At first I was “lol” and then I was “OH MY GOD THEY ALMOST DIED”:
And then came the bees and mosquitoes.
“I tried to not get them to sting her,” Pangborn told KCRA. The bees wanted the placenta, she said with a chuckle. She was stung while defending her daughter, she said.
By Saturday, Pangborn’s desperation reached a fever pitch.
“I was just there at the end, thinking, ‘Oh my God.” I wasn’t sure if we were going to actually get out of there,” she said.
*
This is a high school stadium. It cost sixty million dollars. What is the world.
*
When I was in the eighth grade, I let my mother do my homework for me. Well, only once. It wasn’t for a grade or anything. And it was less that I let her do my homework for me and more that she insisted: she sat down, wrote out what she wanted me to turn in, and told me to copy it in my own handwriting.
It was for an essay contest. We were preparing to go on a class trip to Washington, D.C., and among the many, many patriotic activities planned was a visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, where we would observe the changing of the guard and a wreath-laying ceremony. Four lucky students, winners of the aforementioned essay contest, would get to actually participate in the ceremony. My mother desperately wanted me to be one of them.
*
So if The Huffington Post — which is 10-years-old, hauls in more than 200 million unique visitors a month and cranks out roughly 1,200 posts daily on the backs of reportedly poorly paid or unpaid writers — can’t turn a profit on $146 million in revenue, then how are the other, venture-capital fueled sites with smaller audiences and fewer relationships with advertisers supposed to achieve profitability?
*
Facebook threw up an old Ask Polly and I hate this dude soooo much (you should refrain from diagnosing your boyfriends with BPD, and you should also be more upfront about maybe having herpes, I am not saying the lady is a saint):
In the past few weeks, he’s had random outbursts where he’ll assume that I’m cheating on him and that I’m a terrible person who just fucks guys and hands out herpes. What provokes him is either nothing at all, or my getting a random Facebook inbox from some idiot I slept with over a decade ago—which I never so much as acknowledge. But I waver between being understanding and accommodating because I DID hurt him profoundly, and being absolutely appalled. I’ve never cheated, nor will I ever cheat. Not my thing, and, as I told him, one of the awesome things I have to offer in a relationship. (It’s worth noting that in the midst of all of this tumult, we managed to get back on track and skip while holding hands through fields of rainbows and shit.)
*
The rise of the wartime lady bartender:
And then, just when things seemed to be leveling out between the booze-savvy, the inevitable happened: the fellas heroically returned from overseas, expecting to find both their jobs, and their wives, exactly as they’d left them. Many American women complied, though some held tight to their jiggers and shakers, refusing to give up the lucrative and respected profession that had treated them so kindly throughout their years of service. As a wartime barmaid named Lorretta (pictured) told the Brooklyn Eagle, “A woman has to make a living, and what’s wrong with bartending? During the war it was patriotic for us to work.”
*
The last issue of Scratch Magazine is upon us, and I enjoyed everything in it, including this:
In 2010, Gail Hochman, my first literary agent, fired me after five years together. The end of our relationship felt as big as any breakup, nearly as devastating as the end of my first marriage, even though we parted on the most amicable of terms. Comparing a business relationship to a romantic one sounds like ridiculous hyperbole until you take into account that I had put all of my professional and artistic hopes and dreams into my agent’s hands. Or, rather, I had projected that power on to her. I wanted to publish books, and to publish them well. I wanted to be read and respected as a novelist. I wanted to put books out into the world and have people read them and care about them. I believed that having a literary agent was the only way to make that happen. And then I didn’t have her anymore.
*
Mr Wilson (I am not good at doing my kids’ hair):
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I fuckin’ knew that stadium had to be in Texas. God, I can’t tell you how pissed off I was growing up, watching my own high school’s budget pour into athletics (football specifically) while we had teachers who didn’t have a classroom and rolled their computers and projectors from room to room on carts during other teachers’ free periods.
To be fair, the new football stadium was part of a whole new high school that was getting built, which was more than big enough for all of the teachers to have their own rooms, but GUESS WHAT GOT BUILT FIRST. (There’s also the part where the football team went to away games on air-conditioned charter buses while the marching band took the school buses, but I won’t get into that because I wasn’t in band.) You can probably argue that the school’s biggest fundraiser was its athletic program (because it was), but it didn’t exactly make me feel any better at the time.
As an avid fan of Friday Night Lights, I concur. Tammy Taylor wouldn’t stand for this shit!
‘MURICA.
AMEN. I have so much resentment about this; honestly my high school experience was basically fine, but the emphasis on sports bugged the hell out of me when I was busy with arts activities that got no such adulation.
