Never Walked In High Heels

I’m not sure why whenever I know that I am beginning to perform for an audience, the tension in my body escalates to an extreme degree. I consider myself a rather laid back person and with my disability I am notorious for having rather floppy muscles and overly limber movements. However, you put me on stage even as a trained actress and everything in my body grows nearly as fixed as concrete. This is particularly odd because in my daily life, walking down the street in stiletto heels, leopard print coat, wheelchair and flaming red hair a number of people are looking at me at all times. Even then, I am on display even though I am not necessarily “performing.”

The tension tends to creep in onstage as all of a sudden I attempt to fulfill everyone else’s expectations, please everyone via show rather than attempting to complete the task in front of me. In its simplest form, acting is about communicating ideas, which I should be relatively decent at as a writer. However, I find myself suddenly wanting every word to be clear in a way that is almost unnatural, I want to be sure I fit in on stage, shine, and be noticed. This of course calls in the eternal question that every actor must struggle with, who exactly am I performing for? Here the stereotype of the vain and self absorbed actor is at its root. If I am performing for the effect of self aggrandizement my own narcissistic qualities begin to weigh upon me harder than lead balloons. It is impossible for any actress, regardless of her talent, to please anyone. It is impossible for every performer to be completely understood by every audience. It is impossible to create the same perfect performance over and over again. However, these are the unreasonable standards I attempt to set for myself whenever I am in the wings waiting to go on stage.

Or is it, I perform for the stake of examining man, what it means to be human and the questions which inevitably plague us all. This is the reason why I am attempting to perform at all. I have set out to complete an unreasonable and impossible task. To examine mans’ questions and dilemmas is of course, equally impossible. One would go insane attempting to do so night after night after night in a two hour show. After all, we are called actors, not thinkers, emoters or (some of us may wish otherwise) even philosophers.

After having several weeks of attempted performance and fighting the unnatural tension of my own body I can see that I perform because on some level regardless of what is called the “prime mover” I was created to be a performer. Everything about my experience, my dreams as a little girl, high school aspirations and studies in college, point me in that direction. This means that it is not necessarily on stage opening night with bright flashing lights and perfectly choreographed sequences in which I accomplish my goal of performing. Being a performer can be fulfilled within the four walls of a rehearsal studio, making the audience myself, God and whatever other invisible beings may exist as important as any West End audience or Broadway crowd. Whenever I attempt to slag something off as just an exercise or a simple reading requiring little to no skill, I must then question what it means to be a performer. And realize that on its face, a performer performs simply because, she cannot help herself. She was created for it, even when the audience seems completely invisible.

I was walking home one grey Sunday afternoon, when I met a young man, who happened to attend my church, he was bringing his gas canisters to have them refilled for his boat. I was on my way home battling the grim London rain and unexpected cold weather, where as is often the case with Sunday afternoons, I fully planned to curl up with my television and to watch a plethora of movies, among them seeing that I was feeling particularly spectacular this weekend included Priscilla Queen of the Desert, The Birdcage and Mrs. Doubtfire. I informed him of my plans and immediately invited him to do likewise.

“Oh no I don’t think I would enjoy those movies at all, they’re not really my type.” I suggest that maybe he would come over and watch The Birdcage, a good mid 1990s film about the importance of family values regardless of your background. He backed up even more, immediately gave an excuse and started walking the opposite direction.

I like movies about men who dress up in drag and come across other strange beings in the human race, all of a sudden my life looks incredibly normal compared to three female impersonators making their way in a giant tour bus across the Australian outback. They calm me down and remind me in a way that romantic comedies and action films can’t, that absolutely nobody’s life could be remotely classified as normal if put under much examination. Many people I know can’t stand the strangeness of these movies even within the safety and comfort of the darkness within a cinema. These people I suppose look for films where everything is normal and expected. Films that reflect their values and their lives, which like it or not, are usually greatly different than my own, or, on the other hand; these people are looking for depth and poignancy in every film. A moral lesson that can be repeated in both Sunday school and on the steps of the Washington D.C. Capitol Building, more power to them. I guess when I pop a DVD into my television I’m looking for some way to remind myself that despite the extreme strangeness and oddity among people I find in my own life, its all going to be okay.

