my girlfriend is also my man is also "my partner" if i'm in a professional setting. yesterday we went to a ren faire and a man mimed at me - you're together? and at my delighted nod, his baffled, you're gay? made me laugh. a woman with rainbow hair said i love the two of you together. you're both so beautiful it's absurd.

my dad introduced my partner as my "..... friend. or whatever" the other day. he knows we're dating. in the same way, i was never able to get my sister's husband to stop saying that's gay like it's 2008. he still uses the word fa***t, and my sister's defense of him has always been well, he's just kidding.

my lover and i dance to old music in a tiny kitchen. we judge new music together and take food critique very seriously. we watch love is blind before we fall asleep and agree that if they had a queer season, it would be bloody but also make for excellent tv. of fucking course queer people would meet someone for 2 weeks and agree to get married. what are you saying.

at a bar with friends, a man puts his hand on my wrist. got a boyfriend? and yes, i do have a boyfriend, she's amazing. i am texting her while i wander around a gas station named after geese. i am visiting a swing state for a wedding. in the candy aisle i overhear: she's actually like a lesbian it's disgusting. two teenage girls with packaged sandwiches in their hands, giggling. no literally, like. i'm not, like. okay with her being there while we're all, like, naked and changing.

my girlfriend and i tailgate, drink gin and cider out of cups. from the frat group beside us, a man corrects himself with one of his friends: bro, i mean, nonbinary entity, and it makes everyone around him laugh, myself included. he razzes his friend the same way i would have killed for at 19 years old - like nothing happened, he continues: you apply sunscreen like an alien. he does a little sassy (and fairly accurate) dance interpretation of the motion. his friend is laughing so hard they're crying.

i am lucky, i live in a safe neighborhood in a safe state. my masc passenger princess comes up from DC. i drive her for an hour to where all the leaves are a violent arrangement of color. we walk along the trails, letting autumn into our blood. in this part of the state, there's a lot of pickup trucks and trump signs. when we chastely kiss before getting into the car, i accidentally make eye contact with a woman holding her child's wrist. she looks disgusted. she looks fucking pissed.

two hours later my girl and i are eating dinner on a patio, soaking in the last warmth of new england sun before the chill of winter sets in. we are giggling and trying to talk through plastic vampire teeth. at another table, i see a young woman sit up straighter. i watch her watch us. she blushes and takes her partner's hand from across the table. shy, like the taste of evening has just become something deeper.

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

me: dONn’t touch those

new guy:

me: they need the toys to function. if they don’t all have toys they get jealous.

new guy:

new guy:

It has become the lucky charm in the IT industry because engineers believe it will make machine acting good (like the name of the snack) and stay in green light (like the color of the snack’s package) when a 乖乖 is put on top of a server.

It is the only food allowed in a server room and the biggest semicondoctor company in Taiwan (which is also the biggest worldwide) even commissioned the snack factory to make a customized version with blessing on the package.

This is how a server room is blessed by 乖乖. You put at least one on top of each server. It’s important that the engineers change them before the expire date because legend says the snack looses it’s power after expire date.

You’ll hear engineers swearing up and down that their server room crushed down the one time they forgot to change the snack.  Or some newbie ate the forbidden snack put on top of their server and caused a disastrous crush down.

The 乖乖 religion later spread to all people who want their machine to act nice. In the lab we put 乖乖 on ultra-low freezer (you really don’t want it to drop dead along with your 2 years’ worth of sample/data), mass spectrometer etc.

When Taiwan’s about to launch the first self made satellite in 2017, the develop team even put 乖乖 around the satellite model to prey for a successful launch (it did). This shit is real.

Broke: Humans are inherently evil

One time Mr. Robinson closed the door to the classroom furtively and asked a student near the door to keep an eye on the door’s window in case anyone from the administration was coming.

He explained the next curriculum was one he had been explicitly disallowed from, but he didn’t know how we were going to cover the next portion of our history work fairly without covering it first. He said if any of us were offended by it or felt it threatened our beliefs to be discussing it, please talk to him and he would gladly find alternative work for us to do instead. But he asked if we would be okay not broadcasting too loudly to the administration (our parents were fine) about it.

At this point we’re on the edge of our seat. Forbidden curriculum? YES PLEASE.

“All right, do I have a promise from you you won’t tell on me to the principal?”

We, of course, promised.

“Good. Then let’s talk about World Religions.”

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(A side note here, if you ever have a not-forbidden courseload you want your students to really enthusiastically consume, I think pretending it’d forbidden will up interest levels immensely. The work was informative and we loved it, but the Secret Agent-ness of doing a SECRET ASSIGNMENTS and having SECRET PROJECTS and LOOKOUTS FOR THE FUZZ upped our investment in the material beyond description. Even if you DON’T have secret coursework, PLEASE DO THIS WITH YOUR CLASS SOMETIME. IT’S FUN.)

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At the start of the Great Gender Debate when someone would try to say boys and girls aren’t different and they can do whatever the other does, he’d super respectively ask them if they really thought that, or if they were saying it because they thought that’s what they were supposed to say, and encouraged us being honest about how we actually felt about the difference between between boys and girls and who was better.

Then lots of super fun shouting and throwing paper at each other and making desk barricades and more yelling.

(Keep in mind, this was 1999/2000. A lot of people didn’t even have internet at home. This was a small conservative town. Being trans or nonbinary wouldn’t have even been an option we knew about.)

