just another magic monday

the best piece of writing advice I got was from my creative nonfiction professor when I turned in Kill Yourself (a transgender metaphor, one of my favorites) which amounted to saying I'm not committing hard enough. The piece was somewhat gory and kinda painful but I wanted it to be visceral and he was literally the only one to see that. Every other person and professor would have said to make minor changes here and there but he was the one seeing I was holding back for the sake of the assignment. So, he told me to stop being scared and just write exactly what I wanted to say, to commit as hard as possible to the idea instead of testing the waters to see if im even allowed to. So I did, and he was right. The original lacked the conviction required to make the idea work, and the revision brought it to the level that truly let it shine

Lightoller: Do you ever wake up from a dream like "woah ok I guess I'm not coping with THAT as well as I thought I was."

working with kids and one of them says “you know you eat 8 spiders a night on average right?” and another goes “no no no those statistics are actually skewed by people who like eat spiders recreationally for fun and stuff” and my head snapped up like a fucking sleeper agent

oh my god I just saw the cutest thing in the world. little Black girl with beads in her hair for the first day of school and the beads were pink then silver then a bunch of yellow then beige then grey to make them look like pencils 🥺🥺🥺 brb I will draw an artist’s rendition

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.

Moody: And here we see Phillips and Bride in their natural habitat. Telling each other variations of the term "garlic bread" to try to make each other laugh. Phillips: Gaelic bread. Bride: Grueling brad. Phillips: Ha ha, glamorous beans.