Looking at movies such as The Birdcage or Mrs. Doubtfire and honestly listening to them (indeed that’s the key) one can see a host of family values being supported and portrayed in a much more real and dare I say honest way than many of the Sunday school films produced by so-called “Christian” film houses. Their’s not the typical problems and dilemmas that are repeated over and over as new and exciting plots which test us as barometers of moral courage, indeed if the situation is black and white, just about everyone regardless of name of faith/god he worships can determine the right end of the path to take. The situations that test us in real life as well as the situations that make us think when we are telling stories, are the sticky ones. Filled with uncommon characters and circumstances, that don’t follow the Sunday morning curriculum. They don’t look nice in a suburban atmosphere, and they may never make you popular in school.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of all, be it family value or otherwise. Is the willingness to admit that one’s life is not ideal and even more shockingly, not perfect. This is the thought that we as Americans routinely revolt against as we visit our car washes and do everything possible to make sure our homes look like they belong on the covers of magazines. There is an ongoing pressure in the Western world that I see where a person has to be absolutely justified in his actions and blend in with the rest of suburbia around him. If you fall into this trap, ultimately everyone runs your family as you run around seeking approval from the people you know.

A willingness and almost preference to look odd to outsiders be it the way you dress or how you behave is almost a trademark of moral living. It is these people who refuse to look like everyone else, thus making us all take a second look that also refuse to look for praise be it from a fellow stripper or your small town minister. Being anything less complicated than the divine creature you were created to be is surely short changing yourself in order to live up to someone else’s expectations. Such is never acceptable to any all knowing creator or life force that has put specific energy into building you into the being that you were created to be. In terms of everyone else, when looking at the force that runs the universe in its eyes, the opinions of your next door neighbor hardly matter. After all, it is impossible to place judgment on anyone else until you know the complex characters that they too were created to be.

It is a typical question my parents ask of me at about this time. The family letters go out mostly to people I have never met although heard about in stories from their time in grad school or law school, and in return we get pictures of new babies and blushing brides. It is without a doubt the Christmas card season, which in recent years has mostly been re-dubbed the Christmas letter season. The time of year where you attempt, usually in vain, trying to figure out the mail merge function on Microsoft word just to add a personal touch to a general form letter, thus making it look like you wrote the letter for a specific recipient all along. For the sake of our letter, if anything, I have been working on “This School Year,” I hadn’t thought of my life in terms of school years and grading terms for ages, thus reminding me how little structure and accountability I have in my life as it currently stands. And to be honest, I couldn’t think of a way to sum up my entire existence in one simple line. What was I working on? Part of me didn’t even know.

All of a sudden I feel an enormous rush to justify my self-existence. I want to find a masters program to enroll in, some sort of regime that I cant point to and say “See that? This year I am doing that.” But that is the nature of having a creative life. My life doesn’t fit into scheduled time tables. Some of my most important work happens between the hours of 9 o’clock and 12 o’clock at night. A friend once told me that being an artist is as much a life style choice as it is vocational decision.

He explained that his 30th birthday was spent cleaning toilets and living on the dole and that two years previous, when he was twenty-eight, his birthday was spent sipping champagne and eating strawberries. Being an artist means that you can fall down the ladder as quickly as you can climb up it. The structure and security is completely gone.

I’m sure, regardless of whatever my parents write, many of those who read the Christmas letter will think that I somehow managed to fail them. Growing up I was your typical success story: straight A student, never veering off course, the front row adolescent who’s mind was full of questions and never entertained rebellion. They used to tell my parents, “She’s going places. She’ll be great at whatever she does. I can’t wait to see her in the future.” And right now at least, all I’m great at is provoking a lot of instability in my own life.

By nature of my condition, much of my life has been spent with a sort of warped view of time.  When you are disabled, time slows down and success is largely relative for a kid who was never meant to live much further than her first evening. This means that growing up, taking your first steps at age ten, waiting until fifteen to attempt to ride a bike, still being unable to tie one’s own shoes, and even today, I must find great significance in even the smallest victories. As I wait, often overwhelmed by rejection and closed doors, I am forced to answer myself with regards to whom I’m writing and performing for. When I discover the answer, even the rehearsed readings and showings that occur inside an acting classroom become as important as any opening night on a West End stage.

My life, scattered as it is, has become impossible to sum up in a single letter, much less in a single sentence contained in a letter. I figured this out for myself my first year out of college when I attempted to write my own Christmas letters from the UK. All I could do was write each one out by hand and fill it with questions about the life of the recipient. This took pages and failed to pinpoint exactly what in my life I was accomplishing.