Maybe the athletic program WAS a big fundraiser, but I would want that to mean there’s more money for the school, in general, and for all the programs that don’t bring in money.
I’m so, so grateful that I went to All-Weirdo Arts High School where we had no sports teams to speak of. (Well, I guess there was a bowling team, now that I think about it…)
Same! Well, it was just a normal public school, so we HAD sports teams, but they were all shit except, like, swimming and soccer. And the administration totally knew it and funneled all the resources into performing arts and academics, because those were the factors that drew out-of-district students in to pay tuition. My high school was great.
I wish that was just a Texas thing- I’m from PA, and when they built us a new high school, it was A. at the intersection of two major highways (GREAT for walking to school, lemme tell you), B. in a major flood zone, and C. over an old mine (although in their defense, that wasn’t unique, basically my entire hometown is built over old mine shafts). Also, we went from having a full-size theater with a backstage, green room, etc, to having the CRAPPIEST THEATER IN THE WORLD. But it WAS right next to the FOOTBALL STADIUM, so the team could get there easier. Not a coincidence. That is the actual reason it was built there.
Our high school was known for its plays, which were almost professional quality. Our football team was notoriously and ludicrously awful.
Still bitter.
Sounds an awful lot like the main public school in my PA town, which was not only built next to a major road but ON BOTH SIDES OF IT and ON TOP OF MULTIPLE SINKHOLES which repeatedly flooded the theater wing and football field. I spent most of my time in the tiny artsy public school and thanked my lucky stars.
What the hell is that thing?!? Our high school didn’t even HAVE a football team.
I HATE SPORTS.
We had AP Computer Science class with ZERO computers, so they could build a new expensive sports facility.
Wait I read the wikipedia article and it opened in 2012 and closed in 2014 because of substandard construction? And it’s only the 5th biggest in Texas? For $60 million?
I don’t understand.
I’m putting this here because I’ll likely sleep through the open thread tomorrow – today is my last day at my job in Dallas! And it’s a half day where I turn all my keys and stuff in at noon! AND IT STILL CANNOT BE OVER FAST ENOUGH.
Good for you!!!
Are you staying in North Texas? The Dallas Toastie branch would love to invite you to the next meetup!
Actually, I’m the one moving to Portland. XD If there’s a meetup between now and Wednesday, I’d love to go!
We’re actually meeting for brunch Sunday – send me an email (acbrown01 at gmail) and I’ll get you the details!
Mr. Wilson is a perfectly sized dog for a child. He looks patient.
WHO CARES, OH LORD, WHO CARES? https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPCm-KoT6fI-…
(the second one is a video. the third and fourth are the cake we ate afterwards.)
Absolutely beautiful, and great harmony! Thank you for posting this!
This is beautiful, thank you for posting it!
THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL. Also I need to start going to shape note singing again.
Gorgeous and inspiring!
PERFECT
There aren’t enough thumbs up on your amazing video! Will you post it again in open thread tomorrow? I’m concerned that so many toasties missed it and it shouldn’t be missed!
Even people in the rest of high-school-football-crazy Texas make fun of that stadium. In no small part because it is/was already falling to pieces.
We sure do! Allen (and Collin County in general, really) is absolutely ridiculous.
Jaqui Shine’s piece is fantastic. The terrible thing I wondered while reading it was, “how easy or hard would it be, as a sub-par to par but still adult writer, to win a children’s essay contest?” I have no plans to enter a children’s essay contest but I am curious.
Also, here is my High School Stadium Story: we did not have a “stadium,” per se, in high school, but did do a ~$1mil renovation of our outdoor football/track/soccer facility. The deal was for the district to cover upfront costs, and for the booster club of parents who had pushed the renovations to fundraise and pay back, say, half. Anyways, the parents were terrible at fundraising to begin with, and then 2008 happened and the economy melted down, so they became even worse at fundraising. The district reeled, and ended up laying off a ton of “non-critical” staff– that is, counselors, special education workers, and even some teachers in subjects like foreign languages and art. Some of that may have happened regardless, but the general diagnosis was that the football renovations had eaten up the whole slush fund for the district and left it vulnerable to economic swings.
Tl;dr: Midwestern “football parents” are the worst.
Guess who was originally supposed to be researching at the Navy Yard today if she hadn’t been delayed by awesome finds?
(Never leaving Williamsburg again.)
“Confusion Corner kept me safe!” is a historical (an historical?) first. Glad to hear you’re out of harm’s way.
