Does anyone else have stories of classmates who where just a little “different”? Weird clothes/behavior/eating habits, etc? Not talking about cultural differences or obvious disabilities.
Mine was Q. I went to school with Q from 7-9th grade. He fit “eccentric” to a tee.
Just some of the things:
*He would sing in an opera like voice at random times. He would sing in class, the bathroom, during lunch. He also would get thisclose to someone and start singing. Several teachers had to yell at him to get him to stop.
*He said he knew one of those African dialects that was comprised of clicks and other noises (fyi he was AA). So he told the Spanish teacher he knew X language and would sit there making random clicking and other noises. I’ve listened to recordings of those languages and he sounded NOTHING like them.
*He carried an expensive briefcase instead of a backpack. He would take out his work/homework the way CEOs take out papers during meetings.
I went to a Catholic elementary school. I had a couple classmates who exhibited odd behaviors. They did not fare well at the hands of the nuns or our rather nun-like lay teachers.
Greg was twitchy and sweaty. He also ate non-food items commonly found in children’s desks. Glue, crayons, red rubber erasers, paper…he ate all that stuff. His pencils always looked like they had been gnawed by rats. I went to a different school in grade 6 and lost track of him. Mutual acquaintances tell me that he had tried, as an adult, to become a priest but had been turned away.
Mike, in retrospect, had mental and emotional problems. He screamed. He threw things. He jumped out of windows. He destroyed school property. The nuns, and nun-like lay teachers, did their best to help him with ligneus therapy, to no avail.
There was the guy who spoke like he’d learned humour from a book.
There was the guy who used chopsticks for all foods. He was not from a country where this would be considered the norm, he picked it up as an affectation on his gep yaah.
Then there was the waistcoat-wearing, egg-consuming, roleplaying beardy freak. I think his name was Double Foolscap…
When I went to Purdue, I met my first meatspace troll. There was a guy in my dorm that wore a blue worker’s cap with a red star on it, and was a self-professed Communist. He’d spend every possible moment trying to recruit others, or railing against the US and capitalism. I never figured out if he was a true believer or the longest running performance art act I’ve ever seen.
I soon left PU and went to a different engineering school called Tri-State. There was a kid there named Ned that made Sheldon Cooper seem totally normal. Lack of hygiene, could not relate to people, spent most of his time in his head, and lived for Dungeons and Dragons. We called him Gonad behind his back. Ned would be in his mid fifties now, like me, and I still wonder if he ever got laid.
In an adult ed class, I had a classmate who was not just weird, but a neo-Nazi (and I don’t throw that word around lightly.) Not just weird, but disturbing. He was screwed up in the head.
Went to high school with this kid who looked and acted and sounded funny. Annoying. Creepy. Weird. The most memorable thing about him was he carried two humongous bookbags/duffel bags everywhere, one in each hand, probably weighing more than his 100-lb self.
Since he was in band with me, I tried to be inclusive years later when Facebook came about (we had graduated in 97 and 98) and would invite whoever was my FB friend to my parties. This dude showed up. He was ok but still as annoying as ever.
But then he started getting really creepy on Facebook, and it turns out he’s a Men’s Rights Activist or whatever. I un-friended him when he started talking shit about stay-at-home dads. My other friends have kept up with him, and his recent tirades are anti-circumcision and anti-school football (it teaches boys to beat up boys).
Anyway, no one is friends with him IRL anymore. They just follow him on FB so as to poke him.
I’ve learned my lesson, though. Not everyone deserves a chance. If someone is creepy when you don’t know them that well, there’s a good chance they are even more creepy when you do get to know them.
I went to grade school with this kid who everybody knew was weird. It was like he wanted people to pick on him. I know that sounds odd, but I think it was true. It was how he’d get attention. I once saw him, on a dare, eat a piece of dog poop. He had this strange, vaguely not-quite-there, vaguely condescending personality that pretty much everybody found off-putting. I felt a little sorry for him, but not enough to befriend him. Even as a kid he put off crazy vibes that creeped me out. I’m not proud to say that I picked on him a couple of times, and I was usually the kid that got picked on, not picked on other kids.
