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#and that’s not to say young people aren’t capable of profound or complex emotion or whatever
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i think the purest section of the internet i’ve ever stumbled across was the comments section of a lyric video for “i’d lie” by taylor swift sometime in the aughts the song’s chorus goes “i could tell you his favorite color’s green / he loves to argue / born on the 17th / his sister’s beautiful / he has his mother’s eyes / and if you asked me if i love him / i’d lie” and all the comments were lovesick young girls rewriting the song to fit their own crushes like “i could tell you his favorite color’s blue / he loves NASCAR / born on february 29th / his brother’s kinda cool / he has his mother’s old toyota camry / and if you asked me if i love him / i’d lie <3”
#tswift#mine.txt#long tags#tagged tangent#it was simultaneously the purest and also the funniest corner of the internet i’ve ever encountered#bc it was just all these young girls pining very earnestly for oblivious boys#and rewriting love songs to fit them even if they couldn’t quite make the chorus rhyme#like that’s so cute??? idk i think that’s why i’ve always gravitated toward TS#bc i think it’s really neat that even her most personal/niche/unrelatable songs have an element of universality to them#and there’s plenty of written work re: universal experiences but it can be inaccessible to Youths™️#like are you 12 years old lamenting the inevitability of oblivion a la hamlet? no you’re crushing on jeremy from math class wtf is a hamlet#and that’s not to say young people aren’t capable of profound or complex emotion or whatever#and even if they’re not waxing poetic about mankind as a whole doesn’t mean their emotions aren’t complex and nuanced#like is a girlhood crush on an objectively lackluster classmate as high stakes as other universal human experiences? of course not#does that make it any less important? i mean i guess but c’mon#trivialities are as much a part of existence as the dramatic shit too#idk i just think about the comments section of i’d lie a lot lol#being a swiftie on youtube in 2009 was a thankless job but there were rare pockets of joy amongst the joesulub#idk fearless (taylor’s version) has been doing a number on me lmao
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moodsmithmedia · 4 years
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An ‘Atypical’ Piece of Television
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Warning! Spoilers for all three seasons of Netflix’s Atypical ahead.
I’m a mixed kid. I don’t mean that I’m bi-racial though. I spent time in both public and private school which is a mix I think is worth reflecting on. I spent half of elementary school at a public school and then the other half of elementary and all of middle school at a private, Catholic school, before returning to the public education system. Before I went to private school I signed up to be in the Boy Scouts and met a young man named Matt. He and I would never become friends, but we’d spend much of the next several years together camping and doing...scouting activities. He’d consistently test the limits of my patience. As it turned out, at that age I didn’t have much patience. They say teenaged girls are mean...boys aren't much different. I suppose we’re just quicker to accept shittiness when it comes from a person with an X and Y chromosome. Matt was a remarkable kid because he was autistic, which made him a fairly difficult person to know. Or at least that’s what I called logic at the time told me. It wasn’t until about 12 years later when a show on Netflix showed me the complexity of the situation I barely understood.
‘Atypical’ is a Netflix Original Series about a high school senior named Sam and how his high functioning autism affects the lives of those around him in profound ways. There are a number of things about this show that stand out. Michael Rapaport turns in a performance I’d have never guessed he was capable of, no disrespect intended. He’s not particularly nuanced, but neither is his character. He’s a simple guy in an exceptionally complicated situation. But some things are simple. Sam is his son and he’s going to have his back no matter what. This is just one example of a multitude of ways that Atypical shows how much heart is at the center of its story.
Just entering its third season, Atypical is far from a perfect show. Or even a particularly well produced one. Jennifer Jason Leigh is profoundly strange in her role as Sam’s mom Elsa.  In the third season Sam’s sister, Casey, is revealed to be atypical in her own way as she begins to realize that her sexuality is far more complex than she’d realized. In what I imagine is an effort to reflect the reality of how people actually come to terms with their sexuality that storyline moves slowly. Like...geological timescale slow. And then once it’s clear what’s happening the season briskly wraps up. Sam’s best friend Zahid is a caricature of a caricature. And just when you think they’re going to make him a real boy things get even more ridiculous. Virtually every misgiving though is forgiven because at the center of this story is something genuinely heartwarming. 
