When I was a kid, probably in first or second grade, I was put in the “special” class for a while, probably because I couldn’t for the life of me pronounce a proper “r.” How I eventually figured out how to say things like “Red Riding-hood was ridiculous and should have never wandered from home” by the time I reached third grade isn’t really the point of this, though.
This story is about a stupid word association test they made me take in the Class for Kids Who Can’t Talk Right.
A word association test, as you almost certainly know, is the test given by trained psychologists and well-meaning teachers (who are also probably trained psychologists) where they give you a word and you need to say the first thing that pops in your head. “Airplane-fly. Chair-sit.” That sort of thing. Easy, or it should have been.
The problem was, somewhere in my seven-year-old brain I decided upon hearing the incredibly simple instructions that they didn’t want to hear a word that was even remotely related to the word they said. I don’t know why I thought this. Maybe I thought they’d think my creativity was broken or something. As a result, I spent the entire test focusing on saying words that had absolutely no relation to what they were saying to me. “Cat” was met with “light,” “sky” with “knife,” “grass” with “divulge.” Or whatever. Sometimes with pauses of several seconds between their word and mine as I desperately tried to think of some word as freakishly unrelated to theirs as possible. Repeatedly the teacher would remind me of the rules of the test in an exasperated sort of way, which only convinced me I needed to come up with random words at a faster pace.
The result of this (I am guessing here. I was only seven years old and time and ill-treatment of my brain has seriously eroded any solid recollection of my childhood) was two-fold. First, the test went on a lot longer than they had planned. I have distant memories of sitting there for what seemed like hours, straining my young mind for random words (I vaguely remember the word “clock” coming up multiple times). Probably, it only went on for a few extra minutes as this poor special education teacher watched the child in front of them spew one random nonsense word after another in muted horror, desperately hoping something, anything relevant would eventually come out of my mouth.
Second, I was almost certainly condemned to the special education class for much longer than was probably warranted, even after someone just straight-up told me “This is how you make an ‘r’ sound. How you are doing it sounds weird to everyone but you,” and just like that I was cured of a fairly common speech impediment, but not, alas, my trips on the proverbial (and at times actual) short bus.
Now, to the point of all of this.
There is no point. The original point had to do with what I thought this website was going to be called, until I came up with the absolutely stupendously creative name r-a-fisher.com, which was, shockingly enough, actually available. However, when I came across this while digging through some old files it seemed vaguely amusing, if entirely irrelevant, so, lacking anything else to post this week, enjoy.
Also, you might be wondering what this picture of a dead fish I found on the beach has to do with this. Clock.
Finally, this is going under “On Writing” because it doesn’t fit anywhere else either, and I don’t feel like coming up with a new menu item for something that is almost certainly going to just be a one-off. So sue me.