Patron (on the phone): I have a business card here, and I want you to type what’s on it into your computer and see what comes up.

Me: Okay. . . .

Patron: H-T-T-P, double slash . . . [sic]

Me (typing and correcting): “http://”

Patron: W-W-W, period, E-B-A-Y, period, C-O-M.

Me (typing): “www.ebay.com” (aloud) All right. I’m on eBay.

Patron: And what does it show?

Me: . . . It shows the eBay.com website.

Patron: . . . .

Me: It’s a popular place where you can buy and sell items online?

Patron 2: I’m going to give you a web address and I need you to give me some information from it.

Me (cringing): Okay.

Patron 2: Go to [website address].

Me: All right, it redirected me to a different site, but I’m there.

Patron 2 (sharply): No, it should’ve taken you right there! [recites slightly different web address]

Me: Well, that’s not quite the same address, but as I said it redirected me. So I’m there.

Patron 2: Okay, click on “Forum” at the upper left corner.

Me: Done.

Patron 2: Now go to the bottom where it says “Users Online.” Do you see anyone logged on whose username starts with a ‘J’? I need to see if my phone line is in use.

Me: (head explodes)

“Faggot!”
“I bet you like taking it up the ass, don’t you?”
“Homo.”
“How many guys’ dicks have you sucked? It’s your favorite thing ever, isn’t it?”

Responding only made it worse, because then they would shriek with laughter and mimic my shrill, effeminate tones. Sometimes there were slaps or shoves, which I was always too slow to avoid. Even though they were almost all younger than I was, most of them were bigger, and all of them were meaner.

When it was time for our lunch break, we would pile back onto the big yellow school bus that hauled us from town out to the fields and back every day, and they would surround me as I tried to eat the lunch I had packed the night before, usually a PB&J sandwich that was now soggy and half-boiled.

“Homo.”
*slap*
“Faggot.”
*shove*
“Ass bandit.”

Up front, the crew leader—a (gorgeous) gung-ho blond male college student—ate his own lunch and pretended he didn’t hear.

All in all, I’ve probably gotten off easily when it comes to bullying, seeing how I was homeschooled from the time I was seven until I was fifteen. There were a lot of reasons my mom made that decision, some of which I agree with, some of which I definitely don’t. (You are correct if you assume that those motives had to do with religion.) But on the whole, looking back, I’ve always thought that I did better—from a strictly scholastic point of view—studying what interested me at my own pace at home than I would’ve done studying the approved curriculum at an artificial pace in public school.

When Mom pulled us out of school, my sister and I were in second grade. I already knew I was a little different from the other kids, but I had a few friends, and the teasing wasn’t that bad. I generally liked school, except when the pace of the lessons was too slow. (I also hated the fact that second-graders weren’t allowed in the chapter-book section of the school library. Thus my absolute opposition to ageism in libraries. But that’s a different story.)

After my mom started homeschooling us, my main social contact was with other Mormon kids in the area—at church, at youth activities, in the local congregation’s Scout troop. As we got older and my acquaintances entered middle school (sixth grade, or eleven to twelve years old), suddenly they stopped being nice. Teasing became namecalling and constant mocking, and I was frequently the target. They had always been “church friends,” never actually my friends—although I don’t think I realized that until later—but now they weren’t any kind of friends at all.

Things got slightly better when we turned fourteen and they all entered high school. I still felt like a complete outsider, but this time there seemed to be an identifiable cause: they were in high school, and I wasn’t. Their conversations revolved around which teachers they liked and which they hated, which extracurricular activities they were a part of, which scene they were into.

I, in contrast, was homeschooled. I only had one teacher, and then only in the loosest sense of the term. I had no extracurriculars—except church; how cool—and I had no scene. The solution seemed simple: Ditch home school! Enroll in high school! Try out for a team! Join a club! Make friends! Enjoy life!

Things didn’t exactly work out that way. My sister and I begged Mom to put us back in public school, and she finally gave in and went to talk to Mrs. Rose, the school district superintendent. She had been our principal in second grade, and Mom had approached her back then as well for advice on the transition to home school. Mrs. Rose had been only too supportive at the time, but now she was less positive.

She explained that re-enrolling us in public school would be difficult. There would be placement tests to take, and given our nonstandard homeschool curriculum, and notwithstanding how bright and studious we were, we might be forced to do remedial coursework in any number of subjects. Also, Mrs. Rose said, knowing us and our situation, she thought the social adjustment would be especially onerous. Not impossible, but perhaps not worth the effort. Why didn’t we consider enrolling in the local community college instead? All we’d have to do was take the CHSPE (California High School droPout Exam, the easiest standardized test known to humanity) and we could be college freshmen.