Atypical portrays Sam in a light that is both pitiable and enviable. I’m happy to live my life without the burden of having emotional outbursts in public. I’m sad for Sam and people like him that this is something he has to deal with. Simultaneously, I deeply envy the ways Sam can be truthful with people. If something is stupid, he says so. If something is wrong, he lets you know. It’s almost as though there’s something wrong with us neurotypicals for behaving in ways that we KNOW are inauthentic. Quick aside, I learned from the show that neurotypical is how you refer to folks who aren’t burdened with autism or some other intellectual disability. The word is neurotypical. Not neuronormal. What even is normal?
The show opens with a bully picking on a young woman and promptly being punched in the face for it. Scene after scene you find characters who are indifferent to the adverse consequences of doing right by the “disadvantaged”. These situations had a pretty profound effect on me because there were situations where I wish someone would’ve had my back. More importantly though, and much more common for me, were situations where I wish I’d had someone’s back. I’ve grown to be much more empathetic than a younger me seemed to have the capacity for, mostly an expression of youth angst and insecurity. Easy to say now that I’m an adult who’s never in as robust a social setting as a high school. The show makes it a point to address insecurity, infidelity, friendship and authenticity through a perspective that I hadn’t experienced in, what feels like a long time: innocence. 
Quick aside: I took a break from writing this to go to the grocery to restock my depleted kitchen. I was walking past the butcher section oogling over meat products I mostly don’t eat anymore, but deeply miss. There was a gentleman with a son who was (and I mean nothing untoward when I say this) clearly not neurotypical. At the youngest he was 18. I stepped aside and pulled my cart away so that they could pass by me. The area was a bit congested and I wasn’t in a rush. The father thanked me and walked by first and his son approached me with his hand up to give me a high five. Was he saying thank you? Was he just being nice? Was he doing it to every person he walked by in the store? I don’t know. But look at that. The way the world works these days, before any interaction we subconsciously consider the racial, gender and political identities (among other factors) of the people we come across. This young man was unburdened by the fact that I’m African American, heterosexual, liberal...but felt compelled to connect with me. For all the things we say we value and have learned to value...how can neurotypicals claim to be normal?
In both public and private school I dealt with what we now call bullying through furrowed brows. In private school some of that bullying was delivered by the very people my parent’s tuition money was paying to educate me along with my peers. The remorse and sympathy we feel for the bullied today, while an awesome development in culture, simply wasn’t in stock when I dealt with it. That said, I look back with some resentment, mostly toward myself rather than those who imposed upon me, because I consider myself neurotypical. I should have championed other bullied people. Instead I did something far more cowardly and attempted to replicate my abusers in the hope they’d have me. Shock of the millennium: they didn’t. It took a long time for me to realize how flawed my thinking was, and when I did...I overcompensated for it. 
I’ve deserved to have been punched in the face more than I have in my life (once). I was sucker punched at a bar in a college town for sticking up for a friend who was socially awkward. I hated how he was being treated and didn’t want to see him go out like that. Call it karmic retribution for all the times I hadn’t stood up for myself but more importantly for the people who needed it more than I had, like Matt. 
When Todd Phillips ‘Joker’ came out earlier this year the backlash was vicious. “It’s an incel instruction manual!” shouted the morons who knew nothing about the minutiae of the film because it hadn’t been released yet. They attempted to boycott, never mind that their ignorance almost certainly helped propel the Warner Bros. film to one of the most historic and profitable runs in the history of cinema. The thing Joker does best that those too closed minded to have seen the film wouldn’t know, is it begs the question: “Do we treat each other in a fashion that encourages evil?” There’s no question that in some instances evil may be a consequence of mental illness or hormonal imbalance of some sort. But sometimes, just the propensity for evil is fertilized by an awful attitude by people who are too self interested to realize the ways they tread on the well being of others. And there’s something necessarily wrong with seeing the intellectually disabled as potential criminals with an excuse for their bad behavior. That young man at the grocery store lead with love in his heart in an interaction with a stranger. And it’s probably far more common than we care to admit that his endearing positivity be rejected on the basis that he’s different. We should all be so lucky to be just a bit atypical.
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eldritchwyrm · 7 years
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what goes around comes around (a fic for the glorious 25th of may)
The first time Lu-Tze learned of the Glorious People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road was long before Sam Vimes got caught in a thunderstorm and was swept thirty years into the past. In fact, when Lu-Tze was young and light on his feet and had only just moved to Ankh-Morpork for the first time, he took a wrong turn and stumbled upon a narrative temporal phenomenon the likes of which he had never seen in his life.
