“What I learned from reading pro-Confederacy children’s books“:
There are several black figures in Confederate Alphabet. One is a soldier eating peanuts with three white friends in the entry “G is for goober peas”; in an illustration of the siege of Vicksburg, an apparent slave woman comforts a frightened white girl. And “J is for Jim Limber,” a young black boy who lived briefly in the home of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis. As Pittman’s rhyme goes, his “story should be told.”
*
How anti-vaxxers are leveraging social media:
Much like any other group with a message, anti-vaxxers have leveraged Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for quite some time. In the early days, the majority of their activism focused on propagating the myth of the autism-vaccination connection. In August of 2014, anti-vax activity began to coalesce into one primary hashtag: #cdcwhistleblower, a reference to an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory that claims the CDC is concealing information that proves a link between the MMR vaccine and autism in African American children.
*
This is everything to me:
The grandparent who is persuaded that screens are not destroying human interaction, but are instead new tools for enabling fresh and flawed and modes of human interaction, is left facing a grimmer reality. Your grandchildren don’t look up from their phones because the experiences and friendships they enjoy there seem more interesting than what’s in front of them (you). Those experiences, from the outside, seem insultingly lame: text notifications, Emoji, selfies of other bratty little kids you’ve never met. But they’re urgent and real. What’s different is that they’re alsoright here, always, even when you thought you had an attentional claim. The moments of social captivity that gave parents power, or that gave grandparents precious access, are now compromised. The TV doesn’t turn off. The friends never go home. The grandkids can do the things they really want to be doing whenever they want, even while they’re sitting five feet away from grandma, alone, in a moving soundproof pod.
*
On Sunday night’s episode of True Detective, Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) and Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) visit a film set presided over by the worst person in the world: In a few scant minutes of screen time, we learned that the film’s director is an alcoholic prima donna who alienated his crew and got mixed up in sex-party shenanigans that led to the death of a local politician. Oh yeah, and this horrible man just so happens to bear a clear resemblance to former True Detective director Cary Fukunaga, all the way down to his distinctive hairstyle. Assuming this wasn’t just an unfortunate coincidence — and in the world of True Detective, there are no coincidences — this sequence should go down as the most passive-aggressive TV scene of 2015.
*
I don’t know why I let myself read this because now I want to eat it all so badly.
*
Queer comic book characters FTW (Joey is a friend of mine, and Joel Kim Booster is writing up his experience at Flame Con for us!):
“The purpose of Geeks Out is to let the L.G.B.T. community interact and let the industry know that we are here and have a voice,” said Joey Stern, the president and co-founder of the group, which last month organized Flame Con, the first L.G.B.T. comic book convention in New York.
“A big part of it was to offer an opportunity to give exposure to artists who were often in the background,” Mr. Stern said.
*
Love to any Canadian Toasties who might be impacted by the wildfires in British Columbia.
*
GONNA CRY MY FACE OFF ALSO MALLORY DOESN’T FIND HIM FUNNY AND SHE BEST KEEP THAT TO HERSELF HE WAS AN ANGEL FROM GOD:
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Poor grandparents have to get texting!
Or become relevant. And interesting.
I’m lucky. My dad’s parents were fascinating people and I happily listened to their stories about throwing rocks at the National Guard when they came in to guard the scabs during a union strike. Or about how theirs was the first lunch counter in their city to seat Black people. Helping grandma in the kitchen and her telling stories about the people who bought her pies as she taught me how to make a good pie crust. I mean, I guess I didn’t have the option of internet friends back then, but even today, if I had the choice to visit with them about their amazing adventures or scroll through my Tumblr dash, I probably wouldn’t choose Tumblr.
Old people need to get over the notion that they’re deserving of time and attention just because they’re old.
It’s different if it’s your family, though. Like if it’s a random old man on the street, sorry bro but I’m not talking to you, but I think it’s pretty harsh to say that if your grandparents can’t entertain you with crazy stories they’re SOL and don’t deserve your respect or attention.
I don’t feel that anyone deserves my respect or attention just because they’re family. I realize I might be unusual in that opinion, though.
Well sure, if your grandma is an asshole who treats you badly or if she’s a crazy racist or something, then fuck her. I’m just picturing some old people who might not have lived super fascinating lives wanting to spend time with their grandkids but being deemed too boring, and that makes me sad.
