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Sigh, how many men’s careers are efforts to refute the validity of someone some woman did that made them feel bad one time?

or other genders, I guess, could do this, but, anyway.

“Yeah, sure, you’re world famous for carving intricate art into wooden desks. Wow, your last work sold for millions. Wow.”

This is a made-up scenario, but I have a feeling it exist somewhere, and the guy I imagined is saying, yeah, he’s just passionate about art, and really, he’s just devoting his life to making me wrong for telling him to stop carving his desk in class. He’d rather devote his life to avenging the perceived personal attack rather than acknowledging that I was doing my job in which I was held responsible for both his ability to perform on some dumb standardized test and the government property he was defacing. #abolishschools.

sequel to Good Will Hunting about Will’s daughter Trisha, who was raised in Boston and a Southern Hemisphere Anglophone country. She is a genius who looks for treasure and deals with generational trauma. 

I heard some guys talking about treasure hunting and misheard it for something.

As an old lady, I’m happy for all the younger ladies and other marginalized groups coming up with confidence. 

As the last generation thoroughly enough conditioned to be ladylike, it’s like being a doe in the last generation of deer that just accepted that Does aren’t allowed to have antlers and bucks have to wait to grow them. 

Then, suddenly all the fawns are born with antlers. Ouch. 

ouch, ouch, ouch. That’s what raising confident, tech-savvy children.

But, cool, the kids seem to have equality and a defense against the cruelty of the world. Surely, they have our back? Right? Empowered females will come to the defense of us olds who can’t get past our “niceness” conditioning.

Membership in organized religion is sometimes like being a house cat, with all the variety. In my group, a very un-cat-like cat. The kind that wouldn’t eat a dead owner’s face, kill baby birds or destroy furniture. Also, my cat was declawed, even though it never wanted to climb anything or fight anyone. 

But the house burned down while the owner was away and the un-malicious, declawed cat was unleashed into a world of outdoor cats, where the claw-having cats were eager to fight and the only food was baby birds up in trees. 

*The cat knows it must eat the baby birds to survive. As often as well-meaning bystanders love to say, “You can just go kill some baby birds,” the cat not only finds that repulsive, but it can neither climb nor kill. Its digits have been amputated. 

It’s, in my opinion, inherently patriarchal. The way I experience the painful end of it is inherently patriarchal.

I hear a lot of majority, male, otherwise privileged individuals lauding themselves for “not following the rules,” “subverting authority” or “playing by their own rules.”

But they’re not following their own rules, they’re following  a very boring set of ancient rules, in which they perpetuate their infant state—in which they require constant attention and service. They aren’t subverting authority, they are affirming their own authority as the most favored group. 

As long as I’m going to continue being lumped together with my age peers AND their children, I’m going to differentiate between my age group and the next group down—the group harder to name even than mine. (Remember when they were calling us the MTV generation?)

My group is the group that was never allowed to grow up, but still indoctrinated to the rules of growing up:

1) You must obey the rules (unless you’re a douche.)

2) You must arrange your young life around the goal of going to Uni, getting a good job and buying a house.

3) Oops. Turns out you can’t get a job, own a house or pay for that degree you were supposed to get.

4) Shame on you.

My group is doing a lot to care for the current younglings. They, uh, aren’t quite like us. We never got to be adults, and neither, really, do they. But they didn’t really get to be kids, either. They started out without privacy, needing already to perform a brand like we learned to do as teens. 

They, however, I have noticed, aren’t ashamed of their inability to achieve the markers of adulthood like so many of us are. 

You know what else? We helped shape them. I have a feeling a lot of us came to believe that much of our pain came from not being listened to as children and we compensated by really listening to and accommodating them. You can see in the young achievers. We, the older failures, cleared part of the way for them by not breaking their wills the way ours were broken.

So, I have realized, maybe it is fair to lump us together. The old, bitter children as stepping stones for the young, more entitled never-children. 

Like de-clawed cats holding up the kittens to the unclimbable fence so they can reach the tree just out of our own reach. 

*Oh, look. What a bummer.

*university, for those who can’t forgive American lexemes.

It’s me, from, like, 11-13 years in the future.

so, remember HBO? Well, now you can choose what to watch at any time, like with MP3s on media player. Still have both original shows and other stuff. It’s different from TiVo. It’s called streaming.

