{"id":44748,"date":"2026-02-08T16:14:45","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T22:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/?p=44748"},"modified":"2026-02-08T16:14:45","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T22:14:45","slug":"our-own-kind-of-weird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/2026\/02\/08\/our-own-kind-of-weird\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Own Kind of Weird"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was searching my brain for a character I hadn\u2019t thought of in awhile, someone random I could re-introduce. It wasn\u2019t someone I <\/span>knew<\/span><\/i> and I was just searching for their name. I was purposely hoping to find some character I had forgotten about that I could find some inspiration from and insert into a scene.<\/span><\/p>\n

I still haven\u2019t found that elusive character from my story universe, but it did make me think of someone I occasionally remember.<\/span><\/p>\n

My family was weird, the kids at school told me so. My brothers were bullied mercilessly. We were always outsiders. That isn\u2019t really the point of this, but serves as an introduction to my life as a homeschooler from second grade onward. Because I didn\u2019t have friends, and I hated going to school and being reminded that I didn\u2019t have friends.<\/span><\/p>\n

Every couple of years I would get so hyped up about the ideas of friends that I would ask Mom about going back to school. I felt that if I was at school, friends would just happen. And Mom warned me that it wasn\u2019t that easy to make friends. (Incidentally, I originally wrote \u201cget\u201d friends and auto-correct reminded me that the term was \u201cmake\u201d friends. I\u2019m clueless.) It wasn\u2019t in an unkind way. Just that she knew what it was like, because it had been the story of her life, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not against homeschooling. I just don\u2019t think it sets you up for socializing as much as pro-homeschoolers imply. What homeschooling does is give you experience for socializing with people with your exact beliefs. It\u2019s still going to be a culture shock when you get a job or go to school outside your bubble. For a weird person like me, that was going to happen whether I was in public school or homeschool. If you\u2019re not innately weird, it’s probably jarring.<\/span><\/p>\n

My mom took me to one of those homeschool co-op meetings once that the blogs talk about. I don\u2019t remember how she found out about it (we weren\u2019t in any social circles). But we went, and the kids went off to play while the moms did whatever. I remember the kids being a little younger than me and not that interesting, and they didn\u2019t find me interesting, and it wasn\u2019t really fun at all. Except there was one girl who was closer to my age and eventually we started talking and went off to the playground and I actually felt like this was someone I could be friends with. She talked about Hot Wheels and I probably talked about my My Little Pony collection. I actually don\u2019t remember what I talked about, except I said something along the lines of \u201cwe\u2019re all our own kind of weird\u201d when she mentioned feeling like she didn\u2019t fit in because of her Hot Wheels collection. She was just someone I was able to talk to, and that was kind of nice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then the meeting ended and we went our separate ways and that was the end of it. I certainly didn\u2019t know how to keep in communication with her, especially in the days before the internet. I don\u2019t know anything about her, but I still think about her every so often, thirty years later. I wonder if we could have been friends.<\/span><\/p>\n

My mom\u2019s experience with this group was that when she brought up My Little Pony (we were always looking for ways to buy MLP collections, Mom was an enabler), the other moms told her that any MLP in the house had to have their unicorn horns cut off. Because reasons. That told Mom that these were not our people. We never went back.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, there\u2019s no point to this article. Just ruminating on a missed opportunity.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was searching my brain for a character I hadn\u2019t thought of in awhile, someone random I could re-introduce. It wasn\u2019t someone I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[1169,1140,1168],"class_list":["post-44748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-friends","tag-homeschool","tag-missed-connections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44750,"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44748\/revisions\/44750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fakiespaceman.com\/toyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}