Our #1 Daughter highly recommended Freaks and Geeks. I’d heard a lot of praise for it while it was on, so, when she said she and hers loved it and she offered to lend me the entire series (18 episodes), I took her up on it.
I turned it off partway through the first episode. It was just too much like real life. But she talked me into watching more, and I’m glad she did. Turns out, it’s a little like real life, but not too much. Since I was a geek until I got into college, when I became a freaky geek, the suffering of the geeks cuts close to the bone. But it doesn’t seem to scar them, and they always stick together. So that’s nice.
It’s set in the early ’80s, so the music is familiar to me, which doesn’t hurt. Lots of good acting, lots of good writing.
My nails this past week:
And then I did these for Imaginarium. For those who don’t know, these are in tribute to SAGE, my fantasy trilogy, featuring the four Divine Animals: Dragon, Phoenix, Unicorn, and Tortoise. There are bees in it, too, so I have a bee on my thumb.
A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: Were you a freak, a geek, or Other when you were in school?
MA
Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
September 21, 2020 at 11:12amGeek brought up by a very social mother, who despaired of her eldest once she had more promising material.
As a result, I know how to act, and usually do, but it is a put-on construct, conscious and deliberate, and is sometimes exhausting.
Having not had the American high school experience NOR given it to my children because I accidentally homeschooled, I find all these shows with angsty teenagers who don’t want to be seen with their parents completely incomprehensible: where are the grownups, and how did they allow this chaos to happen?
I wasn’t bullied in school – I was just not included unless ‘everyone’ was invited to a party. But it didn’t bother me – I lived in books, was going to be an astronaut (this is in Mexico in the 1960s), and we all knew I was smart so I was protected by the teachers without me being much aware of it. I had, basically, one or two friends, and still have them. And a huge extended family where I was the eldest of 42 grandchildren on both sides. So I was allowed to be a little odd, and in return I loved every one of them, even though they talked a lot of things I didn’t care about. I also depended early on the grownups, and was tolerated because I was never in my life disruptive or grandstanding.
Everyone was surprised when I left and didn’t come home; I think I needed to find my own tribe, like The Ugly Duckling.
Still geek, never freak (except by comparison). Love ’em all.
Marian Allen
September 21, 2020 at 11:20am“Geek brought up by a very social mother” could have been written about me!
My high school experience was unusual, in that my class was the first graduating class in a new school, so there were no upperclassmen to bully us, and we didn’t bully the classes below us because we didn’t have anything to pass along.
There are parents in Freaks and Geeks, and you see how some of the chaos happens, and also the difference there can be between siblings raised in the same environment.
Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
September 21, 2020 at 11:56amIt is sad how the students are allowed, in some schools, to set the tone.
I’m thinking in particular about the horror of English boarding schools: at the most critical time in their lives, children are sent to be brought up by their ‘peers,’ under the very casual supervision of uncaring adults.
Sometimes it is necessary – the parents are in the diplomatic corps, and posted somewhere unsafe – but it breeds abuse with the slightest lack of oversight, and a culture which is horizontal instead of vertical.
I’m sure there are opportunities for disaster in either system – teens at home or away – but only one is designed for love. IMHO, of course, not having been the beneficiary of the group system, and having a particular horror of groups because I was never the natural participant, and certainly not the natural leader, of a group.
Roy A Ackerman, PhD, EA
September 21, 2020 at 1:42pmNever opted for Freaks and Geeks. But your 10 individualized nails… 🙂