People who only know me by Christmas letters can’t really begin to understand what I am up to, so even a ten page letter I think, would illustrate that really I don’t know what I’m up to and perhaps my incompetency at running my own life would only be barely shown within a ream of paper. Nonetheless my parents pressured me to come up with anything to explain to relatives.  It’s not that my parents don’t love me or they don’t understand, its that they are at a loss to explain what’s going on. Sometimes I tease them, “Tell them that I am one of those people who change the digital clocks on banks every year during daylight savings time. That will illustrate some sort of stable success.” People remain unamused by this answer, looking for a simple one line statement of what I’m up to.

Most of all, I wish my parents just to tell their friends that I am well. Because I am well.

She tells me the story with a presentation so simple, it is perfectly elegant. Her father, growing up in a communist country, figured out at the age of five that he could take penny baseball cards and sell them for two pennies to his friends; thereby making a 100 percent prophet. In the Soviet Union of the 1950s, this was of course highly frowned upon. I look at her as she retells the story, explaining everything that happened and the trouble that her father and her grandfather got into as a result of profiteering. “You should write that down and do a short story,” I say. She looks at me as if ridiculous and scoffs “Why? Two lines and you’re done. Story’s over. There’s nothing particularly interesting about it.”

How many stories like this are lost by people who assume that everyday occurrences are not worth mentioning, recording, or even refining until they are something to be passed down from generation to generation? These are of course, the lost voices of human experience, silenced only by the owner.

Often times, people think that not only do they lack the talent to adequately record a story, what’s more, that themselves and their singular experiences don’t matter in the long run of human experience. However, it is the experiences of everyday people that make up a cultural zeitgeist, not the experience of celebrities or those in power.

I am reminded of the numerous nights my friends from all over. stayed up late telling stories, either by tradition or as a means to kill the time. Amongst my friends over the past year who have gotten married, just about all of them spent the rehearsal dinner telling stories about the couple; stories that make us laugh and touch us in a way that we can’t help but cry. These are the stories that we will someday tell our grandchildren until they are sick of hearing them. And when we are gone, although it might not feel like it at the time, they will long to hear us repeat that same story over again.

Long before my own grandmother died and even before her descent into Alzheimer’s, my father had the foresight to record her telling childhood stories. Like any old married couple, my grandfather can also be heard correcting her, cutting in and out, explaining “No that’s not right” and “This is how it really happened.” They are both gone now and I’ve listened to these recordings staring up at the ceiling fan above my bed and wondering if they knew when they told me these stories as a little girl what impact and beauty the stories actually held. Stories remind us again and again that we are not alone in the human experience; that we stay connected by passing down the line.

I know we love each other because we can scream at each other without worrying that it will ruin our friendship. Despite anything we say or might disagree about, or no matter how deep the issue runs, before the sun sets it will all be fine. Secure love, the best kind of friendship there is, can survive through rough waters even when going through dangerous territory is self induced. It has taken me several years to come to this conclusion, but in fact the people who you love the most are the ones you can allow to see you at your worst. Anything short of that and the relationship is built on very unstable ground.

There is of course a cliché that any couple doubtlessly believe when they first get together, and that is the idea that “we will never fight.” We hear this particularly as girls in our infancy seeing Disney movies and countless happily ever afters. All of this is infinitely harmful to our idea of what love is. More often than not, young women (and probably men, although I can’t speak from first hand experience on this one) will do anything to avoid conflict just for the sake of living up to hopelessly high expectations. Not only do they change small preferences such as what items they would normally order off a menu in order to seemingly agree with their date, but eventually it reaches into other areas as well. What they say, what movies they prefer, what books they read, and eventually what ideals they hold. All of this to be able to give the illusion that indeed, together with their mate, the two are the perfect couple.

Our idea has changed from the notion that love conquers all except for conflict and disagreement or, better yet, love can conquer anything except pure honesty. What this does is shatter our expectations of what love is. If an honest opinion is something that love won’t stand, what hope does love have to conquer any struggle?

Too often I have witnessed my female friends trying to soften the blow of truth when a situation is particularly sticky. They wind up selling half truths and reinventing the situation for someone who they are attracted to in order not to shock their potential soul mate or at the very least, to coax their lover into agreeing with their own opinions. If you have to do this, then your problem is not breaking news to someone, your problem is the entire relationship being on unsteady ground.

