look at the skill and spirit

Me as a textile historian: Spinning has historically been the biggest bottleneck in textile production because it is so slow; industrialization of textile production would never happen if spinning couldn’t be at least somewhat mechanized

[...] The child-figure of nineteenth-century science appeared as an instrumental, and indeed vital, bodily container for human variation across the globe and through historical time. Progressive development, figured through this child, constituted and ordered a plethora of human differences in hierarchical series, including child-ness itself. The ‘‘normal’’ child, then, was a figure through which the ordering of children across the colonial globe was realized as well. From the ‘‘savage’’ urban poor child, to the child at the ‘‘uttermost ends of the earth,’’ to the bourgeois child in the nursery—all were brought under the scientific gaze, where their bodies materialized a continuum of normal and pathological development that simultaneously told a story of human history—and of human mind, desire, and moral justice.

Childhood may be one of the only socially degraded statuses that, in theory, every person passes through. No wonder, then, that psychoanalysis should have discovered the apparent amnesia about it in adults. Somehow, once it becomes memory, we ironically cannot remember what it really felt like to be children in the present tense. (To which we might respond, of course, who would want to remember that?) But in truth, we know that many groups of people are structurally deprived of anything like a childhood in the first place, or they experience infantilization throughout their lives. These are two of the many denials effected by the ideology of the child. Childhood is only shared retrospectively by those adults who made it out.

I cant go to my local libary anymore because last year when I stopped by a librarian was reading a book I wrote under a pen name years ago. This book sold under 10k copies and I've literally only heard people talk about this book online *if* I went looking for it so I went up to them and tried to start a conversation like "oh hey I've heard of that book is it good?" Like hoping for some real feedback and she goes "yeah I love reading things by queer writers" and in a moment of terror I was like "oh but- hold on, I thought the author was some old hetero white guy?!" A thing I thought because I used my own dead grandpa's picture for the author pic because grandpa never had internet. I fake looked it up and was like "yeah if he was queer its not public?" And without looking up this absolute unit goes "oh the author bio is obviously fake. I'd bet my left leg the author is a west coast millennial non-binary queer who has never lived on the east coast." And then proceeded to rattle off a dozen linguistic flourishes that are specfic to the pacific northwest that are in the book and several that are nearly ubiquitous in the state where I said my pen name lives that are somehow completely absent from the book.

when the character is obsessive and desperate and guilty and scared and ashamed and traumatized and repressed