Tales of a Pretender

Anyway.

It has been very pleasant out. We had the windows cracked and left them cracked when we went to work. This has never been an issue before.

My darling spouse was working on a job in a small town about a mile from our place. He was getting some stuff from the work van when he sees a large white dog prancing along.

"Huh." He thinks. "That looks an awful lot like.....TYR WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE."

Tyr, delighted that she has Found Father, bounds up happily and gets in the work van to give face kisses.

"GIRL NO WHAT." Kev says, scrambling to go let the client know that he has to take the fucking criminal back home real quick.

Turns out she discovered that a window can be shoved open with a determined snoot, and a window screen is not as strong as 80 pounds of muscular dog. And went for an adventure.

I got a call at this point while I was doing payroll.

"BABE WE NEED TO BABY GATE ALL THE FUCKING WINDOWS." My spouse says.

"....okay??" I say, and then get the story. I swore a bunch.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

yeah that looks normal… yeah these are all— um. hold on. hang on.