SuperPowers

Daniel Tiger & Black Panther ^ on the Toy Bridge

I am afraid of banking and making phone calls and administrative tasks like that.
Like, I'm not (very) afraid of the dentist, but I am afraid of MAKING THE APPOINTMENT to go to the dentist. Also, filling out forms about money. I just don't.

So––very boring, but exciting to me--I am Super Proud that tiny-frightened-tiger me did a Super Thing in the realm of Practical Life Skills yesterday.
With the hand-holding of brave bink––who also dreads these kinds of things but had stumbled on a nice banker she took me to see––
I went to the bank and bought a thing the banker called "an instrument", which I should have done almost THREE YEARS AGO with money I got from Auntie Vi when she died.

No, wait--I didn't get the money 3 years ago.
Vi died three years ago, but I waited almost ONE YEAR to fill in the forms with her insurance company--and even then, I got my SISTER to do it for me. It took 15 minutes.

And then I waited two more years to move it to an interest-bearing savings "instrument". Which also took 15 minutes--not including driving time and going out after for celebratory Iced Brown Sugar Oatmilk Lattes at Starbucks.
I also splurged twenty bucks for a 12 oz.-bag of premium, fair trade bean--with "nutty and cocoa-toned highlight notes of pistachio, salted caramel and baking chocolate".

I like Starbucks, atrocious ad copy notwithstanding.
I don't even care what evil means they employ to make this happen, everything works like clockwork there, and I find the contrast with the thrift store calming and reassuring. Clean aprons are possible!
At the thrift store, there aren't enough aprons for workers;
half the things I set up for human dignity (including the bench in the exit hallway) have been dismantled;
and the bullet-hole in the front window remains after 2+ years, its cracks more crazed than ever.

I've come to suspect that Big Boss is proud of the shot window--possibly considers it a badge of honor? This would make some psychological sense--he has become Executive Director this year, and that's far from his hood roots. The window affirms that, as Mr Furniture says, "We're the ghetto mall".
Not that there's any doubt about that.
There's no Starbucks for miles.

I'm volunteering today, Book's Girl's day off.
I totally didn't mean to diss the young people for being floaty, btw--look at the world they live in!--but I do like to power through work on my own.
_______________________

The Once and Future King is hotting up, now Arthur is grown and married to Guenever. I totally missed this as a young adult, but it is a weird book, full of nasty cruelty--and a main character, Lancelot, whose own attraction to cruelty spurs him to wrench himself into alien kindness (thereby bringing down the edifice of Goodness that Arthur had constructed out of cards).

T. H. White spells this all out for us, quite clearly.
I'd said in an earlier post that the book was subtle, not preachy, but I was entirely wrong--it smacks you in the face with its thrashing moral anguish over how to be good.

I gather that was T. H. White's struggle himself--"a homosexual sadist" who refused to beat the boys he taught, but whose book The Goshawk recording his cruelty to his captive hawk disturbed Siegfried Sassoon so much that he couldn't finish reading it:
“I now flinch from anything frightful,” Sassoon wrote, “and what I read was agonizing."
(--"How to Train Your Raptor"--review of H Is for Hawk in the New Yorker)

O&F King is too blatant--thud! but it's also good about how hard it is to figure out how to construct anything good in this world.
Poor Arthur! He is not internally conflicted, he is simple and good--White literally says so--but he just can't figure out, no matter how hard he tries, and he tries very hard, how to create lasting social goodness.
Goodness is a wild, slippery and muscular fish.

Trying to force Goodness into domesticated tidiness is a mistake. Like the Project 2025, which Michael at OCA has been posting strictures from--(today's, on "Leftist broadcasters").
Attempts like the Project's to clean up human society are pathetic, laughable, and very frightening.

After all, even in the 1950s the "happiest of doll families" didn't need two parents, and Baby has no gender! From paper ephemera at the store: