ceasing to question what doesn't concern us

Her mom and dad return and give her iPad on first request. She plays with it peacefully while adults talk. Mom moves to take it away for bedtime and it’s immediate tantrum. Screaming and crying tears. The screaming continues all the way to bathtime and bed. Mom and Dad have to cajole her with a snack and lots of attention for about twenty minutes before her crying stops.

Now, I want to be fair to these parents: toddler is overwhelmed by Mom and Dad returning from a, by her standards, “long” time away. It’s getting late, toddler is tired and maybe actually did need that snack. Toddlers also just act different around babysitters than they do mom and dad.

But for a toddler who was a pleasant and attentive kid for three days to dissolve into tantrum of that length as soon as she is reunited with and then separated from her iPad freaks me out. She is not a teen upset she can’t communicate with her friend. She’s not even a grade-schooler who didn’t save their Minecraft world. She’s a toddler who is distressed by being separated from an overstimulation machine.

Her parents have convinced themselves it’s a tool and a convenience by handing it to her and gaining silence at mealtimes and car rides and every request when she’s a bright kid who can spend just as much time with a book as with a screen, with much less distress at separation.

The monkey riding an elephant from the top left corner of the first panel of Hieronymous Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” triptych tattoo? Yeah it is

black hair? check. bad parent(s)? check. trauma? double check.

bruce: how’d you get your scar?

zuko: my dad got mad at me for saying that killing people is wrong so he lit my face on fire and banished me.

J: "wan na kno w h ow i go t thes e sc ar s"

Consider

Iroh: you too must learn patience. Boiling the water ruins the delicate flavor of the white jade

Alfred: oh I'm dreadfully sorry - for some reason I expected this tea to have TEA in it

(later)

Alfred: *aggressively laying out full tea service with milk, lemon, sugar, and, just to drive his point in, jam*

while Zuko is enthusiastic about cream and sugar

damn near every time I mention im working on a fic or piece of fanart, he gasps in hopeful anticipation and asks "tamatoa and heihei?!" and he always acts bitterly disappointed

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening

until 2020 when i was living on a boat completely alone in quarantine during the heat of lockdown. i woke up at 1 am from a dream in which i was whistling. i sat up in bed and i thought, "oh my god, i get it now,"

and i whistled. i whistled a tune, even. i took a video of myself whistling just to prove it to everyone.