eat dirt, dig deep, drink water, go to sleep!

Ivory mirror box cover, France, 14th century

One of Watterson’s strengths was really selling what it was like to be a kid, and that includes all the shitty parts. The way nobody listens, how Calvin has to do so many things he hates just because someone told him to, how often things are just never explained to him, how unfair life is and how there’s nothing he can do about it.

And obviously Calvin is neurodivergent in probably a ton of ways. I think its extremely easy to see the ADHD and the autism, and I know a number of people see him being plural as well, and I think the text can support all of that. Most of that wasn’t intentional, as far as I know—Watterson didnt set out to write a kid with ADHD, he just wrote what he knew and had seen around him.

And he’s left handed, and yet I can’t for the life of me remember a time when that is brought up or addressed, and that does feel intentional to me. As an example of the ways the world just cannot and will not accommodate your differences, being left handed is one of the original and most straightforward poster children.

So I love especially that it was just… snuck in there, without being called out in any specific way. He could have! It would not have been hard to have an arc about Calvin learning that the reason so many things are hard for him is at least in part because none of the tools were made for him.

There’s a bunch of left-handed family members of one of his childhood friends! Source: that friend is my uncle.

How medieval Normandy’s carefully managed forests supplied the timber needed to build warships, repair castles and produce weapons during the Hundred Years’ War.

Roman Gold Eros Ring, 1st Century AD

Eros, (Roman Cupid), was regarded as the deity who awoke the passions and fostered love in the hearts of both gods and mortals. The poet Hesiod sings his praises as the most beautiful of the gods. His worship seems to be much more ancient than that of the winged boy in popular imagination. At Thespiae, in Boeotia, his cult had ancient origins and the main image at his temple was a block of stone, most likely a meteorite, a common object of worship in many of the more ancient cults of Greece.

His power to rouse and move the world was viewed by the Orphic mystery cult to regard him as the creator of the world. Although there are many visual images of Eros there are surprisingly few literary references to him from ancient times. The only mythological account of the birth of Eros comes from Plato’s Symposium, where we learn that he was conceived by Poros and Penia, plenty and poverty. It was not until the seventh century BC that the poet Sappho describes him as the son of Aphrodite.