I think that when I'm ready to work with other people again, I want to work with children.
When I was still University-oriented – so my last year of high school and my six weeks at Wright State – the plan was to double major in Philosophy and Psychology and then bee-line a PhD in Psychology with a focus toward counseling. I wanted to work with specifically troubled adolescents. I thought— Well, of course that hasn't changed, has it? I still think that if I can figure out how to get my life under control, just like in my Calculus classes at SSU, I could help other people figure themselves out.
Obviously that didn't happen.
But I did develop one particular skill set among the many similar during my years waiting tables and taking orders through drive-thrus: how to make kids smile. I specialized in big tables, especially families with lots of kids. And I literally sought out the UDF job because I wanted to hand-dip ice cream for kids. You want to talk about the most rewarding effort-to-smile ratio? Hand a child – of any age – an ice cream cone you've dipped maybe a little too heavily – or that you've made look that way.
It makes me smile now, all these years and all these tribulations later. Those are definitely some of my favorite memories in my life, and almost make everything else worth it. Knowing that I made a lot of people's days better with well made milk shakes and floats and sundaes.
Maybe that makes me stupid. Or simple. Simple is the better word. Maybe it makes me a simple person, to be happy to get paid too little to really survive just to make kids smile.
That sounds like the kind of thing teenagers are supposed to do and we're supposed to grow out of into adulthood. Adults work in cubicles and complain about how they make too little to afford the appropriate status symbols to pretend they're on the next pay-plane above them.
But I disagree.
And maybe that's why I'm the Hermit, right? Maybe that's why I identify more with the Chinese Buddha, Budai, who wandered around with a sack, stealing things and collecting knick-knacks and doodads and whatsits, but also sharing his rice with the poor and children. Children were his favorites, though. When his bu dai, that is cloth sack, was full, he would gift it to a child just to see their face light up with the wonder of the meaning of all the meaningless things he'd given them.
I hate that we try to put the modern interpretation on it that this guy was fucking those kids, by the way.
My favorite thing that happened while I was at UDF—
I had this kid who would come into the store in the summer. He was probably in his teens? And I'm pretty sure he was severely autistic. He was obsessed with coins. With looking at the dates stamped on them. So he'd come in, he'd get an ice cream, and then he'd buy his change in rolls of quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies – whatever he could afford that day. Then he'd go and sit in the parlor and look at the dates. Sometimes he'd make multiple trips. I'd always sell him whatever change he wanted. Who really cares?
He actually found several coins that were worth legitimate money. He showed them to me. He was basically buying the buffalo nickels and whatever else he liked, then he'd sell the coins back to my register, take his bills and go home. I got to talking to him about his hobby, what he did with it. Then he introduced his grandmother to me and she and I talked one day about how glad she was that he'd made a friend. And I really thought he was my friend, for the record.
I wasn't just being nice to the autistic kid because I pitied him or I was on the clock. We hung out in the parlor a couple times when my shifts would end early.
Also shame on you if your brain went there – that's projection; would you have?
So, anyway. The summer goes by, and I've chastised literally everyone I worked with, including my GM, for giving the kid shit and getting an attitude about their rolled coins. Jesus Christ, he's just a kid who wants to eat ice cream and count dates. Leave him alone. Fucking smile at him. It's what you're paid for.
You can see why I didn't get along with many people.
No one like to be reminded that smiling is what they're given checks for – not just what they do on the way to the bank with them.
The summer rolls by and he's about to start going back to school, and he comes in one day, tells me about how school is starting, and how he took all his rare coins he'd found through the summer to a dealer. And I'm like holy shit, this is so cool. And he shows me a bunch of the coins he traded for. And then he puts three of them on the counter and pushes them over to me. And I'm looking at him like, What are these?
And his grandmother comes out of the parlor and sees them on the counter and tells me that he got them for me. With his own money, not his earnings.
And I just started crying. Not like sobbing, but like, articulating tears.
That was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. And I just wanted to learn about his cool coins.
So, yeah. They're one of the very few things that have survived that span of my life. I keep them in my portable art supplies, so I'll never lose them.
And that's why I want to work with children.
