Throwing this out there

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Yep....Sidewalk Surfing---Jan and Dean!

Never heard skateboarding called that, though.

When the urethane wheels came out, skateboarding became a real craze. And they put the urethane wheels on roller skate, so there was no more roller skates with the key.

Melanie had a song called Brand New Key....Where the guy has the key that would open up her roller skates.

Yep...Chuck Berry, My ding-a-ling. I was so naïve; I didn't get the phallic interpretation at all.

Those few years that separate us are crucial at that point of notice. But!! We got it and giggled all the way to the bank with it then....Looking back on it, I know a lot of my teachers had to be stoners.

I had one music teacher that brought in "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and spent the first half of the class telling us how cosmic it was. The other half was listening to it. LOL

If there's one saving grace in your life: you matured pretty fast.

You were already given responsibilities at age 16 that I wasn't given yet. I was still absolutely a kid....in all ways.

Now....we have to tell these kids today how we enjoyed ourselves without Internet, cell phones, home computers. Without TIVO, DVR, even VCR's. Even without remote control for your TV. When the hip thing was to manipulate the TV dial so one could watch UHF channels.

Uhhhh...no LOL

What you are referring to was a complete lack of fear in certain circumstances with a blindness to opposition and just true defiance. Here's what I mean:

I would go and do those type of things because I had seen that in my family. Example and all. And I am totally blind to some things. And, no sense of danger. One day I was riding my bike home with no hands....My father pulled up without me knowing and paced me to get my speed. Never knew he was there while I tooled along with my hands crossed and just relaxing in my zone until he beeped the horn and almost scared me into a wreck.....idiot....LOL I was a radio disc jockey at 16 in the days when you had to have a sanctioned FCC license to work as a broadcaster. Worked all night on Sunday and went to school on Monday.

But, I was scared to do the things other kids would do. Like call each other up and just go ask the parents if they could make a 200 mile one way trip to go 'tubing' down the silver springs or just drive for the day, all day to St. Augustine or something. That terrified me and was always difficult.

It's the classic, "I can do something really amazing, but fall on the simplest of things."

Oh yeah...maturity...about the level of a 12 - 14 year old......

You might have been a heedless hellion.

But I, at 16, would never have been able to get that FCC license. I didn't have enough discipline to even do the paperwork required to get the license.

Don't reflect on what went wrong then. Reflect upon the good times.

I reflect on what went wrong to try to not do it again.

I do try not to beat myself up on it though. It's all only for understanding.

What I meant....is that one should not dwell on the negative.

Denial of any sort is quite detrimental to any progress one makes.

Ahhhh, yes, I agree. Succinct....

The good part is that the review of the successes do reinforce good things too.

Thank you for engaging in this conversation! I enjoy the opportunity to 1. learn about other people's perspectives and 2. be challenged to express my own thoughts coherently. I am likewise definitely an overthinker, so I'm working on composing my thoughts in a way that's both coherent and less than 12 pages long. I shall return... and thank you for the new theme song to go with my username! I grew up listening to "Stairway to Layla from Tokyo" radio (I love this name-- I hope you'll pardon the acknowledgement of how recently I was born) and, accordingly, had never heard Hey Paula before.

I am glad to have you back....I actually worried that I offended you with the song. I just think like that. It's a three ring circus in my head and I really, really work to restrain it because I never know how it comes across.

As for the response...let it fly. We are here for a reason LOL

And, even a lot of people my age never heard of the song.

Crap...And I just found another one out of the blue...what does this mean?

"sapiosexual"

Ok, here goes:

Nonbinary: Generally I would say people tend to use "nonbinary" as an umbrella term for when someone's experience of their own gender (or lack thereof) doesn't feel, to them, like it fits into one of the two "binary" categories of Man and Woman. For some people, this means they feel more like a man one day and more like a woman another day; for others, it means they feel like a mix of both all the time; for others, it means they don't like the fit of either label, and feel most comfortable defining themselves as something entirely separate.

For me I would say my identification with the broad "nonbinary" category is not disconnected from my autism. I never really understood the complex network of roles and rules etc. that make up our system of gender, and ended up feeling increasingly constrained and uncomfortable within the "guidelines" set out for the gender I was assigned when I was born. "Man" and "woman" are exactly the kind of social categories that make my head spin. There are clearly social consequences for not conforming to the rules that govern one's assigned gender-- but, to me at least, most (if not all) of the rules seem arbitrary and incoherent-- not to mention that they're rarely expressed out loud in clear terms. Every individual person seems to have a slightly different set of ideas about what makes someone a man or a woman, and how a man or a woman is supposed to look and behave-- how can I adhere to a set of social guidelines that don't even stay the same from person to person? And even more frustratingly-- what is the logic behind deciding to divide the infinite world of human potential and experience into two columns, and people in Column A aren't supposed to/expected to like or want any of the things in Column B, just because? Why is someone in the Allowed to Wear Dresses category also expected to be in the Plays With Dolls category but not the Plays Football category, etc?
And then, why was I assigned to Category A and not Category B when I was born, before I'd even had the chance to grow up and decide I like more of the things in Column A or Column B? Why are these the only two options? And if no one person holds the official definition of what it really means to be a woman or a man, then on what grounds does either category apply to me at all? The entire subject has honestly always confused me deeply.

