From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Sat Aug 28 1999 - 07:07:17 MDT
> Robert J. Bradbury wrote: Lets take a straw poll, how many people
> in the group were "outsiders" as children, e.g. played mostly alone,
> had only a few friends, or were generally rejected by the social
> cliques that educational system produces?
For what it's worth, here's my history: As a child I enjoyed spending lots of
time by myself, either reading or "playing" (which usually involved using
some toy or other as a prompt for elaborate space opera fantasies starring
yours truly). But I also always had at least a few fairly close friends with
whom I enjoyed often outrageously dangerous physical play, usually initiated
by me (for instance, the episode that nearly gave my mother a heart attack
when I was about nine years old, when she discovered that I was conducting
"flying lessons" for the neighborhood kids by teaching them the trick I had
learned about how you could jump off the roof of our garage and land on the
ground with a roll, suffering only relatively minor orthopedic damage). In
high school I was a "cross-clique" kid, with social relationships among both
the "popular" kids and many of the "fringe" groups. I think that I
discovered around the age of 13 or so that I could travel in just about any
social circle if I offered some "value" to each one: A special skill, a set
of interesting social cross-connections or just specialized knowledge. I
guess I must have understood "comparative advantage" even at that young age.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"Civilization is protest against nature;
progress requires us to take control of evolution."
-- Thomas Huxley
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:04:55 MST