02.18.2003

things to read, what I did on my holiday

The bar on the side of Anil Dash's Blog led me to this excellent piece, which theorizes that the root cause of the cruelty of American (primarily high school) teenagers is the fact that schools are primarily designed as a place for our kids to be watched while we're out earning our money. He says a lot more than that, though, about Nerds and Freaks and intelligence and popularity. Since my own early teenage years as an outsider was only a mild reflection of these things, I've got a slightly different case to draw observation from, and his essay actually touches on some of this. (He talks about a mitigating factor being strong families, where kids don't need to worry so much about what their peers think because they're busy worrying what their families think.) I don't think he mentions class size as a factor, and I think it is - while the clique I inhabited was the closest thing my class had to "nerds," there weren't overwhelming numbers against us - in a class of 60 or so kids, there's not so much to worry about.

I worked from home again today, in the morning. Later I dug out my car, which took hours, and I'm sore as hell. There are no shovels to buy ANYWHERE. Or, well, that's my uneducated guess after having visited the CVS, the Home Depot, the Target, and the supermarket.

.link..comments.