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"corporations don't have a soul" "machines don't have a soul" neither do humans. I won't convert to your religion. Think up a new argument.

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I think adults should stop demanding obedience from children and should start focusing on requesting respect. That’s what will actually serve them in the adult world and help them make good decisions mindfully.

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Are lace-makers ever struck by the realisation that all the holes were already there before they started?

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This post is not about ballet.

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Hi! Just a genuine question, I was curious as to why you dislike the Rainbow Fish?

Because Rainbow Fish can be retold like this: 

A fish has a part of their body - their physical, incarnate body, what they were born with - that makes them very happy and that they are very proud of. They also have an unfortunate habit of thinking that they are better than other fish. That part isn’t good, and causes the other fish to be unhappy with them and avoid them. 

The fish is now very sad. The only person who likes the fish anymore tells him to go to the octopus, the animal framed as the adult in the story. 

The octopus tells the rainbow fish that they have been a snotty jerk and that the only way to make people like them again is to take off their scales and give them away. That in order to have any friends and make up for their behaviour, they have to rip off pieces of their own body and self and give them away to other people to make the other people happy and make up for their transgressions. 

And the rainbow fish is upset. And then another fish comes and asks them for a scale. And the rainbow fish takes off a piece of themself, their body, the thing they were born into, and gives it away. And now that fish likes him, and is materially benefitted by this piece of another fish’s actual body that has been given to it. 

And then the other fish come, and the rainbow fish rips off more parts of its body - all of the parts that used to make it happy and that it was proud of - and gives them to the other fish, because it’s not fair that the rainbow fish’s body was so much nicer. And when the rainbow fish has ripped all but one scale off, tearing out of themself all but one of the things that they possessed in their self that made them happy, then all the fish are friends with them! And everything is great! And everyone has a fair share. 

Of the rainbow fish’s, and I do quite mean to keep hammering this point, own body.

What the book says is: 

1. if you are born with something nice - like, for instance, an attractive body or a clever mind or a talent or whatever - and it makes you happy and proud, you are a horrible person and deserve to be shunned. Absolutely no line is ever drawn between Rainbow Fish’s self, their actual own body, and their behaviour. In reality, it’s their behaviour that’s the problem: they are mean and aloof to the other fish. This could be the case whether or not their body was all covered with magnificent scales. However, the book absolutely conflates the two: their behaviour is framed as a natural and unavoidable outcome of being happy about and proud of their special, beautiful body. So don’t you dare ever be happy or proud of anything you have or can do that everyone else doesn’t have exactly the same amount as, because if you do, you are horrible and by definition snotty, stuck up and mean. 

2. That in order to make up for the transgression of having something about your actual self that makes you happy and proud (which, remember, has automatically made you selfish and snobby, because that’s what happens), you must rip pieces of what makes you happy out of yourself and give them to other people for the asking, and you must never ever EVER have more of that part of - again, I hate to belabour except I don’t - your self than other people have, and that makes you a good person that people like and who deserves friends. 

To summarize, then: to be a good person you must never have something about yourself that makes you happy and proud and if you happen to be born with that something you must absolutely find a way to give it away to other people and remove it from yourself, right up to tearing off pieces of your body, in order to be a good person who deserves friends. 

This, I am absolutely sure, is not what the author intended: the author definitely meant it to be a story about sharing versus not sharing. But the author then used, as their allegory/metaphor, the fish’s own actual body. Their self. It was not about sharing shiny rocks that the rainbow fish had gathered up for himself. It wasn’t even about the fish teaching other fish how to do something, or where to find something. 

The metaphor/allegory used is the fish’s literal. body. And so the message is: other people have rights to you. Other people have the right to demand you, yourself, your body, pieces of you, in a way that makes absolutely sure that you have no more of anything about your body and self that is considered “good” than they do. 

And that might just suck a little bit except, hah, so: Gifted adult, here. Identified as a Gifted child. 

This is what Gifted children are told, constantly. All the fucking time. 

(Okay, I overstate. I am sure - at least I fucking HOPE - that particularly by this time there are Gifted children coming to adulthood who did not run into this pathology over and over and over and over again. I haven’t met any of them, though, and I have met a lot of Gifted adults who were identified as Gifted as children.) 

Instead of being told what’s actually a problem with our behaviour (that we’re being mean, or controlling, or putting other people down), or - heavens forfend - the other children being told that us being better at something doesn’t actually mean moral superiority and is totally okay and not something we should be attacked for, we are told: they’re jealous of you. That’s the problem. 

Instead of being taught any way to be happy about our accomplishments and talents that does not also stop the talents and accomplishments of other children - whatever those are! - from being celebrated, we are left with two choices: to be pleased with what we can do, or what we are, or to never, ever make anyone feel bad by being able to do things they can’t. And the first option also comes with two options: either you really ARE superior to them because you have skills, abilities and talents they don’t (or are prettier), or you are a HORRIBLE stuck up monster for feeling that way. 

