[Starship Troopers voice] Would you like to know less?

Pro!!!

After a particularly demoralizing day today, I had a 5min interaction with someone at work who was told I was a talented engineer by a mutual friend before I started in my position, and that’s just their internal model of me now. To be assumed competent *by default* for 5min made my entire week

To you their talent may feel so blatantly obvious, so much a fact of your day-to-day, that you don’t want to get weird commenting on it, but to strangers, people who don’t look/feel like engineers just… aren’t engineers, or could be perceived as proto-engineers with caveats at best

✨ fashion ✨

I’m nowhere near the same unconditionally badass engineering level as you 💕

bsky.app/profile/mrpu...

(And by accept it, I do mean accepting any literature as “better” somehow than other literature instead of just 1) someone more powerful than you thinking it wasn’t boring, 2) taking that so far as to make other people appreciate it exactly the same way)

My opinions that developed from those experiences but then strengthened over time: 1) getting to call “classic” literature boring is a privilege, 2) that space can be very interesting to play in if you accept it, but I still don’t know if we should

Another teacher said the same thing when I privately complained about high school grammar lessons and our punctuation studies stifling creativity

My short story teacher said something to me like, “You’re not wrong but other kids don’t read as much as you and they’re learning this for the first time”

A couple years prior to that, I had sat through a unit on short stories and their basic structure, and I straight-up said something to my teacher like, “I don’t understand what you’re trying to test me on because Shirley Jackson doesn’t write stories in this structure and she’s great”

I got so mad during that discussion because like YEAH, it had bored me too, but I had sat there engaging with why it had been assigned and where it was coming from and they just got to call it boring because summer reading didn’t really count and their parents would pay their full college tuition

I had to read Heart of Darkness over the summer for an AP lit class and I felt like the prose was unappealing in style and also kinda racist; when classes started we were forced into small groups to discuss and I ended up *defending* it to upper middle class white women just calling it “boring”

Oh dang I didn’t know Charlottesville was actively taking 16-25yr peak rollback requests, is it too late to get in on that, there are some Tokyo Rose shows I’d like to catch