I snap at her, "Don't tell me what to do!"
I'm not sure why I do it, to be honest (and I've actually been consciously making an effort lately to not do it). It's a knee jerk reaction in me. I guess it's supposed to be a joke. But it's neither funny nor amusing anymore (if it ever was). Mostly it's just one more quirk that ensures that--if anything ever happens to Lisa--I'll be unable to ever sustain a serious relationship with another woman...
But I'm not here to talk about my marriage today. I'm here to talk about this: every joke (even a bad, annoying one) has an element of truth in it. And though I rarely ever really refuse any request my wife makes, my instant desire to reject any command put on me points to a basic personality characteristic (or maybe defect) that I possess.
I don't like to be told what to do.
I've wrestled my whole life with a tendency to want to reject anything that I've been told I HAVE to do. If I'm ordered to do something I always bristle a little, but it's even worse for me if what I am being asked to do sounds unreasonable. And I still struggle with this tendency today. There are about ten different posts on this blog (see here, here, and here for just a sample) that focus on the fact that any sign telling me not do to something just makes me want to do whatever it is I've been told not to do. And sometimes this tendency has gotten me in trouble...
I remember two specific incidents that occurred within a very short period of time when I was in the sixth grade. First, my entire grade was taken on a field trip to see THE NUTCRACKER ballet. As the teachers were preparing for the trip, they went through the list of rules we'd have to follow. Most were pretty standard rules that you'd expect on any field trip (No shouting on the bus, No wandering off alone, No "horseplay"), but one rule was unique to this trip.
"Finally," my teacher said severely, "I don't want to hear anyone laughing at the men in tights." As soon as she said this, most of the students in class started laughing uproariously. This seemed to make the teacher angry, and she furrowed her brows and shouted, "I MEAN it! No laughing during the performance if there are men in tights on the stage, or there's going to be big trouble!" Her anger just made the class laugh more.
I was NOT one of the students who laughed. I guess I should be embarrassed to admit this, but at age 12 I didn't know what tights were, and I also didn't know why anyone would laugh at a man wearing tights (Thirty years later, I have a pretty good idea of what the joke was). In any event, I thought it a little unfair that we should be punished for laughing, something that is a pretty automatic response and hard to suppress, so I decided that--whether I got the joke or not--I WAS going to laugh at the man in tights. Trevor, one of my friends in 6th grade, sat beside me at the performance, and he was one of the people who, that first day, had seemed really amused by the whole guy/tights thing, so I asked him to let me know when a guy in tights came out.
I was actually pretty sure it was never going to happen. The whole ballet seemed interminable to me. It was interesting at first to hear the thrilling sound that was the orchestra playing, and it was interesting at first to see the delicate women in the equally delicate and colorful costumes come out onto the stage and dance. I was especially entranced by their ability to stand on their toes and leap around. But then the same thing seemed to happen over and over again, and I pretty soon lost interest. I wasn't even watching the ballet, in fact, but was looking around the performance hall and noticing how each section, row, and chair were either numbered or lettered, when Trevor elbowed me in the side and whispered, "There's a guy in tights on stage, Bryan!"
I took in a deep breath and laughed as loudly as I could before shouting, "Hey! Look at the guy in tights! That's hilarious!"
I got in a lot of trouble for that one...
Later that school year, my rebellious side caused more trouble. I had been identified as being "Gifted and Talented," and as a result I'd been placed into my elementary school's Gifted and Talent program, which was called--for reason unknown to me then and now--"Pegasus." This blog post is already getting to be a little bit on the long side, so I'm not going to go into all of the reasons why I had trouble getting along with the Pegasus teacher (some reasons which--looking back as an educator--were quite valid on my part, and some that were just me being a jerk). That may be fodder for a later blog post. Suffice it to say, though, that I DID have trouble getting along with her. I KNOW I was a thorn in her side, and she certainly was in mine.
Our disagreement came to a head when she asked us to complete an activity that didn't seem like a good one to me. I whispered to a fellow Gifted and Talented classmate (probably Trevor again), "I don't want to do this. This is stupid..."
The teacher overheard me and I guess misunderstood what I'd said. She quickly walked over to me and got her face about a foot and a half from mine. "Bryan!" she sternly said. "If you have something to say about ME, I suggest you say it to my face!"
This was unlike her. She was a VERY soft spoken, kind, demure teacher (In retrospect, I wonder if she hadn't complained to some veteran teacher about her problems in class and the teacher had told her to "get tough" with me). In any event, I was taken aback. "I didn't say anything about YOU," I tried to explain. "I just..."
"Nope! Nope! Nope!" she all but shouted into my face. "If you have something to say about ME, you need to say it directly to me!"
The response that came into my head I KNEW was going to get me into trouble, but I felt trapped by the situation, and I honestly couldn't stop myself. "Okay," I said slowly and quietly to her as I stared unblinkingly into her eyes. "YOU'RE stupid!..."
That comment landed me in the principal's office for a conference with the principal, the Pegasus teacher, her supervisor from the Board of Education, and my mother. I don't recall the entire conversation (I've tried to block such unpleasant memories from my mind), but I do remember my mother finally saying, "It sounds like Bryan is just unhappy in the Pegasus class, and maybe he should just be pulled from it."
The board of education supervisor, who had been mostly just observing, stood up immediately and said, "I'm afraid you don't understand. Once a student is labeled Gifted and Talented they ARE Gifted and Talented, and we have to provide services. No one's ever left the Pegasus program before. I mean there's just--" She paused, trying to find the right words. "--No one's ever quit before. He can't!"
There were several more minutes of conversation, and I was kind of like a witness in a criminal trial. I was there, but no one was allowing me to testify. Finally, though, the elementary principal, Mr. Johnson, turned to me and said, "Bryan, what do you have to say for yourself?"
I pointed to the woman from the Board of Education. "Did you just say that I CAN'T quit Pegasus?"
"That's right," she said. "No one's ever quit before."
I turned to my mom and Mr. Johnson. "Okay, then. I DEFINITELY quit!"
And so I was pulled out of the Pegasus program for the remainder of the year. The following year I moved on to the middle school and had a different Gifted and Talented teacher and everything was fine again. But I missed a lot of opportunities in that Gifted and Talented class, including the chance to go to Washington, D.C. with my classmates. All because of my resistance to being told what to do.
Okay, and maybe because I was a little bit of a jerk, too...
Though--as I mentioned before--the tendency to be a rebel is with me still, I FINALLY learned that knee jerk rebellion wasn't worth the consequences in my second year of college. I came perilously close to getting kicked out of the university I was attending.
But this blog post is long enough already, so I will tell THAT story in a later post.
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