Recalcitrant

Recalcitrant

I'll admit, when I was going through my rebel years (and when I say years, I mean years), I never referred to it as rebelling. I referred to it as recalcitrating.

Mom: Where are you going?
Me: Out for my evening recalcitrational.

I'm not sure but I think they thought I meant to say 'evening constitutional' and just didn't have much of a grasp on the language English.*

At the time, of course, my 'evening recalcitration' was walking down to the local biker bar** where no upstanding community member's kid would ever have been seen. I loved it. I'd don a ripped up T-shirt and trashed gym shorts and go barefooted (the laws were different back then). I got called an anti-gay slur once, not directly to my face, but in a conversation he made sure I heard*** and a woman with him immediately stood up for me - I'm not even sure I knew her. I thought that was very cool.

Since I was barefooted and walking I'd get huge water blisters and bits of glass shards on the bottom of my feet. I thought digging glass out of my feet the next day was the most bad-ass thing ever. Actually I take that back. I just thought it was funny.

Oh yea, and I smoked for a few months. So silly. Now that I thought was bad-ass! Luckily the brand I chose was mentholated, and they messed me up so much I never really got into it. I'm sort of glad I chose the brand I did, though, cuz after that I had some regulars, and they were actually quite nice. Now when I see a teen thinking s/he is cool smoking and obviously doing it for effect I think back on how I musta looked. Silly.

But mind you, it was  only once in my life that I looked silly.

*See what I did there? I took liberties and reversed the words like in The Brothers Karamazov~ or The Sisters Gish. Clever, huh?
~Speaking of the Bros K, many years ago I was paying Trivial Pursuit with the siblings and the question came up, "what brothers in Russian literature blah blah blah." I gave the correct answer and the sibs all looked at me like I was crazy. "How did you know that?" quoth one of they. "I'm an English major," replied I. Shoot, while I was an English major, it's not like I had actually read it. I just figured, it's the American version of Trivial Pursuit, how many Russian brothers can there be that would make it into the game?
**Motorcycle, that is, not bicycle.
***Obviously the guy had a crush on me - they all do, you know. I mean, not just me, but on whomever they spew a slur. The bigger the slur the bigger the crush.