wrote an nmsc app

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+I struggle constantly with pedantry, whether it's “correcting” my own
+words or others', reading and re-reading a line of poetry or a line of
+code to assure myself of its correctness—or its error—or revolting
+at the sight of a misplaced comma.
+Of course, I still mistake in these areas; pobody's nerfect, after all.
+But I still have to deal with this unconscious strategy—correct for
+its overcorrections.
+When I was 7 or 8 years old, I was deep in to this addiction, niggling
+at little spelling errors or “he and me” instead of “he and I.”
+And since I was “objectively correct,” I felt validated in bothering
+my parents and my siblings and my friends with the trivia that I
+learned.
+
+The obviously anti-social aspects of this tendency didn't even dawn on
+me because this type of behavior and thin-but-annoying knowledge was
+rewarded by the school system.
+Learning this trivia, while technically a type of learning, prevented me
+from a lot of humanities, more flexible and expressive language, and
+more connective learning.
+I also used a set of beliefs to justify this rigidity: that facts were
+inherently deducible, rational, and extremely prevalent, so I could be
+either objectively right or objectively wrong.
+Since school taught me to prefer being right over being wrong, I held on
+to the facts that I knew and avoided anything I didn't already get.
+
+This adaption worked great for standardized tests and for essays graded
+for grammar, so my gradual transition away started, by necessity,
+outside of school.
+For me, it was Model United Nations.
+My first serious Model UN conference was at Georgia State University,
+and in the nights and weeks before, I had had to develop and create a
+position based around the policies of the Netherlands on immigration and
+on a human rights/aid issue.
+I know now that neither of these can ever have an absolutely correct
+answer, but at the time I searched at length for The One True Policy of
+the Netherlands on Immigration (TM), and didn't find it.
+I read that there were dozens of different policy proposals (should we
+open up the EU's borders or close them but provide FDI to emigrants? It
+looked like Holland had supported both).
+And there was a basketful of existing United Nations programs to choose
+to support or to adjust, yet none of them were explicitly, singularly
+supported by the Netherlands.
+Not being able to find the correct answer was a distressing experience.
+So, during the conference, which is centered around giving speeches and
+convincing others to support whichever policies you chose, I stayed
+quiet so I wouldn't be wrong.
+And, of course, I didn't win any awards from a performance like that.
+
+The next time around, at a conference run by the University of
+Georgia, I took a similar path.
+I was a little less focused on specifics, but I still stressed over
+whether the policy that I settled on was the right one, and I tried to
+hedge my bets by dragging in as many other ideas as I could.
+But once I got to the conference and needed to actually present, this
+wouldn't work.
+I had prepared parts of speeches that I recited anxiously, but once I
+got through my one or two monologues, I was lost.
+Thankfully, I had a much more experienced partner to help guide me.
+They gave me one piece of advice (that seems absurdly obvious in
+retrospect): “just go up and say something.”
+So I tried it.
+I rambled for 45 seconds (to the tee) about how allocating FDI for
+refugee camps in Turkey was the best possible solution to the Syrian
+refugee crisis, and even though it wasn't THE solution, it was
+something, and it worked because there is no absolute truth.