My kid’s grade is undergoing some “very important comprehensive testing” this week. Or maybe next week, I’m not sure. No testing is remotely important to third graders. It’s the teacher who is being evaluated. She’s written several emails to the parents exhorting us to tell the kids not to worry. Of course, the best way to make a kid worry is to persecute her with pleas not to.
Imagine a friend coming up to you and opening with, “please, don’t worry, everything is fine. There’s really no reason to worry at all.” Immediately you’d know that something bad occurred and you need to start worrying.
I wish teachers learned not to outsource their drama to kids and parents.
BREAKING: In a shocking moment, President Bukele says he won't return Abrego Garcia, who was accidentally sent to El Salvador. "How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I'm not going to do it." pic.twitter.com/871ExyrjvM
I don’t understand this whole story at all. Did Abrego García enter the US illegally? Is he a citizen of El Salvador? Is he now back in his country and under its jurisdiction? Why isn’t it very obvious to everybody that entering a country illegally should constitute more than sufficient grounds for removal from its territory?
It is a myth that you can only learn another language to near-native fluency in early childhood. I’ve been teaching languages for over 30 years and have seen enough to say with certainty that it’s very much possible in adulthood. I never said or heard a word of Spanish until I was 23. I currently have a student who was forced to start learning Spanish at age 33 because her husband had to move to Colombia for professional reasons. We both speak like natives.
Language learning in adulthood has to do with one’s personality type. Have you noticed how I change my opinions dramatically on very big topics, read extremely widely, always come up with unexpected new interests, teach something very out there and new often, and shift my research interests like chess pieces? That’s why I learn languages easily.
In order to achieve fluency in another language, you need to be fine with the idea that there’s another way. One that is as good as yours or maybe even better. You need to have a higher than average need for change and stimulation.
At the same time, change is a heavy burden for a human brain. This is why I compensate my protean shifting in some areas with iron-clad rigidity in others. It’s downright comical how set in my ways I am in some things while keeping everybody dizzy with constant changes in others.
There’s neither sin nor virtue in any personality type. My facility with languages is not a sign of moral superiority. Or anything much except having a brain with weak dopamine receptors and figuring out how to use that to make money instead of perishing in a car crash.
The guy who tried to burn down the house of the Governor of Pennsylvania is as beyond politics as the Moldovan kid who murdered his mom. People politicize this needlessly. Both criminals should absolutely be in jail but trying to figure out what their politics was is a waste of time. They are both clearly in the grip of something that utterly apolitical in nature.
Authorities said that Nikita Casap, 17, killed his parents in February in a plan to finance the assassination of US President Donald Trump and overthrow his government
Before anybody jumps to any conclusions, the little dude’s mom is called Tatiana. This is probably not remotely political at all.
I ran across a group of online diabetics who insist that their doctors tell them to eat a high-carb diet. People have a tendency to hear exactly what they want, so I don’t believe their protestations of how their doctors tell them to stuff their faces with bananas and cereal. Even small children know that diabetics can’t eat carbs, so pretending that this is a huge revelation is strange.
After observing the happenings at my university, I now understand how the 2008 crisis could happen. My question was always, they had to know. They had to know the model was unsustainable and was going to blow up soon. Why didn’t they do anything?
Today I know. People will hold on to the last, decaying remnants of what’s familiar and comforting. They’ll close their eyes to reality. They’ll deny the evidence of their own senses. They’ll stick their heads into the sand and ignore everything in order to pretend that the status quo can be preserved forever.
The link to the review is here, and yes, my friends, the review is as neoliberal as those books seem to be. You can catch a glimpse of how a brain that has been marinated in neoliberalism works. Although I do understand that “works” is too generous a word to apply to the linked piece of writing.
The author of the review doesn’t really review anything. She retells the plot in a scatty manner of somebody who interrupted her reading after every two pages to check the much more enticing goings on in her social media accounts. What the reviewer thinks of the books or what connection she sees between them other than that their heroines go on dates is never explained.
Only at the end of the article does she venture into something akin to reviewing. Here is the entirety of that part of the piece:
“YOLO” is the last phrase to appear on the last page of this book — and lo, you doth only live the very once. You might as well write like it. This book swings big. The ball arcs toward Gehenna, and Kemp’s hyper narrator Naruto-runs off the page, trying kawaiily to get under it. Here, at last, is someone doing something new.
Do you understand what this paragraph means? Neither do I. I have read the review and have no idea what the reviewer wants to say or why she even bothered. Neoliberalism always devolves into utter meaninglessness. Meaningless books, relationships, lives. It’s all as bleak and tawdry as these novels and the person writing about them.
Are you his best friend, too? Have the rest of his friends also become acquaintances? The reason why I ask is that the romantic relationship between the two of you has collapsed because you wanted him more than he did you, so the relationship was unequal. (Of course, the he/she may be completely swapped in your situation).
Another question is, are you still in love with this person? Meaning, are you really friends or an unwanted ex-lover clinging to a situation and a person being clung to?
If the relationship is still unequal, I think the right thing to do is to find a reason why the situation of being rejected is something that you seek. Once you figure out why “continuously rejected by the only person who matters” is your go-to scenario, the scenario will go away and you’ll move on to something better without even noticing.
I’m not suggesting any drastic measures like dropping this person immediately because if this is a situation that you need, you’ll re-engineer it in some other form. Instead, I suggest thinking about other situations in your life when you felt like you did when this person refused to move in. And other situations where you felt like you do at the realization that you’ll remain all alone if you cut this person out.
It’s always best to find the reason instead of forcing yourself into something. The way you know you found your answer is when the situation falls away painlessly and casually.
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