bear

why are you not filipino

5 years ago i was this 🤏 close to ending it because i was trapped in an endless cycle of drifting and failure to launch but in the exact right/wrong state of mind i listened to the Long Lost album by Lord Huron and the song "Twenty Long Years" convinced me to take a huge risk with another move. i left my dogshit job selling things i didn't believe in, finally got my driver's license at 37 years old, picked up all the hobbies i had been previously limited from doing, and now i'm sitting outside on a summer evening listening to Lord Huron play live for free because i live with my beautiful partners in a beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood that happens to be the site of a yearly music festival and when they're done playing i'm going to go home and watch dumb movies on discord with my friends while i finish prepping for my first table at an art market.

it's really funny teaching rhetoric to college freshmen because i explained ad hominem to them via example by arguing with a student over something silly (i kept insisting 25 minutes was a quarter of an hour, not 15) and then "insulted" her instead of addressing her argument (i said she doesn't have a college degree whereas i have two, so of course she'd be wrong - which the whole point is that it's a stupid insult but not something that's actually mean) but she got soooooo mad so even when i stopped the exercise and explained that she was indeed correct (15 minutes is a quarter of an hour). like she was still fuming. so i validated her feelings on that, complimented her, and even reminded the class that a college degree doesn't mean that a person is smart/right. and then i went on to explain that, yeah, dirty arguing techniques like that are meant to make you so unreasonably angry that you can't respond or that you lose your cool, so your opponent looks like they win by default. the student i was arguing with then just said that it seemed like professional ragebaiting and i was like. well yeah that's correct.