Sweet, Dark and Crazy

Monday, October 11, 2010

And Still I Rise (and Talk)

So, it was brought to my attention in an impromptu meeting with my boss, that several people (and I have a good idea who) were complaining that I was spending too much time talking to one of the contractors. These people were ‘concerned’ that I might not be paying enough attention to my work.

Of course, my job is different from theirs and I’m pretty sure they don’t even know what it is that I’ve been tasked to do – as my job is slightly different than my predecessor’s. They also don’t know that I’m on top of all of my projects and am on schedule, if not ahead of schedule, on all of them. Besides, the overwhelming majority of the time I’m talking with my contractor friend, we are talking about work. It doesn’t hurt though that she’s funny as hell and we just get along really well.

Anyway, it got me thinking and I realized that pretty much since I’ve been able to talk, I’ve gotten in trouble for talking – which is kind of odd because I know a lot of people who talk a lot more than I do. I guess I’m just too social. Like I can help it that I’m naturally popular!

As far back as grade school, I was called a ‘busy body’ and a ‘Chatty Cathy’ by my teachers. Yet, it took my meeting with the boss to recall the very first time I got in trouble for being too chatty. It happened while I was in Head Start. I was about four. And even though I was very young, these are my actual memories and not based on stories someone told me later on.

I have never taken naps. Never. To this day, if my dad calls during daylight hours and I’m napping, he knows I must be sick. I’ve always been this way. As a toddler when my mom would put me down for a nap, I’d play with my toys or if he was out, I’d try to get the attention of the boy next door … a cutie named Eric. He was a teenager and I would try to impress him with my ability to recite my ABC’s or count to 10. I mean what boy wouldn’t be impressed with that? Of course, I know now that men really aren’t impressed with intelligence. It didn’t work when I was two and it doesn’t work now, forty damn years later.

Anyway, at Head Start, they’d put me down for a nap and wide-awake I’d talk quietly to the little boy who laid next to me. He wasn’t as cute as Eric but he was okay. I would whisper to him about whatever I was thinking about. Were Big Bird and Snufalupagus really friends? How I really liked Ernie but didn’t care much for Bert (who always seemed kind of mean to me). And of course, the harrowing story of how I drowned my Mrs. Beasley doll in a puddle in the backyard because all the sudden, I got a really weird (evil) vibe from her.

Anyway, my teacher would yell at me and swat me a couple times with a ruler. Corporal punishment at the tender age of four! It’s a wonder I ever liked school!

This is the same teacher who later pulled me up in front of the class when I scribbled all over a picture of a rooster we were supposed to color. She told me my picture was “wrong” and “bad” and then she put a big red 'F' on it. I didn’t know what that meant but I knew it wasn’t good.

You see, I knew how to color within the lines, but on that particular day at that particular time, I didn’t feel like it. At the end of the day, in tears, I showed the source of my shame to my mom who marched right into the classroom and had a few choice words for the teacher who was trying so hard to stifle my creativity and squelch my bubbly effervescence.

And, in my boss’s office, four decades later, it continues. People continue to want to kill my joy. But guess what? They can’t. You can try to pop the bubbles that naturally emanate me but there are more bubbles where they came from. I’m bubbly damn it and I can't be stopped!

To paraphrase the great Maya Angelou,

You can tattle to the boss on me
With your petty, nosy cries
You may try to dim my sunshine
But still, like bubbles I’ll rise!

Labels: Memories, Work

posted by SDC @ 6:56 PM

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