And notice the potato doesn’t guilt you with “if you don’t, something horrible will happen.” Potato wouldn’t betray you like that, because potato is a refined person of good humor and character, and understands that, sometimes, a visit to your dashboard just isn’t convenient right now. Sometimes you just went on a fandom gif reblogging spree or your energy is low, you do not have the time to make your dashboard suitable to guests, and a polite visit just isn’t in the cards. Potato understands this, and doesn’t get upset, or gods forbid, throws a tantrum and wishes ill on your household. Instead, Potato merely stores away their blessings for a later visit and leaves as a good friend should.
I had “the worst herniated c5-c6” my surgeon and ortho docs had ever seen, and I could not feel or use one arm, I could barely breathe or talk and I couldn’t fucking move. parts of my disc were traveling up and down my spinal canal causing spinal cord injury symptoms. my surgeon decided to operate immediately or else I might. Idk. become permanently quadriplegic?
but my insurance, not understanding the severity of my illness or not caring, wouldn’t cover the surgery to fix it unless I went to the hospital and sat in the emergency room and waited for twelve fucking hours. that was the only way they would cover the surgery within a week.
I had HOURS for nerve damage to become a permanent issue. I wasted so many of them because of this bullshit. this country is absolutely deranged and makes being sick and disabled so needlessly traumatic and morbid. It’s such a horrible fucking joke
for the Europeans/Canadians/Aussies— this is literally a best-case-scenario for Americans in my exact same circumstances, too. This was a “good” hospital. I have “good” insurance. This was a “good” doctor who was on my side and literally wanted me to have the surgery. and it still(!!!) didn’t work out in anyones favor except for my insurance company.
to save MONEY
disabled Americans are all being held hostage by a capitalist death cult and not even our doctors can save us
I'll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.
Most classroom practice is astrology.
Before the late 19th century, no human society had ever attempted to formally educate the entire populace. It was either aristocracy, meritocracy, or a blend. And always male.
We’re still smack-dab in the middle of the largest experiment on children ever done.
Most teachers perpetuate the “banking” model (Freire) used on them by their teachers, who likewise inherited it from theirs, etc.
Thus the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction continues even though it’s ineffectual with most kids.
What’s worse, the key strategies we’ve discovered, driven by cognitive science & child psychology, are quite regularly dismissed by pencil-pushing, test-driven administrators. Much like Trump ignores science, the majority of principals & superintendents I’ve known flout research.
Some definitions:
Banking model --> kids are like piggy banks: empty till you fill them with knowledge that you're the expert in.
Lyceum --> originally Aristotle's school, where the sons of land-owning citizens learned through lectures and research.
Things we (scholars) DO know:
-Homework doesn't really help, especially younger kids.
-Students don't learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don't either (it's supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).
-Spending too much time on weak subjects HURTS.
Do you want kids to learn? Here's something we've discovered: kids learn things that matter to them, either because the knowledge and skills are "cool," or because .... they give the kids tools to liberate themselves and their communities.
Maintaining the status quo? Nope.
Kids are acutely aware of injustice and by nature rebellious against the systems of authority that keep autonomy away from them.
If you're perpetuating those systems, teachers, you've already freaking lost.
They won't be learning much from you. Except what not to become. Sure, you can wear them down. That's what happened to most of you, isn't it? You saw the hideous flaw in the world and wanted to heal it. But year after numbing year, they made you learn their dogma by rote.
And now many of you are breaking the souls of children, too.
For what?
It's all smoke and mirrors. All the carefully crafted objectives, units and exams.
WE. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. PEOPLE. LEARN.
We barely understand the physical mechanisms behind MEMORY. But we DO know kids aren't empty piggy banks. They are BRIMMING with thought.
The last and most disgusting reality? The thing I hear in classroom after freaking classroom?
Education is all about capitalism.
"You need to learn these skills to get a good job." To be a good laborer. To help the wealthy generate more wealth, while you get scraps.
THAT is why modern education is a failure.
Its basic premise is monstrous.
"Why should I learn to read, Dr. Bowles?"
Because reading is magical. It makes life worth living. And being able to read, you can decode the strategies of your oppressors & stop them w/ their own words.