Then he eventually stepped back into the fray of the Great Gender Debate and made us break down our points, which he had been taking notes of, on the white board and then had us carefully and intentionally refute or discuss them one at a time. Until we had reached a real and honest consensus that actually we’d been tricked into thinking gender was anything at all. Now when we said we thought neither was better than the other and being a boy or girl didn’t mean anything about what you could or couldn’t do, we fucking meant it.

One of our male classmates started wearing nail polish the next week and we told him it looked rad.

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One time it was a nice day out and even though we weren’t doing trig at that point he was like, “Wanna learn something cool? I’m gonna show you how to calculate how tall something is using shadows” and then we went outside and learned how to find out how tall things are by measuring their shadows and measuring the shadows of stuff we knew the length of, and then for fun we also independently worked out the world was round and how big it was.

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One of the times the cops were called on us it was because we were having a Hot Air Balloon making contest and people thought there were UFOs or spy planes.

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Another time we were just setting off dry ice bombs, lol.

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They changed the milk at lunch and we hated it and Mr. Robinson may have given us ideas about civil disobedience and direct action that led to the lunch room sit-in the schoolchildren ended up staging until they would switch the milk back. At the time it felt like he was being really cool, and he was, but thinking on it he may have also been using us as props to prank the administration and also give himself an afternoon off while all the administration tried to get a hundred 11-12 year olds to leave the damn cafeteria while we chanted about milk.

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We grew up in a town that was about 2% black. It was not uncommon for people living there to not know any black people at all.

One day Mr. Robinson told us we were going to be having a very important speaker come talk to us, and that he expected us to treat her with respect and deference. That she was one of the most important people we could be learning from, and we were honored to have her come to us. We all sat up, wondering who this important woman could be.

And he opened the door and it was one of the ladies who worked the front office, accepting our tardy slips and making us wait for the school nurse. A black woman, one of the only black people you’d find in the school.

She then sat down with us and talked to us about the racial history of our town. Explained to us what a Sundown Town was. Explained to us the racism she experienced growing up there. Explained the mistreatment of the police.

She wasn’t even that old. It struck us all. But you’re not even old. Is this still happening? Why didn’t you leave? Did anyone help you?

It was an incredibly powerful day.

When I went home to talk to my parents about it, they had no idea about any of it, even though this was the same town they had grown up in.

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Mr. Robinson would occasionally repeat this habit of special guests were not academics, just people who had lived in our town for a while, bringing in a lunch lady or a janitor, making us talk to them, learn our town’s history, learn to respect their jobs, learn manners and deference for the working class.

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One time he gave us bread, water, and ziploc bags and set us loose on the school to rub the bread on stuff, drip water on it, seal it, and watch what mold grew. The kid that got the grimiest piece of bread with the most enthusiastic mold would win.

We learned that many of the surfaces we consider the most dirty get the most regular cleaning, and so are in fact the least likely to produce mold. While many of the surfaces we eat off of and touch regularly are nasty as hell.

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Similar to the Great Gender Debate, one time he let class go wildly off course while we debated hotly for over an hour about The Lion King. I do not, for the life of me, remember the substance of this debate. I think The Little Mermaid may also have been a point of conversation? I just remember it got HEATED, and Mr. Robinson always thought these heated debates were REALLY ENTERTAINING and would quietly sit back and egg them on.

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One time he gave me detention and I cried through the whole thing thinking my parents were gonna kill me when I got home and instead when I got home my mom hugged me and told me how he’d called her and said I’d been really honest and showed moral fiber in standing up for a friend and taking the detention in the first place and she was really proud of me for being a good person or whatever and idk if he actually was impressed with my actions or if he saw that I was stressed about my parent’s reactions and wanted to mitigate that, but that was such a good move.

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IDK. I just have a hard time thinking of any teacher I ever had both as capable of chaotic dry amusement and completely upright righteous anger. He modeled for us what it was like to evaluate things based on merit rather than based on rules and expectations, and you felt that energy constantly.

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hi hi! I understand your scepticism, but I lived Here for half a decade:

and nnno we don't call it "winter" when it's december even though we're TECHNICALLY in the northern hemisphere. because it is 35+ degrees during december and 35+ degrees during july and 35+ degrees every other time of the year as well. so it doesn't really make sense to reference the typical northern/southern seasons when you live right on the equator!

The mirror replied "To whom?"

"The miller who made the flour for my bread," the queen would say, or "Whoever spun the thread my shawl was made of".

The second time, she says "To the King," and she is pleased to see herself once more.

The third time, she says "To the Royal Advisor," and is once more satisfied to see herself.

The fourth time, she says "To the scribe who takes the King's letters." She is shown the man's wife. And she seethes, but quiets herself, for it is only right that a man loves his wife.

The fifth time, she says "To the Court Wizard," and is shown the man's departed mother as he remembers her from his youth, radiant and smiling and warm and larger than life.

The tenth time, she says "To the Stable Master," and is shown the fastest horse in the stable, majestic and free as the wind even in captivity

"To the baker," she is shown the man's daughter, young and adorable and full of joy and laughter.

"To the artist who did my portrait," she is shown a painting of a woman done by the man's teacher, who he still looks up to now that he is well established himself.

"To the Royal Knight," she is surprised but not displeased to see the castle's entire guard force in the middle of doing drills.

The one hundredth time she asks the mirror, and it asks her "to whom?" she once again says, "To me." And she does the same the one hundred and second, and again and again and again.