So, My University Does A Lot Of Outreach Classics Work, Trying To Make It Less Of An Elitist Subject

A lot of pets will ignore you, but only a cat will follow you from room to room and check your lines of vision to make absolutely certain that you can see them ignoring you.

if you dont have me on facebook you are probably not missing out on any posts but the comment section is important too lmao

okay, so I’ve seen multiple posts just today that were basically like “haha who ever said adulthood was having your life together and everything figured out, I’m 28 and real life is drowning me as much as it ever was”

and like…the answer to that is…adults. adults said that. generation after generation, the narrative from adults to young people has been, “you are a dumb kid who doesn’t know the world or yourself but I am a Grownup with Life Experience™, and that’s why you’re supposed to do what I tell you, that’s why I don’t need to listen to your thoughts and feelings, that’s why society imagines me as a full human being and you as something that’s going to grow into a full human being.”

there’s a great book all about this that I’ve had a lot of my students read - Childhood and Society, by a sociologist named Nick Lee. Lee argues that the child/adult binary is a socially constructed one, based, like any other such binary, on an imagined idea of clearly oppositional characteristics. specifically, he says that children are imagined as incomplete, unstable (as in their lives and experiences are constantly changing, not as in mentally unstable), and dependent, and adults as complete, stable, and independent. those characteristics don’t match up to reality if you think about them too hard for even a moment - no one is truly independent, adults’ lives aren’t stable, what does judging a human being’s “completeness” even mean - but it doesn’t matter, because our culture is so obsessed with believing in them.

and adults being forced to pretend they’re complete and independent and living stable lives is one of the toxic ways all this plays on people of all ages.

I really hope that seeing my generation talk like this - just flat-out admit that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing any better than we did ten years ago - means we have the potential to break this cycle. but honestly, entering my 30s and having seen so many people my age turn into those adults who act like they have life so well figured out compared to those dumb kids, it doesn’t seem likely. we might be a little better than we could’ve been, but too many of us are going down that tired old road of transitioning from talking about how much smarter we are than our parents to talking about how much smarter we are than our kids, just like every generation does when it hits this age.

I guess what I’m saying is, please, young 20-somethings of today, be better ten years from now than we are.

17% of cardiac surgeons are women, 17% of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice? …We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17% women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33% women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.

Source: NPR: Hollywood Needs More Women

(via febryafanblog)

Watch: Carl Sagan schooled B.o.B. on his flat Earth theory more than 30 years ago

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STILL ON PATROL

I learned something new and horrifying today which is… that… no submarine is ever considered “lost” … there is apparently a tradition in the U.S. Navy that no submarine is ever lost. Those that go to sea and do not return are considered to be “still on patrol.”

?????

There is a monument about this along a canal near here its… the worst thing I have ever seen. it says “STILL ON PATROL” in huge letters and then goes on to specify exactly how many WWII submarine ghosts are STILL OUT THERE, ON PATROL (it is almost 2000 WWII submarine ghosts, ftr). Here is the text from it:

“U.S. Navy Submarines paid heavily for their success in WWII. A total of 374 officers and 3131 men are still on board these 52 U.S. submarines still on patrol.”

THANKS A LOT, U.S. NAVY, FOR HAVING THIS TOTALLY NORMAL AND NOT AT ALL HORRIFYING TRADITION, AND TELLING ALL OF US ABOUT IT. THANKS. THANK YOU

anyway now my mother and I cannot stop saying STILL ON PATROL to each other in ominous tones of voice

Hi! Just a genuine question, I was curious as to why you dislike the Rainbow Fish?

Because Rainbow Fish can be retold like this: 

A fish has a part of their body - their physical, incarnate body, what they were born with - that makes them very happy and that they are very proud of. They also have an unfortunate habit of thinking that they are better than other fish. That part isn’t good, and causes the other fish to be unhappy with them and avoid them. 

The fish is now very sad. The only person who likes the fish anymore tells him to go to the octopus, the animal framed as the adult in the story. 

The octopus tells the rainbow fish that they have been a snotty jerk and that the only way to make people like them again is to take off their scales and give them away. That in order to have any friends and make up for their behaviour, they have to rip off pieces of their own body and self and give them away to other people to make the other people happy and make up for their transgressions. 

And the rainbow fish is upset. And then another fish comes and asks them for a scale. And the rainbow fish takes off a piece of themself, their body, the thing they were born into, and gives it away. And now that fish likes him, and is materially benefitted by this piece of another fish’s actual body that has been given to it. 

And then the other fish come, and the rainbow fish rips off more parts of its body - all of the parts that used to make it happy and that it was proud of - and gives them to the other fish, because it’s not fair that the rainbow fish’s body was so much nicer. And when the rainbow fish has ripped all but one scale off, tearing out of themself all but one of the things that they possessed in their self that made them happy, then all the fish are friends with them! And everything is great! And everyone has a fair share. 

Of the rainbow fish’s, and I do quite mean to keep hammering this point, own body.

What the book says is: 

1. if you are born with something nice - like, for instance, an attractive body or a clever mind or a talent or whatever - and it makes you happy and proud, you are a horrible person and deserve to be shunned. Absolutely no line is ever drawn between Rainbow Fish’s self, their actual own body, and their behaviour. In reality, it’s their behaviour that’s the problem: they are mean and aloof to the other fish. This could be the case whether or not their body was all covered with magnificent scales. However, the book absolutely conflates the two: their behaviour is framed as a natural and unavoidable outcome of being happy about and proud of their special, beautiful body. So don’t you dare ever be happy or proud of anything you have or can do that everyone else doesn’t have exactly the same amount as, because if you do, you are horrible and by definition snotty, stuck up and mean. 

