smeej

36 ms·

601.
by smeej 2y ago
Those responses have puzzled me the most. Like, OK, there was an odd little girl somewhere in the world back in the '80s. So what? We know there are kids who earn graduate degrees in their early teens. Why is it implausible that the oc
602.
by smeej 2y ago
I'm so curious about the last part of your comment. You're not the only one who seems...at least uncomfortable with?...the idea that there was an odd little 3yo girl back in the '80s somewhere who once had a weird conversatio
603.
by smeej 2y ago
Oh believe me. They and everyone else tested me by giving me books without pictures, and that I'd never seen before. I was reading. It's not common for 3-year-olds to be able to read, but it's also not so rare that you&#x27
604.
by smeej 2y ago
> ...casting nervous glances at a rooster slowly approaching me like a Weeping Angel. > Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They [the Weeping Angels] are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't t
605.
by smeej 2y ago
It's not an accident that we haven't lived within a thousand miles of each other since I graduated high school. Fortunately my mom eventually figured it out and left him, and we've had the chance to build a very strong relati
606.
by smeej 2y ago
No, as far as I know I'm not dyslexic, and I suspect it would have come up in my life by now if I were. The way I read is a lot like certain old speed reading trainers used to teach, where I'm able to pick up the meaning of the wh
607.
by smeej 2y ago
Hmm. I could definitely see that. Learn to speak early because the parent obviously isn't recognizing and responding to your needs the way you're already trying to communicate them (not that it'll help; not being able to unde
608.
by smeej 2y ago
One of the things I wish people had realized about me back then was that just because I had the verbal fluency and reasoning ability of a much older child, it didn't mean I had the maturity and life experience of one. I still had such
609.
by smeej 2y ago
It's not enough tiers, though, because (at least in my experience and the sense I get from other people) the specialists still have only mastered the 20% of issues that account for 80% of cases. I'd love to see two more Pareto lev
610.
by smeej 2y ago
I don't even think it means I'm particularly "smart," whatever that means. I just picked up one specific set of skills extremely early that happen to be highly valued in young children.
611.
by smeej 2y ago
I've always hated chess because of my dad! He wouldn't even prompt me about what I might have considered that could have helped, so after a dozen or so games in the span of an hour, I decided I didn't want to play with him an
612.
by smeej 2y ago
My ereader is an Android tablet under the hood. I don't know of any apps that can do this on Android, but I can go hunting!
613.
by smeej 2y ago
It seems like as a culture we have a lot of weird baggage around dealing with doctors. It makes me wonder if it has something to do with our fear of our own mortality and unwillingness to talk about death or something. I remember my classma
614.
by smeej 2y ago
You know, it's taken a lot longer than I would have hoped, but I'm grateful enough that it happened at all that I don't dwell much on what could have been!
615.
by smeej 2y ago
I think it's central to the story that it was highly unusual. My dad couldn't believe I could do that, so it doesn't surprise me that you can't either. Many children aren't speaking clearly at 3, much less reasoning
616.
by smeej 2y ago
I figured out far too early that I was thinking on abstraction levels different from my teachers. I say "far too early" because it was before I had the social maturity to know better than to point it out. I didn't mean to be
617.
by smeej 2y ago
Is it possible to switch back and forth between the written text and the audio, like Amazon's Whispersync? I prefer reading with my eyes when I can (especially on my ereader, so with pagination instead of scrolling), but I would love t
618.
by smeej 2y ago
I don't know that he meant to teach me a lesson. I think it was just a mentalist-style magic trick, not unlike pulling a quarter out of a kid's ear. Just for fun. I guess it was useful to know people are alike enough to be predict
619.
by smeej 2y ago
This makes me wonder about what turned out to be a pivotal moment in my early life. It was the day I first realized other people have their own minds, and that I could predict with some degree of accuracy what was in them. My dad wrote the
620.
by smeej 2y ago
Came here to make a related comment. I've had the equivalent settings active on my GrapheneOS device for at least a couple years, and I still find myself losing hours of my life to the darn thing. If you don't go after the underly
621.
by smeej 2y ago
Would we even have an "I'm going to get mine no matter what happens to anyone or anything else, now or in the future," mindset if we all grew up with healthy attachments? I know scarcity would still exist. It's not lik
622.
by smeej 2y ago
I think the way relational trauma is understood today, at least as applied to children, is that the event breaks the person's internal sense of self and of safety. Children are SO vulnerable, and their brains understand this on a lizar
623.
by smeej 2y ago
This is the reason I have a relationship with my mom and not my dad. She did eventually try to understand why she thought the things she did were OK at the time she did them (and that's actually been helpful for me to understand over t
624.
by smeej 2y ago
Carlo passed away at only 15 years old in 2006 after a battle with leukemia. With the formal recognition of a second miracle attributable to his intercession, the Vatican is prepared to canonize him (declare him a saint). He spent much of t
625.
by smeej 2y ago
There wouldn't be any way to collect this data, but if you could, I guarantee the overwhelming majority of "apologies" from parent to child over the course of these relationships would start with, "I'm sorry you
626.
by smeej 2y ago
I think you've nailed it, and that it's subjective. I missed out on those things too, but it doesn't bother me at all, because they're not things I wanted to experience, whereas parenthood feels to me like a big loss
627.
by smeej 2y ago
Estranged parents seem to think everything was fine and then suddenly changed, and usually "for no reason." I had four friends, separately, individually, reach out to me and say, "I know this isn't actually my business
628.
by smeej 2y ago
The list of "Reasons for Estrangement" in that first article is sorely lacking in anything that acknowledges the parent might be at fault.
629.
by smeej 2y ago
I'll even acknowledge his dad was worse than he is, and my great-grandfather worse still. But all those generations until my brother died defending the belief that they were fine and everyone else was the problem. I think change is pos
630.
by smeej 2y ago
Plus, everyone is in it together when no one has enough. Once you get to "some people could have enough at the expense of other people," victim/perpetrator dynamics show up, but when no one does, you're suffering toge

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