For Bart

In my 200 Things post, Bart asked a question about one of my answers. I figured it was decent blog fodder.

I bolded the statement "Gotten into a fight while attempting to defend someone" because I've done that- on a number of occasions.

As a kid I was very aggressive, and I had a rather short temper. Because of that I got into a handful of minor skirmishes. Usually, much to my dismay, things were broken up before real fighting began. And more often than not, the fighting or near-fighting started because I felt that somebody I cared about was being mistreated.

One time, when I was in sixth grade, I was attending an awards ceremony for a competition called Odyssey of the Mind. The competition had lasted all day long and involved hundreds of students in teams of 5-7 kids each. Each team had a "coach" or two, usually a parent. As such, the awards ceremony was always jam-packed, and you had to get there pretty early if you wanted to get a seat with your team. Otherwise you'd be spread out and might lose each other, not that it mattered that much, but it was nice to be able to sit with your team. Because of the mass amounts of people that had to fit in the high school auditorium, there were signs all over the place that said "No reserving seats."

For whatever reason, I was not with my team, but I was with my brother's team, whom my mom had coached that year. We were there very early so as to get seats together. We found a good section of seats, and we all sat down only to realize that we overflowed by one person into seats that said they were reserved. We took that one seat anyway because, hey! No reserving seats! (These seats just had signs taped to them that said "Seats reserved for such and such team"). We had been sitting there for quite some time, and the auditorium was getting very full, when Mean Lady Coach (a parent) came and told us that my mom was sitting in a reserved seat. My mom, who is a polite person, kindly told the lady that because there were signs everywhere that said "No reserving seats" we went ahead and took the seats since they technically couldn't be reserved in the first place. Mean Lady Coach then insisted that my mom vacate her seat and find somewhere else to go sit since those seats were reserved for her team. My mom, rather than get in a fight with Mean Lady in front of her children and her son's O.M. team, just decided to go ahead and move. She told us to stay there and we'd catch up after.

Enter Furious Sherry.

I yelled at my mother, "No! Mom, you sit down. No! Sit down! You're staying there." (My mom had dared to defy me). And then I proceeded to yell at Mean Lady about how she was breaking the rules, we followed the rules and got there hours early, and we weren't going anywhere. And then the lady left.

My mom was a little flabbergasted at my behavior, but I don't think she chided me for yelling at her or at a strange lady. Probably because I was right.

Some people get tattoos to show they love their moms. I just yell at Mean Ladies.