College was 1000 times more alluring than high school, so my sister and I didn’t take much convincing. Who needed dumb teenage friends when we could hang out with cosmopolitan twentysomethings at a podunk junior college in Nowheresville, CA? We scheduled our CHSPE test date and began reading SAT prep books. And of course we also needed to earn some money, for tuition and books . . . which led us eventually to a yellow school bus in an enormous cornfield in South Dakota.

My story had a fairly happy ending. After a week of lunchtime heckling, the bus driver—a fun, down-to-earth lady in her late thirties—invited me and my sister to come up to the front of the bus and sit behind her. The bullying petered out, and few days later the detasseling season was over. We went back home and enrolled in the community college, where virtually everyone else was an adult and acted like it.

I sometimes wonder whether attending public school would have prepared me better for the insults and the taunting I experienced on that big yellow school bus. Would I have had more armor? More weapons? Would I have been more used to it, not cared as much? I would almost certainly have experienced more frequent, more sustained, even possibly violent bullying in school. Would I have been one of those bullied gay kids who gives up, drops out . . . commits suicide?

U.S. President Barack Obama just signed an inclusive hate crimes bill into law (eleven years after Matthew Shepard’s torture and murder in October 1998), but something needs to be done to combat the wave of anti-gay bullying and hazing in public schools. That summer detasseling corn is still one of my most nightmarish memories. The thought of any kid having to endure the same—or worse—for years, with no support or recourse, is horrifying to me. It’s time for every school district to have an anti-bullying policy that specifically addresses bullying against LGBT students. It’s time for every school to have anti-bullying and gay-tolerance training and activities. There are thousands of gay-straight alliances in schools across the country, but there are not enough. It’s time to create a new culture of tolerance and acceptance in our public schools.

Resources:

• GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network)
• ThinkB4YouSpeak.com
• National Day of Silence
• No Name-Calling Week

“Me at the contra dance camp, not looking quite so daisy fresh.” by Pizzo Calabro on Flickr.

The weekend-long Wasatch Wiggle contra-dance event ended on Sunday, and three days later I’m finally getting feeling back in my toes. The blisters speckling my feet are turning into odd-shaped lumps of callus. My knees and hips have stopped trying to give way at odd times and they no longer feel uncertain about which way they’re supposed to bend. So much dancing! So much fun.

I wonder how many miles I walked, hopped, skipped or pirouetted over the weekend. And how many calories’ worth of high-energy snacks I nibbled on from the sideboard between dances. The best I can hope is that I broke even, I’m afraid.

The music was provided by Notorious, which performed as a duo+1—Eden Macadam-Somer, Larry Unger and Sam Bartlett—and they are fanTAStic. Seriously. Go watch this video of them performing “Gelem, Gelem” (the Romani national anthem) earlier this year at a different contra dance event. Marvelous.

The caller was Rick Mohr, and he led us through round after round of intricate, exciting choreography, almost without pause. I guess it’s really Rick Mohr’s fault my feet are so tired.

I took along my new-ish camera—a Canon PowerShot SX200 IS—to the Wiggle, and amused myself/annoyed everyone else when I wasn’t dancing by filming and photographing everything that happened. Here is some of the evidence:

Click below to view the full Flickr set:

Wasatch Wiggle 2009

Contra dancing is fun, is (relatively) easy on the joints, can be excellent exercise, and is danced to gorgeous music. And it’s great for beginners, because the steps are fairly simple, each dance begins with a run-through beforehand and then is danced to called instructions. Find a contra dance event near you and check it out!

Related links:
Wasatch Contras
Notorious
Notorious (Myspace)
Rick Mohr

Me: Salt Lake City Public Library, this is Sean.
Patron: Hello, I’d like to have a book come in.
Me: . . . you mean you’d like to place a book on hold?
Patron: No, I’d like to have a book come in.
Me (completely baffled): I . . . I don’t know what that means.
Patron (sarcastically): That’s FINE. THANKS. *click*
Me:  . . . bye.

Me: Salt Lake City Public Library, this is Sean.
Patron 2: Do you know what “arterial celebration” is?
Me: “Arterial celebration”?
Patron 2: NO. ArTERial celeBRAtion. S-I-L-L-I-B-R-A-T-I-O-N.
Me: Is that S as in Sam or F as in Frank?
Patron (raising voice): It’s F as in . . . FINE.
Me: So . . . F as in Frank?
Patron: NO . . . yes.
Me: I think the word you’re looking for is “atrial fibrillation.”
Patron: “Arterial fillibration”?