Also. Is that some sort of King Charles Spaniel? Please say yes. My main life goal is to one day have a small retinue of them that will follow me everywhere. They will all be named after various Restoration courtiers. It seems a valid thing to work for.
Oh man I have wanted that for a long time too! Like corgis, but (dare I say) better.
It is the noblest of goals.
Mainly I want to do it so I can apologize to people and feel a rush of nerdish glee.
“Sorry about Rochester and Buckingham. They just really like humping things.”
“Sorry about Nell and Louise. Bitches, am I right? They can’t stand each other.”
“Sorry about Rochester in general.”
As a native of Rochester, NY, I say that last one a lot.
Out of curiosity– if the King Charles Spaniel is the courtier’s dog, is there a Puritan Roundhead dog? For instance, one that looks disapprovingly at you on regular intervals, that delivers long sermons, and is prone to schism over things like, say, collars?
I don’t know about a possible Roundhead breed of dog, but your list of requirements pretty accurately applies to every cat I’ve owned.
Friends, it is a technical Friday and tomorrow I probably will not be around, so forgive me for going off-topic, as the young people say.
But last night I finished my book, and now I feel beswelt by my sense of victory.
(It’s a weird thing finishing a book, because you get the same kind of feeling when you kick the game-winning soccer goal or other [important sports event] but there’s no really good time to just jump around and rip your shirt off and do an endzone dance or whatever.)
Whoohoo! Congrats!
Yes! Many congratulations! Did you have any kind of ritual or marker of the occasion? (When I finished the first draft of my post-apocalyptic farm/murder mystery story, I went out and bought a yooooge cocktail and a frivolous dessert.)
Well, I almost always finish my books at like 1 in the morning (because I get towards the end and it’s like, “NO, I AM SO CLOSE JUST PUSH THROUGH”). In the old days I’d have just gotten hammered and taken the next day off, but I’ve had to quit drinking, so now basically my ritual marker is to wake up the next morning and be very tired at work.
hooray
ugh
In lieu of huge cocktails, here is my ritualistic HIGH FIVE ACROSS THE INTERNET *SMACK* YOU ARE AWESOMMMMMME.
High five: ACCEPTED
Can you post what your books are/where to find them? I looooove to read books by Toasties.
Oh, hey, sure!
I got two novels up at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=chris+braak
and there’s a novella that you can buy if you want but also you can read it for free here:
https://swordofsavonarola.wordpress.com/
it is part of what will one day be a series of novellas that tie together into a substantial epic, but who knows how long that will be, don’t get too excited about it.
I would like to read your book; does it exist yet?
Well, it is in DRAFT form right now, but I got to share it with a bunch of people to get feedback, so I guess if you are interested in some kind of fantasy novel about girl-Harry Potter meets Event Horizon (or I guess if anyone else is; the people of the Toast have pretty good taste in books, I feel pretty confident in their feedback), you could send me an email and I will send you the draft. I guess. If you want.
I can be found here: [email protected]
THAT SOUNDS AWESOME.
Well. I agree.
Amazing!! Any tips for book-finishing, or starting, for the rest of us?
The only tip that I have found to be even remotely successful in my process is to repeat the mantra of, “it’s all fucking garbage just get something down so you can get to the next part.”
In retrospect, I don’t think everything IS garbage; sometimes I am pretty proud of how bits unexpectedly fit together.
It’s a strategy that can be psychologically stressful at times, if you (like me) entertain the fantasy of being a good or well-respected author, but I think that sometimes the fantasy of being a good or well-respected author is a detriment to getting your book done.
Yayyyyy!!!! *throwing confetti*
I think you should have done a victory lap around the block. GO YOU!!!
WOOOO! Cheers!
Oh man, someone needs to do a list of the most metal births in literature/real life. Marisa’s is probably up there.
I would read that article. I have a friend who was born in the car on the way to the hospital, but I’m afraid this baby has one-upped her.
I have a friend who delivered her child in the bathroom on her own while waiting for the midwife to show up. This ALSO took place in N. California and people talk shit about the West Coast but it is rugged as fuck out there in the rural parts. Too rugged for me!
I did that! My third baby was born in the bathtub at home about 5 minutes before the midwife arrived 🙂
SO RUGGED! 🙂
ENGLAND. 🙁 I’m a US fan, but I was rooting for them to make it to the final, and what a way to go out. Heartbreaker.
I know, right!! That was one of the saddest moments I’ve ever seen in sports.
That was probably the worst ending to a game I’ve ever seen! And like, I’ve seen my club team give up a 4 goal lead in the 2nd half of a game, and this was SO MUCH WORSE.
