Is there any hatred stronger than the rage kids get towards Barney the dinosaur as soon as they are just a little too old for Barney the dinosaur
So, this guy, Martin Pistorius, fell into a coma when he was 12 years old and eventually awoke completely paralyzed, at least physically. He was misdiagnosed. Doctors believed he was in a completely vegetative state, but in reality, he had regained full consciousness and awareness. He just didn’t possess any motor function, so he couldn’t communicate to anyone that he was alive in there. He lived this way for 12 years before he overcame it by sheer force of will and was given the tools to communicate. He tells his story in his book, Ghost Boy. Since then he’s also been the subject of the first episode of Invisibilia on NPR and had his own TedTalk.
Anyway, the breaking point that incited his plan of escape was being forced to watch Barney reruns all day, everyday at his care center. Sitting in front of the TV, he learned to tell the time by the shadows on the wall. If he had time he could know when Barney would end. With the ability to measure his days, he was able to pull himself out of the void and ultimately start down the path to recovery. Today, Martin can communicate whatever he wants with the help of a computer program, but there’s one thing he can’t articulate: “I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney.”
So it turns out that the primal hatred people have toward Barney is strong enough to pull a disembodied consciousness out of the abyss of existential despair and into the physical world out of pure spite
I often refer to my bottle-raised lamb as my adopted daughter, because it’s mostly true, it temporarily keeps nosy strangers from knowing I’m an eeeevil childfree woman, and it’s hilarious when people find out. And by that time they’re usually too disturbed by the “her-daughter-is-a-sheep” thing to get on my case about the “woman-with-no-husband-or-kids-oh-the-horror” thing.
Most of my friends are aware that I do this, and will back me up in conversations without batting an eye when I reference my daughter. And the best part is that they literally never drop the story. They just 100% all the time accept that I have a two-year-old adopted daughter. The fact that she happens to be a sheep is an unimportant detail, not worth mentioning until an anecdote gets too weird to plausibly be about a human toddler.
Which actually takes much longer than you’d think, since human toddlers apparently have absolutely zero sense. “She bites if you stop paying attention to her” is believable, “she tries to eat rocks out of the landscaping” is believable, “she stuck her head through a fence and couldn’t get out” is believable. “She jumped a five foot fence and came screaming back into the house through the dog door when I left her outside in the pasture” does get some strange looks, though usually not for the right reason.
Occasionally the joke gets turned around on me, though. I posted a picture on my not-tumblr blog of her wearing my glasses, and every comment was “Oh my gosh she looks just like you!!!” “I would never have known she was adopted If you hadn’t told me!!” “Are you sure that’s not an old picture of you?!”
