Human history is an interesting, fluid thing. Reasons, events, happenings, they all morph so easily without our notice. I\u2019m no historian so I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll give an incorrect example if I try, so let\u2019s take a small anecdote from my own life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
After visiting my current combined middle\/high school for the first time, I told my mom I wanted to go to the school because the bathrooms were good. To this day (and until she reads this article), she still thinks that\u2019s why I wanted to attend my school. She\u2019s told dozens of people this little anecdote of my precociousness. Perhaps one of those dozens of people mentioned this story of bathroom decisions at their workplace. Then, maybe their boss or an activist, after overhearing this little anecdote, was pushed to petition for improved facilities at workplaces, resulting in a state law being brought into being by a ten-year-old talking about bathrooms. Far-fetched? Yes. Possible? Also yes, at least in the highly convenient, coincidental world of fiction and imagination, which is certainly the realm we\u2019re working in now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, in my graduation speech (which I have yet to give), I said that I actually wanted to enter my school because that\u2019s where my brother was. However, because I didn\u2019t want to make my brother\u2019s head big by citing him as my reason, I made up an excuse about bathrooms. This means that, in a day\u2019s time, perhaps hundreds of people will believe that my bathroom claim was just an excuse built from sibling rivalry. Perhaps it\u2019ll become a sweet story that can be told to children in the future as an example of what to do\u2014or what not to do\u2014as siblings. Who knows?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In reality (or is it?), I was predisposed to believe the school was grand and fantastic. There are a few reasons for this predisposition: (1), my brother was attending the school; (2), my parents kept talking it up; and (3), secondary school just seemed so much cooler than elementary school! I\u2019d get to pick my own classes Which means that there are three separate versions of this insignificant tale percolating through the world right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n History is written by the winners, the saying goes. But it\u2019s not even that. History is written by whatever is the most popular, whatever tale is the most known, whichever one happens to be told around the campfire the largest number of times. Often, that history happens to coincide with the winners\u2019 dialogue, but with the advent of technology, perhaps the popular will diverge further from the winner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a meme that says, \u201cI was today years old when I learned that the game TAG stands for \u2018Touch and Go.\u2019\u201d It doesn\u2019t, actually, but maybe someday, historians will look back on us and believe that as the truth. There are no winners or losers in that, certainly. It\u2019s just a silly meme, but it\u2019s popular by way of strange internet mechanics. Maybe someday historians will look back on 2023 and assume that \u201cthe Game\u201d is an incredibly commonplace item, like keys or glasses, that is easily misplaced (incidentally, speaking of that, I LOST THE GAME). Or that Rick Astley can do a backflip or make a really fancy Swiss log<\/a>. Or, well. At this point, I\u2019ve kind of lost track of my analogy, so let\u2019s get back to the original story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because somehow, even though I know the real reason for my silly bathroom comment, whenever I think of each reason, I can\u2019t help but think it\u2019s the real one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is maybe just a sign of my bad memory and not some deep philosophical insight into humanity, but let’s just end this here so I can at least pretend it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Human history is an interesting, fluid thing. Reasons, events, happenings, they all morph so easily without our notice. I\u2019m no historian so I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,14],"tags":[59,122],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333,"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions\/333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/giftofpresent.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}(but only in STEM, because I was sufficiently poor at humanities that I had to stay on track)<\/s>, I\u2019d never make hand turkeys again (except STUCO actually ran a hand turkey event one year)<\/s>, and each class would be with a different set of people (but not too different, there being only 150 students in the whole school)<\/s>: how sophisticated<\/em>! With this predisposition in mind, I noticed that the bathrooms were quite good, so I reported back to my mother that this school was so fantastic, even the bathrooms<\/em> were wonderful! Of course, as a ten-year-old, I couldn\u2019t understand the intricacies of my own logic so I simply kept repeating, \u201c\u5395\u6240\u597d\u8c6a\u534e!\u201d (the bathrooms are so luxurious). And now an untold, unknowable number of people online will know this third reason as the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n