Unsolicited Advice

The somewhat-overdramatic juris doctor  reminds me of me a lot. It's a mix of "huh, so that's what that looks like from the outside," and "there, but for the grace of God..." I've told him this, too. It's not the sort of thing I'd usually voice -- you never know who will take it as a compliment and who won't -- but he made one too many comments about being a space alien, and I couldn't quite tell from context if it bothered him or not.  It's mostly entertaining. Every time I start a conversation and have to watch him drag himself out of whatever's happening in the back of his own head, I smile a little in sympathy. He is emphatically not bothered by me "knowing" things out of nowhere, because he can follow the deductive process that got me there. I commented on the age gap between us once. Mind you, he's never told me how old he is. What he did do was put the year he started at our studio in the bio he gave us for th...

A couple days ago, the somewhat-overdramatic juris doctor had a guest instructor in. I don't usually bother to go when he does that; I'm too old to waste time taking classes with anyone whose choreography doesn't make me desperately want to get up and dance. But the SOJD was going to be in class with us, and I thought, my, wouldn't that be an interesting thing to see? I've never seen him as a student before. So what the hell, I signed up. The lady he had in is a successful commercial dancer, who was actually scouting for a performing arts academy the week she was here. She can fuck all the way off. She said we were going to start class with a warmup. We did not. We slammed straight into a lot of high-speed, high-impact cardio. I have a mild case of asthma that can be triggered by sudden bursts of exercise in an unfavorable environment -- I've done it by suddenly running to catch my bus in August -- or just by excessive heat and humidity. We're still stuck ...

I am still in the slightly-overdramatic juris doctor 's class. Classes. They're intense but useful enough that it's worth killing myself to get through them. They're also bringing up a lot of uncomfortable stuff about my educational history, and how I handle a classroom environment. I learn best when given as much information as possible right up front. I joke that I learn everything via cryptography, because that's actually the standard procedure you follow when trying to decrypt an unknown message in an unknown system: Gather as much cyphertext as possible, put it in a big pile, and then sit down and stare at it (or get a computer to stare at it) until patterns jump out. I often make better progress starting out in the advanced class, as I've done here, and then doubling back to the foundations course once I have some experience. Most beginner classes are streamlined and pared down until you're learning only the thing that is directly relevant at any given...

The slightly-overdramatic juris doctor  has been waging a campaign to get me to take his class. And more recently, to take all of his classes. I didn't... miss  it, exactly, I just doubted my perception of causality.  To now get too far into the amateur psych profiling, he is surprisingly rule-based. I think most people just think he's super on top of everything, and highly self-critical when he does miss something, but it also comes out in socialization, and I suspect is a lot of the reason he comes off as eccentric. I accidentally instantiated a rule about answering my emails with emails and not randomly in person next time he saw me. It was only relevant once, when the office wanted a written confirmation of something, but it's stuck very, very hard for several months now. I have to interpret him for my smart-but-normal coworker a lot. He has this schtick where he borrows the staff to come in for the last five minutes of his classes to watch the choreo and give feedbac...

I have signed up for class with the somewhat-overdramatic juris doctor from previous posts. It is... interesting. Not getting too far into the amateur psych profiling, he shows every sign of being someone who was tracked into every gifted and talented program they could find as soon as they figured out he could read. Which was probably before anyone else got around to teaching him. He is pathologically observant and terrifyingly smart. I like him, a lot. The popular concept of what happens when you tell a kid they're exceptional from day one is basically House, the intolerable asshole genius. I won't say that never happens, but it's pretty rare. Getting that result involves a lot of confounding factors, and, let's be honest, some significant inborn asshole tendencies. More often, you get someone who is no better or worse a person than anyone else, but is really  oddly calibrated in many regards. One of the earliest things you learn as The Gifted Kid is that the other k...

You may recall that a while back I posted an anecdote about spooking one of our dance teachers. I asked him about his JD out of what he thought was the clear blue sky, having momentarily forgotten that he'd put it in his email sig. I admit the impulse to do this strikes mostly because I find the startled reaction funny; I indulge this one because it's arguably a good thing to remind people that the cool things they do are, in fact, visible to other humans. Turns out that once I explained how I knew that, he also thought it was pretty funny. I was suddenly a very interesting person, and he wanted to hang out and chat. This is great, and also makes me very nervous. It's not that people never talk to me at the desk, just that I'm the receptionist and therefore basically scenery, so it's not something they have much investment in. I am a part of the familiar tableau, and the small talk they make is part of the ritual of coming in for their classes, like saying good morn...