These tweets are from Dara Kass. She's an MD. Please take her advice on how to deal with this current situation. Read. Take notes. Memorize it. And protect yourselves.
the other night i tried to make a curry and i got chilli burns all over my face, so i thought to myself ‘hang on, doesn’t milk soothe chilli burns? it does’ and i couldn’t google because i couldn’t see so i just had to blindly feel my way to the fridge and pour out a bowl of milk, and then plant my face in the bowl of milk, anyway at that point the rice cooker went off and triggered a power surge which turned my electricity off, which i didn’t notice at first because i had my face in a bowl of milk and when i did emerge from the dairy prison i thought i had gone blind with chilli burns. so no i don’t really cook much.
Apropos of a really stupid bunch of people on twitter I mean nothing speaking as a librarian every time I do a big whack of weeding I reflect happily on how many book fetishists would be pissing their pants.
This is why I’m not allowed on twitter.*
(*note: I am the one who has made this rule for myself.)
Like you have to understand: books are just things. They are objects. They are a very effective way to contain information, whether that information is a description of history, a poem, instructions on how to change a tire, or an epic work of fiction, but they’re just objects.
Some of them are very lovely objects, and deserve preservation because they are lovely works of craft in their binding or their creation; some of them are precious to an individual person, and so deserve preservation the same way a beloved stuffed animal, or carving, or jacket, or other object that has personal meaning imbued in it, deserves preservation. Some of them are the only repository of their information, or are a single historically significant repository, and so are valuable as historical artifacts. But none of that is because “they’re books”. Like every other object in human existence, they are valuable or not valuable based on their context and history or lack thereof.
But a book is just a convenient way of assembling information, in one way or the other.
When Nazis burned books it was not bad Because The Objects Were Sacred. It was bad because they did it to destroy knowledge forever. They did it to erase knowledge and information and words from the world. At that time and in that place, burning the physical copies was a very efficient way of doing that because the technology and dissemination of most of them was such that destroying these collections would make that information unavailable within their borders, or anywhere they controlled.
It would in fact destroy that knowledge.
When you chuck an old romance novel in the recycling - or even use it as kindling! - it does not actually destroy any knowledge. When someone carves out an old copy of a book to use for an art project, it does not destroy any knowledge. They’re just things; they have served their purpose. Hoarding impulses aren’t any less pathological just because the object you can’t bring yourself to chuck is a book, instead of an item of clothing or a broken vacuum.
If you want to keep things, go ahead! You are the decider of what is valuable to you. But there is no moral or ethical value in being horrified that objects that have served their purpose are being disposed of, however that disposal happens; the information, the knowledge, continues, and that is what has value.
As a fellow librarian, I just want to add the following rebuttal to various objections to throwing books out:
“Why can’t you host a book sale instead of just tossing them?” We already did and no one wanted them. Or we don’t have the staff or the time to host one without sacrificing something else that we’re doing for patrons.
“Why can’t you give them away to people who might need them?” If you understand why donating expired food or clothing with stains is not actually helping people in need, you should be able to figure out this one.
“You should recycle them instead of just sending them to the landfill!” A lot of books, especially books with library binding, can’t be recycled. Or they can be, but it costs a lot of money, which we don’t have.
“But surely it’s better to hold onto books if they’re still in okay condition!” Not necessarily! When we weed books, we now have the space for new books. Maybe we can get a new copy of a classic with better notes, making it more accessible to people. Maybe that book we just threw out had outdated information (we had to replace all of our solar system books, for example). Maybe the needs or interests of the community changed, and we can buy materials better suited to them. When we removed old reference material that was outdated and not being used by patrons, we had room to add new things, like musical instruments, board games, and sewing machines!
Weeding isn’t about depriving people of library resources, it’s making sure that the library can offer the best resources possible.
And also like, look: when the newest James Patterson book comes out, to serve our community we need to buy roughly four copies. In fact we have a system set up where a certain number of Holds on a title automatically triggers a new purchase of the title because otherwise the hold list lasts for like a year before our patrons get to actually read that book. At which point there is probably another new James Patterson book out.
Two years later, we really, really do not need four copies of the same James Patterson book. MAYBE some of them will be sold! (And trust me we as a public library DO have book sales and they’re quite important as revenue.) But not always. Because actually by two years on everyone who wants to read that James Patterson book has probably read it. So yes. Some James Patterson is definitely going in the bin. Because every other public library also has this problem which means that the market is, I promise, flooded with James Patterson books. XP
And this goes triple for books that actually do have time-sensitive information. In my previous job I was in an academic library where the Head Librarian was tragically and painfully allergic to weeding. One of the major programs for that (small) college was practical nursing.