I can’t even imagine how terrible that must feel :((( poor Laura Bassett :((((((
SO much worse. About 1000000x worse than losing on penalties. I feel so terrible for her 🙁
seriously, what an awful awful end to their World Cup. it was heartbreaking, seeing her sobbing on the pitch like that 🙁
Agree on all points. Poor, poor Laura Bassett – talk about a defender’s worst nightmare. I was trying to think of anything else as horrifying that I’ve seen in a soccer game, and all I could come up with was when one of Mexico’s stars broke his leg in the last exhibition game before last year’s World Cup. This one wins.
Germany is my #2 team, but now I kind of want England to stomp on them. And Japan can just gtfo – they haven’t earned this spot in the final.
So, so brutal. We were at that game and it was such a terrible ending.
People in TX laugh at the stadium because it cost SO much and it also had problems right after it opened but an 18,000 seat stadium doesn’t seem crazy for Allen. Their high school is massive and the city is growing wildly too. Plus all the visiting teams are pretty local so I bet they come close to filling it most weeks.
Yeah, the note that a thousand seats are reserved for the home band and drill team — if they come even close to filling that section, which it sounds like they do, then I 100% believe that they can fill an 18,000 seat stadium.
So… We’re acknowledging that the stadium might be the appropriate size for the football needs of Allen while understanding that the football needs of Allen are totally out of proportion to the point of sickness, right?
The bees wanted the placenta, she said with a chuckle.
That must be why all the hip Pinterest moms are such big fans of eating your own placenta.
Because… they’re bees??
I CAN’T NOT
I don’t generally consider myself a picky eater, but there are a handful of things I just can’t imagine enjoying eating. or, like, really big pills? Sometimes I have to take them, and I’m really bad at taking pills, so I just stare at them for a while until I can work up the gumption to successfully swallow them, but it’s always a huge willpower issue.
I cannot imagine going through all of the work of GIVING BIRTH and then feeling like I really ought to consume my placenta. Like, that seems like one of the very very last things I’d be interested in at that moment. I figure that consuming a placenta would be a hard sell at any time in my life short of me being literally starving (if I was just figuratively starving….. I’d continue being figurative starving). So doing it in an already physically and emotionally exhausting scenario???? Why would that be a thing I would want to do?????
I just can’t imagine a scenario in which I would think, “Hey this just came out of my body – I’m gonna eat it!” especially when it’s a pretty damn big organ.
I can sort of understand doing it in a physically and emotionally exhausting scenario where there is no other food available – “I’ve given birth, and I’m so tired and overwhelmed and drained, and the thought of having to go and find or prepare some other sort of food is more than I can handle right now” – but not otherwise.
agreed. and if i was already gung-ho about eating it, sure! If I were the sort of person who regularly looked forward to and enjoyed eating things that I hadn’t grown up eating and so were novel to me (so, for me, that would be hearts and feet and eyeballs, but would obviously be different for other people), I can imagine that the opportunity to eat one of my own organs might be the sort of limited opportunity I would want to jump on. If I was in a situation where I knew that other nutrient-rich foods were in short supply, I’d probably get over whatever squeamishness I had pretty damn quickly, and I appreciate that my ability to turn down potential sources of nourishment is a display of privilege.
But I very very much wish to live in a world in which EVERY woman who gives birth can be secure in enough nutrient-rich delicious food being on its way to her, without any serious effort or thought from her, in a timely manner, that she doesn’t feel that consuming a placenta is necessary.
But I very very much wish to live in a world in which EVERY woman who gives birth can be secure in enough nutrient-rich delicious food being on its way to her, without any serious effort or thought from her, in a timely manner, that she doesn’t feel that consuming a placenta is necessary.
No argument from me! I would very much like that too.
Is it nutrient-rich though? My understanding was that it was both gross and not actually helpful in any empirically proven way: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33006384 Although an interesting trend for those studying the intersections of health/culture/media!
I imagine it is more nutrient rich than ~nothing~, and also more nutrient rich than some foodstuffs available in under-privileged areas of the world. I personally haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe that it’s better for you than any of the sorts of meals I would usually eat, but I don’t plan on giving birth, so I haven’t exactly looked into this enough to have a confident opinion.
I’m guessing the thinking is that “Other mammals do it, so it must be good for you!” But that might be more to avoid attracting predators than for any nutritional value.
In any case…… blerchhh.
Placenta honey is the next big thing, I can just see it.
No no no, you have to take the placenta, dip it in poster paint, and then press it against archival acid-free paper, and then frame it. On the left and right should be baby footprints, and then the date/baby’s name written in PERFECT handwriting (think Stacy from the Baby Sitter’s Club) underneath.