Ahhhhhhh, I see the difference, here. I’m applying the assumption that kids are taught general decency and manners to other human beings (be polite, pay attention to people who are talking to you, actually listen to what they’re saying). That’s probably not the best way to get a grasp on the reality of the situation. I still think, though, that as the adult in the situation, it’s the responsibility of the older family members to find a way to positively interact with children. Even a technologically-disinclined person can ask questions like “What’s your favorite part about playing that game?” or start a conversation with “Tell me about the time you got your best score on this.” If the child refuses to engage in an honest attempt conversation (and not just disparaging comments about Kids These Days), I think that’s more an issue regarding general manners than technology.
this is a very good point, I wonder how many of those thwarted grandparent/kid conversations start with a very antagonistic “put that down and let’s talk.”
Having different standards for family is a little double-edged to me. I knew three of my grandparents– two of them quite well.
The grandma I lived with for a year when I was a young adult, though, is the one I miss the most, and also had internalized the most by the time she died. I moved in because my job plans had fallen through, and her spouse had just died. I needed a place to live while regrouping, and she wanted some company. And we turned out to be more simpatico than either of us had guessed. She had an absurdist streak that I’d never noticed before, and she’d been the same sort of argumentative, opinionated reader of literature that I’d become. My aunt walked into the kitchen one morning while we were swapping mangled versions of lines we’d memorized in survey lit, crying with laughter, and rolled her eyes, muttering, “NERDS.”
I can still come up with a pretty clear sense of how she would answer any given question. She’s the one I’m most likely to think, when watching a movie, or hearing a piece of music, “G would *love* this.” Because she’s the only grandparent whom I got to know all over again *as an adult*, for an extended period of time, she’s the only grandparent I perceived as loving me for the person I had become, rather than for being related to her.
Being loved by an elder I treasured, apart from any sense of familial obligation on her part, was delicious. It felt like mutual choosing.
I’m not sure if kids will want to listen even if to great stories. I think attention spans and communication may have just changed and kids would respond better to texts/short posts than to long stories. I bet a bunch of kids would be happy to communicate with their grandparents via text, etc., but aren’t interested in conversations or at least conversations without other distractions at the same time.
This is fascinating to me. Largely because I have the luxury of not having kids, myself, and not being terribly affected by the generational behavior changes.
“attention spans and communication may have just changed and kids would respond better to texts/short posts than to long stories”
Does this hold true for kids who read, too, do you think? If so, now’s the time for people to start publishing anthologies of short fiction for the 10-and-under set…
I think it probably is true for reading also and I bet even short fiction is too long! Kids seem to want bite size answers, factoids and listicles. In a way that makes them great generalists, and forces them to think in a totally different ways than are formed through reflection/reading longer narratives, etc.
Interesting! It’s always good to be presented with a reminder that it’s human nature to recognize change as scary. Like, I find this terrifying and sad, but who knows? That approach to life could be just as useful and valid as the one I’m used to.
or maybe it means that the educated few who are forced to learn critical thinking will have more and more power whereas the masses will get poorer and more content with their immediate and hollow gratification 😉
As someone who works with kids and teens, I have to say I am skeptical of the shorter attention spans being as big a thing as people say. People have always wanted bite sized answers and listicles, they just came in print newspapers before, not on their phone.
But those kids are willing to watch hours long videos of people playing video games, the books they read are similar in length to books of past generations and so on.
you think so? i’ve found that kids will not watch hours long videos without also texting and snapchatting and doing all sorts of other things. not putting a value judgment on it; i do think it’s a different way of interacting with the world
I feel like some kids nowadays are not even getting the chance to try or to experience not being plugged in and multitasking all the time–they are so constantly supplied with personalized instant entertainment they have no opportunity to figure out for themselves if they can sit through a conversation or similar experience.
I’m just going to put this xkcd comic here because it looks like people complaining about attention spans becoming shorter is a thing that has being going on for ages…
It’s true, people always have and always will complain about the new technology that rots their kids’ brains, makes them self-absorbed and ruins their concentration. There was no golden age of polite, focused children.
it’s true. we have to get more creative in finding things to complain about!!!
It seems like we’re always having a cultural moment that should lend itself well to short stories, and yet large numbers of people actually wanting to buy anthologies of short stories just do not appear. I remember having this conversation ten years ago with some folks in publishing–the student-aged people were going “bite-sized reading! you can read it on the go!” and the publishers were saying, yeah, in theory, but the sales numbers say no. There are exceptions, but I think most new authors with exciting story collections still get steered to two-book deals where the second book has to be a novel.
Yeah, good point. Publishing as we understand it is, I fear, a dying thing.
hm, this is interesting because i’m perfectly happy to read a bunch of 2,000 – 20,000 word fics, but I’ve basically never just picked up a collection of short stories. I don’t know exactly where the difference is in my preferences, either.
