kids have no concept of anything. i walked into my kindergarten class and one kid asked me what my name was. when i said miss jones, he said “i like that name. did you know i’m in love with you”
i asked my four year old cousin how old he thought i was going to be at my next birthday and he said 8. im 23
once i told a 6 year old that i had finished school and was doing “more school” [university] and she asked “why haven’t you found anyone to marry then”
We were at a museum and I was asking for the student discount and my nine year old cousin looks up at me with his eyes wide and says “wait you’re a STUDENT??”
I used to babysit these three kids and the eldest who was around 11 at the time was talking about how adults are boring and when I told him I was an adult he said, “That’s not true, you’re my age”
our aunt teaches and she has this story about a little girl who really was always pretty quiet in class and then on the final day of kindergarten she just up and stated ‘i’m all teached now. i don’t need to be teached anymore. i’m done of being teached.’
once when i was 19, I told my little cousin that i was 19 and she looked up at me with huge eyes and went, “Does that mean you don’t have to bring an adult with you to the pool?”
My 6 year old cousin saw me driving for the first time, looked up at him mom and said “does that mean she is married now?”
I watched my dad and my niece (3 at the time) arguing over a pair of pants and whether or not they were also a dress. My neice’s argument was that they were, in fact, also a dress because they were blue.
I asked the kids in my daycare class what they thought I should be for Halloween and this little boy goes, “ooh I know! A pickle! You’d be such a good pickle”
On the first day of class with my favorite student of all time, I said, “Are you okay? You look like you have a question.” And she looked me right in the eyes and said, tremulously,
“Can a piranha eat a stapler?”
One time I was working with a kid and he looked up at me and asked “Do you have a boy?” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I told him that I did not have any boys. He looked shocked and then deeply concerned and said “Well, you better hurry up and shave your arms so you can get married; August is next month!”
I was sitting on the floor with my 3yo niece and we were playing with her younger brother’s alphabet blocks and the O had an octopus on it. So I picked it up and asked her what it was.
“Octopus,” she said, all curls and smiles.
“And what kind of animal is an octopus?” I asked. I was looking for “fish” or “sea creature” but I would have accepted almost anything–”weird,” “gross,” even “slimy.” “Underwater” or “it lives in the ocean” would have also been acceptable.
She looks me right in the eye and says, happy as a clam, “It’s a cephalopod.”
i always thought of a king sized bed as being a bit bigger than a queen, but now that i have one, i can tell you that a king sized bed is an absurdity. i can sprawl out, and my husband can sprawl out, and the cat can sprawl out, and none of us are touching. i reach out in the night, and find only pillows and plush walruses. i reach further and eventually find his elbow. he rolls over the comforters to try and find me. “i have crossed oceans of bed to be with you,” he says. there is a vast expanse of bed untouched, unmapped, unexplored. the cat is still trying to sleep on my face.
the best part is all the people reblogging this under the impression that my husband was being poetic rather than quoting a porn comic
PSA: never put stickers on your helmets (unless you have checked with the manufacturer) because the adhesive can weaken the structure!
One day my health teacher in middle school just like … didn’t show up for class. And so of course we were all “oh if he doesn’t show up in fifteen minutes we’re legally allowed to leave”, giggling about it and all the bullshit. He did eventually show up, ten minutes into the class time. He looked haggard as fuck, sweating all over, hair messed up, beaten to hell and back. We stared at him and were about to ask what in the world happened to him when he stopped in front of his desk and smacked his bicycle helmet down on it.
His helmet had this odd discolored patch on it. Like, white against white, but … weird? It’s then that I realized his helmet didn’t have a discolored patch, it had a patch missing. A big chunk of his helmet had just been shaved away, the curve of the helmet gone and sanded flat by whatever it had been scraped against. And running through that patch, from one side of the helmet to the other, was this big crack, like the whole helmet had split like an eggshell.
Our teacher took a couple deep panting breaths and then told our class: “And this,” he took another deep breath, “is why you always wear your helmet”.
And that’s the story of how an entire class of middle school students took helmet-wearing very seriously for the rest of their lives.
This reminds me of a party I went to last year. I was standing with some friends, chatting, and someone said something that indirectly implied that sexism exists. Some trivial recounting of the basic facts of daily life for most women. Something so mild, so uncontroversial, so mundane that I don’t even remember what it was.
Suddenly, this man standing on the outskirts of our conversational circle piped up with “actually, I think men are more discriminated against than women these days.”
All conversation died.
I turned to look at him and he had this smug, insufferable grin on his face, relishing this moment, expecting us to waste our time and energy refuting this ridiculous thing he had just said.
The Devil’s Advocate was among us.
And, in my mind, I saw the next 15+ minutes playing out. The parade of facts and statistics in a vain attempt to defend ourselves, our gender, and to prove that misogyny is real. The glib, snide denials from some shithead who is getting off on our pain and frustration. The Gish Gallop of bullshit that would take a whole evening to properly dismantle. It was depressing and overwhelming. I hated it. I had to kill it before it began.
So I looked him dead in the eye and I said “OK,“ shrugged, and just walked away.
Nothing I have ever said to another human being has ever been so crushing. As I walked away, I watched the smug grin vanish and confusion and anxiety set in. The rest of the group turned their backs to him and carried on as if he had never spoken – as if he was invisible. He was still staring at me when I walked over to another friend and told her what he had said. I pointed him out for her and made direct eye contact with him while we both laughed.
tl;dr: Don’t feed the troll. Let it perish, cold and hungry, in the wasteland of your indifference. It is weak and you are strong. Live your best life.