Although I suppose you could wash off the poster paint and then put it out for your beehive to create the placenta honey. Which one shouldn’t feed to one’s infant, so, yeah.
EAT OR BE EATEN
For the mother to live, the placenta MUST be destroyed.
Neither can live while the other survives! Sybil Trelawney warned us all, but did we listen?
Still the best NYT headline of all time:
“I Regret Eating My Placenta”
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/i-r…
If they were after the placenta, though, they were most likely wasps. When I was a kid we called them “meat bees” but they are totally just wasps (or yellowjackets).
I’m currently hate-reading this NYT interview with Robin Thicke: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/arts/music/robi…
His crash and burn entertains me to no end. I especially enjoy the part where the interviewer brings up song-plagiarizing accusations against Bruno Mars and Sam Smith and Robin is like “Well THOSE guys totally stole their songs but I am completely innocent because when I write I just sit down at the piano and the music pours out of me.”
Thank you for that! I love “an annus mirabilis that devolved into an annus miserabilis”
“I’m just so inspiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiredddddddd”
suck a dick, dude. you are gross.
I can fully believe that he sat at the piano and wrote all of Paula in one go – relatedly, Paula was by all accounts absolute garbage
I’ve also read that the actual case sets a not-great precedence for future plagiarism cases, which ://///
#askthicke is still my favorite Twitter PR disaster. I love that we, as a species, can unite on hating this pile of garbage.
Mr. Wilson! What a handsome gent.
I did some writing for the Huffington Post when it launched its Canadian edition a few years back, and it was a deeply silly experience. I sincerely don’t mind doing a little pro-bono work here and there, especially when it’s for an outlet that doesn’t have a lot of infrastructure or is just getting their feet under them. But HuffPo was so not that company, and promising “exposure” when they make millions is super shitty.
As one of my professional-writer friends puts it, “exposure is a cause of death.”
I do have to wonder about the premise of articles like this, though. “Turning a profit” is often far more about corporate accounting choices than it is about how well the company is doing. Amazon, for instance, famously hasn’t turned a profit — but that’s because they’re choosing to put the money that would be “profit” into investments in growing the company that show up as expenses on the balance sheet. Arguably, when they start turning a profit it will be a bad sign that they’re starting to stagnate, and I’d guess much the same is true with HuffPo.
This is from a few days ago, but Linda Holmes reviewing Zoo (Zoooo!) is basically the best: http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2015/06/30/…
Ohhhh my god I was cracking up at my desk by the end of the second paragraph. Her review of Magic Mike XXL is also delightful, although not as overtly comedic.
There is a place in my heart for a show where a guy looks at the front of a malfunctioning truck and says, “It seems that the lions got to the radiator.”
You know, I think there might be a place in my heart for that, too.
Can we talk about Zoo? My sister just lent me the book so it’s fresh in my mind and I have Opinions. Mostly I’m pissed because even though the book wasn’t a Great Piece of Literature it had a female scientist in it. Which is obviously rare. And the show makes her some woman on her honeymoon alone because her fiance cheated on her. Why? Why? Would 1 more scientist on the show have been 1 too many?
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
That’s… not great.
sounds kiiiiinda like she wanted to do an unassisted birth in the woods but things went awry?
Oh, that would make sense. I’ve been trying to figure out from that article how she ended up getting so lost while so pregnant.
Right. Because she had the car the whole time — she sheltered in it with the baby after the baby was born according to the article. So did she run out of gas? Or was she bush-whacking in her car?? How did she lose the highway going through the woods that she had been driving on?
Another news article said that she ran out of gas after taking the unfamiliar route.
FANCY THAT, it’s almost like that’s always a terrible idea.
It kind of does, but I’m having trouble figuring out why someone who’d already given birth multiple times deciding “you know what this experience needs? MORE BEES.”
“My 3 previous deliveries were pretty boring, I want this one to have some element of novelty to it!”
I’m also kind of confused that no one reported her missing. They knew she hadn’t made it home and had been missing for days, but they just posted on Facebook and didn’t alert the authorities? That seems like really odd behaviour.
I don’t know, I’ve worked in that area. The roads look short on maps, but are long and hard to travel in reality. Logging companies maintain a network of minor roads really well, but the roads on the maps are Forest Service, and the maintenance is… look, most of the Forest Service’s budget is in fire thanks to global warming and Bush-era asshattery.
