Aliens & Anorexia, Chris Kraus
When you spend all day gentle parenting other people’s children and then watch their parents undo it :)
Me: hey dude, I know you don’t like wearing your shoes, but to play over here you have to wear shoes because if you don’t you could get hurt. If you don’t put on shoes, you cannot play here.
Child whose incentive to put on shoes is to join playtime: ok
Parent at pickup: What did I say about taking off your shoes? If you don’t have your shoes on in three seconds I’m going to take you to the bathroom and spank your bare bottom!
Child whose incentive to put on shoes is now fear of physical pain: *screaming crying and running away resulting in more disruption*
Me: hey guys, I heard you two were having some problems earlier. I know you two are usually friends, so let’s take a few deep breaths and then we can talk about what happened and make up, okay?
Their parents in the parking lot: *screaming their heads off at each other*
Their parents in the
parking lot: *screaming their heads
off at each other*
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly.
There’s a boy in you about three
years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl.
The child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”
You live with this child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want
To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.
/end id]
kids were roleplaying with minecraft figurines and one of them had their figure go up to the other and say “i’m in love with you” and the other one replied “sword slash to the chest. and you’re on fire”
this is how loving somebody in real life works btw
When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises.
Ted Hughes, from ‘Letters of Ted Hughes’ — Donald Hall, late 1963
People refuse to be loved the same way dogs want to throw up in the most inconvenient places.
You're a social pack animal with enough awareness of yourself and enough theory of mind to understand that you're unwell and that the others around you don't want to see you unwell. But you've also got like 3 brain cells going on in there so the most logical solution to this problem is to hide in places where they won't see you, so you can feel bad without anyone else being aware of it, so nobody else will be upset by this.
This feels like an excellent idea even when you've been on the other side of it and you know how much you hate it when someone you love is struggling and won't let you help. But no matter how much the people who love you won't enjoy cleaning up your vomit from the middle of the living room, at the end of the day that's better for everyone involved than having to first spend 3 hours trying to find where the problem is, because something's wrong and you went out of your way to make sure it's hard to find.
It's hard to go to people you love for help when people who didn't deserve your love and trust have punished you for doing so. It's counterintuitive, it goes against what makes sense to you. Don't beat yourself up for doing what instinctively feels right.
But for the love of god let them pull you out from under the couch before you get it on the hardest-to-reach spot on the carpet.