Have you ever told or heard an anecdote that begins to curdle about halfway through? That friend whose amusing hijinks, you realize as you recount them, were really symptoms of a serious drug and alcohol problem? A fun childhood adventure that was horrifyingly dangerous and just turned out OK through blind luck? A harmless prank that was, in retrospect, way over the line? That tough first job that … wait, are sexual harassment, wage theft, and illegally dangerous working conditions good fodder for anecdotes?
They’re slippery things, our memories and our stories, and they mean things to us that they don’t mean to others. And of course they’re inaccurate: we play down things we don’t want to be bothered by, exaggerate things that we feel ought to be more important.
Take “the hometown scandal,” a perennial cocktail party topic. Everyone’s got a wild hometown scandal story to tell — the dueling car dealerships, the local real estate magnate’s marriage collapsing in public, that lady who murdered her husband and hid his body in a storage unit and told everyone he’d run off and only confessed on her deathbed.
Here’s mine: In elementary school, my friends and I all took taekwondo lessons from an affable due named Jim. He had what seemed like a pretty common-sense rule about the (rather small) changing rooms: when you were done changing, you should leave the door open and the light off, so other students would know the room was available. I forgot about the lessons and the oddly specific lights-and-doors rule until a few years later, when a local paper published an expose about the trick mirror he’d installed to spy on students undressing. When the story broke, he killed himself with a sword in a public park.
Is that a weird and sordid story? A recollection of trauma? I certainly don’t feel traumatized by it. I usually changed at school anyway, and he never touched me inappropriately, and by the time the scandal happened, the dojo had moved from the location where I’d studied, so the peephole/mirror probably wasn’t even there when I was. Probably. Right?
How about “how I fit into middle school stereotypes?” We may exaggerate the hierarchy of nerds and jocks for TV drama, but at the time the whole thing felt very real to me, with a special emphasis on “nerds like me don’t play team sports.” One year, an unpopular student a year behind me tried to join the junior-junior-varsity lacrosse team, and several of his teammates beat the shit out of him. One of the assailants was expelled, one was suspended, and the remaining team had to run a lot of laps for their failure to intervene, but I wasn’t surprised it had happened. That’s just what team sports just were to me: a clique that hated me and would hurt me if they got me alone.
I have no idea how badly he was actually beaten. (Of course I don’t: there was no way a prey animal like me was going to go into that fucking lion’s den). I heard he had to go to the hospital. I heard he exaggerated his injuries because he was a pussy. I heard a concussion wasn’t actually a big deal. Whatever it was, it seemed to me like the obvious outcome of joining the team, and I felt that it was his fault. I don’t think I talked to my parents about it, because it didn’t affect me, because I wasn’t stupid enough to try out for the lacrosse team.
My younger brother remembers it differently. He played lacrosse a few years later, and vaguely remembers that there had been an incident in the past, and the coach had placed a good deal of emphasis on being a good teammate, so maybe they fixed it. Maybe the scandal I remember was actually an isolated incident. I don’t know. It wasn’t about me, it didn’t happen to me, it was just something that happened in another room to someone I didn’t even know very well.
The kid they beat up left our school, of course, but kids getting bullied out of our school wasn’t that unusual. Not unusual enough to be notable, really. Although I did remember it. And when I was joking with a friend recently about how nerds like me didn’t play sports in the early 90s, I told her that story, and she said “Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry.”
But memories are slippery, and they mean things to us that they don’t mean to others.
Linkages
- Jason Kottke looks back at “The Long Boom,” an influential set of techno-optimistic predictions from 1997. It’s interesting to see which have come true, and which “scenario spoilers” have affected us.
- An incredibly funny description of Florida as that friend of yours who has terrible luck because they make terrible decisions.
- Challenge: Republicans stop lying about history.
- Challenge: Republicans stop trying to hurt seniors with lies about gay people.
- Challenge: Republicans attempt to reduce, rather than increase, infant mortality.
- Quick history of right-wingers trying to boycott things from integrated sitcoms to Bud Light.
- Firearms manufacturers are trying to fight a Massachusetts law that, among other things, prohibits the sale of defective weapons known to fire accidentally.
- The Saturday Evening Post still exists, and it can explain the history of “sundown towns” and that controversial country music video about how great vigilante violence is. See also, the New Yorker on the political divisions within the country music industry.
- Surprisingly fascinating insights into the ongoing collapse of the commercial real estate market.
Joy (all cat edition)
Secretly Ironic 