Celestial Silhouette

I think the right comeback to that is, “are you saying you support conversion therapy?”

I’ve gone to therapy for YEARS. A good therapists job is not to make you “normal” but to make you the best version of yourself. There is a REASON that in order to be diagnosed with a mental illness it must cause some amount of distress and disruption to your life, personally. People don’t to go therapy just for being weird, they go because something about their life or their brain is making things difficult and upsetting for them, and they want to learn how to deal with that.

If you feel uncomfortable about something, it’s up to you to figure out why. Not simply “it’s just wrong”, because that can apply to all manner of cultural and societal things that you may just not have encountered yet. The world is immense and varied, not just the corner of it you grew up in.

In The Fault in Our Stars, Gus is indeed engaging in classic teenage attention-seeking by putting a cigarette in his mouth but not smoking it, and he justifies this by claiming it's a metaphor for his agency, for his control over what happens to him. "You put the killing thing between your teeth but don't give it the power to kill you." As if you have the power.

But of course, the reader knows this is not a good metaphor. This is not how power or agency work--you don't actually have control over what happens to you, and (as Gus eventually realizes at the very end of the novel) you don't have any say in whether you get hurt in this world.

Happy New Year 2024 from Korea.

I have fond memories of spending entire afternoons as a teacher assistant in developmental psychology watching children figuring shit out as my students were administering classical piagetian tasks to them.

Piaget’s research method was to present (supposedly) fun tasks to children to figure out at what age/developmental stage they acquired certain concepts such as conservation of matter, for example. It’s less standardized testing (although the task itself is the same for every child) and more of a conversation with the child to try to figure out their reasoning. (So YES very much talking to them! You ask a lot of questions. A LOT.) The point of Piaget’s developmental psychology theory is that children before a certain age/developmental stage absolutely CANNOT grasp certain concepts because they just haven’t matured enough to do so. Doesn’t matter that it seems perfectly logical to you as an adult, doesn’t matter that you show them that’s not how it works, doesn’t matter that you try to explain it to them. They CAN’T get it.

Of course in that class we’d test children that were right on the cusp of acquiring said concept as to have a variety of responses to the task (it’s not like you turn idk 7 and it suddenly dawns on you, there’s individual differences, hence the variety at the same age/inside the same classroom). Some of these children would be baffled by the questions because the answers seemed so obvious to them there must have been some kinda trick to us asking. Some were equally sure of their answers although the answers were, technically, “wrong” and they would not hesitate to give contradictory justifications to their answers. (Doesn’t actually matter if it’s right or wrong in practice, you’re trying to figure out their developmental stage, it’s not a school exam.) Some of them initially didn’t understand, until they had a “eureka” moment so intense and sudden you could almost see the lighbulb light up above their head as they went “OH WAIT ACTUALLY I KNOW” and it made me beam every single time.

But the most fascinating ones were the ones who understood that their solution wasn’t adequate, but couldn’t figure the “right” solution because they just weren’t quite there yet. I swear some of them must have laid awake at night at the end of the day still trying to understand what the answer was with how hard I saw them thinking during the task. And some of these children, the ones on the cusp of the cusp, would come up with such creative solutions to that cognitive dilemma as well!

My favorite was a kid around 9 years old. The task was the islands task, and here’s how it goes : you present the child with a blue cardboard sheet on which there is brown rectangles and squares. This is the sea, you explain, and these are islands. There’s a wooden block you set on an island that fits it perfectly. This is a house, you say. People are living in it. The problem is, the island it’s built on is sinking! You must build a new house for the residents on this other island. The new house needs to be just as big as the old house, so everyone can live in it like they used to in the old house. You give the child a bunch of small wooden cubes and let them build a new house. Now here’s what you don’t tell the child : the trick is that the first island is 3x3 cubes, and the second island is 3x2 cubes. If you were to build the big block with the little wooden cubes it’d be 3x3x4 cubes. To get the same volume on the new island, the child must thus build a 3x2x6 house with the cubes.

Accordring to Piaget, children between 5 and 7 yo (again: not exact ages) will first refuse to build a higher building than the model even though they should and then will build higher but not know when to stop (some children I’ve seen stacked all the cubes at their disposal, making high, very unstable towers, two to three times the height of the old house, without batting an eye). Between the ages of 7 and 11-12, the child will start to measure the old house with the cubes to try to figure out how much higher the new house must be until they’re able to figure out how big a story is and multiply by the height etc. Children from 12 years old on should have acquired volume conservation and get it right more or less easily.

