Insults

I wrote this as an example for my Stretch A class and wanted to share it here just for some giggles.

Insults typically don’t work that well against me. When people try to get me riled up and react to what they’re saying, most of the time it doesn’t do anything to me. If someone is doing the overplayed joke of poking fun of my mom with a classic ‘yo mamma’ joke, I’ll most likely pile in with a few of my own about her. They’ll want to say ‘yo mamma is so fat, dumb, stupid,  or anything like that, and of course I jump in and say my mamma is so far in denial about her son that she still treats me like I am thirteen and trusts me to do nothing. My job last family reunion was to bring coloring pages for people to color on – the crayons to color on them was my niece’s job. 

Once that falls apart and they realize that they can’t insult my mom, some people trying to get a reaction from me might want to make the very stupid mistake and start insulting my wife. I love my wife. I wish I could be the knight in shining armor that rushes to her aid in the time of need to defend her honor, but she’s got a knife and can stab people all by herself. There’s no need for me to rush to her aid because if she even catches the scent that someone was talking bad about her that will be the last mistake that they will ever make. 

My mom is off the table of insults, my wife is off the table of insults, and that doesn’t leave much room in my life to insult. Some really creative souls try their best to insult me, but the down side to that is that I’ve pretty well come to terms with who I am. Jokes about my lanky body, glasses, nerdy hobbies, voice, mannerisms, musical inclinations, or anything else doesn’t really phase me. It’s impossible to insult someone about something that is true. Yeah, I do look goofy. Yeah, I do listen to weird music. Yeah, I do have glasses. I can’t really argue against truth. 

As Zen as I try to be, and as much as I try to act like the world will go on and nothing will bother me, there is one type of insult that will motivate me beyond anything else in the world. Anytime I have an eye on doing, being, or achieving something, if someone tells me that I can’t do it or are unable to do it because I’m not smart, fast, old, or young enough to do it will kill me. 

People telling me that I’m stupid, or that I’m not smart enough to do something, stick with me, and they stick with me for a long time. In second grade I was trying to run for class president, and my competition made a quick jab towards me that I didn’t even know how to spell ‘book’ right. I still remember it. I still replay that moment in my mind. I try my best to not let it sit against the guy too much because it was firmly in our past, but every time I see him (we grew up in the same neighborhood and whenever I visit home I see him) that is one of the memories that I have of him.

I have a list of people who have laughed at me, told me I couldn’t reach my dreams, or simply told me that I wasn’t smart enough, and they are a major motivator to do things. Logically I know that most of their comments and restrictions about my life were in passing and not well thought out. In my right mind, I know that none of these people even think twice about who I am, what I’ve become, or where I’m going. When I have my mind about me, they are ignorant people who could not see the big picture. When I’m not thinking right, they are what keep me up until four in the morning trying to become something more. I can’t stand it when people tell me that I can’t do something that I know I can do, if only I try. 

Insults can be shrugged off and forgotten, but limitations become a gauntlet thrown to the ground begging for me to pick it up. 

Limitations about things that I don’t care about can be forgotten. Someone telling me that I will never be a football jock, a fashion model, or the typical dad because of who I am is nothing to me. I don’t care about those things, and so it doesn’t matter if I’m not achieving it. Trying to tell me that I will never be an air force pilot because I’m too tall isn’t really a limitation because I never wanted to fly. Trying to limit me by saying that because I’m built the way I am I’ll never be a good lineman, doesn’t quite bother me because that’s never been a passion of mine. 

The limitation, that turns into an insult, that turns into a grudge, that turns into something that haunts me for far longer than it should, is when someone limits me because of my intelligence.

In 9^th grade I was a slacker, a smart slacker, but still a slacker. I was in all honors classes, and I was actively failing my geometry class because I simply never did the homework. I aced quizzes and tests, but bombed out and ultimately had to retake the class because I chose not to do my homework. When I finally sat down with my counselor who had never met me and knew nothing about me in 10^th grade, he said that I should go to a more basic math class, and that I should not try to take any more honors classes. He wanted to transfer me out of a challenging course because he thought I wasn’t smart enough. 

