Anne Woodland

      Sometime in middle school my mom mentioned that I have a learning disability. I don't remember it being more than a passing conversation, but aside from blowing my mind, it made quite a few things make sense: like how from approximately second to fourth grade I'd had to go to special education classes at certain times during the school day. It also quickly made sense why my mom hadn't mentioned it sooner, because I started milking that thing for all it was worth. A classmate commented on how I failed a spelling test: "I have a learning disability!" To be fair, my learning disability is directly tied to phonics and spelling, but still... Fortunately, spelling tests weren't so much a thing in high school, so that phase passed quickly.       However, I didn't remember what my condition was called and it was an infrequent topic of conversation, so for years I've referred to it as a "sight-sound retention deficit", which is technically accur...

      When I was twelve or thirteen I played Clue for the first time. We had gotten the board game for Christmas one year as a family gift. The game is basically a process of elimination mystery game, for those unfamiliar, and one of the things you need to solve is which of the six weapon options was used to kill the victim.  The weapons in the classic game are a candlestick, knife, revolver, rope, wrench, and lead pipe. Now at the time, the fact that it was specifically a lead pipe seemed significant, especially since none of the other weapons had their composition designated. I was familiar with the concept of lead poisoning, so obviously the lead pipe was used to kill the victim through poisoning, otherwise why did it matter that it was a lead pipe?       I was eventually disabused of that notion, but I still find it irksome. Especially since three out of the six weapons were apparently used as a bludgeon: the candlestick, wrench, and lead pipe...