Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Anti-bullying month
Who is the biggest bully in your life? One response chosen at random will win an Amazon Kindle. [contest details] (sponsored by bullying_begone)

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WHOA! Perfect timing, bullying_begone - today, I met my first real-life bully in 11 years. (So far, people online have only been mean to me when I actually say stupid stuff, so I don't count those.) In fact, this is a rare occurrence of me using my uChIN RA G userpic without having banned someone from commenting in my journal.

See, today in College Connections class (which was hard enough before I knew one of the other students would bully me), we did a couple of group activities, and the first was a common camp activity that's starting to get old, so you may have heard of it - it's that one where there's a "chocolate" "river" and two "islands" and we have to all cross to the other side using "marshmallows". (EDIT: Due to pathvain_aelien's confusion, I should say the only reason I put stuff in quotes in the previous sentence was to show they were pretend marshmallows or islands or whatever, and were actually rubber square tiles, hula hoops, etc.) The first time we did it, I lost two marshmallows in a row by forgetting to make sure someone else had their foot on them before I moved mine off of it, so once we were done, one guy who had collected about half of the marshmallows whacked me in the head with them. One girl said something like, "Hey, don't hit him with the marshmallows!", but no one else seemed to notice. It didn't physically hurt that much, and the pain went away quickly, but it still hurt me emotionally.

Then we had to try to do the same thing again, but faster, now that we knew the strategy. Although I had finally figured out to leave my foot on each marshmallow until I knew someone else's foot was there, I messed up in some other way that I still don't quite understand, so that guy hit me upside the head again (which, at the time, I thought was him still not forgiving me for my errors the first time), and either that same girl or a different girl told him not to, but again, no one else seemed to notice.

So after that activity and the other one they did (luckily, this time only 10 people had to volunteer to participate, because I was too depressed to want to participate in anything else), we discussed the differences in everyone's strategies and stuff. I called out the guy who had hit me with the pretend marshmallows, and since I was so depressed, I don't really remember what all was said, but at the time, it seemed like no one would talk to him about it because the professor didn't see.

After class, though, the guy did apologize to me, saying that it wasn't supposed to actually hurt and that normally he does it to everyone when they mess up. I asked him why he hit me the second time, because I didn't remember messing up that time, but he pointed out that I did, and now I vaguely remember. Nonetheless, I still couldn't fully accept his apology because it was still uncalled for, especially since he only hit me even though everyone - including himself - messed up at some point. And, as it turns out, the professor had noticed after all; she sympathized with me, saying that his behavior was uncalled for, and that she would talk to him about it.

Repost this entry or I'll hit you with marshmallows