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Sesame Seeds

Cranberry

Pineapple

Peanut

Cashew

Pistachio

Brussel Sprouts

Cacao

Vanilla

Saffron

Kiwi

Pomegranate

These breathtaking gifs of different species of blooming flowers are from a time-lapse video shot by Japanese artist Yutaka Kitamura. Entitled Touched by Strangers, the flowering gifs, whose original video is part of a performance art collaboration with Alexander Reeder, is taken and separated from its film format to highlight the profound beauty of a brief moment.

Here is the thing about Memorizing: Some people are naturally really good at it and others have to work harder.  

When I was younger, I was the first one. I memorized all of my music for band and passages of books for presentations.

When I got to university and was asked to memorize long strings of dates and events, my professor introduced us to the “Door/Hallway technique”. If anyone watches Sherlock, this is similar to the memory/mind palace technique, or the roman room method.  

The first step is to close your eyes and imagine you’re in a hallway with a row of doors. For me, I imagine the hallway where I live in my university residence, which is a row of orange doors.  

Now imagine you open up the first door. For this example let’s say you are trying to remember everything that happened last month first: you might visualize a calendar showing February. If you had a test, you might visualize your materials spread out on a desk. If there was a family member’s birthday, you might show a cake with their name on it.

The last step is to continue doing this. That’s it. Add as many rooms as you need. I used this method to memorize the entire canon of art history for a test, from 35 000 BCE to Byzantine Rome. By creating rooms for each period, I was able to visualize what was happening at the same time: it allows me to connect what happens in the Mediterranean to what’s happening in Europe to what’s happening in North Africa. It allowed me to memorize and visualize thousands of years of art and situate them in relation to each other the way a timeline just couldn’t.  

It doesn’t help, when it comes to trying to get people to respect the consent and emotions of children, that in the assertions we make about our reproductive rights our discourse frequently descends into comments like ‘kids are gross’ or ‘I just really hate children’. There is something about making these kinds of blunt statements as a person with a uterus that feels liberating – and I get it, because I used to say similar things myself. I would relish the shock of conservative people listening. I think the time of this kind of statement being radical or shocking is past, but I also think that these sorts of comments distinctly lack respect for the inherent human dignity of very young people. 

I very much had my “kids are gross” phase in reaction to my parents, who openly expected me to have kids and would get angry with me if I said I didn’t want them (”you’d deprive of us grandkids? selfish!”), but after a few years of not being in the same country as them, I realized these weren’t inherent feelings I had about children and kind of folded them away

Oscar gets more unsolicited comments about how cute he is, more uninvited pinches on the cheek and ruffles of the hair and demands for affection from strangers, than anyone else I know. I made a point, from when he was very young, of teaching him to express his discomfort: he says ‘I want some space’; he says ‘I feel shy’; he says ‘I don’t want you to touch me’; he says ‘I don’t like that, please stop.’ These statements from him are almost always laughed at, and then ignored, until I step in on his behalf.

all I gathered from this was that people further using statements like “I hate children” and “children are disgusting” in often just an attempt to get some sort of mild liberation from being seen as an inherent caregiver, but that ultimately all it does is lead to further disrespect of children’s boundaries and respect to their consent.

maybe it’s time to be more clear. “I do not want to be a caregiver to children” “I do not want to be responsible for any children” etc., carries no inherently offensive meaning and can’t be construed as “anti feminist” or being disrespectful to children. all while simultaneously asserting ones own autonomy and right to chose.

Concept sketch by Tuomas Korpi.