If she was heading to her parents, and made a bad decision about picking a road, and then took the largest best maintained road because contractions, well… then there is ONE PLACE on that entire chunk of land with cell phone reception. It is colloquially known as “the office”, because usually there are two-three trucks parked there, making calls to bosses and landowners. It is believable.
totally legit! I think what struck me more as being off were the non-reporting other than fb and also the slight discrepancies between her story and her mother’s account? WHO KNOWS. I am very happy she and baby are well.
Maybe they thought she was in low-contact mode to avoid crotch-watch?
I went and read up on things, and dang, that woman has had a really rough decade. It seems like the only people in her life who would feel obligated to report her missing are her parents, and I do not think that her parents are speaking to one another.
Oh God, this story is just about what a shitshow rural Northern California is THE WHOLE WAY DOWN. Get it together, home.
I kind of agree. Like I don’t understand why she didn’t stay in the car, where there are presumably no bees? She says she ran out of gas, and I trust LeastBittern’s description of the woods. But I don’t understand why this involves bees, like at all. Also, why would bees be attracted to the placenta? Mosquitos obviously would, on account of all the blood, but what’s there to attract bees?
My guess is that they were actually other hymenopterans, like yellow jacket type things that are actually carnivore/omnivores and not actually bees
Agreed. I had a yellow jacket persistently pursue some feather pillows that I was drying outdoors earlier this summer. It would not believe that the ducks were long dead.
Welp, now I have another thing to be terrified of. (runs around flapping hands)
Another “probably gonna miss the open thread” note here.
We unexpectedly had to put down one of our cats yesterday. He was quite old (16 or 17, his age when we found him was indeterminate), and had recently lost weight. We originally had an appointment for when we got back from vacation, but yesterday morning he was walking funny and acting weird, so the vet got us in before 10am, thankfully. Unfortunately, he had advanced kidney disease (common in elder cats), and between his age and the stage of the disease, there wasn’t much to be done but give him a painless, dignified death. My partner took the rest of the day off from work and we just hung out in our PJs but now I have to pack and get ready for vacation and I’m just not feeling it, toasties. He was a tremendous cat, a shoulder sitter, climber, troublemaker, and ear-sucker. And I have a sad.
I’m so sorry. This is the worst thing.
I’m so sorry about your kitty 🙁
Damn, condolences… That sucks.
Oh no, I’m so sorry. He sounds like he was a most excellent cat.
I am so sorry. My condolences.
Oh, no. [internet hugs to all of you]
I’m so sorry
I’m so sorry. Even when it’s the right choice, it still hurts to have to make it.
Condolences and internet hugs to you and yours.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
Jedi Hugs for you and partner.
Our lifespan discrepancies are the worst thing about our companion animals.
Oh no! He sounds like a darling. My sympathies.
When our cat (thirteen years, probably liver cancer) died, my husband and I spent about three days just crying and clinging to each other. It’s rough!
I’m sorry. Losing a pet is so hard and not everyone really gets what a big deal it is. But we do! Our thoughts and sympathies are with you.
I am in love with some delightful songs Marian Call just released:
-The Liberal Arts Degree Waltz
-A spot-on impression of Tom Lehrer, complete with an intro and (fictional) elements song
-A rendition (with Molly Quinn) of “Space Oddity” using only the 1,000 most common English words. Ground Control to Top Space Man!
I misread “Marian Call” as “Maria Callas” and actually hurt my head trying to figure out how she could have released new songs when she’s been dead for almost 40 years.
I can vouch for that version of Space Oddity being absolutely delightful.
Molly Lewis, not Molly Quinn. And if anyone is going to be in the Los Angeles or San Diego areas next week, we’re all (as in Marian, Molly, Seth, everyone in the video) doing a SPACE TIME themed show and I am going to be in the show, reading short fiction about Mars… go to Marian’s Call’s website for more info.
Thank you! I must have gotten some wires crossed there.
I adore Marian Call! She’s come to my town twice and I managed to see her both times. Sadly, I was one of the few people who came to her shows, so she probably won’t be back any time soon.
THE BEES
……… beads?
Gob’s not on board.
Doing your kid’s hair is overrated. Toddlers look cuter with crazy hair anyway.
Seconded. Plus: depending on the toddler, it could save you a world of grief.
I cannot say enough positive things about pixie cuts on toddlers. I’m not even sure the hours my friends spent trying to brush long hair or their toddlers made for cuter photos, tbh.
I’m pretty sure that any kids of mine will be having either buzz or pixie cuts until middle school. No hair until you can do it all yourself.
Hours of my young life were wasted as my mother braided and generally wrestled with my out of control hair. Never again. Big hair must be earned with one’s own sweat and blood.
