Catching Up

I had a pretty lousy childhood, but my adulthood has been pretty good so far if you really want to know about it.

       When I finally got fed up with therapy trying to “cure” me, if you can call it that, I got my a** up off the couch and decided to do something with my life.  Like my sister was doing with hers.  I still missed my brother and all, but I loved the way my sister was all grown up now.

       You know, she was kind of all grown up when she was a kid, so it’s just the old her in a big person’s body.  She’s still my favorite person in the world, and whenever I’m feeling down, I’ll just call her up on the old phone.  Talking to her for an hour does me a whole lot more good than lying on that lousy couch for an hour for all those years ever did.  Psychiatry’s a racket, if you want my opinion.

       If you’ve got a sister like mine, you don’t need a psychiatrist.  All you need is a phone.  She’ll cheer me right up any time of the day or night, no charge.

       But like I said, I was mostly cured when quit going to therapy.  And if you want to know what cured me, it was getting up off that lousy couch and never going back there.

       I don’t know who was crazier, that shrink or me.  By the time I called it quits with that moron, I think he was spending more time unburdening himself to me.  It was like I became his shrink.  He unloaded all his baggage on me.  I felt like old Maurice.  Like I was this guy’s lousy life story bellboy, carrying around all his stupid problems.  And you know I wasn’t going to get any tips.  Seriously, he should have been paying me a wad for all the time I spent listening to his crummy problems.

       I’ve heard that people go into psychiatry to try to figure themselves out.  I think that must be true.  It got weird.  One session, out of the blue, he started talking about his parents, and how his mom and his dad never really understood him.  And it was all downhill from there, boy.  If I hated going in there every week before, I really started hating it then.

       But then I turned 18 and went off to college if you can believe it, and I just quit torturing myself with those stupid sessions.  Between college and my sister, I started feeling good about myself.  I hated high school like the plague, if you want to know the truth, but college was a whole different ball game.

       I think my brother would have liked college.  It can open up a whole new world for you.  It did for me.  Instead of these cruddy adults breaking your arm to show up and learn what they forced you to learn, college was kind of like you forcing yourself, in a good way, to choose from all these great classes.  It was like a knowledge buffet, really, and you could choose any course in the world.

       I declared an art major.  If you know me, you know I like to express myself, and I thought I’d learn all kinds of ways to do that with art.  But then I took a geology class, and the professor turned out to be the premier volcanologist in the world.  I liked that.  Studying eruptions and all.  So I took another one, and that professor was this world-famous hydrogeologist.  Learning about how water shapes the earth and all, that really intrigued me.

       So I changed my major from art to geology.  Which was a kind of a new passion for me.  But then I took a Shakespeare course and literature, I tell you, it really stole my heart.  And to tell you the truth, one big reason why was because it reminded me a lot of my brother and how he liked poetry and all.  And he was a pretty good poet, too.

       I ended up getting my degree in English, and now I’m out in the world trying to figure out what to do with my life and all.  I’m glad I’m not a kid anymore, where adults can tell you you’re screwed up.  In the end, I think I was all right, you know, and I can tell you more or less that they were the messed up ones.

       Now all I have to do is avoid a career in something idiotic like advertising, or some other job where you have to lie your head off to people.  I like honesty.  I want a job where I can be honest with people and with myself.

       Anyway, my main goal, whatever it is I end up doing to make a living, is I hope I don’t turn into some kind of phony adult who makes his kids think they’re crazy when they aren’t.  I think if I can avoid doing that, I’ll make a pretty good father.