Also, remember that company that lets you choose DVDs online and then mails them to you in little red envelopes? Well, now they’re another streaming service like HBO.

Remember that website we used to buy textbooks? They have a streaming service, too! Also, the wealthiest person of all. He bought a newspaper, even. 

And Disney has a streaming thing, too. And they bought Star Wars, and all the Marvel movies except X-men. Oh, and Superhero movies are the whole deal now. There’s this group called the Avengers, but not like the British one. They’ve got the Hulk and a bunch of unpleasant anti-heroes you’ve never heard of, or maybe kind of heard of, like Iron Man. Remember the actor who got high and went to bed in the wrong house, he’s like, the most popular superhero now. 

Do you watch Youtube yet? It’s some people’s whole jobs, now.

There are a few other streaming things, and that’s pretty much all of life, Remember that ad for I-phones? Well, that caught on. You can watch all the shows on your phone now. 

Don’t go on that mission trip. Don’t quit your job. It could be so much worse. Change majors and do AGRADE. Don’t go overseas. Vote in 2010. 

Very sadly, I was listening to bingemode HP while reading commentary about real life sad stuff.

very, very unfortunately, someone was mentioning the marauders showing off for each other right when I was thinking about prep school boys hurting people to impress each other.

The four beloved teen boys had the privileges of great magical powers, intelligence and friendship, and they used their gifts for themselves. It just happened to work out for good.

Dear most advanced class at the most advanced boarding I could find,

I was recently informed (significantly, perhaps, too you) that my son did well on some tests that were important to the people who made those kids take tests. I also informed (significantly, to me) that my son is not very nice. 

My son, himself, insists that this is because other people are dumb and deserve to know. I felt very bad about this and thought about for a long time.

I have had to contend with the fact that in spite of my efforts, my influence on my own son is far out-gunned, out-manned and out-numbered (but not likely out-planned.) by that of entertainment. That’s a given, the more important obvious point is that the most popular entertainment of every form often portray intelligent characters that are also mean, sarcastic or rude to everyone else. The storytelling grounds this by saying, “He’s got PTSD, so it’s ok that he’s a jerk. He’s socially awkward, so it’s ok for him to be rude. He’s smarter, wealthier and/or better at fighting fictional problems than others, so he’s allowed to disrespect them and they have to take it.” The exhausted trope also continues on the justification that sick burns are fun to write and watch, and the fact that such awful people are very compelling and likeable for various reasons. 

I suspect that in addition to this, my son may be the victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but don’t want to explain any of that. 

Therefore, I thought it best to keep him away from anyone dumb enough to deserve to be bullied by him. I’ve been assured that my son will be the dumbest  kid in the school according to tests. He is probably anticipating that everyone will talk to him the way he talks to those he considers dumb. I suspect he’s preparing all-manner of counter-burns, snark and sass for everyone, especially the instructors. Either:

A. He will be emotionally traumatized by the abuse of higher smarts.

B. His caustic wit will have him “leading the pack.”

C. He’ll be impressed by the intelligence of everyone else but also find intelligent people are actually kind. He will then decided to:

In any case, he may or may not learn anything or benefit in any way. 

As a high-achiever and good intelligence-test taker I have been placed in two different kinds of advanced groups:

1. Kids that loved learning for learning’s sake and didn’t care how this related to status.

2. Kids who cared most about their status as superior to others and the ability to exclude those who didn’t belong.

Later, as an adult I encountered a new group.

3. Children (and adults) who believe their heritage makes them inherently more intelligent, harder working, more morally upright and possessing better culture than others. More importantly, they feel compelled to remind members of other groups of these elements of superiority whenever possible. 

I don’t actually care how many of each group meets or how his life goes. As mother of my generations, I am guaranteed to be highly criticized for every aspect of my efforts to prepare my child for survival in the future. My out-dated but unshakeable moral habits with cause me to respond with debilitating guilt and sadness. I won’t live to see how his life turns out, and I don’t care about yours any more than you care about mine or those of any of the adults who are giving their lives over to improving yours. I only want to acknowledge that I understand how the system works and I’m not gaming it—not because I’m too dumb to know about it—but because it feels wrong. 

So, do whatever you were going to, but consider being nice, even if it is a commitment to losing to those who think everything is a burn-battle and other people don’t deserve to be treated respectfully. 

sincerely,