I was the toddler whose hair looked like that five minutes after you brushed it, and as an adult my hair STILL looks like that five minutes after you brush it, unless I use product. I envy those people who can shake their heads and have the hair fall back in the same way.
(Those people use product.)
My kid hated to have her head touched, so any time there was a brush or comb in her vicinity, she’d start screaming.
A few weeks ago, my now-27-year-old daughter said “You should have brushed my hair anyway! I’m getting so much crap from my friends because they can’t braid my hair or anything cuz it hurts too much. It’s embarrassing.”
Yeah, I dunno, I expected, as a parent, to give her various syndromes and therapist-needed moments, but the hair thing … oh dear god it’s the Hair Thing. And if she’s still having this Hair Thing, she should go to a doctor to see about her hyper-sensitive scalp.
OMG, my youngest…I just let it sprout errant curls. She was adorbs. Always with a curl over her eye and a band-aid (for cosmetic reasons) on her cheek.
Oh my god, I won that essay contest in fifth grade and got to lay a wreath on the tomb. It was my first trip to the East Coast, and I was so nervous, but the Marine who was leading us was the sweetest. He would bark out the orders and then, without moving his mouth, quietly say encouraging things to the kids who were there under his breath. My essay was about my grandfather, a WWII vet, and how he was the only survivor among the friends with whom he enlisted.
I don’t know how I got chosen to lay a wreath on the tomb when my school went in 8th grade. Maybe my mom wrote my essay???
Also, that Ask Polly column is worrying me. That guy sounds about five seconds from hitting her.
No kidding. And is probably cheating on her! Dudes who freak out and cry and make a big huge deal about their girlfriends’ “pasts” pretty much always turn out to be cheating themselves, in my observation.
Or Catholic. Or both!
Yep. Yep yep.
That guy is terrible, and reading her letter I think, “She sounds so smart, how could she not get how terrible he is” and then I remember what equally terrible shit I was blind to, and…I dunno, when does the Toast Nunnery open?
Yeah, I think I remember this letter (can’t read it at work) and the guy sounded SO MUCH like my ex. And I don’t think I’m generally a dummy or a push-over. But I was with that jerk for 3 years.
Oh hi did we date the same dude because this was my ex, word for word. And I toughed it out with him because it was my first real relationship and I didn’t want to just ‘give up’ after a couple of months when we were talking about ~forever~ on the first date?? UGH 24-YEAR-OLD ME.
My first thought was, “Sounds like my ex-boyfriend.” I just thought he was like so refreshing or whatever at first and then he became completely unbearable. And I still dated him for another two months.
I do not miss my early 20s dating life. Maybe the casual sex. Not the dating.
The only good thing about early-20s dating was that it taught me everything NOT to do/look for in a healthy relationship.
Very true. That dude I dated legitimately propelled me into the arms of my current partner and made me certain not to take any more bullshit, and almost eight years of awesomeness later, I have a tiny sliver of gratitude to him for that.
“And I toughed it out with him because it was my first real relationship and I didn’t want to just ‘give up’ after a couple of months when we were talking about ~forever~ on the first date??”
This is also exactly the same as me, except I don’t have the excuse that it was my first real relationship.
I of course do not generally condone non-medical-professionals diagnosing people with mental illnesses, but in this case, if she needs the gravitas of that label in order to give herself permission to leave, then it’s cool.
I dunno, I tend to agree with a lot of the commenters that this dude actually just sounds like a jerk, and she seems to be using an armchair diagnosis as an excuse to be like “see, he just needs to go to therapy and all will be well!”
Also OMG, how do you think you’re going to get him into a serious mental health treatment program when you have been dating for four months and he obviously doesn’t give a shit about you?
90 days away playing baseball sounds like a perfect amount of time for her to dump him and change her locks and/or phone number.
I cringed when I read that letter. I dated someone who had an actual borderline personality disorder diagnosis and I have a pretty decent understanding of how it works and how it’s treated. I have zero sympathy for the ‘My Partner with BPD is making me a victim’ narrative. If you know a boyfriend has a PD, break up and recommend therapy. You do not get to continue to date him and make yourself a martyr because you know he is unwell and won’t change without major therapy (which is often prohibitively expensive or unavailable). My ex did some Very Unacceptable Abusive Things and I get that it’s complicated and difficult but choosing to date a person who actually has untreated BPD is like willingly riding with a drunk driver and complaining when they crash the car.
WOAH. This is some victim-blaming bullshit.
I don’t mean to offend but this issue is triggering to me and my initial tone may have been harsh.
