In my younger years, I had my moments when I behaved in ways I’ll choose to call “oppositional.”\u00a0 I took my mom’s “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge after them” statement to heart.\u00a0 I actively tried to not go along with the crowd.\u00a0 I wanted to make my own decisions for my own reasons.\u00a0 I didn’t like to do things I thought were dumb just to do them.\u00a0 This manifested itself in several ways.\u00a0 Some of them were fairly good, and some were just, well, oppositional.<\/p>\n
For instance, I didn’t want to affirm my faith at the traditional Confirmation ceremony in my church just because it was the thing to do.\u00a0 I refused to be confirmed with my class.\u00a0 I did decide to be confirmed before we moved to Ohio the next year, because my Iowa pastor knew me and knew I’d completed all requirements for confirmation.\u00a0 I decided I was ready to make the public confession.\u00a0 Had I waited, my new church might have made me go through the process all over again, and I certainly didn’t want to do that.<\/p>\n
My junior high physical education teacher must have been a saint.\u00a0 She put up with a lot of guff from me.\u00a0 She was also our neighbor.\u00a0 I mostly refused to play volleyball, for instance, because I thought it was stupid. (I later lettered in volleyball in Ohio — thankfully, the coach there taught us to play it the right way, and it wasn’t just a ball slamming fest.\u00a0 I also gave her a lot of hassles during the swimming portions of class.<\/p>\n
My eighth grade history teacher, when we were learning the political spectrum, pegged me as radical.\u00a0 At the time, I liked that, but as I’ve become a little more educated, I find I’m much more Moderate to Conservative in my beliefs.\u00a0 Given the title of my post, perhaps, when I was an eighth grader, I may have been much closer to radical on the spectrum.<\/p>\n
I’ve had a lot of tendencies to stay out of trouble — I found I always got caught, so it rarely paid to do something “wrong.”\u00a0 That’s not to say I’ve always been a goodie two shoes either, but, mostly, I try to do the right thing, whatever that may be.\u00a0 And sometimes, doing the right thing, is a little oppositional.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my younger years, I had my moments when I behaved in ways I’ll choose to call “oppositional.”\u00a0 I took my mom’s “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge after them” statement to heart.\u00a0 I actively tried to not go along with the crowd.\u00a0 …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-z-challenge"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=972"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15020,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972\/revisions\/15020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}