I find I have a harder time keeping my attention on shorter stories than novels, generally. I don’t know if it’s that I have an expectation of having to sit and finish a short story all in one go, or that I don’t have time to really sink my teeth into the characters or world of a short piece, or what. Even as a kid I never really enjoyed them.
My theory is that the difficulty of answering the question “What’s this about?” plays a big role. Like, I think I’m fairly normal in choosing books mostly based on the back cover/inside jacket synopsis, and maybe flipping it open and reading the first page or two; it’s a lot harder to write a back cover synopsis that conveys anything useful about a collection of short stories, unless they’re very closely related, and reading and liking the first page of the first story is no guarantee that I won’t hate half the other stories. And that’s less of an issue with fanfic, since short fics usually aren’t presented as a collection like that; each one comes with its own summary and tags and whatnot to help you decide whether you’ll like it.
this is definitely true. so many fics are about familiarity as well, knowing the characters and knowing what to expect from the story. I read all of one author on ao3 who does original stories in ~4,000-word installments, but even then, I basically knew the subject matter going in. And actually the installments/pacing/etc. of her stories feel almost more like a narrative webcomic than anything else.
I also think being introduced to short stories primarily in school gives me a reticence to pick them up, because I feel like I have to put more effort into reading them. Which is absurd, I realize that, but there’s no expectation with shorter fic beyond “I want to be entertained for 10 minutes”.
you know – I tend to really enjoy short stories, especially the mildly post-modern or brief windows into fantasy.
but dang if it doesn’t take me FOREVER to finish an anthology. you’re very right about “what’s this about” when it comes to my choices for short stories, but there’s also an element of flow. you finish one short story and it’s done, and maybe you sit there and ponder it a bit, but there isn’t an immediate Go To The Next Page thing that a novel has. a short story often does all the work of a novel, but in a much smaller space, so even if they’re very, very good stories, you still get a very jumpy flow in the anthology, which makes it harder to read.
i don’t have a clue if i’m explaining this in a way that makes sense to people-who-are-not-me. but i’ve been trying to finish rereading Garth Nix’s Across the Wall since *December* and I’ve read five other novels in that time. It isn’t even much of a “reread” because I barely remembered any of the stories. But every time I think “ah, time to dip in” I have to think about the mental sink of a new story, and then it’s over soon. With a novel of the same length as the anthology, I can just pick up where I left off and keep going. (kind of like how fanfic feels to start?)
so, anyway, I enjoy reading short stories, but I often avoid actually picking up collections because the experience of reading them just isn’t as easy as reading a novel. (I have several collections of short fiction, essays, etc. whether specifically short stories or not that have bookmarks in random places because I trailed off or got distracted by a Shiny New book, and i keep meaning to finish each book, but…..)
The split between TV and movies seems to reflect something similar, though I’m not sure exactly what. An episode is closer to a short story in terms of time investment, but we talk in terms of seasons now. That’s more like 10-20 hours, like a novel.
Seeing a movie every Friday is a lot more like an anthology of short stories. But people don’t do that as much any more.
Right, it’s become common to watch whole seasons of TV in a short time. There was also a 24-hour Marvel marathon in New York earlier this summer, where the theater didn’t even take breaks for the audience to sleep or eat real meals. That might say something about what a pervasive role media plays in American life nowadays, but it sure doesn’t seem like evidence of short attention spans.
I always felt like movies resembled short stories more than novels–that you had to get in, build crisis, conclude it, and get out in the way a short story does, rather than living alongside the story for days as you do when reading a book. “Brokeback Mountain” started as a short story, and Annie Proulx has said that she feels her work got the most faithful, thorough adaptation any writer has ever had.
Maybe because having made the decision to sit down and read, the book has to be something to get your teeth into, rather than a short piece you could have read anywhere?
For me, I think it’s exactly the opposite. Reading a short story is always a conscious decision: “I want to sit down for about this long and feel a lot of strong emotions in a brief span of time.” A short story feels like it comes with a predetermined time commitment. Whereas a novel, I can dip into anywhere, any time. If I have a few minutes to spare before leaving the house or before starting a show, I’ll get a few more pages through my novel. But I also can lose hours reading a novel, and as people have said above, short stories by nature don’t have that kind of flow. So short stories have a very limited time allotment that they can fill.
My grandparents scared me and I never knew what to say to them anyway.
