it's twelve days to equinox. i opened a couple of upstairs windows this morning on opposite sides of the house, but the neighbour cat (who lives in a bungalow) saw me & was confused & plaintive about it. the 'mraaa?' had very clear subtitles reading 'how in the world do you expect me to get up there?'
so i went downstairs to greet her at ground level & explain about lüften.
then the dogs spent a pleasant twenty minutes sniffing the cat smell off my jumper.
timesuck recommendation: a few days ago someone on here linked to https://thomaswc.com/2025.html - a browser game of matching categories. very good. compelling.
current read: no book but the world, leah hager cohen (link is to storygraph, not a shop). very gentle unpicking of childhood damage & being different & how we self-regulate & assess others on their self-regulation... i genuinely think there's no right way of raising a person, I think everyone alive has childhood damage of some kind, & I don't think any person is equipped to be perfectly responsive to a child through its childhood.
i was also recently reading the simple life by charles wagner (link is to where it's legitimately free on project gutenberg) & had to read several bits aloud to my husband. here, on mass education / schooling:
"It is the attenuation, pulverization and assimilation of the individual in a social body, be it theocratic, communistic, or simply bureaucratic and routinary. Looked at from without, a like system seems the ideal of simplicity in education. Its processes, in fact, are absolutely simplistic, and if a man were not somebody, if he were only a sample of the race, this would be the perfect education. As all wild beasts, all fish and insects of the same genus and species have the same markings, so we should all be identical, having the same tastes, the same language, the same beliefs, the same tendencies. But man is not simply a specimen of the race, and for that reason this sort of education is far from being simple in its results. Men so vary from one another, that numberless methods have to be invented to repress, stupefy, and extinguish individual thought. And one never arrives at it then but in part, a fact which is continually deranging everything. At each moment, by some fissure, some interior force of initiative is making a violent way to the light, producing explosions, upheavals, all sorts of grave disorders. And where there are no outward manifestations, the evil lies dormant; beneath apparent order are hidden dumb revolt, flaws made by an abnormal existence, apathy, death.
The system is evil which produces such fruit, and however simple it may appear, in reality it brings forth all possible complications."
We looked at each other for a long while & then he said 'oof.'
I once read that it takes at least half as long to recover from a long damaging situation as you spent under it (including the time you spent under real danger of being taken back into it). I incorporated that into my belief system immediately & can't remember where it came from. Seems connected.
