a series of hyperfixations

I pointed it out to her and together we regarded the infant screaming.

After she left my coworker came up and informed me there was a bird on her car. I went out to look and lo, the fledgling had scrambled up onto her windshield and was pecking forlornly at its reflection.

It stayed perched there in the hot sun, trying to move higher up the car with no success but too scared to fly down. She was agitated that it was on her car since she didn’t know if it would leave on its own.

“It’s a baby,” I told her, “It’s still learning how to fly.”

“That’s a baby?! It’s so big!”

“Yeah, it’s just a little guy.”

I went out to investigate. The parents began screaming and swooping. I placated them with crackers which they accepted without relenting their screaming. My coworker said she could now see that the creature on her car was indeed a baby with the sleek black parents swooshing angrily around in the air.

We regarded the baby together. After a while I started noticing it was showing signs of fatigue and distress. Mouth gaping but not begging for food, wings drooping. I went back out to check on it.

I was debating moving the baby; the day kept getting hotter and it didn’t have the energy or skill to relocate itself. My coworker also wanted the bird to stop pooping on her car. So eventually I announced, “I’m gonna move the bird.”

“Your gonna grab it? Aren’t you scared?”

I looked at her in bafflement. I grew up around every imaginable kind of fowl. The only bird I’d be scared of would be some of the big flightless ones. Even geese/swans are manageable if you just grab their necks before they really get flapping. The parents were not gonna go for my eyes like magpies and in general crows tend to recognize when you’re trying to help. “It’s just a little baby guy. It’s fine.”

I approached the baby amidst its parents shrieking crow obscenities down upon me. I scooped it gently like the burger.

I cannot begin to convey how soft that baby crow felt. It was the downiest most pleasant tactile thing that I’ve maybe ever held and the experience was only slightly marred by the goober trying ineffectually to bite me. It was stymied by the fact that it ain’t my first rodeo.

I brought it ten feet away to a nice shady tree. I held the baby gently so it could get its feet under it on the branch. It seemed a bit confused at this point but eventually gripped the branch and I stepped back and threw peanuts in self defense while the angry parents swooped showily around at me.

It stayed there pretty much the rest of the day. Its parents both checked in to make sure I hadn’t murdered it then flew back to where we could see a nest. So best theory is that this dingus was the first to start fledging and couldn’t actually return to the nest after launching.

I told my wife afterward and they went, “You. You touched the bird?!” My coworkers husband was also flabbergasted that I’d been brave enough to grab it. My coworker said she was just gonna shove it off her car with a broom.

As if they didn’t know who they married. As if I am not someone who would confidently help a stray cat or wrangle a chicken.

You haven’t seen that meme?

If you're someone who wants to be able to find (or avoid) ships while reading on AO3, odds are good that a fan coder out there has created a user script that could help you out.

User scripts are similar to extensions. You add them to your browser to automatically adjust web pages for you. User scripts allow you the opportunity to personalize them, however, which is wonderful for things like AO3 filters.

Here are a few that might be worth a look:

AO3 multishipper saviour - if you want to read about a particular character in a relationship without specifying any other person. The relationships can be specified to be romantic or platonic or both.

AO3: Reorder Ship Tags - Automatically reorders relationship tags on work blurbs so romantic ships (/) always appear before platonic ships (&).

AO3 Relationship/Character Highlighter - highlights the ship/character you’re looking for if they appear in the first two relationship/character tags.

AO3 romantic relationship savior - hides all romantic relationships in sort & filter page that has "/"

AO3 First Relationship Tag Filter - toggle on the script if you're browsing a relationship tag and all the works that don't have that tag as their first tag will be hidden. Works on both romantic (/) and platonic (&) relationships.

AO3 relationship savior - hides works that have too many relationships in them.

AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing - will hide fics that don't have the designated pairing listed first in the tags.

AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing (Auto) - The difference between this and Neeve's script is that it automatically detects the primary pairing, little to no configuration needed.

AO3 Show every pairing except THAT one - Remove relationship tags from script which you do not want to read.

And after the movie, or every few episodes, I'd ask her, you know, what her favorite part was, or what did she think would happen next? Total glass eyes. Okay, okay, favorite is a bit much. Was there a part she liked? A character? ..... Any character's name?

I told my sister I was concerned of course. I got blown off. And then she started school and started getting notes about her reading comprehension and my sister was like but she knows how to read, I know she knows what words mean! And I was like no no no this is what I was talking about and like. Obviously I read the four year old picture books too but the example that came to mind was being disappointed we couldn't finish Carmen Sandiego and either not knowing or not wanting to tell me the main character's name.

And she's like, well that isn't reading.

Okay! So! The skill isn't named correctly but that's what it is!! That's what it is for a 4 year old, they should at least be on that level!

The one that I know that I learned in college because I remember having problems with it, and then it finally clicking, was warm and cool colors. Golden hour, or how to indicate cool or warm in art. It’s one of my very favorite ways to play with color, NOW, but, it took me most of a semester in a color focused art class, in my early twenties to SEE it.

Ugh. So many assignments where the teacher was like, “nope, bot there yet.” So many!! (So long ago, too. We were doing slide photography and showing the slides in class, every class meeting)

It was useful, to me, to encounter something that took so much work for me to actually see it. Before that, I had mostly just done what was easiest, what people told me I had a “talent” for.

No. The skill of learning new mental skills? The frustration tolerance to get through and get it to click? THAT was the most valuable thing I encountered in college because it applies to everything all the time everywhere.

And it’s good to understand that it is ALL SKILLS! All of it. The easy and the hard stuff. You CAN learn it. Figuring out how to get yourself to actually grasp it is harder, though. Different people learn in different ways.