That child I saw though wasn’t there yet. He was at the point where he wouldn’t build higher than the model. So he built a 3x2x4 house on the new island. But he KNEW that it wasn’t big enough to fit everyone inside! He was positively perplexed by the problem. He could voice the issue, the island was smaller, but didn’t know what to do with that information. He tried building beside the island, so the base of the building would be the same size as the old one. “Oh but look,” my student told him, “you can’t do this because it’s in the water! It will sink!” The boy spent long minutes thinking about it. “We could build it on stilts,” he said. My student was not prepared for this but she did well. “We don’t have stilts, unfortunately, we only have cubes,” she said. He spent more long minutes thinking about it. “But if we sink many many cubes, then we can build on top of them, maybe?” My student looked up at me baffled. “No, unfortunately we can’t do that, the sea is so deep we wouldn’t have enough cubes,” she said. She put her hands on the blue cardboard all around the house he built. “See you can’t build here, nor here, nor here, nor here. Where else could you build?” He thought some more. By then, all my other students had moved on to the next task already. As the teacher told this student they should do the same, he still came up with a last idea : “What about floaters?”

This child thought about stilts, sinking building materials until it filled the sea, and floaters before he thought about building a taller building. If you don’t find that fantastic and fascinating I don’t know what to tell you. Creativity through the roof! I would spend my whole life watching children figuring shit out if I could.

Tldr vaccinate your fucking kids you assholes, this can and does kill people.

When I was a baby, I was allergic to the pertussis component of the TDaP vaccine. I'm not 100% sure how serious my reaction was - my mother just says I turned bright red and screamed for 3 days straight afterwards. When she told my pediatrician, the pediatrician said it was safe to not vaccinate against pertussis, as herd immunity would protect me. So the rest of my vaccines were tetanus and diphtheria only.

Fast forward to when I'm 8 years old. My family and I are traveling up to a family vacation spot like we did pretty much every weekend when I was a kid. We stop at a McDonald's. I play with the other kids in the little play area. My mom remembers a couple of them being sick, but I don't think I was paying attention. We eat, pile back into the car, and off we go.

Maybe a week later I start feeling sick. It looks like a cold, but I keep getting worse instead of better. My mild cough turns into horrible coughing fits, where I cough until there's no air left in my body ... it feels like I'm suffocating (because I am) until some instinct kicks in and my lungs reinflate with a horrible sucking gasping sound. I start coughing up blood and throwing up from my coughing fits.

My mom is terrified and my doctor (eventually a small team of doctors) is baffled. Remember, this was 1994, when the anti-vaccination movement was still pretty new. No one on my team had ever seen whooping cough before; it was just something you read about in a textbook, not something anyone actually *gets* these days.

They treated me for pneumonia, for bronchitis, for asthma and croup and I don't know how many other things. I just remember lots of pills and syrups and inhalers and a nebulizer that tasted like ghosts.

Finally, my mom saw a segment on the local news about an outbreak of pertussis (whooping cough) in the area where we had been travelling. The epicenter of the outbreak was a charter school that had a high population of "persona exemption" unvaccinated kids. She looked up pertussis in one of her family medicine books (which she'd been reading like a fiend since I got sick) and the symptoms fit me perfectly.

The doctors didn't believe her at first. They thought she was being overdramatic and overprotective. It took her ages to convince them to test me. Lo and behold, it's whooping cough! They start giving me the proper treatment, and I s.l.o.w.l.y start to get better.

Most of my memories of that summer are pretty dim. I remember waking up in the mornings covered in blood that I'd coughed up in my sleep; I had to sleep with towels covering the bed because I kept ruining my sheets and blankets. I remember my mom sleeping next to me on the floor so she could wake up and give me medicine when I woke up coughing. That medicine tasted like death (I used to cry and scream when they'd try to give it to me), so she'd mix it with a glass of fruity sparkling water to get me to drink it. I didn't know how to swallow pills, so she would crush them up and mix them with these orange sherbet Flintstone's push-up ice cream pop things. (I still can't eat sherbet without throwing up.) I remember her holding me, rocking me as I cried because I was in so much pain from coughing. Each fit was agonizing, and I would cry because I knew another one would always come and I was helpless to stop it. I remember being rushed to the pharmacy, literally being picked up and carried into the car and then out again to the counter, for an emergency dose of some medication or another, I think it was an injection. It was loud and scary and chaotic and I didn't fully understand what was going on, just that everyone around me was terrified.

Most of all, I remember being really angry that the Lion King came out that summer, and I was too sick to go see it. Clearly I had priorities.

What I don't remember, because no one told me at the time, was just how serious this all really was. My parents and doctors were very reassuring, and I was too young to really understand the severity of the disease. My mom didn't tell me this until years later, but they had wanted to put me in the hospital in case I started to ... well, her exact words were, "They wanted me to put you in the hospital, but I said no because I wanted you to die at home."

I was incredibly sick for months, continuing to throw up and cough up blood for about a year after I first got sick. (I'd start coughing if I laughed too hard, so you can imagine my asshole siblings got a kick out of taking advantage of that.)

The long and short of it is, I lived. If I'd been even a little bit younger, or if my mom hadn't caught that news segment, or if my doctors had waited just a little longer to start proper treatment... who knows.

But I lived, and dammit, I'm angry.

This should not have happened to me. This shouldn't happen to *anyone*. Diseases like whooping cough, measles, rubella, polio... they're all absolutely *terrifying*. They can kill, they can maim, they can leave a person permanently disabled or brain-damaged.