2. That in order to make up for the transgression of having something about your actual self that makes you happy and proud (which, remember, has automatically made you selfish and snobby, because that’s what happens), you must rip pieces of what makes you happy out of yourself and give them to other people for the asking, and you must never ever EVER have more of that part of - again, I hate to belabour except I don’t - your self than other people have, and that makes you a good person that people like and who deserves friends. 

To summarize, then: to be a good person you must never have something about yourself that makes you happy and proud and if you happen to be born with that something you must absolutely find a way to give it away to other people and remove it from yourself, right up to tearing off pieces of your body, in order to be a good person who deserves friends. 

This, I am absolutely sure, is not what the author intended: the author definitely meant it to be a story about sharing versus not sharing. But the author then used, as their allegory/metaphor, the fish’s own actual body. Their self. It was not about sharing shiny rocks that the rainbow fish had gathered up for himself. It wasn’t even about the fish teaching other fish how to do something, or where to find something. 

The metaphor/allegory used is the fish’s literal. body. And so the message is: other people have rights to you. Other people have the right to demand you, yourself, your body, pieces of you, in a way that makes absolutely sure that you have no more of anything about your body and self that is considered “good” than they do. 

And that might just suck a little bit except, hah, so: Gifted adult, here. Identified as a Gifted child. 

This is what Gifted children are told, constantly. All the fucking time. 

(Okay, I overstate. I am sure - at least I fucking HOPE - that particularly by this time there are Gifted children coming to adulthood who did not run into this pathology over and over and over and over again. I haven’t met any of them, though, and I have met a lot of Gifted adults who were identified as Gifted as children.) 

Instead of being told what’s actually a problem with our behaviour (that we’re being mean, or controlling, or putting other people down), or - heavens forfend - the other children being told that us being better at something doesn’t actually mean moral superiority and is totally okay and not something we should be attacked for, we are told: they’re jealous of you. That’s the problem. 

Instead of being taught any way to be happy about our accomplishments and talents that does not also stop the talents and accomplishments of other children - whatever those are! - from being celebrated, we are left with two choices: to be pleased with what we can do, or what we are, or to never, ever make anyone feel bad by being able to do things they can’t. And the first option also comes with two options: either you really ARE superior to them because you have skills, abilities and talents they don’t (or are prettier), or you are a HORRIBLE stuck up monster for feeling that way. 

(It is not uncommon for Gifted kids to chose either side, which means it’s not uncommon for them to choose “okay fine I really AM better than you”; this can often be summarized as “intent on sticking their noses in the air because everyone else is intent on rubbing them in the dirt”; on the other hand I have met a lot of Gifted women, particularly*, who cannot actually contemplate the idea of being Gifted because to do so is to immediately imply that they are somehow of more moral or human worth than someone else and this means they are HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SELFISH PEOPLE, and so will find literally any reason at all that their accomplishments are not accomplishments or that they don’t deserve anything for them.) 

Instead of being given any kind of autonomy or ownership of ourselves, we are loaded down by other people’s expectations: we are told that because we can accomplish more we must, and that daring not to do what other people want to the extent that they want with what we are capable of we are selfish, slackers, lazy, whatever. We are taught that we owe other people - our parents, our friends, even The World - excellence, the very best we can possibly do, and trust me when I say people are ALWAYS insisting We Could Do Better. And we should, or else we will be disappointing them, or letting them down, because (because we are Gifted) the only reason we could possibly be failing is not trying hard enough. 

We are, in fact, told over and over and over and over again, to rip off pieces of ourselves to give to other people to make them happy, because those pieces are valuable, but forbidden from enjoying the value of those pieces - pieces of our selves - for our own sake because that would be selfish and arrogant. And we owe this, because we were born a particular way. 

Because, metaphorically, we were born with rainbow scales, so now we have to rip off those rainbow scales in the name of Sharing, and otherwise we are selfish and horrible and deserve to be alone.** 

That is why I fucking hate The Rainbow Fish. 

Because whatever the author INTENDED, the metaphor they chose, the allegory they picked, means that THAT is the story they actually told. (And is the story that child after child after child after child I have encountered actually takes from it.) I don’t hate the author; I’m not even mad at them. But I do hate the book with a fiery passion, and it is among the books I will literally rip apart rather than allow in my house when I have kids, because I’m not going to give it to anyone ELSE’s kid either. 

*but, I would like to note, not UNIQUELY: this is something I encounter in Gifted men as well. 

**I can’t remember who it was, in relation to this, put forward the thought: if people actually talked about the access and use of children’s bodies the way we talk about access to and use of Gifted children’s minds and talents†, the abusiveness would be absolutely clear? But they’re right. 

†because sometimes it is Gifted children’s bodies in an abstract way, in that its their talent for gymnastics or their talent for ballet or sport or whatever, so I mean in a very raw way, the actual physical embodied flesh we are. 

I love kids they’re all like.. “when i grow up i’m gonna be an astronaut and a chef and a doctor and an olympic swimmer” like that self confidence! That drive! That optimism! Where does it go