Quote:
Originally Posted by Tech House
Thanks for your stats, graphs, and analysis. Fun stuff. It's kind of amazing to realize that there are other people in this world who are even nerdier than me. I used to drive my family crazy when I was a preteen, because they couldn't mention the name of a place without me jumping in with population and other statistics. My dad called me "Geographer George." When I was in 1st and 2nd grade, instead of reading comic books I would read the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Were you like that, or did you acquire your interests later in life?
The US Census has always been like porn to me.
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I've gone through so many changes in my life it's (the correct one, lol) unreal. When I was a kid I was like that, but then when I started getting picked on in elementary school for being so gender non-conforming (I was a very effeminate kid, even if I still preferred all the boy toys) I kind-of sunk back into my shell. When I lived in New Mexico the school system was catered to the Mescalero Apache reservation, so it was horribly underfunded and so I fell really far behind the average kid nationally, especially considering I was pretty alone.
On the last day of 5th grade, I was stabbed in the back with a pen (it went like a good inch in) by another kid while he was screaming faggot, and so my parents decided to home school me. They weren't really prepared intellectually to teach me, with neither of them having college degrees, let alone catch me up from all the deficiencies of an underfunded Native-serving school system (my school books were from the 50s and 60s, which is typical of Native-serving systems). So... I fell further behind.
Somehow, don't ask me how, after we moved to Austin I passed the entrance exam to get into LASA (the magnet school in Austin). Yet again, I was bullied in the context of the LBJ local kids, and I never really got along well with the nerdier kids of the LASA crowd because I wasn't actually a nerd, geek, or whatever, just a normal kid who happened to be a really effeminate gay guy and the other gay guys in the school didn't like me because I was too effeminate (just for the straight people on the board, there's a huge problem in the gay community re: discrimination against fem guys)... So, I really didn't have any friends at all throughout high school and I didn't really excel at all in class. I think I graduated with a 2.3 GPA or something like that near the bottom of my class.
That all changed in college. I ended up having a lot of friends, doing well in class, etc. I graduated with a 3.6 GPA, got into a masters program where I graduated with a 3.9, and am now a Ph.D. student at USC (a top 10 program in one of my two subfields of political science).
The one thing I will say about myself, though, is that I have no self-confidence whatsoever in who I am, and I think that's a product of having been bullied consistently throughout my formative years for being so effeminate by straight people and having been told my
entire life by other gay men that I'm too effeminate to ever stick around. A few days ago, actually, some really cute gay guy told my friend that I was "too gay to function," which really hurt. It sucks because I think I'm pretty attractive, and I'm intelligent which... should count for something, but for gay men it counts for very little sadly.