My GPA went from a struggling 2.0 where I was slacking my way through honors classes learning just enough to get me through, to my senior year where I took summer school, not because I needed to retake classes, but because I wanted an extra space in my schedule to take a heavy load including an Economics, AP Lit, AP Bio, Pre Calc, and Physics. Because of his complete lack of faith in my brain, I could not stand it. He, and a few others at that school, tried to limit my knowledge, and it became an insult against me. 

Then came the insult that I still cannot understand, I was not smart enough to think in more than threes. 

I try to think about when in the world I should only think in threes and its mind boggling. I stretch to come up with an idea of where three is the only answer and only complication to any resource to talk about, and I find a blank. Even when talking about something as basic as the three primary colors, I have to ask which form of colors are being discussed. The primary colors of additive coloring are different than the primary colors of subtractive coloring. If the primary colors really are red, yellow, and blue, why in the world when a printer runs out of ink does it need ink that isn’t red or blue? Yellow is fairly constant within both forms of primary colors, but even then there’s more than three primary colors. 

Just like I don’t see it ever possible to limit myself to only thinking in threes, I can’t process how to only defend a topic with three ideas when writing. According to some very lost souls in the English teaching world, not only is there only ever three ideas about a topic, there’s only ever three defenses to one of those ideas. If I ever get arrested for a crime, which is bound to happen one of these days, I’m picking my lawyer by asking them to write a five paragraph essay of how they plan to defend me. If they actually write a five paragraph essay, I won’t hire them because they’re limiting my defense to keep my butt out of jail, on three ideas, with only three defenses of each idea. If I’m on trial for my life, I want all of the defenses. I do not want my lawyer to only think of three; I want him to think of three hundred. 

Five paragraph essays are the haiku of the prose world. They’re full of limitations and guidelines which make it impossible to write a good one because rules and structure become more important than the message. The only good part about haikus and five paragraph essays is that they’re impossibly easy to write. 

A haiku is a structured poem of three lines. 

I want to go on and say more about what it takes to write a haiku, but my hatred of three cannot make it past this point without having to say something. If an idea is more complex than three lines, in the haiku world, it is not worth having.  

Within those three limiting lines of a haiku, the rules are always based off of syllable count. The first and last lines have five syllables, and the center one has seven. If an idea is more complex than seventeen syllables then haikus will avoid them. The easiest way to write a haiku is to write a normal sentence, and then just hit enter once the syllable count is hit for that line.

Haiku’s Suck – A Haiku

Haikus are stupid.

They make people think they could

Be a real poet.

That’s all it takes. Five paragraph essays are in the same boat of simplistic writing. It doesn’t take any brain power or resemblance that the author is thinking to write a five paragraph essay; it takes a long list of rules and guidelines that they have to follow. Five paragraph essays don’t show or demonstrate how a person thinks, they demonstrate a schooling system that doesn’t want to see complexity of thought because complexity is difficult to grade. It’s not just insulting; it’s limiting. 

Looking around and seeing just how complex the world is around me, I cannot understand that the art that is supposed to share that complexity has so many rules about it. I can stand some basic rules like spelling and punctuation, but after that there is no rational reason for me to limit my ideas. If I’m trying to make sense of the world around me, I’m going to use every tool and complexity that I can to try to do that. I’m not about to let myself be limited simply because someone is too lazy to read. 

People can insult my hair, my glasses, my car, my taste in music, my taste in hobbies, my books, my house, my religion, my job, my (lack of) masculinity, without any response from me. They can insult the holes in my socks, the cello in my closet, the glowsticks in my desk, or even my name of Adrillf and no sleep will be lost. The real way to fire me up, send me on a quest, get me to see red, and vow vengeance is to limit my intelligence. Call me stupid, call me inept, call me inadequate, or say I’m simply too simple to understand, and I will do everything I can to prove that wrong. 

I know I should let the limitations roll right away along with the insults, but I will remember the student who was double my age who screamed at me during a class that I wasn’t an authority on what I was teaching them. I will remember Professor Thayer passively mocking me and the idea that I would ever be able to publish. I will remember Mr. Santana saying that I should take basic math. I will remember Skyler saying I was too dumb to become a second grade class president. I will remember, and quote to anyone insulting me, that my mamma called my graduate program a “cute little program” like she was talking about a middle school production of The Music Man.