During one of my favorite moments in the film “Juno”, the father states “In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person is going to think the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person worth sticking with.” His statement doesn’t sound romantic at all, but it’s true. Every relationship is going to go through periods of conflict and that is the basis for sharpening each other, making each other better, more loving, and more human than the two of you could be on your own. This is the beauty of a relationship that works.

I’ve often heard it said that lover’s quarrels are the worst kind of verbal fights around, and in many ways, true. That’s how they should be. After all, if you can’t really fight with the person you love the most while understanding that the freedom that tomorrow is another day with new challenges and testing new boundaries of your love for each other, there’s really not much hope of any relationship surviving.

I have learned in recent years that there are many hazards of not having a diamond ring. However, this was one that I never expected.

I was in a coffee shop the other day when a young man asked if he could sit next to me. Instantly suspicious, I stupidly nodded even though my past judgment has told me that individuals who wish to sit next to me usually want to talk to me, and such individuals who want to talk to me usually prevent me at the very least from getting my work done. However, this particular man illustrated that not only would he hold me back from work, but I would proceed to a conversation which even my best etiquette teachers would be at an absolute loss to navigate. The young man proceeded to tell me his name and states that he has been abducted to the planet Zorbon, and what I am actually seeing is his hologram android.

At first I think, he must be joking in order to seem more bizarre than he actually is, and then he proceeds to tell me that he is serious, using his laptop to pull up star charts, databases, and other information regarding the great planet of Zorbon which, forgive me if I’m mistaken, seems as if no one on earth has ever heard of.

This of course is not the first time I have found myself in a conversation which made me question whether or not I had slipped into an alternate universe. I seem to attract weirdos from every tribe, nation, and planet. This is a gene I am convinced that I have inherited from my father. My father has the remarkable ability to attract cult leaders, religious fanatics and shall we say, oddities of all sorts. Evidently during their early dating lives, these convergent flocks would hound my mother and father; making it impossible for them to go on a simple date. So I seem to have inherited this gene and although it seems to be recessive in most people, I have a pheromone that somehow attracts very bizarre people.

On the whole, I think that I am pretty tolerant of different individuals’ world views. My own views are fierce in their own right, which may be as strange to some as hailing from Zorbon. Among my friends, there are many Jews, Catholics, Hindu’s, Muslims, basically an entire diversified population which would make the BBC diversity department howl with envy. However, there is only so much a woman can take and being introduced to a hologram android is pushing the limits. The only appropriate response I could garner was, “Buddy, you’re bloody insane.”

I’m not exactly sure what he was trying to accomplish. Maybe being from the planet Zorbon is supposed to be particularly sexy. Perhaps in the style of, I’ll let you see my hologram if you let me see yours. But in my book, this is not a particularly pleasant way to start a romance let alone a conversation.

I have often been told in my life to be kind and tolerant to everyone and to love them exactly as they are, giving every guy a chance before I reject him as a potential suitor. These days, coffee shops are the place to meet your soulmate; and so I do my best to smile and look inviting, even when I’m only there to get a little work done. I don’t know if these rules of dating extend to people who have been abducted and replaced by androids, but after about fifteen minutes of supposed conversation, I found it best to take my work and make an exit.

He is at it again. After four beers in the course of ninety minutes, my friend is drunk. Or at least teetering on the edge of drunk and doing a fine job remaining stable while standing. But what is more stereotypical of the entire situation is not only is he drunk, he is in the middle of an argument and everybody is looking at me to put in my two cents regarding his unbearably loud opinion. I do the one thing I have been trained to do in this situation after coming across it several times. I grab my iPhone and begin to check my email as a distraction.

His argument is, regardless of the fact that he is highly intoxicated on beer and cider, nonetheless poorly thought out and I want absolutely none of it. Everyone at this point is looking at me beginning to ask questions which are directed at getting me to let go of my phone and participate, and I’m simply (adamantly you might say) uninterested. I know of the flaws in his argument. I’ve heard him argue the same point (even every once in a while while sober!) a million times before and it’s simply not interesting. It would be like a low speed chase. He says something which directly contradicts the sentence he said before and in this particular form of reediting, with the assistance of people also drinking alcohol and refusing to listen closely, they all buy it and his rant is able to continue. I’m beginning to wonder if it will eventually become indefinite.

