Growing Up Creepy pt.2 - Tree-hugging conformist!

Hey guys

Do you remember that Simpsons cartoon, I think it was in the movie, where Green Day said they wanted to talk about the environment and everybody started throwing stuff at them. Yeah well, I guess you could say that I get that a lot. Well maybe not literally...sometimes... but you get the picture. I don't know why exactly but it kinda seems to me that people generally assume that environmentalists and nature lovers are like a bunch of hippies who hug trees all day and have little or no regard for personal hygiene. Well let me just say this, I bathe three, or at least two times a day and although I truly love the flora of the land well, I can't say that I've exactly hugged a tree before and that's being honest. I guess its the same way people generally think that all feminists are lesbian women who don't wear makeup and have a complete disregard for personal presentation. Again completely untrue!

I have a theory that high school is the place where the different get weeded out. It is the battle ground where young men and young women must kill or be killed. It is the stage that tests your resolves to your believes, to what you truly stand for. In short entering high school was really a big shock to me! Growing up in primary school, things was just so much easier. I could do whatever I want, whenever I want and if some annoying kid were to pick on me, well I guess there were always teachers for that. But teachers don't do anything about things like that in high school. I used to think that it was a bad thing, now I am beginning to see that maybe, maybe it was because we had to learn that at some point in our lives, there will come a day when there is nobody to protect you, just you. That's what school is for anyway isn't it? Preparing children for that scary 'real world' out there. They say when a butterfly emerges from its chrysalis, if you help it, you doom it to a life of deformity and failure. Its wings never expand to their full size and it never learns the joy of flight.

I used to scoff at the notion of this 'real world', possibly blinded by my sense of self immortality at that age. I mean, how scary could it get right? Its ironic that now, as I stand at the threshold of the next chapter in my life that I would be standing still instead of taking that step forward. Doing my Honours was as much an excuse for me to put off stepping headfirst into this 'real world' as it was finally do some research on all those myths and mythical figures I've been interested in. So I guess its one more year at Monash for me then, before I truly take off on my own new adventure. You know, one of the things that really thrills me about raising my butterflies is the very nature of the life-cycle. It's a cycle right, so everything eventually comes back down to the same thing. No matter what a butterfly may eventually grow into, no matter how beautiful it is now, it is still the same caterpillar that it was some three to four weeks ago.

So I guess I wasn't really one of the popular guys at school. I wasn't the boy who got invited to parties or the one that people were dying to have on the basketball team. I was the boy who had tons of friends who were girls but no girlfriends. I was the boy who got good grades, who got laughed at over his fascination, nay obsession with observing some of Nature's smallest and most overlooked of creatures. Well, some things have changed. But others have not. And in more ways than one I am glad that I stuck with what I loved to do, and what I had a passion for because it sure looks like things worked themselves out eventually. You just got to have a little faith sometimes because really there's no running away from who you are. Plus, I kinda like the person I've come to be and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. So, toss all the figurative trash you want cuz, if I would've ever conformed to peer pressure, I would have already regretted doing it in High School.


Growing up Creepy