Woodsywander - Figuring Out Adulthood

Grumpy little rant:

I'm so fucking tired of trying to juggle a full-time class schedule as a student while also working full time. I work all day then come and I have to do MORE work for school and MORE work trying to clean up after myself which for some reason is obscenely hard because I'm the messiest person to ever exist and I'm SO FUCKING TIRED of not being able to cook a real fucking meal and I just keep eating chicken nuggets and pasta and I spend like 2 hours EVERY DAY thinking about how much I should be vegan or at the very LEAST vegetarian and I'm not and so here I am eating shitty food in a messy house and I'm Still overwhelmed ALL THE TIME I feel like I'm making compromises on everything instead of some things and getting nothing out of it and I'm just fucking tired. Oh, and did you hear the world is ending and I belong to the country that's fucking torturing people and fucking over literally everyone?? Sorry guys! Wish I had the time or energy to do something about it but I can't even put my fucking dishes away and I have 6 weeks worth of laundry on my bed. Fml

Ok but how do you even respond to that?? Am I doing my job or am I not?

Free will is realizing i can dip chicken nuggets in nacho cheese instead of ketchup

Another one:

Too tired to cook, too hungry to sleep

hey man is it cool if i bring my pet airpod. no worries if not

This is a fantastic linguistics paper – the researcher observed the artificiality and social pressure imposed on kids when they're asked to produce language on the spot, so instead had them talk to a rabbit in a room with a tape recorder. He found that when talking organically, without an adult authority figure around, their speech was exponentially more sophisticated, socially fluid, and creative.

As someone in the twitter thread points out, this has obvious implications for situations in which cued language production is used in diagnosis e.g. for autism. I'd add that (while this particular paper's remit is limited to children) it should also make us think about situations where adults are pressured to speak by authority figures: court hearings, police encounters, benefit assessments, asylum interviews, etc. If the presence of power hampers your ability to advocate for yourself, these are all rigged propositions.

Anyway, you can read the whole piece here (taken from a talk on his research, so it's very readable):

https://betsysneller.github.io/pdfs/Labov1966-Rabbit.pdf

e: sorry, I should add the context that this is a language study situated in Hawaii in 1970 so there are also some very significant racial socio-linguistic politics discussed here that might be distressing to read about. I don't want to discount that aspect of the power dynamic studied here either.

Hate how lighting a candle does wonders to my mood. Like wowwww. Grug like fire? Grug not sad anymore because Fire in Cave? Wow. Real predictable of Grug.