I'm finally settled into our new home in Sweden so of course I built a tent under the stars for my huskies ✨⭐✨

The star projectors and star lanterns I designed to decorate my home will be available soon on Kickstarter! Follow here Kickstarter.com/projects/yuumei/star-projector-and-lanterns

My boss immeadiately brightened and rushed to explain - "Of course ! Of course! We want to accomodate you! We have another worker who takes off for Ramadan. Do you need to take off for Ramadan?"

@vangoggles THAT WHAT I WAS SAYING .

And I was finally on a shift with this guy. We were both sitting in silence because we had the ass-crack-of-dawn slot.

Over my coffee and twirling my Magen David necklace around my finger, I say "So. Ahmed. Ramadan.

He sighed, and let me know that he did indeed try to explain to our manager that all he needed was to get shifts not around sunrise or sunset. But that in him explaining what Ramadan was, the plot very quickly got lost into this unhinged confusion where our boss was trying to google how people could survive an entire month without food or water.

So halfway through, he decided to pivot and go along with it, expecting less shifts in March because that's a difficult academic time anyway. Then, he had to keep a straight face when the end-product was the entire time off with paid leave.

but i'm in this beta reading group and now i'm getting some insight into why that might be, mainly in how people respond to writing that doesn't do that. they don't like being expected to do this mental legwork themselves. they see it as the writer passing off the difficult burden of interpretation onto the audience, resulting in a text that is unnecessarily "hard", opaque, and confusing. being expected to connect ideas that are not explicitly spelled out is treated as though it's totally unreasonable, because part of the writer's job, in their mind, is to make sure the reader is never confused or uncertain.

"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"

"we don't read that shit"

"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"

I'm not the only one who didn't realize that, uh.

Water buffalo.