Stuff from September, 2022
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on September, 2022.
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on September, 2022.
Suppose you’re taking a class on medieval history and the final exam is coming up. The final exam is supposed to be a test of your knowledge of medieval history, right? So if you have a couple days between now and the exam, surely the best way to spend the time, if you want to do well on the exam, is to read the best books you can find about medieval history. Then you’ll know a lot about it, and do well on the exam.
No, no, no, experienced students are saying to themselves. If you merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you learned wouldn’t be on the test. It’s not good books you want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class. And even most of that you can ignore, because you only have to worry about the sort of thing that could turn up as a test question. You’re looking for sharply-defined chunks of information. If one of the assigned readings has an interesting digression on some subtle point, you can safely ignore that, because it’s not the sort of thing that could be turned into a test question. But if the professor tells you that there were three underlying causes of the Schism of 1378, or three main consequences of the Black Death, you’d better know them. And whether they were in fact the causes or consequences is beside the point. For the purposes of this class they are.
So there’s a meme that goes around regularly and it’s introduced in terms of “food for thought”. It goes something like this: “One day, your mom will pick you up, put you back down, and then never pick you up again.” I’ve seen it a bunch of times by now, and every time, it rips through me. Kind of like how I felt for the entire duration of the movie “Inside Out” (which, to this day, I can not yet watch once more), but in meme-form. I think this trips the same part of my brain that wrote a farewell post to my dorm room or to our first house.
Anne Helen Petersen writes about civilization:
But the idea that I should only pay for things that benefit me directly is anathema to me. Every single thing on that list benefits me in some way, because it benefits the community around me. Kids’ education matters not because they’re my kids, but because education matters, in general. I might not need rescue services in the woods out in the corner of the county, but some day, maybe I would.