back in 2017 when LA Weekly got acquired by venture capital ghouls and replaced a bunch of writers with an email address you could send story ideas to, i sent them so much weird shit

i'm trying to remember why i made this, it was definitely one of my HIRE ME U COWARDS ones, but i don't remember where. probably applebees. like u should hire me to use branding to make ur fast casual restaurant a place where people fuck imagine what if ur horse has died i made this for u wow

right? some of my happiest memories from then are like oh buddy, you're describing something that would be inhumane to make someone do. and a lot of that is just how i managed my profound sense of discomfort with all of the stuff i didn't like or care about. i'll just be a feral work goblin instead

now i'm just reminiscing about self-destructive hyperfocusing. my senior year, i had a restricted use dept of ed dataset that i had to work on in a locked room on an airgapped computer on campus, so i just slept on the floor there for weeks. i have no memory of what i ate or when i showered.

but i'm a specific sort of audhd and chronically ill that made me really good at academic work while being extremely awkward and not particularly interested in anything else that was happening. like i remember having a class that had three other people in it and i only knew one of their names.

my area of research for a long time was generally about social reproduction and elite higher education, looking at first generation college students as a comparison group. but yeah, like i wasn't happy or healthy there. what i loved about it was balanced against so much stuff that i hated

even my experience is now much harder to have at the same school, which has more than doubled in size since i was there without any proportional increase in faculty because higher ed is also a way to print money subsidized by crushing student debt

absolutely, your criticisms of higher ed as the modern engine of elite social reproduction are accurate and it's not like it's structured to provide the lucky experience i was able to have to people generally. i think what's valuable about it could be better achieved in very different ways

i had a very lucky experience in higher ed in that i was still sick and weird, but i had at least a couple diagnoses by then. for me it was almost entirely about having access to unusual people with expert knowledge who were really enthusiastic about having a student who was actually interested