#managed to find my oldest baby cousin on snapchat while he was still in his 'mom can you buy my wrecked mustang from the scrapyard' phase

[mercurymusing]

I've got an aunt that we don't talk to any more. She's a school librarian.

At one point as a kid we went to visit that side of the family. I was in elementary school toting around Eragon by then.

She threw an absolute fit at the idea of me reading something so age inappropriate and dumped a bunch of "better educational" materials on us.

I have a very clear memory of opening up one of these early reader type books and feeling like an absolute idiot because I had no idea what all of the lines and diacritics were supposed to mean. I knew almost all of the actual words they were defacing and could gamely sound out the unfamiliar ones by ignoring the extra bits, but she took this as a sign that she was right about how badly I'd damaged my literacy development.

Like. I mispronounced shit like "cylinder" because English orthography is bullshit, not because I couldn't do phonics. The fact that I could get to "kie-lind-er" and give a more or less accurate description of the meaning should have been all the indication you needed, you harpy.

Anyway. These days I mostly hear about her from incidental gossip about her idiot son that got discharged after falling out of a watchtower at boot camp, but I nurse a quiet certainty that she's not one of the school librarians desperately fighting book bans.

One of the funniest/dumbest literal thinking autism moments of my childhood happened when I was in 2nd grade. I was going to a new school so I was made to do a bunch of assessments to see where I placed in different subjects. I was most excited for the reading one cuz at my old school I was the best reader in my class, and I wanted to show off.

The lady testing me hands me this little short story and asks me to read it aloud.

And for some reason that I still don't understand to this day, a bunch of the words randomly had like lines or dots above the vowels. Which idk seems like an unnecessary and confusing thing to include when testing a 7 year old. Like you're gaslighting them into thinking theres extra letters in the alphabet. So obvi I ask what the symbols mean cuz I've never seen them in this context. She sorta brushes me off and says, word for word, "those mean you just say the letters name"

What she undoubtedly meant was: "on those words, the letter highlighted will sound like what its called. O with the line sounds O and not uh or ew or whatever"

What I understood was "Just Say the Letters Name"

So anyways i proceeded to read the story aloud, stopping suddenly every other word to pause cuz I wasnt supposed to say bow i was supposed to say o. I know for a fact at one point I just said a word and then stopped and repeated the sentence with just the letter so she HAD to've known I'd misunderstood her. But she said absolutely nothing. I remember walking outta there feeling like a complete idiot, and feeling so embarrassed when later they told my mom my reading skills were an entire grade behind where I should've been. But also looking back at it like wtf how could theyve possibly gotten an accurate understanding of my reading ability under those conditions.