I've been told that I have a blank face and that I need to smile more often. I've always looked at this as a fairly recent development, but thinking back, it seems as though I've been told this my whole life. I mean I remember people telling me to smile and keep my head up, or that I always looked really bored, as if I didn't want to be there. I remember when people used to think that I was depressed or angry all the time, even when I was pretty darn high in spirits. Though one of my most vivid memories of someone commenting on how emotionally dead I looked was the then-called "D.A.R.E. guy." My memory evades me a bit, but the D.A.R.E. guy was, like, this cop or something who'd come to my elementary school class to teach us how to say no to drugs—D.A.R.E. stands for
Drug
Abuse
Resistence
Education. I used to find him pretty neat and all; he was always joking and he carried around the D.A.R.E mascot, a stuffed lion plush wearing the official black D.A.R.E. t-shirt, whose name I forget. Each week, whenever the D.A.R.E. guy came to my class, each of us 'lucky' students would get the chance to keep the D.A.R.E. mascot for the duration of class. I forget how it went, but there was something we had to do to win the chance to hold the mascot, but I
do remember having won, like, once. It was at that moment when a simple statement, that once flew right over my head, would begin to stick with me forever.
So... Upon being tossed the D.A.R.E. mascot, the D.A.R.E. guy went, "Here you go,
smiley!" From that time on to the end of fourth grade, that was what the D.A.R.E. would call me (Smiley). For the longest time, I thought it meant that I was always smiling, which made sense, seeing as how I was THE class clown of the fourth grade (yes, I was legendary). It only dawned upon me just recently that the D.A.R.E. guy was being sarcastic. Now I think, "Oh gosh, I must have looked like a total sociopath back then." I'm still unsure as to how this fact evaded me for so long. If anything, I should have picked up on it quickly, simply by inferring back to everyone else's comments about how emotionally empty or sad I appeared to them (my deadpan face was even used as fodder in a case against my dad by the Child Protection Services, but that's a story for another day), but I guess I didn't notice those comments, either...until recently. Hmm... I guess this either goes to show that I started giving less and less of a damn since I was a kid, or that I used to be really, really naïve and dumb, OR that I wasn't always the sarcastic guy that I am today, nor have I always been able to detect it so easily (lol). Whatever the case may be, I really need to get to work on "fixing" my facial expression. I guess I'll start by saving up for the thirty rounds of
Botox injections I'm going to need to get rid of these permanent 'creases' on my forehead (lol?)...