If I Were A Zookeeper My Intrusive Thoughts Would Be Wild

if i were a zookeeper my intrusive thoughts would be wild

Give OP a museum.

Hey hi hello, I saw that you criticized how art museums encourage the dismissal of modern art pieces. I am wondering which aspects of art museum design encourages this behavior, and what could be done to improve modern art appreciation in museums.

Imagine the modern art wing of a museum.

Spare white walls.

Intense, even lighting.

Hard wooden floors.

No seating.

Maze-like, interconnected galleries.

Small plaques identifying the artist, year and title in clean sans-serif font.

These design choices are all in the service of making the art museum the best possible habitat for art.  The museum is a neutral void into which we place great works of beauty to be appreciated.  The work shines.  It’s unburdened by context.  It’s alluring and impressive and an utter fucking cipher if you don’t already know why it’s interesting.

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Here’s something cute

When lockdown happened in the UK it happened very suddenly. At the law firm I work at, our office building emptied overnight when everyone was told to work from home. No time to clear our desks, no time to bring office plants home.

Fast forward three and a half months - everyone assumes that their plants are dead.

But then! An email goes round! It’s turns out that one of our security guards is a florist, and -

-the security team has moved EVERY SINGLE PLANT from all 12 FLOORS of our office building into the cafeteria. It’s been turned into a temporary greenhouse. Cacti and succulents and spider plants and terrariums and potted ferns

AND! Each plant has been INDIVIDUALLY LABELLED by hand with post-it notes with name and desk location so the plants can go home after lockdown ends

To give some indication of the scale of the endeavour:

If you zoom into the centre right photo you can see one of our security team happily waving

The plants are being taken care of tenderly. They get sun and water and are spending happy times with other plant friends

OK, that’s a great ending.

so i was searching scanned archives of historical books for references to the names of the amis outside of les mis, like you do, in order to try and find clues for why hugo picked the names that he did. i found a few things (which i’ll make a post about later), but i wasn’t having much luck overall… until i found this sentence in a french scientific journal (Cosmos: revue des sciences et de leurs applications) from 1895:

for those of you who don’t speak french, allow me to translate:

A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.”

…okay cosmos, you have my attention. the full article is even better:

and another rough translation:

The art of giving bottled wine the appearance of age. - More and more things are counterfeited in our age. This is why there are forged diamonds and other precious stones, ivory, gold, rubber. Now, here’s an example found in the sale of phony old wines, that is, wine stored in bottles having the appearance of age. To make bottles appear older and obtain a better price for their contents, a new industry was created, that of spider cultivation. A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Grantaire has, near Philadelphia (United States), the largest spider “farm.” His stock usually consists of thousands of spiders originating mostly from the selection of spiders imported from France.

This industry also exists in the Loire region, but on a smaller scale. There are however ten establishments devoted to the cultivation of spiders in this department. These spiders are sold for around 60 francs per hundred, and the clientele consists of french wine-growers who use them for a clever, if not recommendable, purpose.

Three months after the introduction of 60 francs’ worth of spiders to a newly stocked wine cellar, the bottles are covered from cork to cork in spiderwebs. The uneducated person, seeing these bottles completely covered in spiderwebs, naturally concludes that the wine which they contain is old, and so one can get a better price for it.

COUNTERFEIT WINE 

SPIDER-FARMER GRANTAIRE

IS A THING

and it gets better — apparently this story went “viral,” in a nineteenth-century sense, appearing throughout different american newspapers and journals, including the scientific fucking american. here’s an excerpt from the story about it in the hartford locomotive:

aka: 

“average ami raises 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average ami eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Grantaire, who lives in pennsylvania & raises over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted”

here’s the headline of the san francisco call’s article:

HE HAS A MOTHERFUCKING SPIDER FARM. 

the text of the article (which we can all read because it is available online, thank the old gods and the new) includes an interview with spiders grantaire, in which he waxes rhapsodically about his charges in exactly the way that you imagine the grantaire of les mis would:

“They think I feed them now,” said Pierre, “but I ford them for you. They have brains, these little creatures. Ah, they are cunning. After you see them and I tell you of them you will not oush them more. You will say, ‘The spider can teach me something. I will Watch him. He is a diplomat, an architect, a mathematician. His knowledge is worth having.’ Ah, there is a fine fellcw running on your neck. Don’t knock him off. He will not bite you. They are harmless. He wishes to give you a bon jour and make your acquaintance. […] “But what money is there in it, you ask. Men Dieu, money, money—always money. I, who love my pets, to be always thinking of what they sell for! I will tell you now, and then you will talk no more of money, and I can show you something. A customer comes to me. He is a wine merchant from New York or Philadelphia, or perhaps he writes. He says that he has just stocked a cellar with five-year-old port or Burgundy, or something else. The bottles have brushed clean in shipping. They look like new and common. They will not sell for old wine. He has attached to them labels of twenty, thirty or forty years ago, some year of a grand vintage. He tells me so many hundred bottles. I know how many of my pets will soon cover his cellar in cobwebs of the finest old kind. I put them in little small paper boxes, a pair in a box. I ship then, in a crate, with many holes for air. Maybe I send 200, 300 or 400 spiders. For them I ask half a franc each, si, for every hundred. In two months you would think his cellar was not disturbed for the last forty years. It has cost him $40, or $50 maybe, but he may sell the wine for $1,000 —yes, more than that—above what it had brought without any pets had dressed the bottles in robes of long ago.”

one million stories, please, about a grantaire who miraculously survives the barricade and moves to the united states where he starts a spider farm and keeps the flame of the revolution alive by bilking snobby fat cats out of their wine money.

Not completely true: some of us allistics carry around with us massive anxiety about social interaction, sometimes having to do with phone calls or emails. Of that group of people, it’s not uncommon to use mental or written scripts to help manage anxiety or prevent overwhelm.

Though I think that the idea that it’s something very big still does apply: it’s just that sometimes, a brain like mine will decide that responding to somebody about a particular thing that makes me anxious is very big. Even when it’s really not. But (at least for me), that’s not every social interaction.

wait wait wait, having to prepare to make a phone call is an autistic thing??? omg. I was taking these online classes and I had to do some tests over the phone, like the teacher asks questions and I answer. I would prepare for at least 45 mins (not study for the actual test, like prepare to have to talk) and write a script for what to say if I had to leave a voicemail. allistics don’t do that?

Nope!  Allistics do not “prepare” in order to socialize.  They do not have scripts.  They do not write them, memorize them, or use them.  They just magically know what to say.  

An allistic might prepare for something very big, like a job interview.  Or right before asking a person out for the first time.  In that case, some of them do practice what they might say.  For BIG things.  But that’s it.

For us, every phone call is a job interview.  Every socialization is a performance where we are being judged.  This is why socializing is exhausting.  Dear allistics, if every time you talked to anyone, it was a person deciding whether or not you deserved the job, you’d feel exhausted, too.