Phoebe: At my old school, we never ended up in the toilet.

Phoebe: At my old school, we never rode on bees.

Keesha: Um, Phoebe, we are at your old school.

Phoebe: Oh… right.

somehow when I think about unassimilating or deassimilating, or affirming my inability to assimilate, or letting go of my impulses towards assimilation, I think about the character Phoebe on The Magic School Bus.

she is the new girl for basically the entirety of the show, she won’t shut up about her old school, which is probably idealized and romanticized, and she says these things, and nobody has any response, and everyone thinks it’s annoying when she speaks, and the things she says are useless, it’s not clear why she’s talking at all, because it’s clearly not, primarily, in order to communicate anything useful or pleasurable to anybody else in the room. she’s talking for herself.

i think when i watched this show as a kid she made me wince, i felt like she was being portrayed as a negative example, of what you shouldn’t do. all my friends agreed that she was “annoying.”

“We poets take all words personally… . I want to say this only for me I think, I think whoever hears this knows it & knows all about you” - Alice Notley, Doctor Williams’ Heiresses. 

and the amazing thing about the internet is that you can talk like phoebe in this miserable muttering way, and maybe social media will conjure an audience for you, and the bored and annoyed assholes will block you and leave you alone.