Every time I hear someone say they're not vaccinating due to a risk of autism (or whatever the big scary syndrome is that week), I want to either start screaming or punch somebody. It takes everything in me to remain calm and rational and explain that (1) those are quite simply not things that happen as a result of vaccinating and (2) even if they were, do you really prefer a dead child over an autistic one? Vaccines are some of the most highly tested, carefully monitored substances in the medical world. They go through years or decades of trials and are constantly being reevaluated for safety and efficacy. The current recommended vaccine schedule wasn't just designed on a whim - it's been developed over the course of 50 years by three separate, independent medical organizations (ACIP, AAP, and AAFP, if you're interested) that are NOT in fact paid by Big Pharma or the government to trick you into things you don't need. Vaccines aren't some vast conspiracy to make the pharmaceutical companies millions, since they actually lose money on each vaccine they produce. (If they cared only about the bottom line, they'd let you get sick and sell you the medicine to make you better. There's more profit in disease than prevention.) Your doctor isn't giving your child shots because it's fun; they're doing it to spare your child from needless suffering.

There has not been one single case of a vaccination causing autism. NOT ONE. Every study, every exam, every peer-reviewed paper on the subject comes to the same conclusion: vaccines don't cause autism, they save lives.

The reason medical science even developed these vaccines in the first place was because the diseases can be *devastating*. Polio can cause permanent paralysis and deformities in the hips and legs. Measles can cause nerve damage which may become permanent, as well as permanent brain damage or death from encephalitis and meningitis. Rubella can cause fatal encephalitis and internal bleeding. Mumps can leave you deaf, infertile, and brain damaged.

These aren't colds. They're not even the flu. They're fatal, debilitating, AND UTTERLY PREVENTABLE.

WHY WHY WHY WOULD YOU EVEN RISK THE POSSIBILITY OF YOUR CHILD GETTING THESE DISEASES?! NOTHING IS WORTH THIS RISK. NOTHING.

This brings me to herd immunity. What the doctors told my parents was true - in a vaccinated community, I would have been totally fine. Vaccines work when everyone or nearly everyone has them. Whooping cough can't gain a foothold in a community if 99% of the people there are protected form it. One protected person gets exposed, and it goes nowhere. One unprotected person gets exposed and they get sick, but the protected people around them don't. It's like hitting a brick wall. The disease doesn't infect the community. The problem comes about when too much of the community goes unvaccinated, and "too much" varies by disease. For measles, a whopping 90-95% of people need to be vaccinated in order to protect the entire population. Yet there are schools out there where 80% of the children are NOT vaccinated. And that puts *everyone* at risk.

There will always be a segment of the population that cannot be vaccinated. It consists of people like me, who are allergic to a vaccine; young children, who may be too young to vaccinate or who haven't had all their doses and are still vulnerable; the elderly, whose immune systems are weaker and whose immunity may have worn off; and those with weakened immune systems, who are more susceptible to disease and cannot be vaccinated without risking contracting the disease.

Whenever a parent chooses not to vaccinate, they are not only putting their own child at risk - they are putting at risk everybody around them who is vulnerable. They are saying that the risk of autism (or, again, whatever the current unfounded fear is) is scarier to them than the risk of letting their child and possibly dozens of others get sick and maybe die. They are saying that they don't care if I, or someone like me, lives or dies.

I don't want to die. I don't want my child to die, or for her to watch a friend die of an illness that should have disappeared when my own parents were babies. I don't want that sweet old man down the street, who blows the pine needles out of my driveway every month because he thinks his leafblower is the most awesome invention ever, to die. I don't want someone whose immune system is shot due to cancer or illness or age or medication OR ANYTHING AT ALL to die just because some asshole ignorant fucknugget thinks 3 minutes on google is better than a medical degree.

If you are An Adult™️ and you were fully vaccinated in childhood as is the thing responsible parents do?

Yeah, parts of your childhood vaccines may have faded in efficacy or even worn off completely. Because biology is weird like that. When I got vaccine titers done before starting my current job (I couldn’t find my old vaccine paperwork), I found out that the mumps portion of my MMR vaccine was no longer effective! Because I work for a large healthcare nonprofit, it was no big deal for one of the immunization people to bring me a mumps booster at work, and the problem was solved.

I don't want that ever happening to anybody again if possible.

But my parents were birders, so hiking we did go.

And about a mile up the trail, a woman came rushing up to us, clutching her binoculars to her chest. "Come quickly," she said, with a British accent. "You have to see this!"

This is what birders are like. They are as excited about a life bird as any fan would be spotting their favorite celebrity. You have to see, you have to.

So my parents rushed off with her, and I plodded along behind them.

To find a cluster of Brits huddled in a bird blind, staring at..

A blue jay.

A goddamn blue jay.

And I was a teenager, but I knew better then to mouth off in front of my mom. So I nodded, and smiled, and bit my tongue, until an elderly man looked at me with tears in his eyes, and said, "Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?"

And I stopped. And looked at it. The way they were. As if it were new. And damned if they weren't right.