thinking about the time a prof told us that in real research mathematics it’s fine to be slow, speed itself is not essential, as long as you can find it within yourself to make consistent unyielding inexorable forward progress, like the time some guy stole an M60A3 tank and terrorized a suburban neighborhood with it, said guy wasn’t going that fast but plowed through cars and telephone poles and shit no problem. i’m not kidding that’s what he said, that’s the metaphor he used, he told us that the act of mathematics is like the 1995 san diego tank rampage
i’m helping out at a creative writing workshop for uhhh i think 10-12s? 10-14s? idk. but that age range. and anyways
a) i forgot how fun this is
b) it’s really hard not to like, re-write for them and stick to just “hey add descriptions here, change this grammar, really cool ideas!” bc i’m an adult and not trying to talk over/railroad these kids, but i’m just so excited for their ideas!!!
c) little boys write cool stuff like “what if we went to mars but it sucked so we left, but left behind all our technology and the technology rose up and created its own society and then went to war with us for abandoning them? what if transformers had 100x the war crimes? what if the earth blew up. what if we were the robots all along?”
d) little girls out here writing like “aunt melanie’s skin was sloughing off the bones as her beloved dogs tore her apart, turning on her in blind animal instinct. the second she stopped providing food, she became food.” and a lot of body horror and dark themes about group pacts and betrayals and ritualistic murder/sacrifices. like a lot
me, turning to the teacher who is also doing this: hey so, i’m personally really cool with the tone and direction these girls take, but is any of this? how you say… a red flag?
teacher: little girls have really rich inner lives to combat the way they’re puppeted by society in real life. they’ll learn to censor it out in a couple years, but it doesn’t go away.
me, who was also a weird little girl who phased in and out of weirdness depending on social settings: nice.
I wish I was a female tiger because then if I was talking to someone and I was getting off topic I could say “but I tigress,” and then kill and eat them because I am a tiger
being autistic is beautiful and then you’re afraid of abandonment because your brain has picked up on the exact patterns that signal another loss and then you step outside and there are patterns in the sky in the grass in every touch and every laugh. someone looks at you and there is a shift in their gaze to tell you “i know you’re wrong. you are something wrong.” something between pity and embarrassment and you want to rip it out of your body for a second and then you listen to music and the euphoria makes it all worth it because they could never experience this joy. you’re sky-high. you look in the mirror and your eyes appear inexplicably vacant and then you read about how so many autistic kids are cleverer than everyone else as children and then the opposite afterwards. at a certain age you equalise. you grow sharper teeth and you bite off more than you can chew and you chew it all anyway. there’s spring in the air and your brain functions like a scattergraph and when you think about it hard enough it’s impossible not to fall in love. if you’re an alien you’re a lovely one. one day you fall in love and you know it’s more intense than it should be but you love her anyway, knowing how it will end. are you invented for grief? are you invented for love, carrying grief?
truthfully being autistic puts a gun full of love to your head. i will always be a little bit more alone than everyone else but the shades of green seperate into a spectrum of feeling and this schematic of an engine is a poem to progress and every song i love is a holy hymn and when your brain is a scattergraph, once you love something, you love everything. you’re more alone than everyone else and the least lonely creature on earth, even in isolation.