(It is not uncommon for Gifted kids to chose either side, which means it’s not uncommon for them to choose “okay fine I really AM better than you”; this can often be summarized as “intent on sticking their noses in the air because everyone else is intent on rubbing them in the dirt”; on the other hand I have met a lot of Gifted women, particularly*, who cannot actually contemplate the idea of being Gifted because to do so is to immediately imply that they are somehow of more moral or human worth than someone else and this means they are HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SELFISH PEOPLE, and so will find literally any reason at all that their accomplishments are not accomplishments or that they don’t deserve anything for them.) 

Instead of being given any kind of autonomy or ownership of ourselves, we are loaded down by other people’s expectations: we are told that because we can accomplish more we must, and that daring not to do what other people want to the extent that they want with what we are capable of we are selfish, slackers, lazy, whatever. We are taught that we owe other people - our parents, our friends, even The World - excellence, the very best we can possibly do, and trust me when I say people are ALWAYS insisting We Could Do Better. And we should, or else we will be disappointing them, or letting them down, because (because we are Gifted) the only reason we could possibly be failing is not trying hard enough. 

We are, in fact, told over and over and over and over again, to rip off pieces of ourselves to give to other people to make them happy, because those pieces are valuable, but forbidden from enjoying the value of those pieces - pieces of our selves - for our own sake because that would be selfish and arrogant. And we owe this, because we were born a particular way. 

Because, metaphorically, we were born with rainbow scales, so now we have to rip off those rainbow scales in the name of Sharing, and otherwise we are selfish and horrible and deserve to be alone.** 

That is why I fucking hate The Rainbow Fish. 

Because whatever the author INTENDED, the metaphor they chose, the allegory they picked, means that THAT is the story they actually told. (And is the story that child after child after child after child I have encountered actually takes from it.) I don’t hate the author; I’m not even mad at them. But I do hate the book with a fiery passion, and it is among the books I will literally rip apart rather than allow in my house when I have kids, because I’m not going to give it to anyone ELSE’s kid either. 

*but, I would like to note, not UNIQUELY: this is something I encounter in Gifted men as well. 

**I can’t remember who it was, in relation to this, put forward the thought: if people actually talked about the access and use of children’s bodies the way we talk about access to and use of Gifted children’s minds and talents†, the abusiveness would be absolutely clear? But they’re right. 

†because sometimes it is Gifted children’s bodies in an abstract way, in that its their talent for gymnastics or their talent for ballet or sport or whatever, so I mean in a very raw way, the actual physical embodied flesh we are. 

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It's Fuck It Up Friday, where we do kinds of art that we're bad at. Have some absolutely chaotic twins who came to me in a dream.

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Little bit funny how people's dislike of Harry Potter has now lapsed into like complete and total dismissal. The other day I was at a flower show and the theme for the displays at this particular flower show were book themed. And of course an admiring crowd went round and did the circuit of displays, ooh-ing and aah-ing at various renditions of The Railway Children and Little Red Riding Hood and taking photos. All extremely cool. And then they got to the Harry Potter section and there was just a complete blank look on a lot of people's faces. They didn't even comment like with the other displays, they simply walked by giving each other what-the-fuck-is-this shrugs. My sister is getting offered the opportunity to go to Harry Potter World by her college for art purposes this year and she said people were so distinctly unpsyched by even the offer of a very cheap coach trip and abysmally low priced tickets that they were already counting themselves out of the trip months in advance. There are stores with discount Gryffindor lunchboxes and scarves piling up desperately by the masses. Little stickers on them denoting price drops. Some stickers on top of others. Nobody gives a fuck about Harry Potter. It's all terribly exciting. I hope the HBO show is the nail in the coffin and we can finally put this shambolic corpse to a stake through the chest rest

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i must take painkillers. painkillers are the pain killer

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despite being beemovieerotica i have not seen you write or talk about writing bee movie erotica

for the last time i'm never going to write bee movie erotica

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Little bit funny how people's dislike of Harry Potter has now lapsed into like complete and total dismissal. The other day I was at a flower show and the theme for the displays at this particular flower show were book themed. And of course an admiring crowd went round and did the circuit of displays, ooh-ing and aah-ing at various renditions of The Railway Children and Little Red Riding Hood and taking photos. All extremely cool. And then they got to the Harry Potter section and there was just a complete blank look on a lot of people's faces. They didn't even comment like with the other displays, they simply walked by giving each other what-the-fuck-is-this shrugs. My sister is getting offered the opportunity to go to Harry Potter World by her college for art purposes this year and she said people were so distinctly unpsyched by even the offer of a very cheap coach trip and abysmally low priced tickets that they were already counting themselves out of the trip months in advance. There are stores with discount Gryffindor lunchboxes and scarves piling up desperately by the masses. Little stickers on them denoting price drops. Some stickers on top of others. Nobody gives a fuck about Harry Potter. It's all terribly exciting. I hope the HBO show is the nail in the coffin and we can finally put this shambolic corpse to a stake through the chest rest

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The communists want to take away YOUR MOLD

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why do we bother with I hate my partner jokes when your boss is right there

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heeeeey 46% of scotland's population (2,444,659) reporting some degree of scots language skills in the 2022 census even though scots language education is still not mandated at any level in this country you're so sexy i'm kissing you all on the mouth