The thing about being in a wheelchair most of the time is that there is absolutely no room for you to have a bad argument. People still automatically assume that I am mentally disabled or incapable of creating any form of reasonable logic. Even while drunk, my friend ranting in a pub gets automatically more respect assigned to him simply because of the fact that he is an able bodied man and able to stand up at the bar (barely) than I am as a woman in high heels sitting down in an electric wheelchair. At best, if I was using the level of pressure which he was using, I would receive people’s pity and at worst I would be ignored or mowed over by some other drunk guy who desperately needs an ego boost.

At this point in time with my friend gathering quite the crowd around him I have checked my email, texted my father, checked my stock, and played a game of Sudoku. Then he said something which for a sober woman, regardless of any sort of brain injury is just too good to pass up in terms of sheer absurdity. I turned my phone off and slipped it into my bag.

At this, everyone turned around and looked at me, “You finally decided to join the conversation?” The old man who always sits in the corner of the pub smiles at me, as he knows what’s coming. He’s been here long enough and seen enough political debates inside the walls of this ancient public house to know that I’m about to make my move and no one is quite ready for what I’m about to say except for him, and me.

By the time I finish my argument; which takes approximately thirty seconds, it is silent. Someone offers to buy me a cider and I quickly make a joke in order to change the tone. The argument is thankfully over and things can get back to at least being pleasantly entertaining even if they will never be profoundly educational. I am ready to have a drink. I am with friends and they all know me in a way that allows me around them to let myself go and fully be the full, silly self without being judged. My friends in this pub will never see me as incapable.

I’ve seen the commercials. The male announcer almost teases you with the idea that all your problems will be solved if you only buy the correct application for under a dollar. And from the stance of creative businesswoman, the App Store for the iphone is enthralling. With no overhead, a constantly changing storefront and boundless creativity, this is, without a doubt, the correct formula for the next stage of entrepreneurship for the new frontier.

If only that ‘boundless creativity’ would come in the form of faster evolution.

After all, what exactly is the use of a program which is an alarm clock on a device where one is automatically build in. Better yet, how about coming to and end of a fine dinner and being unable to calculate the tip without the help of your trusty technological companion. Or there’s always the program, that tells you about what other programs have come out and which other programs you need. (This one, much to my surprise, was not created by Apple.)

I bought an iphone in hopes to make my life as a disabled woman easier. With life in this position one is dependent on barons of industry, invention, and software to make life not simply more convenient but also simply livable. To say that my iphone has changed my life would be an understatement. But I was also one of the first people investing in voice activation all the way back in 1994, and have since thrown money at nearly every piece of assistive technology conceivable. In the case of adaptive tech hardware and software, it really doesn’t matter what sort of resources you have, if can’t be sold to the mainstream population the software will not advance.

This is how we get over 200 software developers which create alarm clocks, and no program that will actually call a London black cab. After all, my friends argue, its easy to hail a cab off the street. But figuring out what fifteen percent of your dinner bill is… that’s a real challenge.

The App Store illustrates to me that the leaders of industry are few and far between while those who have the programming skills but lack the imagination are well in abundance. It’s proof that just because there are lots of hands which can make the industry move forward, without the brains there is little guarantee of it doing so. Looking at what sells today will only show you what you should’ve been selling yesterday. And so to hop on the ‘alarm clock bandwagon’ only serves to tell you where the industry is. As with any other form of progress the market has to look to the needs of people who are not in the mainstream to figure out what comes next.

I’m one of the most non maternal women I know. Its not that I don’t like children, its just that I don’t really know what to do with them. Some many of my friends talk about how they were “born to be a mom” or are willing to manipulate their careers so that they can have children and, truth be told, I’ve never been like that. If you were to ask me to phrase my expectation of having children into a economic philosophy, it, like so many of my views, could best be described as laze fare.. If kids happen… they happen and I’ll rebuild my support system accordingly.

The problem is that as an only child, I didn’t grow up surrounded by little ones. A therapist once told my mother to never speak in baby talk around me in order to force my vocabulary to expand. While it worked to some extent, an above average vocabulary had another effect. Other children steered clear of those people who used particularly big words. So between not having siblings and not having an entourage of friends, I grew up surrounded by the language of adults.

