I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

This is also a good string on this topic.

Okay the funniest thing about this is that everyone’s saying I’m taking away his space by putting things in the window

He has this entire one right next to it with a blankie and he uses it exclusively for people watching. He really only goes to the other window when he decides to be A Menace

Also his name is Banjo

He as a stroller

Omg there been updates!!

My mom went through something similar. She needed a knee replacement and her doctor wouldn’t okay it until she lost weight, which was difficult given the whole knee problem preventing her from walking thing. He told her she was too dangerous to operate on and that there were just too many risks.

My mom tried to lose weight in vain for months before she finally gave into my begging her to get a second opinion. The first doctor she saw next scheduled her for surgery the same day she met him. When my mom asked about the risk of operating on her he told her that there was some minor risks for complication and that all she would need to do to alleviate the risk was spend an extra night in the hospital so that they could keep a look out for any complications.

There were zero. There were also zero complications when she had her other knee done, her hip replaced and her gallbladder removed.

Almost like the first doctor was entirely full of shit and just trying to coerce his patient to lose weight by scaring her for fucking nothing, even when she was living day to day in excruciating pain and desperately needed a surgery.

Hey, April Fool’s day is tomorrow! I wanted to repeat that I will NOT be posting jump scares or anxiety pranks or making any false announcements of anything.

I WILL be posting cute and silly animal photos, both my own and yours, if you want to send one in. If you’d like to play and share your pets, please send an ask or submit a photo with “April Fool’s! Made you look at my cute [pet].” or something similar (to keep them separate from normal day asks).