Kids are truly ridiculous.
This past week I was working at a field-trip based spring break camp mainly with kindergarten and first graders which led me to the conclusion that being a child at that age is, for the most part, totally akin to being on really powerful mind-altering drugs. Young kids who have learned to talk but not to reason say things that are so mind-blowingly insane that there would be no reason to believe them if not for the conviction in their eyes. I mean there is something alternately beautiful and terrifying about a screaming 6 year old running up to you yelling, "save me from the dragons" and meaning all of it. Reality and the encroachment of years on our lives and minds seem to chip away at the all powerful imagination of the early years. Nowadays, if we wanna really be superheros and save the world we need LSD or other things like that but when we were 6 we just need a small towel and a space under a table.
News is truly ridiculous.
I think this almost ended in an actual fight.
and I'll withhold any opining and leave the fun to our discerning readers.
and now...The Monstroblog's newest feature: Darkness of the Week
This week's DOW centers again on my work with children. "Billy" and "Jimmy" (names have been changed because I can't fucking remember them) were changing back into their clothes after swimming in the afternoon. Billy was a bully and Jimmy was a smallish kid who got bullied a lot. Billy pulled out his underwear to reveal that he had large poop stains in them. Jimmy's underwear only had a few drops of urine. Billy said to Jimmy, "These are yours, put them on" and gave him the poopy underwear. "No they're not," said Jimmy. "Put them on anyway and give me yours," Billy demanded. At this point I stepped in as Jimmy was about to put on Billy's underwear and asked what was going on and informed Billy he couldn't give Jimmy his soiled tighty whiteys. "Oh he'll put them on though, trust me, I told him to," Billy said. Jimmy nodded.
From Daniel Levitin's "This is your Brain on Music", concerning infants:
ReplyDelete"During the first six months or so of life, the infant brain is unable to clear distinguish the source of sensory inputs; vision, hearing, and touch meld into a unitary perceptual presentation... As Simon Baron-Cohen has described it, with all this sensory cross talk, the infant lives in a state of complete psychadelic splendor."
yeah, nice find jumago, legitimizes my musings quite nicely...
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