Me either. I always smuggled a book along when visiting grandparents to cope with the inevitable turn of the conversation to whatever sport my cousins happened to be doing and why it was better than whatever nerd thing I was doing. (In retrospect, pulling out a book probably didn’t help dispel that image.)
my grandma found children uninteresting so mostly she just told me to be quiet and play with the dog while she watched her stories (limit your grandparents’ screen time, kids!) But then about 9 I had learned enough words to be a formidable Boggle opponent and was therefore useful.
This sounds great, honestly.
I’m not 100% sure there ever really was some golden age of grandparent/grandchild Deep Meaningful Conversations. I mean, it’s not unheard of, not now, not 100 years ago, etc. But that it was simply the default?
I’d guess that a bunch of kids loved hanging out with their grandparents in every generation, and a bunch didn’t. 30 years ago, they’d sneak off to watch TV; 30 years before that, they’d go outside and play stickball; 30 years before that, probably something with the jazz.
I think that’s true. I also think that kids are sort of kinder in immediate conversation now and if grandparents sent one line texts they’d get much more of a relationship than by trying phone calls/skype/hanging out/etc.
Orrrr they might just get ghosted. Also I’m afraid that texting would be hard on their eyes, or arthritis, or hand-eye coordination. Some might be cool with it, but for others it would be too big a burden. (By the time we’re grandparents-age, the kids’ technology will be totally different and completely incomprehensible to us, I’m sure.)
Total guess here, but I bet such a time existed when the generations were closer together, geographically and age-wise. Grandma would have been 50 instead of 75 and living in the same town, if not the same house.
That’s a good point. And also, I think it matters how old the kids are in question, and the kind of interacting people are hoping for.
If we’re talking about a 6 year old, your 50-yo granny is more likely to get down on the floor and play with you than a 75-yo.
But if you’re 75 now, with a teenage grandchild, you’re trying to match the “grandma was fun!” memory you have, without any details with the “I don’t get this kid” feeling you have now. And blame it on the phone, because that’s the most obvious change, since the other details are so fuzzy.
Not so sure about that – the expectation that adults should play children’s games with kids is very recent. I don’t think the grandmothers of today’s grandmas got down on the floor to play. I think that they (the nicer ones) taught the grandkids to cook and bake, play real card games, identify flowers or whatever the grandmother herself was into or wanted help with. They could send their grandkids on errands, talk with them about people in the neighbourhood, listen to radio shows together and things like that.
I’m 26, and I’ve never played with any of my grandparents, because they didn’t do kid stuff. And we also didn’t really spend much time having polite conversations when I was still a kid, because “put that book down and tell me what you did in school” wasn’t fun for anyone involved, honestly. But we did the crossword together. I picked berries for them when they baked cakes, and then we decorated the cake. We’ve made dinner, bread and dessert, sewn clothes, looked at pictures from my parents’ childhoods, played chess, built a deck and rehearsed the multiplication tables. That’s some great grandparenting right there (I hear they weren’t amazing parents, but both sets were really good at being grandparents).
That’s true. I might also be thinking more of the fact that younger kids are more capable of being played with, regardless of who’s playing with them. But like, “go to the park and get pushed on the swings” is something that happens more when both grandparents and grandchildren are younger. Go swimming, play catch, walk around the zoo – even just picking kids up when they want to be.
totally. and where there were clear future roles for kids in which gparents could instruct them
Maybe, but it’s easy to over-generalize about the length of a generation. Men in particular have typically gotten married once they were able to support a family, like late twenties or early thirties, and they could father children for many years after that. And couples didn’t necessarily have two kids early in their marriage and then stop there, so especially if your father was a youngest son, you could have some very long generations. My dad was born fully eighty years after his paternal grandfather. The last surviving son of a Civil War vet just died a little while ago.
“The last surviving son of a Civil War vet just died a little while ago” that actually blows my mind
Oh dang, maybe he wasn’t even the last one!
!!!!!!
30 years ago, we loved going to my Grandma’s house because she let us watch ALL THE TV. Like we would mostly watch TV and she would bring us food. So I guess it also depends on the grandparents!
Hey Canadians! I have been thinking of visiting one of your cities for an interesting bday wkd in the fall — where should I go / what should I do?
Montreal. Disregard all other suggestions.
Agreed
OK! And what do you … DO there?
There’s SO MUCH you can do in Montreal!! If you’re a foodie, you’ll be in heaven because there are hundreds of great restaurants in all cuisines that are inexpensive & many are BYOB. If you like nature walks/hiking, Mont Royal in the centre of the city is gorgeous with fall foliage & has lots of walkable paths & stunning views of the city/St. Lawrence River – also, the Botanical Gardens are so easy to spend an entire day in. If you like museums or historical sites, all the museums in Montreal are relatively inexpensive & have great collections (I prefer the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Biodome, & the Montreal Science Centre). Tons of landmarks too like St. Joseph’s Oratory, Notre Dame Basilica, the entirety of Old Port, Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, the tower at the Olympic Park, & Parc Jean Drapeau.
