A very tired student is trying their best.

My mother- who was a single parent raising me alone in my early youth- has never believed in baby talk. So when I was born, she started from day one talking to me and treating me like I was an adult. 

As a result of this, I had rather high expectations of other adults from a very young age, and despised being talked down to. The worst was being asked sweetly and stupidly y over and over, “can you say “hello”?” in a way that felt like I was an animal being coaxed into performing a trick. 

In my earliest years, I learned that using certain words and phrases could convince new adults to treat me the way I preferred. So to combat the annoyances of being treated like a subhuman idiot, I began purposefully expressing myself with a broad vocabulary. 

My mother started teaching me how to read when I was three. By the time I was five, my favourite thing to read was Calvin and Hobbes anthologies, partly because I loved tigers, but mostly because in every other book I’d read, kids my age were written as stupid babies with no thought process or agency who nobody seemed to think of as capable of thinking or contributing. Calvin, though, was only a year older than me, and had a rich inner world, and was capable of speaking meaningfully and eloquently while still being a kid. Calvin was a kid the way that kids WERE, not the way adults saw us.

As a consequence of this, I think, I developed a prematurely warped sense of humour wherein- again, starting around age five- the funniest thing in the world to me was to approach adults and instigate conversations wildly beyond my age range. Like “oh, you’re slowing yourself down for me? Bold of you to assume I’m not already four steps ahead”.

I imagine this was probably very annoying, as I mostly didn’t actually have the experience or context to fully understand a lot of the subjects I was talking about and was mostly just imitating the persona of a mildly disinterested and somewhat philosophical old woman, but I genuinely understood enough vocab to bluff around the gaps in my knowledge long enough for the funny part to happen. 

My preferences to spend more of my time fucking with adults instead of my peers slowly widened the already-existing gap between me and the majority of my schoolmates, which honestly didn’t bug me much because the two friends I DID have were way more fun than the rest of them anyways.  But I was probably a bit emotionally stunted by this point anyways 

Cut to me, age nine or so. Annoying know-it-all, deeply ironic, and the kind of kid who would rather lick a carrot peeler than suffer through the torture of meaningful emotional vulnerability with any adult ever

First real health class

We get the Puberty talk

Skin-peelingly awkward

Mr. Q, our fifty-ish something teacher, brings out a question box and a bunch of scraps of paper. Says he wants everyone to write down at least one question and he would pull a handful of them out anonymously to answer. 

I cannot resist

We all submit our questions

Question one. “What is a vulva”

Diagram. Clinical and age-appropriate response. 

Question two. “Is love nothing more than a chemical reaction designed to ensure the survival of the species?”

Long awkward pause

Teacher clears his throat

[This is hilarious]

Teacher speaks

“Uh…….”

“Well, um. I suppose… I love my wife. And I love my children. Or I would describe what I feel for them as love.”

Oh No

[Dawning realization that I have trapped myself and everyone in this room in a Feelings Talk]

[Panic and stare directly through the floor until he stops talking about his personal emotions regarding family and society and shit]

[Pain And Suffering And Hell because this is, in fact, what I signed us all up for, because boarding a plane to Alaska means that you are definitely going to Alaska, no matter if it was a joke or not, because the plane doesn’t give a fuck, because it is a plane and you are a moron]

The lessons in humour I learned that day have stuck with me ever since

Sincerity always wins

"Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?"

We don't talk about acid rain because there isn't any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.

We don't talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.

On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there's nothing to notice. But don't be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.

1st image: two tweets.

From "Matt Walsh", @MattWalshBlog

Remember when they spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the ozone layer

From "Derek Thompson", @DKThomp

What happened is scientists discovered chlorofluorocarbons were bad for the ozone, countries believed them, the Montreal Protocol was signed, and CFC use fell by 99.7%, leading to the stabilization of the ozone layer, perhaps the greatest example of global cooperation in history.

2nd image: Bender, the robot from Futurama, staring out into space, showing blue and purple nebulas and bright white stars. A caption reads:

When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.

people won’t be sure you’ve done

anything at all.

a single magpie with purple hyacinths, both signifying sorrow