It ain't paranoid if
I still read books aloud with my kids, even though they're grown. It's fun time. Like watching a show together, but a bit slower. During my son's teen years we spent quite a while going through the nine book series The Iron Druid by Kevin Hearne. I loved it when it first came out, read it quite a few times, and he loved it, too.
The eponymous character of the series is an iron-age druid who, by the most unlikely series of events, discovered a potion of immortality about 2,100 years ago. He has lived, under the radar, all that time, experiencing the slow roll of history and traveling the world. The books emphasize over and over again how prepared he is, and how strategic his thinking is. Not that he never messes up, the books wouldn't be fun if he didn't, but - always thinking ahead.
That was particularly fascinating to me and my son, both adhd, because thinking ahead, anticipating future problems, and being prepared for them is a particular challenge.
Cut to the current time; Son and I were discussing his limnology class and the upcoming field trip yesterday, and he filled me in on the precautions he has taken against possible bullshit from this highly difficult professor. Just wild. Approval for his fieldwork project - he got it in writing, because if he only got a verbal approval it would be possible for her to let him get it mostly done and then claim she never approved it. He has checked the other students' project topics so he knows where their data collection will overlap his. On the theory that she won't be able to claim his macroinvertebrate data is "wrong" somehow if several other students are also sharing the same data. Just wild 4d-chess thinking, but his prior experience in a class with her suggests that it is truly necessary to be Extremely Vigilant.
Jeez. Wish he could just study the waterbugs, already. But delighted that somehow, accidentally, we both learned good opsec-style thinking. From a fantasy book series.
