I was ten years old in 1986. I remember that year very well.

The reason for my better-than-average recall (for me) is because that was the year that I became functionally an adult — it was when my cogitation noticeably transitioned from some remaining childish notions to fully fleshed-out and abstract. I don’t think I’ve gotten really that much smarter since then, just learned a few more facts.

I could’ve functioned just fine in the adult world at 10 years old if you’d transplanted my brain somehow into an adult body. Which explains why I was vastly bored and disgusted with everything around me for the next eight years.

In many ways, I was a better thinker then because I was more open to new ideas than I am now.

My fifth grade teacher luckily recognized this and pretty much exempted me from class and let me do what I wanted. She was great. Just an empathetic, intelligent and hysterically funny teacher. The kind of teacher that is now leaving the field in droves, I might add. (I just did.)

But this shows how small a town I lived in: the teacher that I mentioned above, some nosy Googling tells me, is now married to a former friend of my dad who was an uncle of my dad’s closest childhood friend — all of whom are also related to me by blood in various ways. So I was actually a relative in some way of my first grade and fifth grade teacher, and also probably others — and now am by blood and by marriage.

The teacher mentioned above called me “Mr. Science” because she (to her credit) quickly realized that I knew much more about science than she did, and allowed me to explain science- and tech-related things both to her and to the class. Endear me that did not, but by that point I was well past giving a crap.

1986 is a year I remember well, as years go.

It was also the year of the flood, which I’ll write about later.