Lessons Learned

Nothing serious here, really. Not the usual diatribe about selfish asshats or any of the deep stuff about Life During a Pandemic or my common rants about those asshats up there persecuting whatever group is being persecuted this week.

Or not much, anyway. There may be bits of these. But mostly just a bulleted list of random things learned or relearned this spring.

• That garlic in the pickled carrots? It's to flavor the olive oil and thereby the carrots. It is not for eating. It's mostly raw and it hurts going down.
• The sharp feeling of extreme relief when the Low Battery light in the car turns out to be indicating a low battery in the key fob.
• Teens and preteens still like to search for their Easter candy.
• Sometimes the old video games are the best. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my ancient (32 years is ancient in game-console time) SNES with my ancient SNES controllers is the best!
• Trust the Libby app's book recommendations.
• I am dismayed that our Superintendent of Schools is leaving us, even though I'm excited for her. Do I think she's perfect? No, although I think she's excellent and the people of the school district on the other side of the country are lucky to get her. 
• I hope we get a decent new Superintendent because as much as I'd love to rub the (few but very noisy) entitled asshats' noses in how wrong they were about her, I don't want any of us to have to go through that to learn the lesson.
• My fingers are getting old. The SNES is great, but the controllers are... less than ergonomic.
• I was a snob regarding college. I blame the hiring manager who talked me into going to college when I was 42 (he was about half my age) because "your lack of a degree tells me you can't stick to things." (No, it told you I couldn't stick to things when I was 17. I'm a grownup now, thanks). 
• But yeah, I still bought into the "degrees make everything better" schtick, until I realized: I have a four-year degree in Intercultural Communications and I drive a school bus for a living. 
• The degree in IC does improve my side gig of 8-10 hours a week writing internal copy for a company, mostly in the Diversity and Inclusion space; it does not really affect my primary employment.
• Supply chain shortages are weird. Some days they're toilet paper, and a week later it might be chocolate coins or clam strips or Otter Pops.
• Apricot nectar is an excellent sweetener for chai.

This post reminds me of some of my early Random Posts before the world got weird. It was nice. I enjoyed it.

It's Not That Simple

Given that it's Autism Awareness Month (and for the love of whatever you may hold holy, remember that awareness is not the same thing as paranoia, please), I thought this was a good time to write this.

A well-meaning person (friend of a friend of a friend) said to me, "Look at how smart your Lizzy is! She must do really well in school!" They were saying this in reference to a Facebook Memory I posted, wherein then-six-year-old Lizzy stated, "myths are like fairytales we used to believe before."

Well, yeah. She was right, they are.

But this well-meaning friend of a friend of a friend (WMFFF) doesn't seem to get that wise little statements like these and excelling in school (or even attending school every day) are not the same. Not at all.

One of these is a one-off statement, clever, off the cuff, probably when everything was okay in her then-very little world. 

The other is a complicated series of things, involving self-confidence, executive (dys)function, anxiety about everything from grades to antimaskers up in her face, self-esteem, boredom with some subjects, being a teenager, shame about previous school behavior, the inability to grasp why she needs to know dates and names when she already understands the stories behind them, trouble staying on task, finally being able to start to deal with her father's death, poor habits she picked up during distance learning, being terrible at asking for help, impulsivity when stressed, the need to understand the why rather than just the name/date facts, and a lot of autistic/ADHD overwhelm at the mere thought of facing any of these, much less all of them.

(And no, none of it is due to vaccines, none of it can be cured or even should be; the issue here is that the world is not built for people who think differently. That's it. That part is that simple. If the likes of Autism Speaks would shut up and let actual autistics speak, they might learn something.)

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here (through my own slippery neurodivergence) is that the issue lies not with Lizzy. Nor with me. Not even with her school (they have tried so hard - bent over backward - to get her on a track that she can thrive in, from switching teachers to letting her draw or read to other accommodations. They're great!). 

The problem is with the system at large. Not even just the educational system (though that's part of it) but the whole dystopian, unrestrained-capitalism, screw-the-planet, -ist and -phobic, awful system that basically says, "If you can't conform to this set of mostly unspoken arbitrary rules, then you're not a whole person."

And because we're all steeped in this since birth, programmed to think this way by society at large, even the kindest of WMFFFs think - way deep in the backs of their minds where they can't even perceive it consciously - think that if we just tried harder, we could be rich or lose weight or get straight As in school or avoid illness or climb the corporate ladder faster.

I wonder how many of them stop to think that maybe - just maybe - it's not all about "getting ahead."