meminerimus

I beta tested this entry, and it was the only one I did for spring thing, and it left me feeling, well, how much would I have gotten out of looking over another entry like this?

Well, I guess I can find out by trying to review the entries I didn't test. I think meminerimus has a lot of impact for its very small size. My initial pass through it with testing was, okay, this works, and I see how the pieces fit in. Then I was surprised how much time I took to sit and think about it, and about some loose ends of things way in the past about my own life. Nothing earth-shattering, but there's something to be said for remembering something you thought wasn't right at the time, and you didn't have proof of that, and people made you feel bad you were upset. And realizing you had a point.

Certainly when I was younger I'd imagine, what would certain adults say once I was out of their life? Or if I managed to get out of the life? I was told I was conscientious, or I could be, and as a result I often focused on the adults more like, well, the narrator in this work, instead of the adults who just wanted what was good for me and were willing to do something without expecting repayment. Maybe part of it was the cliche "You have to give yourself a challenge. If anything comes too easy in life it's not worth it."

The adult narrator here seems quite good at actual-factualing us into agreeing that their way was the Correct Way. But it falls apart if you step back and think about it. They talk about how they gave something and then took it away, because the recipient no longer appreciated it, or maybe didn't appreciate it the right way. Think about, say, a parent who buys their kid weights and exercise equipment to help get good in one sport, but the kid wears them out getting good in another.

I had adults say, well, we'll do this for you if you make a promise to work hard, and I'm grateful to adults who did that. That's part of helping kids grow, but when it's warped into "trust me, do this thing I want, it's good for you," it can misfire.

I don't want to spoil things too much, but this work reminded me of magazine subscriptions my parents got me that I didn't really want, and I felt guilty about it, and I didn't use them and maybe wasted my parents' money and figured I didn't deserve to ask for others. Ones that would have really been more my thing, or my focus, and I was surprised other kids at school had subscriptions, and their parents might have even enjoyed looking at the magazines too or hearing what their kids learned.

I remember trips to the library, too, where it was understood I would try to find smart kid books, but my parents also pushed me away from things that might have been interesting to me. I had some friends who learned chess in 7th grade, and I was well ahead of them and stayed well ahead of them, but I was surprised how much they talked about going to get chess books at the library. My parents took me to the library, but they would have expected better than that. After all, they'd bought me a few chess books, right? And a chess computer program!

I still remember learning Inform 7 and trying to shake off that teacher who was very, very passionate about heap sorts and data structures because that's fundamentals and what's on the AP exam, and I had minor arguments in my head about why I didn't deserve to be locked out of I7's convenience, with not excuse why I didn't really enjoy the CS curriculum.

These are personal revelations tangentially related to the subject matter. I don't want to spoil it, because I think you might find something in there too, if you need to, and if you don't, I'm happy for you and not jealous. (Or I hope I am! It's best for me it I am.) I think it's safe to say that the narrator is transactional, and I realized that they were preventing their target's growth while saying "Well, it'd be nice if you could grow as I'd like you to."

I don't know if I mentioned that I'm a big fan of Robert Cormier and the writing has a Cormier feel about it to me, without really cribbing from him. It deals with unfairness, the sort you may not see it the first time, but if you re-read and see it, it puts some of your own ruminations of what might or might not be unfair in perspective, even giving you the courage to say, well, that thing back then I couldn't prove was unfair? Well, the people involved sure didn't try to make it fair. That can help me bury any worries I didn't do what I should or could have. Perhaps other works may do it better, but this did so very well.

Whether or not the narrator's target is fortunate enough to have had any insight resembling this, or if they had an insight about the narrator's bad faith without finding a way out, I won't spoil. But I found this work surprisingly motivational. Not in the rah rah sense, of course. But I was reminded of times I was told I wasn't motivated for what REALLY mattered, and I'd know what was important some day. Sometimes I'd feel bad enough I wouldn't chase something I found interesting for my own sake, and other times I did chase that and saved feeling guilt for later. That's lessened a lot over the years, but it's still there, and thankfully I can blow it off quickly. But each reminder like this reminds me of another unpleasant episode I can not just get over but push far past.