Me: Salt Lake City Public Library, this is Sean.
Patron 3: Is your wireless card working?
Me: Our wireless card?
Patron 3: Yeah . . . sometimes your wireless doesn’t work . . . and I’ve got cancer . . . and I’m from out of state . . .
Me: As far as I know, our wireless is currently working.
Patron: . . . and is there somewhere I can sit where no one is around? I can’t be near any sneezing, or coughing . . .
Me: Unfortunately, I’m not sure where you would go to be alone in the library. With the bad weather we’re more crowded than usual. We do have a couple individual study rooms you’re welcome to use, if they’re free.
Patron 3: So you’re probably more croweded because of the weather . . . okay . . . and where do you park? I’m not going to pay . . .
Me: Well, there’s really not any free parking downtown, I’m afraid.
Patron 3: That’s why I can never go there. *click*

So I’m diversifying, and bringing my call to action here to my blog, which hardly anyone reads anymore because I never update it. STOP PICKING ON ME I’M IN GRAD SCHOOL. (That’s my current excuse for everything. “I’ll be a better librarian when I’m out of school.” “I can’t empty the dishwasher, I’m in grad school.” “I don’t have time to do homework, DON’T YOU KNOW I’M A GRAD STUDENT???”)

Where to find Avery Edison online:

twitter.com/aedison

Random funny.

AveryEdison.com

Jesus and Judas! …and more!

The Small Picture, Commonplace and Proud Nature

Photo comics.

Answering Yahoos

Avery answers questions from Yahoo! Answers with tact, compassion and aplomb. Hahaha! I kid. She totally skewers the questioners, because they are idiots.

UPDATED November 11, 2009:
I Don’t Know What’s Worse — The Zombie Apocalypse, Or The Patriarchy. Probably The Zombie Thing.

Avery’s 2009 NaNoWriMo novel. About holding off the ZOMBIE HORDES.

You really should check her out, because oh, my word, she is FUNNY.

W. T. F. He did not just go there. But OH YES HE DID. And he’s standing by it, too!

In an interview Monday before the speech, Oaks said he did not consider it provocative to compare the treatment of Mormons in the election’s aftermath to that of blacks in the civil rights era, and said he stands by the analogy.

“It may be offensive to some—maybe because it hadn’t occurred to them that they were putting themselves in the same category as people we deplore from that bygone era,” he said.

The “anti-Mormon backlash” is exactly what the Mormon church deserved for spending so much time, money and effort taking rights away from an already-oppressed segment of the population. This is a democracy; free speech—including free speech you don’t like!—is everyone’s right. Including Dallin Oaks’s right to stick his foot so far in his mouth it comes out his ass.

EDITED (23:18): Somehow the SL Trib article I linked to in the body of the post changed from the AP story to a related one; I’ve changed the link to the AP story on Fox 13 News Channel’s website.
[SL Trib article] [AP article (on Fox News)]

When Father came home, they told him about the New Mother their mother had threatened them with, and he laughed and said not to worry, that Mommy was just having a joke.
They did worry, though. The older children continued telling the younger ones stories about the New Mother, a slavering beast who liked to eat babies’ plump legs and who would force the children she did not devour to slave for her from sunup to sundown. And the younger children had nightmares where their legs had been eaten and they woke up most nights in tears. And everyone was very grumpy, and the children continued to be very naughty, and their mother shouted at them and sent them to their rooms almost every day.

But when the New Mother came a few years later, she wasn’t like they’d feared at all. She was young, and pretty, and she seemed very happy, and wanted the children to like her.
“Now, I know I can’t replace your mother,” she said, “but I really hope we can be good friends.”
“Of course you can replace her,” they said. “She said you would, if we were naughty. You’re our New Mother, aren’t you?”
Father got tears in his eyes and tried his best to explain that the divorce hadn’t happened because the children were bad, but they didn’t listen to him.
In any case, once the New Mother arrived, the children were the best children anyone had ever seen, and did whatever she asked them to do, although the younger ones took to wearing long pants even in the summer, so as not to tempt her with their succulent flesh.
And on every other weekend, when their Old Mother came to pick them up and take them to her apartment, they whined and wept and held onto their New Mother until half the time their Old Mother left alone, seething and raging.

Eventually they didn’t see their Old Mother anymore, except maybe on holidays, and when they did she was cross and short with them, just like they remembered her being when they were younger. And so they did not love her anymore, and started calling her by her first name, which was Patty. And once again they only had one mother, forever and ever.

And when they grew up, they made sure never to tell their children the secret of the New Parents, just in case their prophecy came true and they were replaced themselves. But divorce came for some of their families, too, and when it did they remembered Patty and felt sorry for what they’d put her through. But when they looked her up they found out she was dead, from an untreated disorder that had probably contributed to her foul temper. So they felt even worse, and they couldn’t ever apologize. The end.

Any questions? All right, then. Sleep tight.