Earliest Memories of the World Outside (was Forcing Kids To Watch History Made)

[ssk7882 <skelkins@attbi.com>]

Eileen wrote:

> While Elkins lived a horrible childhood underneath real cameras 
> disguised as sprinklers, I, of course, lived a childhood under 
> sprinklers which I thought were cameras. 

So what are you saying here?  That you're less...less *well-adapted*
than I am?  That you're sicker, perhaps?  More twisted?  More Bent?

Them's fighting words, Eileen.

Seriously, though, I really must stop maligning my poor parents
in front of everyone like this.  They did have their positive 
parental qualities.  They were a trifle deranged, to be sure, 
but they really weren't ESE.  

Besides, camera stories are a total conversation killer.  I forget
sometimes that other people don't always find that sort of thing
funny.  (My housemates no longer allow me to take part in those
'so how nutty were *your* parents?' ice-breaker conversations at 
parties.  They say I spoil them.)

> I lived in the Police State and I survived!

Hey, congratulations!

So how about that Percy identification, then?  Do you think
that believing yourself to be under constant surveillance 
might have encouraged you to adopt a rule-abiding persona?  
Or was the cause and effect reversed?  Or none of the above?

Do you want me to stop asking prying questions about your 
psyche in a public forum?  ;-)


Amy Z wrote:
>Eileen, your childhood take on political reality made me LMAO. 
>The world must have seemed a very exciting, if dangerous, place. 
>And I would love to meet your parents.

Eileen:
> Oh, they're very ordinary. Molly and Arthur Weasley. Do you think 
> they did anything to encourage my paranoiac fantasies? 

You mean, other than leading you to believe that your Mayor ate 
babies? 

> Now, as a kid, I thought they were very twisted and strange 
> people, because they both were fans of a horrible book where 
> the hero was a murderer, and sympathized with him. 

Sympathizing with a murderer?  Scandalous!

The title on my parents' bookshelf that always troubled me as a 
child was _The Agony and the Ecstacy._   I always imagined that 
this must be a sado-masochistic porn novel, and it disturbed me
a great deal to think that my parents (a) had such a thing in 
their possession at *all,* and (b) hadn't even thought to hide 
it away out of sight as surely any normal person would do.  I 
was always tempted to take it down and sneak a peek, but never 
quite dared, on account of the...er, well, the cameras.  It 
eventually became the only book in the house that I *hadn't* 
read because, although I had never been forbidden to read any 
of the books in the house, I was made deeply uncomfortable by 
the idea that my parents might think me the sort of person who 
would be attracted by such an obviously obscene title.

When years later I discovered that this book is in fact a historical 
novel about Michaelangelo, I felt simultaneously vaguely disappointed 
and immensely *immensely* relieved.



Elkins