Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Don't feel bad for my childhood traumas

Some people are starting to feel bad for the things I publish in this site. To all of those thinking they might have pushed me into reliving my childhood traumas (i.e. Chris), let me relieve your bad conscience with a little bit of historic background...

If you cannot stand sexism, please skip the following paragraph...

My high-school class was composed of ten people. Four men and six women. Three of them were jews and the rest of us catholic (which is a pretty bad statistic for a jewish school). I used to be the best student, followed by Jaime Schuster and Alberto Comas (if you feel like proving some male superiority theory, there you have a good example). Then came all the girls, and somewhere in between them, Andres Isaza.

If you cannot stand showing-off, please skip the following paragraph...

When it came to academics, I was always the secret weapon. I represented my school in all kinds of regional and national contests and I even appeared a couple of times in the local newspaper ("brilliant costeño kid got first place in the National Math Contest, among a total of 18.763 participants. He likes playing soccer and watching tv, but his greatest passion is learning"). Well, I didn't really say that I liked spending my weekends in a library, but that was the way it was published. My teachers seemed impressed by my ability to appear on the media, so they decided to make my life easier. Why would you give this little boy a hard time and make him come to school to take a final test in a ten-people class, if you know he would even beat other 18.762 students? No sense at all...

If you skipped all paragraphs, at least read the last one...

But that was back then, when I was a brilliant boy. I was then ashamed of my mother hanging my achievements on the wall and found always the way to make them disappear. But now that I am older and I feel more stupid, I think it was actually cool to be so smart. Things were kind of easier, even if some people never got what I was talking about...

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