A group of rough looking boys walked past me today and all I heard of their conversation was “he’s got that anxiety disorder bro so I went with him so he’d be more comfortable” and it made me realise the world isn’t all that bad
The pet store I worked at had a pen with rabbits near the front door. On every side of the pen were huge signs saying “You can pet me, but don’t pick me up!” One day two absolutely huge guys came in and one immediately reaches into the pen to grab a rabbit. Before i could say anything his friend grabbed his arm and asked him “did you see the sign?” He said “yeah! it says that you can pick them up but don’t pet them!” Then he went quiet for a moment and softly said “I didn’t read it right did I?” And his friend just puts his arm on his shoulder and said “its ok, i know you’ve got that thing where words get mixed up. Let just pet these cute lil shits” And I still haven’t gotten over that interaction.
I was walking my dog through Boston bc he likes the likes car rides. He’s a little thing tbh we call him short and long. So this huge scary man with a full beard approaches me like “hey can my buddy and I pet your dog? He gets nervous around dogs but your’s is so small I think it’s a good place to start.” Ofc I was like “yes he’s very friendly!” So this guy brings his equally big friend over and they sit on the floor while this man looks terrified of my tiny dog so big man number one asks “can I pick him up?” And i say yes so he picks him up and puts him on man number two’s lap and man number two is abt to freak out and his friend straight up just goes “hey man, it’s okay just relax I’d never let anything hurt you. He’s a good boy.” I’ll never forget it ever bc I know that man looked at me (5’3 , glasses, probably wearing a sweater vest) and my dog (kinda goofy looking little thing) and was like ‘ah yes the two least intimidating living things I’ve seen in Boston all day he’ll feel relaxed around them’ and went out of his way to help his friend. It makes me so happy
I love this
I was (of course it was) in NYC at the time, riding on the R train and this burly, tall, leather and black jeans with fuck off huge steel-plated knee-highs and a fourteen foot lime green mohawk gets on the train and sit’s down, his jansport backpack making this Ghu-awful THUNK as he sets it between his feet. And no one says anything. Everyone saw him because how could you not?
And he opens his bag and starts rustling through it and sets aside some YA novel that I don’t remember but that it had this absolutely lovely lavender purple cover. and then he pulls out his fucking knitting and just goes to town. Just, minding his own business, knitting away intently, listening to his earbuds.
And wasn’t a person on that train gonna say a DAMN thing about it. No one pointed or made any comments because this dude was built to crush motherfuckers. And he was knitting in public so you know he knew no fear and was happy and confident and then this little girl walked away from her mum and walked straight up to him and waved and her mother looked surprised (but not scared, this is NYC – we don’t know fear because we’re too busy). But the guy sees this little girl wave at him and just gives her the BIGGEST SMILE and waves back and takes out an earbud and says hi and they start talking about knitting and how he learned on his own and she wanted to learn and her mother didn’t know. But he suggested that there were knitting clubs and a lot of them were free and would happily help a new little knitter like her.
It was the single most adorable and heart warming thing of my life. Like here’s this dude with a Rancid t-shirt that looks like it was probably printed in someone’s flat fifteen years ago with an anti-nazi patch right over his heart and enough metal in his clothes to be worth recycling but a little girl waved and what type of nasty, heartless fuck doesn’t smile at kids? That ain’t punk.
My mom has it too, only hers is sectoral heterochromia. A part of her left eye is brown while most of it is blue. Mine’s complete. My right eye is brown, the left is blue. As a kid I’d get the most excited reaction out of the adults-
“His eyes are so beautiful!”
“Wow, they’re different colors!”
“How stunning!”
I’d like to say that my eyes are only one part of myself, that it’s just a slice of the pie that makes up me. But really, the only fascinating part of myself is the heterochromia. I’m average in grades. Height. Strength. IQ. Not much stunning charisma either- I tend to stick to myself.
today I went out to get some research started with two other people i’m working with and we ended up on this fairly treacherous cliff/slope spot trying to navigate to some tricky coordinates and one of my group members slipped on the slope and started sliding and he reached out and grabbed for a sapling and the ground was so loose it just started going down with him and I was too far away to immediately help him but I wanted to alert my other group member to his peril but I fuckin’ panicked and I just said “THERE he GOES”
if you ever feel you didn’t respond correctly to a situation, ask yourself if you watched someone all but totally fall off a cliff and said “there he goes”
OBVIOUSLY he’s okay or I wouldn’t have posted about it. He got another, sturdier tree.
one time i was camping with my gf in a park that had hella bears and it was dark and we were sitting around the campfire and i had the sudden inkling to turn around and there was a bear not five feet behind me and my first instinct was to say “HEY. YOURE not supposed to be here!” and i feel like that has very similar energy
actually when I was in 8th grade and obsessed with twilight my master plan as a twilight vampire was to sit around in famous shipwrecks like the super deep ones where they can only send robots with cameras from their submarines and when they sent one down i’d be sitting there, pretending to drink out of an old tea cup you know for the drama of it all and the guys in the submarine would know what they saw and that it was real footage but who else would believe them? no one important.
but it didn’t stop there. at the next party they threw to celebrate one of their latest finds, some museum-y banquet idk I was 13, I was going to show up. I was going to show up and make eye contact with them one at a time from across the room and they were going to lose their goddamn minds and then before the volturi could catch wind i was gonna be back in the ocean. how could they find me?
the drama. the theatrics. i can’t believe i didn’t realize i was gay right then but that’s another story, also involving vampires,
artherra 