I actually dated someone with a BPD diagnosis and I find it very troubling to read of armchair BPD diagnoses from people whose partners exhibit sketchy and even abusive behaviour. When I broke up with my ex I checked out a few sites dedicated to supporting those who’d dated/were dating people with BPD and was disturbed by what I found. There is a certain group of people, mostly men, who tell horror stories about their BPD exes, mostly women, and cast themselves as victims of their monstrous exes in a black and white narrative. It is clear that many of them use their partners’ mental health status to deflect responsibility for their own mistakes. There are elements in the Ask Polly letter that echo those men.
My ex did horribly abusive things, and yet I cannot cast her as a villain and I do not revel in sharing gory details. Her life was a nightmare and without access to substantive treatment, she really didn’t know better. There was a point in time when I would describe her behaviour to friends in a tone similar to the LW, and they would point out that it wasn’t going to change and it would have to be me who ended the relationship for my own sake.
Whenever I read/hear this kind of talk about partners/exes allegedly having BPD, the same question pops into my mind: if you’re willing to pathologize someone and suggest that they have an incredibly stigmatized mental health problem, why are you continuing to date them? Steer them toward help and leave. I stay away from my ex, but I have empathy for her, and I really question the intentions of people who apply the BPD label like this. If your partner has untreated BPD, he can’t help himself and you can’t stay with him and blame him for behaving like someone with untreated BPD.
ETA: I would have a very different reaction to someone describing the boyfriend’s behaviour and asking if it’s abusive. It is. The LW didn’t provoke it. But once you go into armchair psych territory, the discussion changes.
Wait—the woman was nine months pregnant and still gave birth to a preemie?! How does that even work? (Former preemie here.)
Also, why was she about to induce labor?
None of this story makes any sense.
“Who wants the hand that rocks the cradle mixing whisky sours?”
I mean, it was pretty standard to give babies a rag soaked in rum while they were teething. Women know/knew this. At least…they did in my family. I guess men have just always been willfully ignorant about ladies and their liquor everything? yeah, fixed that myself, thanks
In part of that Ask Polly NIGHTMARE letter, she mentions that this dude had told her within a month that he loved her and wanted to marry her one day. And so I’d like to give a shout out to my cousin Michelle, who at the age of 24 gave 19-year-old me some of the best advice I’ve ever received.
Michelle had been going out with a guy I’ll call Chaz, because it was something frat-bro-y like that. Chaz seemed like a great guy on paper, and he and Michelle dated for a couple months. When she told me she’d broken up with him, I was surprised, and asked her why. She said that he’d taken her out to a lovely restaurant for their two-month anniversary, and at dinner told her that he thought she was his soulmate and that he loved her.
I blinked and said, “Um, so what’s the problem?”
She said, “He doesn’t even know me yet, so how can he love me? If he loves anything, it’s the image in his head he has of me. Don’t trust people who tell you they love you too soon.”
It has not steered me wrong. While I think it’s totally possible to BE in love after two months, and that there can be exceptions, I think that people who spring “I love you” too quickly are pretty frequently just manipulators.
My late friend Vernon, a Greatest Generation gent from the South, proposed to his then girlfriend after a reasonable courtship thusly: as they both emerged from a highly chlorinated swimming pool, hair mussed and dripping, eyes burning red. It’s possible that his wife to be was wearing a bathing cap at the time.
He said that he timed the proposal to make sure she knew that what mattered to him was NOT her looks. They were married for decades until her death.
I kind of feel like dating someone for two months barely gets the title “boyfriend” let alone “soul mate.” Yikes, bullet dodged there, cousin Michelle.
Well now I’m paranoid (despite the fact that “two months in” was five and a half years ago)(I should hope the significant other isn’t still in love with just an image of me)
Can vouch for this! Last guy who told me he loved me after date 2 got back together with his ex girlfriend shortly thereafter. I think his supposed love for me was really more like a gaseous eruption of feelings for his ex or something.
Anyone else eagerly reading the latest turn in the discovery of the Harper Lee novel on the NYT?
As much as I hope the novel is a success, I wish Lee is acting more infirm than she really is to do research on a book about an evil literary agent — entitled In Cold Words.
That is only the fifth largest high school stadium in Texas.
What the hell?!?
My high school went without computers so that they could build a new stadium for sports.
I hate sports.
That fucking guy in Ask Polly. That fucking guy is almost my ex-boyfriend to a Tee. And guess what? He was diagnosed with BPD recently. I laughed myself silly (he told me online, so he didn’t see me laugh).
That fucking guy in Ask Polly. That fucking guy is almost my ex-boyfriend to a Tee. And guess what? He was diagnosed with BPD recently. I laughed myself silly (he told me online, so he didn't see me laugh).