He was picking up some groceries for Mrs. Cosmopolite, who was graciously allowing him lodging, because was it not written that What Goes Around Comes Around? He was also lost.
He tried asking random passerby for directions, but his attempts were all rebuffed with variants on “up yours, mister” and the slurs that were generally leveled at anyone who looked too foreign for their own good. So instead of turning onto the Pitts as she should have, he missed the intersection and continued straight ahead.
It was the 25th of May. Spring was battling valiantly against the smog and grime of the city, and contrary to all expectation the few shrubs that had survived were putting out green shoots.
Lu-Tze hitched up the bag of groceries and thought the sacred wisdom: My Joints Aren’t What They Used To Be. He was a bit young for that one, he reflected, but was not all wisdom valuable?
He turned onto Treacle Mine Road.
It was noon. Bright and sunny. The street was loud and busy with carts and animals and people, as you’d expect on any weekday. And yet as he walked forward, the sun dimmed. The air cooled. The hustle of the streets became muffled, farther away.
The scent of lilac filled in the air.
The hairs on his arms tingled like a storm was approaching.
He took a good look around, really looked rather than focusing on the unimportant surface bits, like the buildings and the people—and nearly choked on his own tongue.
This—this was—it was a disruption in the space-time continuum so extreme that it was a wonder anyone in the immediate vicinity was still alive. This was a rift so profound that rationally speaking, he should be standing in the equivalent of a smoking crater where a chunk of functional reality used to be.
There were no words to describe the wrongness of this place. You could say that the passage of time in this location was like a length of yarn which had been bundled into a ball and left unattended in a room full of eager-eyed kittens. (It would be blatantly incorrect, but you could definitely say that.)
“Ye gods,” said Lu-Tze, because some words always worked.
He ditched the groceries and started running.
He burst through the door of Mrs. Cosmopolite’s boarding house with a crash. The hostess jumped in surprise and nearly hit him over the head with the plate she was drying, but restrained herself, because that wasn’t Done. Instead she shouted, “Young man, just what do you think you’re doing?”
“No time!”
If he’d stopped to think properly he would have realized how stupid a statement that was, but he was busy racing up the stairs and into his room. He grabbed his emergency supply pack from under the bed and dashed out again.
There were images in his head that didn’t make sense—darkness and rain and a silver cigar case, gleaming on the cobbles, and lilacs blooming in the night, over and over again.
When he returned to Treacle Mine Road he knelt down in the middle of the street, right in the middle of traffic, and the carts moved smoothly around him without a blink, despite their relocation occasionally involved a minor rewriting of the conventional laws of physics. He barely noticed. He found a bare patch of dirt and got to work. He would be hard-pressed to construct a sophisticated detection mandala on such short notice, but he would damn well make do...
The air crackled with energy as he finished the last curve on the mandala. He dusted his hands and waited.
It began to turn.
The patterns shifted, then stilled.
He frowned. “No,” he said. “That can’t be right.  Historical imperative? But this is so obviously a narrative disruption. An unfinished story.”
A rift in time that didn’t exist, memories of events that never happened... it had to be a result of an incomplete narrative unable to achieve a single resolution. Something, somewhen, had gone wrong, and a major role had gone unfulfilled, and now the phenomenon was scrabbling for a solution.
“Must be incorrectly set up,” he muttered to himself. “I mean, this thing is telling me there should be a major temporal incident any moment now—”
Unfortunately, the young Lu-Tze had not yet learned some valuable wisdom. For is it not written that You Are So Sharp You'll Cut Yourself?
There was a sound like an elastic band snapping, and the world turned sideways.
He stumbled upright once the universe had returned to something close to normal and scrambled to get his bearings. He was still in the present day, but another time was—how to describe it, how to describe it—layered on top, one moment falling over the other like snow. Fog and wind and darkness swirled in, obscuring the sky, wreathing around the figures in the courtyard before him.
The men were wearing Watch uniforms.
“Okay, lads,” said one of the men. He had an eyepatch and a battered breastplate, and a voice that echoed as if it was coming from very far away. Years ago, thought Lu-Tze. “What we’re going to do is keep the peace. That’s our job...”
