River: Sometimes my body tells me things...

[mdlbear]

Sometimes my body tells me things. Usually I listen to it, but sometimes the message isn't what I thought it was. Sometimes it's a little disturbing.

My left shoulder has been very tense and sore for the last couple of days. My original guess was that it had to do with manhandling a heavy suitcase on the trip home. That may still be what started things off.

But this morning I found it getting suddenly more tense and painful while reading this article about our latest local school bomber. (Warning: may be triggery.) WTF? The article's title is "Police: 'Techno-wizard' suspect fooled family" Oh.

The law enforcement source described the boy as a "techno-wizard," an assessment echoed by his grandmother. Shirley Youshock said the boy was skilled on the computer and had earned straight A's in school.

Youshock called him a quiet boy and said she knew of nothing that would have prompted Monday's attack.

Right. Me. I remember feeling somewhat the same way around Columbine. (I say "somewhat the same way" without being able to give a name to the feeling. Still.)

I honestly don't remember much about junior high and high school. I remember that I hated them. I remember getting a lot of teasing. Some of it was the anti-semitism that was prevalent at the time, though I didn't recognize it as such until years later. Some of it was the fact that I was fat, slow, clumsy, and shy -- a perfect target. I'm pretty sure my hatred of sports comes from this time; I was never particularly interested in sports, and always spectacularly bad at anything that involved running, or kicking, throwing, catching, hitting, or anything else with a ball. I don't think it was active hatred until sometime in junior high.

Junior high is when I went to a school dance, went home without having actually danced with anyone, and never went again. Junior high is when I and a couple of my equally-intelligent classmates were suspended for our "negative attitude" and had to get notes from our parents before we could come back to school. That's when, long before word processors, a social studies teacher made me write on graph paper to improve my handwriting. High school was when the US history teacher's only criterion for grading the term paper was whether you had enough references, and whether all your spelling and punctuation was correct.

Yeah, I was smart, I was quiet, I was shy... I don't think I had any thoughts of blowing up the school or killing all the teachers, but that may just be because it was another 40 years before anybody did it. I did have fantasies about the gigantic screws that held my junior high's exposed steel girders together...

I have no idea what other emotional baggage I've been dragging around for the last half-century, give or take. It seems to be pretty nasty stuff.

So,... yeah. Funny, my shoulder doesn't hurt quite as much now. But it still hurts.