1988

I continued to read my way through 1988, including things way beyond my grade level. In fact, my mother claims she stopped taking me to the grocery store because I started reading the tabloid covers.

Still, school was a struggle for me. (This will be a recurring theme, by the way.)

See, for the first four grades, I went to a little private school that did something they called "paces". The idea was that the kids had a set amount of work to do in their workbooks/paces in each subject. Once they were done with that, they were free to do whatever they wanted.

Now this works great for most kids. But for me, it boiled down to sitting at a cubicle all day, doing worksheets. For a hyper child with undiagnosed ADD and no ability to self-motivate... Well, you can only imagine what I put my teachers through.

I didn't help that I had very few social skills. I have a fund of embarrassing stories to prove it too. If I wanted to sit in a corner and read, I did. If I wanted to sit under a table and read, I did. I also stared at people a lot because I thought they were interesting. Of course, staring at people, especially grade-schoolers, tends to freak them out.

Of course, it could have been worse, I could have been Matilda.

Matilda is a wonderful book by Roald Dahl about a genius little girl who develops telekinetic powers. When Matilda asks for a book, her loutish father refuses, pointing out that they have a perfectly good television set. Not satisfied, Matilda goes to the public library and proceeds to read her way through the children's section and into the adult books.

(You see why I love her?)

When Matilda goes to school, she encounters a tyrannical headmistress who refuses to believe in her intelligence and let her move up to a higher class. Matilda, frustrated by lessons she's already learned, discovers that she's developed telekinetic powers. These powers come in handy when she decides to help her teacher, Miss Honey, and free the school from the headmistress once and for all.

Matilda is a great book, not just for it's lovable clever heroine. While it would not be fair to say that all adults are as loutish and awful as Matilda's parents and the headmistress, most children have had at least one adult in their lives who diminishes them. Watching Matilda enact justice on powerful adults is something the kid in me never grows tired of.

I haven't changed that much from when I was young. Social skills I developed in high school and college, self-motivation I learned over time, but I am still a reclusive nerd at heart, and I still read like a crazy person.

I think Matilda would approve.