dance with me, this coded waltz

brain-food:

When I was a kid there was nothing I wouldn’t do. Anything that seemed fun I would sign up for without wondering how “cool” it would be. My dad encouraged every activity there was for me, especially sports. Mainly because all of these activities meant I’d be home two hours later and gave him rest from my rambunctiousness.

I joined the mathletes one year when I was really into numbers. I loved everything about math. The solutions, problem solving, everything. I’d sit at the table and make my dad give me fake pop up quizes for practice and I’d calculate our groceries before we took it up to the cashier. I thought being a mathlete was the coolest thing in the world. That is until the boy I had a crush on thought it was the complete opposite. 

There I was sitting in class crushing hard. He liked me too. We would sit together at lunch and he would hold my hand in the hallways. Then one day while we were standing together at recess one kid called him a nerd. I had no idea what that word was. Nerd? Then followed by loser lover and dweeb lover. Everything was going over my head until the boy who held my hand every day at school stopped eating lunch with me, and then eventually stopped talking to me all together. Whenever I went to talk to him after school he would either walk away from me or pretend he didn’t see me. After sulking for a few days, he eventually slipped me a note apologizing for ignoring me and that we can’t be friends anymore because I was in the mathletes. “Only geeks are in a math club.” That’s when the “cool kids” and the “nerds” became a realization to me. 

I skipped Math practice that day and went straight home from school thinking about what happened. Wondering to myself, “am I really a geek? math is just.. fun. fun’s cool right?” I liked him. I didn’t want him to think I was uncool to talk to or to eat lunch with. I sat at the dinner table that evening with my dad and told him I wasn’t going to do Mathlete’s anymore. He was kind of surprised, mostly because I never quit anything before. “I thought you like math?” he asked me. I played with my food to neglect the question. “I do…” I replied vaguely. He raised his brow, “then why are you quitting if you like it?” I slammed my fork down and with a stern voice said, “because the boy I like thinks i’m a geek for being in mathletes and only losers join a math club, and i’m not a loser like them!” 

My dad just sat there staring at me. I didn’t know if he was going to snatch me up and toss me into my room or kill me right on the spot. He calmly got up from the dinner table, walked to the living room, grabbed my super nintendo, and threw it in the trash. I gasped and yelled, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!” He then started tossing all my video games, G.I. Joes, stuffed animals, comic books, baseball cards, literally everything that belonged to me in a giant garbage bag and tossed it into the trash can. I sat in the kitchen crying as I watched it all happen. Each time I stepped out of the kitchen to snatch something out of his hands he would raise his finger with his stern face, the face that said, “I dare you to leave the kitchen.”

He came back to the table and sat down. I was sobbing. He just sat there and stared at me. Finally after what seemed like a century, he cleared his throat and said calmly, “if you quit something because somebody else thinks it’s not ‘cool’ you will have nothing in this world you will love. You will have no passion, no culture, no hobbies, nothing for you to relate to. Do you understand me? Do you want that?” I wiped my nose and told him no. I disappointed him that night. Not because I decided to quit something because of a boy, granted that wasn’t something he enjoyed, but because I quit something because I cared what other people thought about it. And more importantly what I figured out later in life, he felt that he failed me as a parent. 

Needless to say I went to math club the next day. Mainly because I wanted my Super Nintendo back. But also, I loved math, and if that made me a social disease to somebody, that’s fine. I always had Mario and Yoshi to come home to. Once I dug them out of the trash can of course.