The Early Years: Safe/Scary

It’s been a while since I reached into the giant stack of old schoolwork and other papers that my folks sent out to me a few years ago, so I thought it was time to do that again. And what did I fish out? This vaguely creepy little pseudo-Venn diagram:

Apparently this was an assignment where we had to list a couple of things that were safe and a couple of things that were scary, and we had to list them on that weird little split face picture where one half is smiling and the other half is frowning. Sort of like this guy:

Anyway it’s kind of interesting to see what I thought was scary back in the day vs. what might be considered scary now:

• “Being in bed” is safe, but “Being alone at night” is scary? Aren’t those a little bit contradictory? Maybe I meant “being in bed during the day”, or “being in bed with all my stuffed animals on guard duty”; or maybe I meant “being outside alone at night in the woods being chased by ghosts and monsters”. Yeah, knowing me, I was probably thinking of that second one …
• “Playing outside” is safe? The way we played outside back then was, like, all over the neighborhood, generally without direct adult supervision. These days, they’ve got laws against that sort of thing. So evidently the kind of “playing outside” I did would now be categorized as “Scary”.
• “Going to get stitches” is scary? Hmm, you think I would have gotten used to it after the third or fourth time. (See also “playing outside unsupervised”.)

Since we’re talking about things that are safe and (sort-of) Venn diagrams, here’s another Venn diagram for you that involves safety and dancing.

It’s an appropriate enough diagram given that, these days, most of my friends (here in California anyway) do, in fact, dance, but I’m not quite that strict. Your friends who don’t dance can still be my friends. But they’d better like dogs and cats.