Do you have recurring dreams? Or recurring themes? If so, what are they? What’s the first book you remember reading, all by yourself? What’s the first book you remember reading with chapters? What was your weakest subject in school? What was your strongest?
At different points in my life, I’ve had a variety of recurring dreams. However, a few have remained themes consistently over many years. These are: flooding, tornadoes, sharks, and dreams about being cut. I know! Such pleasant recurring dreams! Sometimes I go here to look up dream meanings I’ve had, and I don’t know if that should be embarrassing or not. I can still remember dreams about tornadoes I had when I was five or six. I dream frequently about a friend from high school that I was not particularly close to, but I always wish I had been. I have no idea where he is or what he’s doing, and that might be why he shows up in my dreams.
The first book I remember reading by myself (out loud, to a much older cousin) is this. Bonus: the next book I remember reading is this. I can’t remember the title of the first book I read with chapters, but I know it was about a stray cat who lived under a stoop of some sort, and there were sparrows. I remember there were descriptions of the cat napping in autumn sunshine, surrounded by crunchy leaves. Around the same time I read a book with chapters about a girl, who had cancer, befriending a pigeon who lived outside her bedroom window. And her mother called the pigeon dirty, but she fed it anyway.
I don’t know how long it was before I branched out from books about animals.
My weakest subject in school was always math. I liked some math okay–geometry, trig–but most math freaked me out. My terrible memory/attention span made it difficult for me to remember rules and formulas, and a lot of times I just didn’t care. I turned math into a big horrible monster with fangs, and I remember crying frequently over my calculus homework. My best friend in high school, who was good at math and patient, was a huge help. Every single night, through all of high school, we would talk on the phone after we had finished our homework. We’d star each math problem we had problems with (I usually had several, she usually had one or none) and then try to help each other understand and work it out. We never just gave each other answers, or skimped out and copied work. Instead we had long, looooong conversations with erasing and explaining and frustration and maybe a bit of bickering. Patience always won out. I’m so glad she was there. Most of the math I learned was through her.
Sometimes I wonder how many hours we spent on the phone because of math homework. Compared, say, to the number of hours we spent on the phone discussing things that happened that we thought were funny. Or the number of hours spent discussing Important Things I Can’t Remember, Even Though They Were Important.
My strongest subject was English/reading/writing (I don’t know that I should count music classes). It came easily to me, and English was never anything I gave much thought to–I usually forgot it was a “subject.” I suppose that because it wasn’t difficult for me, and it didn’t cause stress/anxiety/panic/tears/pain, it didn’t seem like a “real” subject. I was always drawn to things that were the most difficult for me. This is why I took calculus–I wanted to fight it. This is why I kept taking lithography, and eventually majored in printmaking. It was hard, and not natural to me.
I wanted to beat it.
Note: this is not how I would recommend selecting a major in college.
Go!
black sheeped