Adults.... That is, really, to say grown-ups – really grown-children— Adults aren't rewarding to work with. Adults feel entitled to things which are not theirs and they have not earned and which cannot be bought – and which do not come with your purchase, sorry.
For instance: Adults demand respect, regardless of whether they return it in kind. An adult will tell you, “Give me chocolate,” when what they mean is, “May I have chocolate.” The words are different. They show a difference in attitude. We teach children to say please and thank you, to ask may I not can I, to ask for things, not say that you want them. “I want the #2.”
Or how about customers that think their tip includes an invitation to your bed?
Is that how you would talk to your boss? “I want a raise.” “Give me that file.” I don't think so. You'd be diplomatic, respectful. Now, whether you'd do it because you have to or because you choose to, that speaks to who you are as a person.
I'm going to lose people with this post. I'm going to lose you, now, the people who are already keeping an eye on this thing as I do it, and I'm going to lose future readers who come back to binge this work – when they get to this point. I'm going to lose you, because no one wants to hear that they remain an undeveloped child in literally any area of their life. Literal babies don't like to hear that they're still children. I am no different. I bristle to be told I am ignorant, just like anyone; which is how I know you likely are, too.
It is this... reaction, this bristling, which causes the hubris of adulthood. The confusion of physical maturity with cognitive and social maturities. I am cognitively mature, physically mature, but my ability to socialize with other adult humans has been severely... what? Retarded? If I were talking about my ability to ride a bike or to do some other manual labor, I would say that I'd been slowed, hindered, injured, right? Prevented by something outside the norm from performing the action I want.
Grief does some interesting things to the brain.
They're finding that an ending of a relationship – either a break-up or an ugly argument with a friend, a job, something to that effect – has the same effect in the brain as a death. So ending a marriage has the same effect on the brain as though that person had actually died. I learned this after I had ended – Jesus – three jobs, dozens of friendships, half a dozen relationships – in something of a Borderline Personality Disorder meltdown, following the events I so eloquently describe in Dreams, Doctors, and Demons.
So, in a way, I'm a man who has lost his family. Lost his world. My brain was basically that of the survivor of a massacre. Basically, horsemen had ridden into the village of my life and slaughtered some thirty people. Now, it was over the course of maybe three years – but the trauma is just as real, if not as immediate, that's the point I'm trying to make. Maybe it's a difference of degrees. But the brain is the same. That seems to be the indication, or what I took from the indication, anyway.
And, who knows, in ten years maybe it turns out to be the opposite of what's going on and I'm just looking for excuses.
So I think that when I'm ready to go back into the world, I'd like to cut adults out of my professional life entirely - or as much as possible. You can't teach an adult that their behavior is inappropriate. You can't have a constructive conversation with an adult about how their actions make you feel that ends with them actually changing their behavior.
Well
Maybe you can. I can't. It never works.
So maybe it's me. Maybe my standards are too high. Maybe, because I hold myself to impossible standards, I hold everyone else to impossible standards. I can't say that I ask anything more of anyone than I do myself. Or maybe it's simply the people whose company I keep.
And that's why I'd like to work with children. Not because I can bully them into being the people I want to be – gosh, no. Because when a kid lashes out in anger because it's the only way they have learned to express their emotions, you can have a conversation with that child. You maybe can't convince them to change their behavior that day, but the child will leave the line of communication open. Because children know, for better or worse, that they are still children and do still have much to learn.
Adults forget that - that we still have so much to learn.
I guess what I'm saying is that you can earn the respect of a child no matter who you are – no matter what your material status – so long as you demonstrate worth. Adults do not know how to evaluate worth. I think that's what professional Sport teaches us.
My blogs are touching here, but I heard Colin Cowherd talking yesterday about how good teams, successful teams, know how to evaluate players, not just talent. He talked about all sorts of teams across all sorts of sports and several generations – people I'd never heard of, frankly. But he's earned my respect, if not my adoration, as at least a person with knowledge, if not wisdom. And sometimes Colin does have wisdom. You listen to him talk about failed marriages and successful family units, and you hear wisdom. But you listen to him talk about other men's personal lives and personalities and you hear a man projecting his own insecurities and struggles and frustrations. But I think he would tell you that, off-air. He admits plenty enough of his own flaws on it.
And how much more valuable is the respect of a child to me now than that of a modern adult?
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