I could go on and on and on, but Montreal has something for everyone & I know you’d love it! 😀
THIS. This seems perfect. Food and fall leaves and museums 😀
Eat! Poutine and smoked meat and Quebec cheeses! And beer, some good local breweries. Walk up Mont Royal and see the hipsters and the LARPers and the drum circle and the view all around the city. The Musee de Beaux Arts and the modern art museum and the McCord Museum (local history) are all excellent. Depending on when you go, there are festivals (jazz, Just for Laughs, etc.), and there’s a great music scene any time. Sit on a patio in the old port area and drink sangria in the sun. Tour the cathedral. You do not need French, I lived there for two years with little more than merci and s’il vous plait.
I am doing a long weekend in Quebec City in September that I am really looking forward to so I would also suggest that option except I don’t know what you do there besides walk around and look at old stuff yet. And I’ll root for Toronto too – you can take a flight on Porter from Dulles that goes direct to downtown Toronto. And Toronto also has great food and local beer and museums and street festivals somewhere every weekend through the summer and lakeshore beaches.
I LOVE LOCAL BREWERIES
If you can visit Toronto on the last Friday of a month you should come to the monthly beer party by these ladies! Lots of local brews and cool ladies.
And oh god yes, the bagels!!
Ooh, Toronto is definitely a good city to go to for local brews. You could spend a day just hopping from brewery to brewery.
The big ones are Steamwhistle, Mill St., and Amsterdam, but there’s a ton smaller ones as well (Hogtown, Kensington, Left Field, Bellwoods, and on and on)
I am not Canadian, but I would like to put a word in for Mother’s Dumplings in Toronto.
YES
Bagels. Hot from the oven sesame seed bagels from St-Viateur. Full fat Liberte cream cheese. Accept no substitutes.
Being a native Los Angelino, I think I’ve NEVER had a proper bagel. I mean, Ive eaten bagels, but my response has always been “Meh” to “I prefer toast.” So anyway, I would really really appreciate a true bagel awakening.
Definitely check them out then! (Although if you don’t like them, I would not write off bagels altogether–Montreal bagels are distinct from, say, NY-style bagels in that they are denser and slightly sweet.)
Co-signed on the Liberte cream cheese, but I will always be a Fairmount girl. The space is so charmingly crowded with flats of bagels and it was the first bagel in SPACE!
Montreal’s beautiful. Just walking around is great, there’s some good window-shopping, good museums, pretty city. Cafes are world-class, possibly world-beaters (more research needed, obviously never enough cafe research). There’s a decent art museum too, if it rains. I couldn’t take in the music/performance side of things, but I believe there is one.
Where are you coming from/how far would you be willing to travel?
Coming from DC… and IDK? I was hoping to take a train or a not too long flight?
Thoughts! I’d be happy to expound further on any of these!
Everyone says Montreal is super fun, which it is, but less so if you’re not a French speaker. It’s possible to get by without French there, but Quebec City is apparently a little more welcoming to non-Franco tourists.
Halifax is a little further afield, but totally within flight range. It’s got a good music scene, tons of local craft beers, and it’s on the freakin’ ocean and postcard-babely.
And, everyone poo-poos Toronto, but we legitimately have tons of live music, great restaurants, amazing nook-ish neighbourhoods, and Stuff To See And Do.
I’m not sure where you get the idea that Quebec City is /more/ welcoming to non-Francophone tourists? If anything, being an anglo tourist in Montreal is easier/more accessible & is accompanied by fewer glaring looks than in Quebec City where even an allophone like me gets constant stink eye when I speak in French (my patois isn’t legit enough).
This is just based on things I’ve heard from friends and family who have visited both cities. Can’t speak from experience! YMMV!
I think it’s definitely easier to get by without French in Montreal than in Quebec, but I feel like francophone Montrealers assume that you’re a McGill/Concordia/Westmount/West Island person who hasn’t bothered to learn French (so they treat you like you’re just a normal fixture of the city) whereas people who live in Quebec City assume that you’re visiting and try to be nice?
Montreal has way more English speakers than Quebec, though, if only because it’s a much bigger city. You’ll get by just fine if you don’t speak French.
