bruh.

Some time ago (I think in 2021) I had to go see a neurologist over really scary symptoms that resembled seizures. I was a nervous wreck about what I was feeling and had barely slept all week, which seemed to be apparent to the doc’s assistant when I sat down in the exam room for questioning or whatever. Dude was pretty young and soft spoken, around my age. He was laser focused doing something on one of those tablet-laptop Surface things as I spoke, presumably writing down my symptoms.

Hey, I'm a huge fan of your blog👋🏽👋🏽

the womack sisters are seriously just the coolest!!

How it feels when someone prevs you

Hey so a small thing that literally everyone who sees this is capable of is correcting any “used to” statements about native people in this country.

70+ tribes have lost their federal recognition since the 1800s for various reasons that mostly boil down to treaties and policies that prioritized termination of tribes and “integration into American society.” Many tribes are also unrecognized as separate from a larger tribe, meaning they can access benefits by enrolling in the recognized tribe but by doing so weaken the chance of their own tribe ever gaining recognition because the government only recognizes one tribal affiliation per person (also screwing over the many people with ancestors in multiple tribes). And since they have no support, they struggle to continue as a community to practice their traditions and consistent community, which is a (hard to prove) requirement for regaining that recognition

yesterday & today i've been thinking a lot about what it means to take children & teens seriously as knowledge creators. because of course people jump to the "oh so you want me to ask a 5 year old why the sky is blue act like the answer is true"

and then it extends to creative endeavors too. i'm a classically trained pianist & flautist and i really like that i got that experience growing up. it was one of the main ways that i got to enjoy being really good at something at a young age. but it took me a good 5 years of being absolutely miserable in piano lessons before i learned to enjoy it at all. and that was because of LABOR ALIENATION fuck ok i'm putting it all together now. i didn't get to choose what genre to play, what pieces to play, or how much to practice. my job was to reproduce The Greats with whatever little personality flair i could manage to add without bastardizing the work. i learned a lot of music theory but it was mostly so i could understand the pieces i was playing, not so i could use it to create my own work. nobody gave a shit about that.

i have a friend doing piano lessons who is working on the exams before ABRSM exams (so shes rlly good at piano basically) and she absolutely hates it. her opinion of composition is that it is a task in her exams, that she has to "prepare" for composition.