I love older science fiction where the author wants to make it known that he thinks homosexuality should be legal and accepted but doesn’t actually want to go so far as to openly depict gay characters… instead, he has his straight characters stand around and make asides to each other or the reader about how In The Exciting Spacefaring Future, Gay People Exist And We’re Okay With That, For The Record.
The step sister to Dmitry and Lennox and eldest daughter of the house. Cunning and deadly, Ayla is a person very much of control. She enjoys the game of playing with the other noble houses as much as she loves the thrill of the hunt. As much as she cherishes the strength of humanity she also finds it can be as ugly as the creatures she hunts and finds a deep fascination with the supernatural others would urge her not to. Their advice is not heeded.
Constantly analyze yourself. Figure out why certain things upset you. Question your own motives. Understand your behavior. This creates a pathway for change. Acknowledging why you do the things you do is the first step in shifting out of toxic patterns.
adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.
children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.
couple things here:
multiple things can actually be bad at the same time
I’m 32
couple more things:
Little kids really aren’t equipped to work full time without damaging their physical, mental, and emotional development and health, and when you play the “but adults work all day!” card you sound like a nineteenth century textile baron.
Highschoolers can easily be “working” 40+ hours a week, between school, homework, and extracurriculars and/or part-time work, and still hear this smug “:/ wait til you get to the real world sweaty” rhetoric all the time.
The original claim here wasn’t even “school is too hard,” it was “school is failing to perform its most basic function,” which is different.
Capitalism is hell and even adults shouldn’t be doing as much work as they are
i want you to imagine you’re at a dinner party, and for dessert, your host is serving apple pie. now, you’re not really an apple pie sort of person normally — you like it from time to time, but you’re awfully picky about it, and if it’s not done just right, it’s not for you — so you pass on taking some when it gets passed around. but then everyone else starts exclaiming about how delicious this pie is, how crisp it is, how flavorful, how amazing it was in star trek, so you take a piece just to see what all the fuss is about. and sure enough, it’s delicious. it’s so delicious, in fact, that you start asking questions about it, bothering the host for the recipe, paying a lot more attention to what a well-made pie it really is. and then it turns out the pie studied english literature at berekely and sometimes gets photographed reading to small children, that the pie regularly walks around in hilariously failtastic hipster-douche plaid and engages in ~intellectual competitions~ with other pies it knows, and the more you learn, the more the taste of the pie starts to curdle in your mouth. it’s so delicious that it’s TOO delicious, and probably you’re going to have cravings for this pie now whether you want them or not and you don’t, you don’t want those cravings, you don’t even LIKE apple pie. so you try to tell yourself you don’t like it that much really, that it’s not that good, that it’s probably the sort of pie that’s a total dick in real life and not in the endearing way like it comes off in interviews either, but it doesn’t help. it doesn’t make the pie any less fantastic, it doesn’t make you enjoy the pie any less, and you become consumed with your frustration at this fact — how dare this pie come along and make you hunger after it? how DARE this pie be so crisp and flavorful and fantastic in star trek? HOW DARE THIS PIE GO TO MUSIC FESTIVALS WITH A SALT AND PEPPER BEARD?? — until eventually you are standing on a table in front of the whole party, an empty pie dish held over your head, screaming “WHY WOULD ANYONE EVEN MAKE THIS PIE”