How Do They Do That?

Well done, Jeff! Love the juxtaposition.

Maybe you and my friend John (a mental-health journalist, author and blogger) have something in common (though probably most of us find ourselves feeling estranged from the world around us these days):

http://knowledgeisnecessity.blogspot.com/2010/07/longing-to-return-to-planet-of-my-birth.html

Longing to Return to the Planet of My Birth
Sometimes I do get to return to the planet of my birth. It’s just that I can’t recall them. I like to imagine it’s a happier place than this one, filled with shady trees, with kind people spread out on the lawn beneath, pulling out containers of Thai noodles and watermelon chunks from their picnic baskets, beckoning me to join them.

The black and white presentation of getting ready every day, brought memories of when I was kid watching “Leave it to beaver”(among many other black and white family situation shows). I just knew that when I grew up, that’s how my world would be. Grown up’s get up and go to work naturaly, and are wise and happy….etc.

The last question on your video hit a nerve after watching it several times. Yes I now do wonder how they do that every day, and why my world didn’t turn out like what what I dreamed. I guess I am not natural(or grown up). Great video Jeff!

Thank you Gina & Scott. I was pleased with the way this one came out. – Cecil B. DeSiegel

I wonder, Cecil, how do you do it? And I look foward to seeing more.

I enjoyed the random piles of stuff on the way out the door. Very true to life.

And yes, of course I’m familiar with this phenomenon you speak of. I’ve been experiencing it regularly since about Grade 1. I first began to experience that “How do they DO that?” feeling when I started to be kept in every day at recess, at the ripe age of 6, for not being able to get my work done in class. I would look around at what other kids were doing and truly, the thought running through my head was very “hmmm, how do they do that?”. The other kids would ask why I wasn’t coming out to recess. I would tell them because I didn’t finish my work and they would react like “oh, well why didn’t you just do it”. And I didn’t know. I didn’t know then, I didn’t know in 2nd grade or 3rd grade or any grade after that…not even in 10th grade when my English teacher pulled me out of class to brand my brain with “why can’t you just FOCUS!?” and I still really, truly don’t know, because we don’t really know exactly what ADHD is. But I still get frustrated sometimes when I hit one of those walls and think to myself “How do they DO that!?!?!?! ARGGGGH!”.

Stories like that make me so sad, Katy. Even if the teacher didn’t know “ADHD,” it probably didn’t take a PhD to see that you were a kid struggling. Certainly not one for punishment.

Then again, I had a nun (one of my few bad ones) who used to keep me after school every day in seventh grade, causing me to reschedule my twice-weekly afternoon piano lessons to Saturday morning. Ruining my Saturday and my teacher’s too!

And she never had a reason. It was a great mystery to everyone, because I was a good kid. Some theorized that I reminded her of someone from her past. But it was really horribly demoralizing. I can’t imagine if I’d had that experience for years.

One would have hoped that the school system – and the teachers – would have been a bit more sensitive to issues faced by children…especially since there’s at least a 15 year difference between us. (School in NYC in the 1970s was “conform or get the hell out.”) And, like you, I still wonder how the heck those neurotypicals do it.

Gina, everyone I know who went to catholic school only had horror stories about nuns. By accident there would be a good one but for the most part…they were all nuts.

Well, that’s what you heard, Jeff. Not sure it’s true. Maybe some of those kids were brats.

I had a great education, IMHO, thanks to hard-working nuns who cared a lot about their students.

Sister Mary Olive (yes, that was really her name) was the oddball, and I mean odd.

I think the nun supply was petering out then, and they couldn’t let her retire. She seemed to be about 80, was about 4-9 (I was taller than her, even in 7th grade), and had these big bulging eyeballs. Oh, and often dabs of blue Dentu-Creme in the corners of her shriveled lips.

She was a hellion in a habit, let me tell you.

I’m just repeating what my wife and her six siblings have told me.