If Lu-Tze concentrated, he could still feel the rush of wind from the passing street and hear the sound of the busy city. But here, in a much more real sense, he could see the watchmen shuffling anxiously as they listened to the sergeant-at-arms. He talked about duty and right and wrong, and then he drew a line in the sand, and then the men made their choice.
History struck a chord.
The world shifted.
A barricade climbed into the air, higher and higher, packed with furniture and upturned carts and spare wood, held up by desperate hope and bottomless fear, the rawest emotions of humanity. When sufficiently concentrate, those were capable of twisting time into knots so complex that only a master of the temporal would ever be able to undo them.
And why would they want to? So what if someone thought it was odd that time crawled by while they were under stress, or if it went by instantly during a fun afternoon? That was what made people human. 
That sound again, and the world changed again—
A battle was raging around him. Men in battered uniforms, not many, fighting for their lives, wearing the lilac...
...the man with the eyepatch leapt forward, sword a blur in his hands, hacking wildly...
...and across the street, untouched by the carnage, was a little old man in a robe. He was sweeping peacefully at a patch of dust, undisturbed by the blood and guts and destruction whirling around him. It was surreal.
The old man looked up and winked.
Time stood still.
(Well, it didn’t really stand still, but the true answer involved multivariable calculus and besides, it was a useful metaphor and at this moment in time Lu-Tze was not the type to spend valuable effort messing about with the sneaky kind of sums with letters in them.)
The old sweeper carefully plodded across the frozen tableau, ducking under an upraised sword and stepping around the body of a watchman who had not yet hit the ground.
Ah, so another monk was on the problem, then? The young time-traveler stood up straight and tried to act like this was an expected development.
“Hey, kid,” said the sweeper. “You look like you could use a cup of tea.”
* * *
Lu-Tze was convinced that this particular branch of the No Such Monastery did not exist in the present day, which made it quite worrying that it appeared to exist in both the past and the future.
He sipped his tea with yak butter and eyed the old sweeper suspiciously. He distrusted older authority figures on principle.
“So you spotted the incongruity, did you,” said the sweeper. “Historical imperative’s a tricky thing, isn’t it.”
“It’s not historical imperative. It’s narrative causality.”
The sweeper sighed. “You’ve got a lot to learn, kiddo. It’s both. The Glorious People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road... it didn’t take long for the city to forget, but the story still leaves echoes. It wants to be remembered.”
The young man frowned. “I kept having memories of things that never happened. Deja vu without the original vu.”
“Sounds pretty standard. Lilacs, right? You smelled the lilacs? That’s the anchor. On the Glorious 25th of May, the lilacs are in bloom. They will always be in bloom, forever and ever, for as long as time exists, and whenever the survivors see it, they’ll be brought back here. Even poor sods like you with receptive enough minds will be saddled with this piece of history.”
“But this doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t understand why a bunch of men would just get themselves killed like that just—just to be heroes.” Lu-Tze knew a dramatic last stand when he saw one.
“Yeah, see, that’s 'cos you’re seventeen and I’m old and wise,” said the sweeper. “Why do we fix time? Is it because we want to be heroic? Is it because we have to? No, we do it because we could just let time curl in on itself and extinguish all the complicated bits like sentient life, but we decide to make fixing this mess our job.”
“But—alright, fine, but there’s still a gigantic rift in reality and I’m standing in it. What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“You heard me. There’s no reason to muck about with a story that’s looking to be told. This case is unusual, mostly ‘cause it’s a bit under-construction if you know what I mean, but yea, is it not written that There’s A First Time For Everything?”
The young time-traveler sat bolt upright. “You—you’re a follower of the Way? But none of the senior monks—it’s just a thing that I made up so—I mean—”
The sweeper shook his head sadly. “Hoo boy. I really am paying for how much of an idiot back then. I suppose What Goes Around Comes Around.”
The young history monk’s eyes widened, realization dawning. He opened his mouth to speak, but the old man interrupted him. “Now, this is slightly more complicated than a standard closed time loop, since you’re not here in any physical sense. So if I just...”
He slashed his hand through the air. The air began to sing with mounting tension, time itself groaning under the weight, and the world snapped back to the present.
The city streets bustled around him. Lu-Tze's mouth was slack with shock. Had that really been...?
He looked down at the mandala he had scrawled in the dirt. The wind had scrubbed it out.
Overhead, the lilacs were in bloom.
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