I had during formal education and that perhaps on some level I was desperate to get caught and expelled (these days you have to bring guns if you want that)… plus, it was a fair while ago. When I started senior school, the cigarette machine had only been removed from the common room three years previously, and even then that was only because someone had found a way to get things out of it for free.
You know, I love how it’s now acceptable to bully people, as long as you’re bullying them about smoking. /sarcasm
I *love* how it used to be acceptable to give another person cancer.
O crawl back into your self-righteous hole and let us alone. Some of us can’t afford anti-depressants.
If I can’t be self-righteous, what other kind of righteous can I be? : )
Oh, and I’m really just thinking about the children. Parents smoking in the car with the windows up, and the little ones in the back clawing at the windows… : (
As a smoker (you are never an ex-smoker), I have to agree with you Davey… it’s not so good for everyone’s environment. If only there was some way to smoke in an air-sealed bubble… I mean, we used to have those, they were called ‘pubs’… however current anti-smoking laws prohibit them these days. Not a bad thing as it happens and incidents of waking up on a Sunday morning smelling of a brewery’s ashtray are fortunately rare.
However, I also get the idea of persecution. I mean it has become fashionable to attack people with an addiction – in a way that doesn’t exist for other forms. Hard drug users get a far more sympathetic ear these days, because they have an illness, whilst smokers are seen as being selfish and socially unacceptable.
It’s getting that way with obesity too… a societal ill that can be persecuted on a personal basis.
And as for acceptable ways to give people cancer, I still think that the figures comparing passive-smoking induced cancers to those with a high probablity of being caused from engine fumes highlights that perhaps cars are currently the most socially acceptable way to give people cancer.
“If I can’t be self-righteous, what other kind of righteous can I be?”
True. If self-rigteousness were made illegal, I’d be locked up for years.
there isn’t really any reason to have a problem with someone else’s obesity i suppose. unless you’re a nurse, my mom’s always complaining about having to move them.
As a tax payer in an obese nation, I feel I have a right to bully fat ppl.
Atleast if I stress them enough, they might lose some weight from the high blood pressure.
Or have a heart attack and die sooner, lessening the strain on the health system.
it’s one thing to be angry at an aspect of a culture, quite another to be angry at it’s participants. it’s not like they’re hurting anybody, aside from themselves. even if it is dumb
The problem I have with people attacking me because I smoke, is the stereotype they fit on me. I do not smoke around kids, I do not smoke ‘in my car with the windows up, the little ones clawing at the windows’. I smoke outside, downwind, and at work when I do not have the luxury of being able to have a panic attack.
So, do think about the fact that maybe some people smoke for Reasons, please–that’s all I really ask of people. After all, blackening my lungs is really much less damaging than being on a psychoactive, experimental drug that is on a fluctuating dosage, the way most of the anti-depressants are.
Why are the British bullying stories always more violent than the American ones?
Whilst I am very much against the use or possesion of guns, in the UK violence tends to be short, up-close and brutal because at the most, the other guy might have a knife.
That, and the fact that I went to a rather odd school. It was a mix of rich boarders and poorer scholarship entrants. This created the fantastic mix of resentment, jealousy and fear that educated me for several years.
…and I got of lightly. I know several of my peers suffered quite serious nervous breakdowns before that place was through with them.
Why are the British bullying stories always more violent than the American ones?
Tradition.
Hahahaha, Seraphine, you’re a genius.
i’ve never really paid enough attention to make any enemies, except middle school, middle schoolers are jerks.
I hit a girl with a book once. After warning her three times. She was berating an acquaintance, and I had to defend this acquaintance’s honour, because I am that sort of person.
Got suspended. Though none of the teachers or asst. principal were mad. Only the really high admin staff hated me. And the students. The teachers loved me, with a few notable exceptions, but just got frustrated because I didn’t do homework or try or anything. Granted, I was coping with grief wrong and therefore acted like a delinquent, but…yeah. My teen years sucked, and I’ve never passed a class. Ever.
I’m going back to school on my own terms, soon. I’m going to just take one class at a time, and not worry about what I’m working toward.
But first I have to move. I have to move. I have to get rid of all my stuff and just move out of here.
I wish I had local friends to help me….
That’s a good way to do it.
Well thank you. n_n Slow but steady, right?
I was going to post a comment here relating to a flaw in my personality, but once I finished writing it, I realised it was over 350 words long and crazy enough to make Freud climb out of his grave and visit our school, just to see if it was true.
That said, if anyone feels they’re stronger than freud and wants to know what I was going to say, I might post the comment I was going to originally.
And you know that game’s still going strong.
I do think about “the Reasons,” and I don’t care.
When I worked in an office, I was sitting at my desk for 4 hours at a shot. Everybody else was up and about every 10 minutes to take a smoke break. If I’d left my desk there would have been a shouting match. When I worked at a restaurant, I’d be standing waist deep in dish water for 6 hours with no break, meanwhile the other washers were sitting out back lit-up, smug, and happy. If I’d left the dishes there to go outside and stare at the moon I would have lost my job. In school, when we were 16 hours from our animation final (12 - 14 of which would have been rendering time - and you can’t leave for that, you have to keep the machines running) the smoker member of my group was crabby and irritable, unless he was outside lit-up, far away from a computer. Who pulled his weight? Hmm? After we did his animation, who watched his computer?
So, if you choose to do that fine, but don’t think because you’re “down-wind” I can’t smell it. Don’t think that I don’t hate smoking (and don’t get me started on pot - makes my allergies flare up something fierce) for a Reason. Don’t think that my hate extends past the filter, either. It’s the smoke I hate, not the tobacco, and not the smoker.
I’ve been ridiculed and made-fun-of for choices in my life and I had to choose whether I cared or not. Did they make fun of me for singing? Yes! Did I quit? No! Keep in mind that people will disagree with what you do, and if it’s REALLY that important to you, don’t listen to them.
By the way, the smoker friend in my animation group started when he was 13 - both his parents smoked in the house since he was a baby - so I don’t blame him at all, nor do I blame his parents, because they are indeed addicted to a drug. Just don’t get self-righteous about my self-righteousness. Sorry for the length of the post, and I mean no offence, but it’s obviously a touchy subject for some. : )