Fast forward many years, to Facebook. I found a lot of my old classmates and friended them. I found this guy and figured, ‘what the heck, he’s probably grown out of the weirdness’ so I friended him as well.
That lasted about six months. Not only has he not grown out of the weirdness, but he added this creepy sexual vibe to it that wasn’t there when he was a kid (thank goodness). He was like one of those sleazy '70s guys in the Qiana nylon shirt and gold chains (he didn’t really wear these–that was just the vibe he put out). He’d make inappropriate comments to FB posts, and post some really weird sex-related items. IIRC he got himself banned from FB for a while when people complained of sexual harassment.
I quietly unfriended him and haven’t had anything to do with him since.
The weirdest thing about the whole situation was that I knew his mother and his sister (Mom was mayor of our small town at one point). Both of them were nice and normal, at least to all outward appearances. I don’t think he was being abused at home or anything, but who knows?
Most of the people described were probably on the Autistic Spectrum. Undiagnosed and unhelped, of course. Today, they would at least get an IEP at school and some help, the amount depending on the school district.
Not in my class, but because the whole school shared lunchtime, I had interactions with this one weird kid. I was in 4th grade, he was in 1st grade (same class as my sister). One day, kids were being kids and somehow he felt put down by me somehow (not that I was doing anything particularly bad to him) and he threatened to have his brother beat me up. I laughed and said yeah okay sure, then I found out who his brother was. A kindergartner. That really set me off laughing at this kid. I actually already knew his brother, just not that they were brothers and thought he was alright (for a kindergartner) but this kid, he was just wrong in the head.
Later in that school year he broke his arm trying to fly like Superman. I know most people have heard urban legends of that type, but it was actually true in this kid’s case. Like I said, he was wrong in the head.
A bunch of guys, and a couple of girls. One guy always carried a briefcase, from 6th grade on. In 12th grade, the cops caught him taking pics of a cheerleader, from a tree outside her house, at night. His hygiene was pretty spotty, and he always wore dress slacks and shirts when the rest of us were wearing t shirts and jeans. He went on to be a accountant.
Yeah, probably the single most weird person I’ve known was a guy who lived next door to me in college. He was socially awkward to an extreme- no social skills, no clue on when the conversation had moved on, etc… didn’t bathe often, tended to spit while he talked, etc… Academically brilliant though.
About a decade later, when I first heard of Asperger’s Syndrome, I thought “Holy shit! That’s John O.! I knew there was something not quite right about him.”
Other than that, I’ve known my share of weirdos (was an RA in the Freshman honors dorm at a major state university for 3 years). Only two guys stand out; one was such a total sad-sack that his last name became a by-word for being wretched and loserly. I never could understand how this guy could be THAT hapless; it seemed like if something could go wrong for this guy it would, or if he could make some innocuous choice that would inadvertently go wrong, he would. It was like something from a movie.
The second guy was this dorky guy who had the least clue of anyone I’ve ever seen, including Asperger’s guy mentioned above. He was entirely consumed with anime, manga, video games and science fiction, to an obsessive degree. He’s the guy who was so engrossed with watching some anime in his buddy’s room that they actually got it on in bed, while this guy was sitting on the end of the bed watching the anime. He’s the guy who wasn’t fun to tease or pick on (a favorite pastime in all-male groups) because he almost never got that he was being picked on, and would often say things that made it worse.
Last I heard, he got a PhD, and is a professor somewhere, and still heavily into the anime/manga scene.
He took a year out to travel before going to university (a “gap year”). Some people go and build hospitals and stuff, which is laudable, and some people just go and have fun, which is fine, and the stereotype is of a rich idiot thinking that staying in a hotel that isn’t five star and going to the occasional rural market has completely clued them in to a whole other culture’s way of thinking and its obvious superiority to the West. Which is also fine, if only they would stop banging on about it.