Even though I know intellectually that these shifting, amorphous rules are subjective and don't have to govern the way I understand and shape myself, I think some version of them gets brainwashed into most of us pretty early-- that was certainly the case for me. I spent a lot of time feeling like I wasn't "doing it right" because I couldn't seem to crack the code of how someone of my assigned gender was "supposed" to look and act. Eventually, I found that when I thought of myself as myself, someone who was neither a man nor a woman, it was as though all of the pressure and expectations I'd always felt disappeared. I figured there was no reason not to take this relatively easy trap door out of a piece of my identity that had always perplexed and stressed me.

Obviously, lots of people feel most comfortable using "man"/"woman" to describe themselves-- including lots of people who think about this stuff a lot and have a very inclusive definition of who "qualifies" as a man or woman (i.e., anybody who wants to!). To me, just because gender labels are social constructs doesn't mean they don't exist-- amorphous though they are, these categories obviously play a huge role in our culture and in the self-understanding of many people. The reasons that people do or don't identify with one or both labels are generally complex and personal. In the simplest terms, I believe that the one thing that "makes" someone a man or a woman is that they like using the word to describe themselves. And so for me, since both of those labels carry cultural baggage that makes me feel weird, I opt not to use either one to describe myself.

Queer: I would say this is still a controversial word among many LGBTQ people. There are obviously many people with traumatic associations with the word, who may or may not want to use it or hear it for that reason. For some people, I think it's a meaningful reclamation of a word that has previously been used against people who stood too far outside the sex/gender norm. For a lot of people who use it today, I think it implies a sort of deliberate location of oneself outside that norm-- like, it implies a sort of conscious decision to live outside mainstream heteronormative culture. That's part of what's appealing about it to me-- it's not just that my sexual preferences don't line up exactly with the way they were Supposed to be (i.e. 100% heterosexual), but also that I want to get myself away from / stand in opposition to the ways our culture works to (I feel) enforce heterosexuality and strict gender roles on people. I also like that the word "queer" is a sort of umbrella that covers a wide variety of potential differences, and doesn't force me to get specific about my own sexual preferences-- finding an exact label for precisely what "types" of people I prefer to get involved with isn't particularly interesting to me.

But also, it's worth noting that another big reason I feel comfortable using the word "queer" is that I was very lucky to grow up in an environment where I never heard that word directed at me by others, or used in a negative way at all. Something like 5 or 6 years ago I remember discussing with a new friend my own age from a different part of the US the terms we used to describe our sexuality. Her reaction to the words I used was essentially "I've never heard anyone say that word before while not also throwing a bottle at my head." I use "queer" because it's a term that makes sense to me and is shared by many other people I have things in common with, but I do my best not to use "queer" to describe anyone who hasn't first used the word to describe themselves, since it's still such a loaded slur for many.

Genderqueer: I generally see this written as a single word. I would say that it has pretty much the same meaning on paper as "nonbinary"-- it's a label that someone could choose to use to describe themselves if they feel like their experience of their gender is "queer," i.e. deliberately outside the mainstream/norm in some way. For whatever reason, it's not the term I currently feel most comfortable with-- I think that's most likely my literalist brain preferring "nonbinary" because it seems like a more straightforward description of what's going on for me.

I hear a lot of people express confusion about the idea of a trans person (e.g. Beau Bridges' cop, who was assigned a male gender label at birth but now identifies with the female label) being romantically/sexually interested in people of the same gender. It might help to envision sexuality and gender as being less inherently bound to one another. We know that a woman who loves other women isn't a man just because she loves women, right? And being attracted to men is something we know anybody who's inclined to, not just women, can do. There are lots and lots of other social and cultural factors to what "being a man" or "being a woman" means to any individual person-- and therefore lots and lots of reasons a person might conclude that the gender they were assigned when they were born isn't the one that fits them best. Loving women obviously isn't a defining characteristic of being a man, since although lots of men do love women, lots of men don't love women, and lots of women do love other women (without deciding on this basis that they must be men). Basically, if a woman who's not trans can be a lesbian, and that doesn't make her a man, why should being a lesbian mean anything about the "true" gender of any trans woman? I don't believe that it does.

"Sapiosexual" is definitely a word I've heard thrown around, but I'm not quite hip to the social/cultural nuances of what it means. I'll keep my eyes and ears open for new info on it!

Sapiosexual means you're turned on by intelligence.

I can see where that could be a problem with naming LOL

I'm a headsexual....nope...

I'm brainrotic.....nope

I'm noggincentric....nope......

Because people like the look and sound of Latin/Greek prefixes. Makes it seem scientific, somehow.

I had always vaguely assumed it was just another synonym for pansexual (I was thinking "homo sapiens" --> "sapio-" without thinking of what "sapiens" actually meant)... good to know!