The Princess

I was planning to write this bit in on my last week off but didn’t manage it. It turned out to be okay because this week gave me a lot of fodder for writing this up.

It may or may not seem strange to talk about hardened criminal adolescent boys as princesses and drama queens. However, in the last few weeks I’ve seen so much behavior that cannot be described otherwise. It is actually pretty pervasive, this princess-ness or drama queen-dom among the boys of Penikese Island. It kind of makes sense in that many of these guys are here with behavioral disorders because they haven’t gotten their needed allotment of attention etc. growing up. Consequently they often do things based on how much people pay attention to them, and their egos are particularly fragile. To illustrate I will describe some of what has gone on with the two boys I think most typify the concepts of princess and drămă queen.

The princess has a rather high opinion of his own appearance. He is very particular about the state of his “do rag.” (sp?) He was once observed looking at a photo of himself that didn’t turn out very well. He was going to burn it but changed his mind because as he referred to himself in the third person, “Adonis*, is just too beautiful.” This last week Adonis was quite proud of his outfit coming out the island. It constituted of a Lakers jersey and a pair of blue jeans with purple and yellow bands on the legs and pockets. (For those as ignorant as I, the Lakers wear yellow and purple.) It was the matching aspect of which he was most proud and I was most brutally mocking. Where I’m from, teenage boys are supposed to ignore such things and leave color matching to girls.

The princess Adonis is also very clever at spinning reality in such a way as to make you think he must be the most awesome person in the world. Should you ever play a few games of pool with him he will not only remember but also vigorously assert that he beat you many more times than he actually did. In my case I grant that he is a bit better at pool than I am. But due to luck, circumstance, whatever, I’ve managed to scrape by winning about half of the games we’ve had. Curiously though, the princess has only recently started to allow that I’ve beat him once. Another example came up this last week. In a bid for attention the princess invaded the staff sleeping quarters to lob bits of cookie dough at one of the other staff members. Refusing all requests to leave of his own power the staff present determined to perform “a restraint.” (That’s code for man-handling a kid or physically moving the kid to solve some kind of problem. There’s a lot of technical hoo hah about restraints but I’ll spare you for the moment.) Basically what happened was the two guys tried to wrestle him out of the room. He’s a big kid and resisted a lot so I helped them out. Anyway, even before the restraint was over the princess began reinventing how the whole thing went down. In each telling he framed himself in increasing terms of glory. “No what really happened was, I was restraining you” etc.

The princess is also not very good at taking criticism. He is clearly above the paltry needs for correction. To paraphrase They Might Be Giants I’ve said “Is it not enough that we get to walk in the glow of his majestic presence?” Examples of this include throwing fits when getting feedback on his math assignments and smashing lantern chimneys when reminded to do certain kitchen work.

Anyway, this is long and probably boring so… I’m going to give the drama queen installment some other time.

* This is a code name. I use it to protect the identity of someone who will never be affected by the publication of this blog.