lib1

I know you don’t gotta hand it to em but…

My TikTok feed is full of American teachers complaining about how their kids can’t read or write. Like high schoolers who can’t write a short paragraph or can’t comprehend simple directions.

I was talking about this with a friend of mine who teaches at the literacy program for a local college and they had two comments:

1. Those TikTok teachers almost universally blame the students for their deficits rather than seeing the trend and blaming the systems. Specifically, my friend blames the curriculum being written by textbook corporations and the decision to make the kids stop learning to read in 3rd grade.
2. My friend is seeing similar, though less drastic similarities in their college students. Mind you, they mainly teach graduate courses, so they are teaching people who are usually already in the field teaching.

And I’m just left thinking… at what point do the illiterate students become illiterate teachers?

They’re currently expanding outside of motor function trials and into speech functioning, which is much more prone to irreversible damage. In 10-20 years we’ll learn about the Neuralink victims coming out of Abu Dhabi. Or maybe we won’t because they’ll have literally lost their ability to communicate or have just died.

I know nostalgia for 1950’s US is normally

But fuck imagine what could have been in the USSA after the execution of Henry Ford

At my first job I worked with a Puerto Rican dude named Ray. We got along good. The work was cleaning duty for a music instruction place so we’d do a bunch of cleaning which was boring as fuck and then we’d have some spare time to play music before our next assignment. Sometimes we’d run over to his house on break because it was close and he was always generous trying to give me food and stuff. All things considered it was a good gig for a couple teenagers over the summer.

Like a month in, he invites me to a wedding his family is putting on. Can’t quite remember who it was for unfortunately. It was almost 20 years ago. He said I just gotta save up and rent a tux. I said hell yeah and we were all excited. We talked about it every week or so and every time he kept telling me, “these Ricans are gonna eat you alive, son.” And I’m white as fuck and autistic so I was like, “that sounds bad but he sounds excited so I’ll just assume it’s supposed to be exciting and not say anything about me being nervous” but inside I was all nervous like “I don’t wanna get eaten alive.”

Some time goes by, it comes time and I hadn’t saved up and I told him I wasn’t going. And he was pretty hurt by it. To this day I regret not keeping up with him and I regret not going to that wedding. Ray was nothing but kind to me and I snubbed him. I could have told my mom and maybe she would have helped me remember to save. And she would have told me to ask what the date was and get details and stuff. Like I just handled it really badly and I regularly feel bad about it.

Taking self-victimization to a new level

I was down 20 pounds. I was feeling hunger in normal amounts. I was feeling full after normal amounts of food. I wasn’t binging. I was motivated to eat better in general.

Then my insurance company decided I wasn’t seeing sufficiently good results and denied my coverage, which naturally put the drug out of my reach financially. Guess who just threw up for the second time this week after eating too much bullshit at night? I’m so tired of this.

I’m currently thinking about Bill Burr’s bit about how funny The Biggest Loser is because so many people are starving and there’s something absurd about being like, “I can’t stop eating Oreos”. And you know what? There is something absurd about it. And to me in this moment it is kind of funny. Fuck that show for so many other reasons but there is some absurdity in that.

“There’ll be a moment where you’re holding a post card. Don’t let go of it.”

“Buy the spirits, but talk the hobo down first. Listen to your tie about the spirits except when it tells you to drink them.”

“If you’re too boring you’ll gain the boring condition”