I’ve not yet hit thirty and today I decided I do not like the language of adults. When I was young I used to long to understand every word of the grown-up world, the simple statements of my peers seeming flat and almost primitive. They just said exactly what was on their mind, without regard to cadence, alteration, or even tact for that matter. The adult way of speaking seemed so complex and exact. I couldn’t wait to hear that language my entire time.

And then I grew up myself.

Everyday, now that I’m in the grown up world, I see that it is this world that has the barbaric language which lacks imagination and beauty. Scoring high on the vocabulary sections of my entrance exams for universities, the are some leaflets I receive in my mail box which I stare at blankly trying to figure out what on earth the advertisers are trying to say in them. Or the words are unnecessarily large that just the sounds of them slice through anyone who doesn’t have a shell instead of supple skin.

“Patient’s gait is uneven and massively unstable with unpredictable movements and often staccato breathing when fatigued.” I live with the condition and I am not even sure what such an analysis actually means.

Last month I found myself visiting an old friend and her two young boys. They were squirrely and much past cleaning up after them, I had no idea what to do with them. Despite my friend’s aggravation at this fact, I didn’t particularly feel the need to learn what to do with young children. Just let the boys do want they want, and cleaning up after to make my friends life a little easier. I was clearing the table when the youngest boy climbed up on his mother’s lap and whispered in her ear. Intrigued, I looked at my friend.

“He says you walk like a dancer.”

“It is a tale told by an idiot,

Signifying nothing.”

It is a very curious phenomenon which can make a person actually question his own sanity, but ever since I entered college, I sometimes wonder if I’m losing my mind. It doesn’t happen when I’m alone, just when I’m listening to my superiors. This strange occurrence is taking hold of every sector of our lives and seem to be spreading like a virus. Soon we will be having national competitions in the amazing ability to talk for hours and say nothing. 

I recognize that due to my disability, some communication problems are evident. Despite being an award winning speaker, comedian, and a RADA trained actress, there is still the occasional idiot I run into who insists on talking to my friend rather than me. I still politely remind waitresses that they weren’t listening when they got an order wrong. And on the occasions that I bump into people who say they can’t understand me, I just bring up that it must be really annoying to only understand one language. They always understand that part. But this is not what I’m referring to.

I have heard people, at terrifyingly high levels, go into a full monologue which I can’t even begin to pull a thesis out of. This extract is from a email I received from a professor concerning a room hire:

“If you think this not large enough there is a rehaersal space ( Space 1) which could hold  70. This is free in April but having given me dates they now want to confirm on Monday what is actually available.” 

What?

OK, Beyond the basic grammatical errors, does this make any sense? A room is free in April but they need to confirm if it’s actually available. Is it free or not? If it is free, why are we waiting for confirmation? If we don’t know, why are you making it sound as if we’ve discovered something? Why can’t you just be clear and give me some information? 

It is like when you ask a friend if she liked a movie, and she says, “Well, I liked it, but I didn’t.” That actually doesn’t tell you anything because in truth she doesn’t know if she liked the movie in herself. She won’t give you a clear answer because she can’t. But to hide the fact that she doesn’t know the answer she veils herself in double talk which is, of course, impossible to decipher. Now she doesn’t look foolish, you just feel stupid. 

What makes matters more disturbing is this language schism seems to go both ways. The second I ask a direct question, a teacher stares at me blankly, and I’m wondering if I’ve slipped into Greek without meaning to. Hello? Can you hear me? Is this thing on?

“So can we rent a room or not?”

And there’s about five seconds of silence before an incomprehensible attempt at an answer.

“Well… er… as I just said…”

Really, if you don’t know the answer, just say so rather than wasting time.  When did we get to a point where we have lost nearly all capacity to communicate? So quickly we want to forget that words mean something that it feels like we have no desire to be held accountable to what we say. If it sounds like I know what I’m saying, I don’t actually have to think about it. 

When I was very little, I would listen to adults talk, sometimes getting lost in the conversation that would sashay above my head. I wondered when I’d be old enough to follow what was being said. Now I look at the students I teach and see them wondering the same thing. Sometimes I can’t help but lean over them, probably stepping way out of my bounds as a teacher, and whisper:

“Sometimes, if you can’t understand what an adult is talking about, its because the adult doesn’t know either.”