So THAT's Why - Part III

ENGLAND
Dec.27, 2015

Does History Matter?
Me

And what about my history?  I am the oldest child - this gives me "can't say no" tendencies as, being the first, the experts say I could apparently sense from very early on my parents' anxious expectations in raising and not messing up their perfect first child.  Once the second child comes, parents tend to be much more relaxed since they've already given up on not messing up the first.  The third is a mere toy for the family since there's no longer any expectation whatsoever that it won't get screwed up.  My perfection ended in grade one when a substitute teacher gave me homework.  I never got homework - I always finished my work in class.  I cried.

Fallen from grace, grade two became a year of subtle and active rebellion.  I kept a very messy desk, and I carved my art into its wooden top.  Esteban, wild, devious and Spanish, became my new best friend.  I practiced swearing in both English and Spanish, and spent many a lunch hour missing recess, sitting on the floor in the hallway writing lines with the bad kids.  I enjoyed that year.

My mother is from French heritage, her ancestors having left Normandy for Canada in the early 1600's.  At least 30,000 years before that, Neanderthals were in France, telling their own stories through drawings on cave walls.  This could corroborate Colin's theory that I am part Neanderthal, as recent studies have suggested Neanderthal genes are present in modern Homo Sapiens - in terms of red hair, the jury is still out on whether this is due to interbreeding, or independent mutations [1], but apparently they were quite good at maths and would have liked spreadsheets.  Red heads are are also notoriously sensitive (to thermal pain) [2] - Colin is English, so is probably just referring to my French side as "sensitive".

My father is from British heritage - a little bit of English, Scottish and Irish coming together after arriving in Canada and the USA over a hundred years ago.  His great grandparents ran the Green Man pub in Cambridge, and I thoroughly enjoy a good tasty ale over lager any day.

A Green Man Pub in London

I am neither predominantly left-brained nor right-brained, but somewhere in the middle.  This means I like to make graphs to explain things, but, they also have to look nice.  So what might take an engineer x hours to do, or an artist y hours to do, will take me (x + y) hours to do.

I grew up in a household where the kids did as they were told.  I am sure we each tried to balk that once, and have blocked the repercussions from memory as often happens to victims of horrible trauma.  We were taught to respect.  Everyone.

I am therefore a corporate office's best hamster, because even if I have to work 23.9 hours a day (to get it right AND to make it look good), I will get everything done that is asked of me and meet or exceed all expectation.  My first reaction is to assume that it comes from sound and well-thought-out authority.

I will have a perpetual to-do list which will be pages long; I will have 400 thoughts per minute flying through my head in an attempt to "keep on top of it all";  I will do all that I can to work nice with others, even those who think respect is optional within the corporate walls (intolerable assholes, to my sensitive nature).

And I will continue to convince myself "I will get caught up, it will get better once I finish this particular bit of work, once we start a new project, once we get some new help, once...".  Because of course yes, everything can be done as expected.

Artistic representation of work
(photo taken in the Peak District)

When I told my parents all of this (and that it's all their fault), my dad pointed out that I am in fact the oldest child of an oldest child.