I really, really hated my high school Geography class. We had to take notes in the dark because the teacher insisted on projecting pictures, we had to make power point presentations and then waste two days listening to our classmates stumble through them, we had to memorize the names of small rivers and then regurgitate them on quizzes, and I sat near a girl who clearly knew more about my allergy than I did.
You see, she had a cousin. And her cousin was allergic to peanuts. But her cousin never mentioned it, and she ate at restaurants, and she didn't carry an EpiPen, and she certainly didn't have a service dog, and so, really, what was wrong with me that I had to be such an attention whore about the whole thing?
We had this conversation about once a week. She told me condescendingly that her cousin got along fine without a service dog, I pointed out that some allergies are more severe than others, and then she either called me a bitch or said I was a liar, depending on the tone of that week's conversation. Logical reasoning did not get rid of her. Providing accurate information and citing my sources did not get rid of her. Refusing to speak or make eye contact or acknowledge her presence did not get rid of her. Fighting fire with fire did not get rid of her. And asking to have my desk moved did not work.
I felt like this girl was trying to persuade me that I didn't need to use little paper wrappers to bake cupcakes because she baked cookies last week and didn't need them, and still insisted that I didn't need them even when I explained how a cupcake is different from a cookie and not all desserts are exactly alike. And she was angry about it. Why was I using paper wrappers? What did I think I was doing? That was wrong, wrong, wrong! Did I want to kill trees?
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