If you would enjoy doing extremely tourist-y stuff all weekend, then maybe Niagara Falls? It is pretty small, but it’s full of falls-focused tourist attractions and also winery tours and wax museums and so on. And depending on how the trains run, it might be a slightly shorter train journey than other cities.
If you want more city than tourist traps, then probably Montreal or Toronto.
I went to Ottawa and then took the train to Montreal – both highly recommended and lovely and delightful.
If you’re the sort of Toastie that has a deep affection for L.M. Montgomery and a relaxing vacation of looking out at red sand beaches and fields of potatoes, Prince Edward Island may be the vacation for you!
If you actually want a city, or it’s late enough in the fall that the outdoors is less interesting………. probably not PEI.
Yes, Charlottetown has a remarkable number of excellent restaurants given its small size, but they all seem to roll up the awning by November.
I went to PEI when I was about 14, after YEARS and YEARS of lobbying my parents. I really really want to go back, but I also want to go to Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal and see more of the Maritimes than just PEI, and also I have basically no travel budget.
sadface.
I am not Canadian, but I’ve been to Vancouver several times and enjoyed it a great deal.
I also like Edmonton, but that’s almost entirely because I have long-time friends there.
That fire looks scary but this line from the article made me laugh: “According to fire officials, zero per cent of the fast-moving blaze is contained.”
You can just see the newbie reporter asking ‘So, how many percent of the fire have you contained so far?’, and the grizzled firechief facepalming and going ‘… Zero. Zero percent.’
All of the maps are so depressing right now.
Danger rating: http://bcwildfire.ca/Weather/Maps/danger_rating.h…
Precipitation: http://bcwildfire.ca/Weather/Maps/precipitation.h…
I was saying ALL WINTER that we needed more snow and more rain because we were going to have a terrible summer of fires and water restrictions if we didn’t get enough. All I kept hearing was “oh, no, it’s so great that it’s not been constant rain!” Well, I would like to nominate all those people to go on firefighting duty now. /Chicken Little grumbling
It rained for a bit while I was driving through Radium and Invermere this morning, so hopefully there’ll be more.
Even big, fast moving fires can be 20-30% contained if they keep moving in one/ a predictable direction, because firefighters can get the already burned/ burnt out bits under control. 0% is pretty fucking scary, especially for a fire that’s been burning for over a week. Percent containment is a pretty big deal when it comes to tracking fire fighting progress, since 100% containment usually comes well before the fire is “out” (from the fires I remember that got close to our place growing up, it seemed like with the big fires they’d be fighting hot spots for weeks before “out” happened). They’ll usually be able to say where around the fire boundary they’ve achieved containment, which is really, really nice to know if your house happens to be near an area currently on fire.
Pizzolatto seems like a piece of work, doesn’t he? I still kind of want to watch season 1, but all the reviews I’ve read of this season have done nothing to convince me to “catch up.”
Unrelated: anyone else ready for summer weather to be over? It is 20 degrees too warm and 50 points too humid for me to exist. Woke up feeling full on sick but couldn’t take off because (a) gotta drive interns and (b) work is air conditioned, bedroom is not.
We have been having lots of mild summer weather where I am–like the 70’s–and it is utterly glorious. Bring on the full Autumn weather.
This week the weather went back down to 85 with an occasional breeze and I am so, so, so happy.
I just want to send the rain to California. That way, rain! Begone! Otherwise it’s been suspiciously pleasant. . .
But also my city seems to have lost spring and fall, which makes me sad, because I love lightweight jackets and cardigans and now I only have about a week and a half to wear them.
Gawd yes. Took my daughter flower picking for an hour this morning and while it was picturesque it was so hot I nearly got heatstroke. Had to come home and jump in the shower before I threw up. I have next to no ability to regulate my body temperature so summer is The Worst. Bring on the fall!
the seasons stand alone. it’s not a continuous story line. you should totes watch season 1. to badly paraphrase another Toastie “i thought i was a true detective fan but it turns out that i’m a fan of woody harrelson and matthew mcconaughey”.
Hey Toasties, I know this isn’t the open thread, but does anyone else get the birthday sads? My birthday is this weekend and I have them like whoa. I’m not sure why. Things are fine, I have nice friends, but every week approaching my birthday makes me want to cry all the time. Anyone else experience this? How do you deal with it?
denial and expensive theater
edit – sorry that’s unhelpful, but please know i also HATE my birthday and spend the week(s) before sick with dread, AS YOU DO, so you’re not alone, it’s just fucking terrible to be reminded you’re living and also never living enough. I HOPE YOUR BIRTHDAY IS OK.
denial and expensive theater is an excellent life strategy as well, I find.
