yesterday i was hiking with my dog and passed by a family with their 14 yo princess of darkness trotting behind them in very unsuitable clothes and uncomfortable shoes that clearly weren’t meant to get dirty on forest mud. oh the quintessential teenage experience of doing something in a way that is stupid and sucks because it’s important that it’s your own way 🫡
The experience of being a teenager, especially, is relentlessly being forced to do things by authority figures who have arbitrary power over you. As a result “Okay, I’ll do it, but I’ll do it in the least compliant way possible” is a persistent and entirely sympathetic element of being a teenager
Okay as someone who professionally works with kids, I’ll weigh on on this and say: the thing about defiance and “brattiness” is they are defense mechanisms for having no power in your life.
Kids and teens do not have power in their life. Even in the most ideal of circumstances. They can’t really make informed choices about voting or houses and especially in America, the entire social structure is hostile to letting them go where they want to go.
So OP is absolutely right and put it beautifully. “it’s important that it’s your own way.” I’ve seen preverbal babies force their shoes off their feet in response to a completely unrelated obligation because I can force them to take a nap but I can’t make them take a nap AND nicely keep their shoes on. It is arguably a pretty stupid defiance, but defiance isn’t about being smart.
It’s the scream of a person without power insisting if they have no choice but to do this, they will do it their way! And that’s more important than practicality. It’s more important than being reasonable.
I firmly believe that deep down adults aren’t less bratty or defiant than kids are- they’re just given more leeway and power so they’re more used to having control and use that to cope. The average 30-year-old would absolutely have a meltdown in the pasta aisle if they were regularly dragged to places they didn’t want to be by another adult who they were never allowed to be away from or choose where they were going besides very limited exceptions.
(also disclaimer that in using the term “bratty” I am by no means condemning this behavior. It’s born of a frustration that is completely understandable.)
literally no dermatologist on earth says acne is caused by bad hygeine/lack of a skincare routine btw. its genetic. every single piece of research ever done on acne says its genetic. feel like i need to restate this every time i see a post about skincare
a few years ago i made an identical post to this and someone tagged it with “yeah ive known this from personal experience. because i once spent an entire summer not bathing and the only water that ever touched my face was from public pools yet i never once had any acne” and every single time i see someone talking up their skincare routine this info forces its way back into my brain
dont be a fucking dumbass on this post btw im serious. actually read academic papers on acne dont fucking post correlation is causation shit on this post. every person who has acne has a half dozen multi billion dollar industries constantly trying to convince them its secretly their fault against all published research as it stands. so don’t fucking help them
The Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River superimposed on a map of Europe
…OH.
I googled it once and the only reason why the Great Lakes aren’t called inland seas is because they are entirely freshwater, not salt.
By any other metric they’d be seas. Superior especially (the big one in the upper left) behaves like a small ocean, and has claimed at least 250 ships and over 1000 people. Gordon Lightfoot wrote a frankly chilling song about her that I’ll include here:
That frankly chilling song is based on a true story. The Edmund Fitzgerald went down on Lake Superior in a storm, lost with all hands, and it took them decades to find her.
children outside screaming: annoying but ultimately for the greater good. children need Going Outside and Screaming Time for proper emotional development. an auditory burden I am willing to bear
neighbor with his car he made louder on purpose: jail for neighbor. jail for ten thousand years
The best thing about the DND movie also is that Jarnathan is 100% the kind of name the DM has to make up on the spot because they forgot to name all the council and the players are asking, so now they’re going “John…Jarnathan….”
Well, fuck me sideways. Connections have been made.
My girlfriend has this specific gesture she does sometimes, a very particular way of turning her wrist around and locking her fingers in one specific grip. Fast or slow, the angle of her wrist and the rhythm of the movement are always exactly the same, and at this point I’ve learned to recognize the motion well enough that she could do it with her back towards me and I know she’s doing it.
The first time I saw her do it I thought she was putting something into her pocket, but once I noticed her making it more often I started making connections. I saw her doing it unconsciously when some situation in the house is getting tense - not during the casual sparring arguments with my other housemates, but the serious fights where shit is about to actually get fucking real - and I figured that it’s a nervous thing, she doesn’t like where this is going and it’s scaring her. So that became my cue that it’s time to back down.
I don’t know when she noticed that I noticed her doing it. We’ve never talked about it, but at some point she started doing it on purpose, as her way of telling me that I should stop causing problems. Rotating her hand slowly means she’s seeing a problem brewing and it’s better that I watch myself before I start escalating it, and a quick flick and snap means whatever I was just about to say or do, I should cut that shit out right this fucking second. It works for some reason, so I’ve respected that.
My girlfriend does some volunteering favors for the neighbors here sometimes. Today she asked if I wanted to come along to walk this one old couple’s dog, and I was feeling up for it so I went along. My father was terrified of dogs so I’m not familiar with them, but her family has always had them.
So we were walking, talking about something else, enjoying the nice weather for once, when my girlfriend saw another dog walker approaching. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, but the other dog walker started pulling the dog back with this roller leash thing whatever the fuck they’re called. And then the old couples’ dog started growling.
With the familiarity of someone who’s been handling dogs all her life my girlfriend grabbed the little fucker’s leash, wrapping it around the width of her palm and gripping it to pull the dog closer a second before it could bolt to attack. A move she’s probably done countless times in her life, that she could do in her sleep, by instinct, without ever even thinking about it. A gesture I’ve learned to fucking spot from across the room from the corner of my eye. That exact same fucking twirl and grip. I have no idea if she noticed me noticing it or making the connection.
She’s fucking learned to pull my fucking leash back when I’m about to start shit.