Let me be super clear: useful books in practical nursing have a lifespan of about five to ten years. That’s how fast the information changes, how often regulations change, these days how often drug information and best practices can change. It is a very fast-moving field and it should be. But that means other than maybe one or two copies for an archive that focuses on the history of practical nursing, fifteen year old practical nursing books are … .
Well. They’re garbage. Nobody wants them. And the fact that our shelves were cluttered with sub-optimal books in this area actually made it harder for our students to use, and discouraged them from trying to find helpful books in the library, because they’d have to hunt around for publication dates or hunt thru to find reliable books - and feel no assurance they were there.
Conversely in the Literary Arts section in my current library, there’s less turnover because, well. The text of Pride and Prejudice is pretty much the same as it has been for quite some time, and that copy doesn’t get worn out. So.
Choices are made in libraries to serve the stated purpose of that library, whether it’s to provide valuable access to information to a community, or to support students, or even support lawyers or healthcare workers or IT people in a large company. But none of them are actually designed or intended or useful to anyone as Giant Book Tombs Where Every Volume Ever Is Left To Disintegrate To Dust On The Shelf Due To Sentimental Object Reverence.
as much as the concept of Jesus being a fairly normal lad has its charms, im personally very intrigued by the idea of him being just… extremely weird. not even in a mystical sense, just…….staggeringly BIZZARRE.
you go to the well to get some water, and here’s Miriam’s boy, staring at the sky, completely still. his expression is unreadable. you hazard a hello and ask how he’s doing, and he slowly, unblinkingly, lowers his gaze on you (he’s 8 and is missing his frontal teeth, not that this is making you any less uncomfortable) and says “I cannot speak of the state of my being, Nathan son of Saul, my brother, but rejoice for the water you shall take today will be as pure as the soul of the children of Heaven”
even funnier, the only person 100% on board with his Prophetic Kid Talk is his mother Miriam, an otherwise placid, absolutely normal woman around 25 or so
kid JC, coming home at twilight, a single white dove following him and chirping with weirdly human-like precision:
moth̫́er,̦͌ ̮̉i h͙̉av͔̽e ͓͗b̘̃r̞̓o̮͘u̲̒gh̟͒t̺́ you a do̗͐ṽ͙e̢͘ ͈̾m͒͢a͈̽dē̝ ỏ̘f ͈̓c̆͜l͔̂aỷ͇ aṋ̑d̳̿ g͢͞i̹̾fted̖͡ ̻͐it ͓͂w̖̿it̎͜h t̥̃h͙͒e ̨̒m̧̂i̡̍ŗ͒â̫cḷ̔è̤ ̛̻of̞̅ l̘̈i̛̦fè̳
Miriam: ! that’s my little boy :) now let’s go get ready for dinner :)
her husband Yosef, a carpenter who only marginally got signed up for this:
God I know you have a sense of humor because otherwise there’s no explanation for the platypus and I hope it extends to comics about baby cryptid Jesus
Something i wish someone had grabbed me by the ears and told me when i was 19 is NOT EVERYONE IS GOING THROUGH IT--suicidal thoughts aren't normal or common!! GET HELP!!
I was talking to a group of friends very recently about therapy, as we all went regularly, and they were taking about getting diagnosed with ADHD. i was taking about how annoying it was, my psychiatrist wouldn't consider it for another year, how are you getting medicated?
All of them were confused as they solely had counselors. I then realized that it was Just Me. It was Just Me with the hair pin suicidal ideation. It was just me with serious mood didturbances. It was really Just Me.
And this revelation isn't too discount my friends at all, but to highlight something that had been dragging me down:
I looked at my friends, thinking we were all going through it, and got frustrated with myself that i couldn't do even a teenie tiny fraction of what they could. I thought we were all fighting to live because we all joked about it, but somehow i was the only one "too weak/lazy/stupid" to keep up.
I thought operating at 2% was normal, just that my 2% was shittier than everyone else's. It only took me the better half of a decade to realize that it's not fucking normal! Get help immediately. Idc how "bad" it is, you deserve help and care and to not function at 2%,you deserve 100%.
I like to be myself. @avengersdrabbles - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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