SAME. my birthday is also this weekend. also feeling weird feels.
hey buddy!
I get that too! (And posted here about it this year, haha)
I don’t have any great advice, I just kind of keep my head down and charge through it. I have never posted my birthday on Facebook, which helps immensely, because having to acknowledge any extraneous well-wishers would be awful. And sometimes I plan a birthday thing for myself either early or late enough that I’m no longer in the sad-birthday-zone, and if I plan it in advance it absolves my friends of feeling like they should plan anything for me (and relieves me of having to do social stuff when I’m in the dumps).
But mostly: cry if you have to, be a little selfish, and get through it to the other side. You can do it!
Ugh, I hate the random people saying happy birthday on Facebook because the site prompted them to.
Oh I turned off my wall, just to avoid that!
I didn’t really used to have birthday sads but now I do and it might be helpful to try and think about what’s giving you the birthday sads- is it the stress of feeling like you have to celebrate a specific day, or the fact that you’re getting a year older, or that you just don’t want to have a day where people seem intent on making a big deal of it?
Ironically I have found saying “I’m gonna have a birthday MONTH” helpful because 1. I stress less about having fun on my actual birthday (which is close to a very sad day and therefore almost impossible for me to be cheerful), and 2. if people know you plan on celebrating the whole month they care less about what you’re doing on the specific day.
That sounds like an awesome idea except that my dad is having major surgery 8 days before my birthday, and we have a super-complicated relationship and thinking about that just makes me sad too. I’m just piling on to this sad thread because I am also sad because of this weird dad-relationship thing. Sorry…
I totally get birthday sads, although mine tends to be about the disappointment around how little anyone cares about me. I like the idea of my birthday, but I’ve never been one for big parties in my honour, I’d rather just hang out with friends.
Last year I was alone in a new country, working on my birthday, and no one knew it was my birthday, that was pretty shit; I tend not to broadcast that my birthday is coming up on social media, if I see you in person, for about a month beforehand I’m all about my birthday, but not so much online, so people who maybe haven’t seen me for a few weeks won’t know its coming, as happened with all my new country friends.
This year was a bit more of a clusterfuck, Brother and GF had their second baby in January, and my birthday is at the end of Feb, so I decided to come home for my birthday and meet the new baby etc, I also thought I’d be able to go out with friends and such. Turns out everyone I know is too involved with their own stuff, even family. I bent over backwards to do a birthday lunch with Mother and brother and family, trying to be considerate for them with two small kids, picked somewhere close to their house, even though it wasn’t what I wanted, picked a convenient time, paid for the whole thing so they didn’t bitch about money; but Brother’s GF was so wrapped up in fighting my mother about baby stuff that she nearly through a hissy fit and didn’t want to go anymore and Brother is whipped so he will never say anything. Eventually got them to go, but the whole thing was so tense it barely seemed worth it tbh. I’m getting pissed just thinking about it.
I thought I’d be better off going home because I didn’t have enough friends in London to make a birthday party worth it, but turns out I should have just stayed and I would have had much more fun. I probably sound well shitty moaning about this stuff, but I think you’re birthday is the one time a year you are really allowed to be a bit demanding, right?
Moral of the story, do what you want to do for your birthday and fuck everyone else, you want to go drinking? go. You want to stay in a not see anyone, you do it!
It’s not shitty moaning about it. I see birthdays as the one time of year where you get to be selfish and expect everyone to make it about you without feeling guilty about it. When people don’t, it’s shitty. They shouldn’t have made your attempt to celebrate your birthday all about their problems and stresses. I’m sorry you had to deal with that 🙁
My personal mantra is “birthdays are for crying” but YMMV. I have found it helpful to give myself permission to feel sad. I also find the pressure to Do Something Fabulous with Friends quite suffocating (sorry, well meaning friends!) and have been doing my best to do nothing… this year I decided that nothing would make me happier than painting a large piece of furniture (a project I had been meaning to do for a while) and I did and it was very satisfying. I think we all need more expansive ideas about how to celebrate (or ignore) one’s birthday. I hope you have a great (or mildly nostalgic/ tender/ bittersweet but ultimately satisfying) day this weekend 🙂
More expansive is a great idea! I hate the pressure to organise birthday stuff and then I feel responsible for people enjoying the activity that I have chosen (which is generally a compromise to suit the maximum amount of people), and then I hate that I will inevitably think too deeply on who can’t come. I love other people’s birthday’s and buying gifts and I know its ridiculous but I’d just rather pretend mine isn’t happening.
I do like to do my new year resolutions on my birthday though, as I find new year even more hard work.
I get all kinds of anxiety around my birthday because I feel an immense amount of pressure to plan something – it has gotten worse since I took a job that brackets my birthday with events for which I actually have to, you guessed it, plan.
Throw in that my grandmother’s birthday is the day before mine and since she died four years ago birthday week has become pretty bittersweet and, yeah I feel you.
Ugh, yes, every year. My birthday is this weekend also. Unfortunately I have no good advice to give you, just commiserations. HUGS FROM AFAR, FELLOW SAD BIRTHDAY FRIEND.
Hugs back!
I get wicked birthday sads. I’ve tried doing the party thing, the nice dinner thing, doing nothing at all, and none of it really made it any more tolerable.
Last year I decided to aim as low as possible, that way if it was even remotely enjoyable it’d be a nice surprise. So like instead of trying to make myself look especially nice (which always ends in me feeling frustrated), I put on a hideous faux fur coat and smudgy makeup. Then I went and saw some mediocre bands in my neighborhood’s grodiest sad bastard bar. I worked on the assumption that no one would come, so when 3(!) people showed up I was pretty stoked. Overall one of the better birthdays I’ve had.
Every time my birthday rolls around, I obsess over which friends got in touch to say “happy birthday” and whether it means they actually like me. Not my best day!
I just had a meltdown yesterday because my birthday is coming up! Like nauseated and can’t get out of bed meltdown. My spouse has tempted me with gifts and everyone’s ok with it being low-key, but I freak out about how my birthday IS SUPPOSED TO BE HAPPY. BE HAPPY. NOW. It’s like my birthday is just another thing to fail at and disappoint people. That’s at least how my brain interprets it. : /
The only thing that’s worked is finish the freak out and keep your expectation low, but pleasant, like thinking about what you want to do on the weekend.
My birthday is tomorrow, and I definitely have the sads/massive doubt and insecurity and regret going on. No advice, just solidarity.
Oh man, I’ve been thinking so much about kids + tech in the last couple years. I feel like it’s such a fine line to walk. On one hand, cutting it out of kids’ lives completely just isn’t possible: there are computers and iPads in classrooms, and there’s no such thing as a landline anymore, and even our cars have DVD players. But I’m also uncomfortable with handing a two/six/nine-year-old a phone or a tablet and just saying, like, “Here, entertain yourself.”
My parents had a one-hour-of-screen-time each day policy, which we could split between our (pre-approved) TV schedule (Blossom at 3:30, Dinosaurs at 4), or whatever educational computer games our 1992 IBM machine would begrudgingly run.
I’m generally torn between “yeah, sometimes kids are on screens a LOT” and “damn, there were SO MANY times I was bored out of my mind as a child – like waiting at a restaurant for 30min for a table – and a tablet would’ve been really damn nice to have.” You know, it shouldn’t be an always thing, but sometimes it’s a good option versus just a bored child doing nothing and getting increasingly restless.
Also, my grandparents couldn’t be bothered to be grandparents so I don’t really care about that aspect.
That’s why you keep a book on you at all times.
I want to look back at my 8-year-old self and say, “Child, take up knitting now.” Because there is nothing like signifying your willingness to wait patiently until things get interesting like whipping out a hat in progress.
This is why I laugh at people who go on about how patient I must be because I knit – I am the least patient person on Earth and I have a habit of getting to places early and that is exactly WHY I knit, so I always have something to do no matter how long I’m stuck waiting.
Am I the only one who thinks young children don’t need tech in the classroom? Everyone is all ‘They need to get ahead for the future job market and they will need to know how to code’ etc, but I rather think that if you focus on the basics with young children, things like maths, logic, reading etc, they’ll pick up tech as teenagers no problem. Hell I didn’t start working in tech until I was 22 and I’m getting on just fine.
Tech at home is a different story, and I totally see the appeal of giving them a phone or an ipad, or turning on the TV to give yourself some peace, but I’m still a childless perfectionist, so I kind of think that if you can’t handle engaging with your children all the time, or get through a dinner without distracting them, you maybe need to review how your life is organised? Most of this opinion comes from working in a restaurant where most customers were families, and seeing just how many parents preferred to plonk the kid in the corner with an ipad and no food, or just some sugar packets to chew on (vom.), while they ignored the kid and had their feast.
if you can’t handle engaging with your children all the time
Dude, I don’t even engage with my husband all the time, and he’s not a tantrum-throwing toddler who is bound and determined to run in circles around the doctor’s office waiting room. I don’t have kids yet, but I nanny/baby-sit quite a bit, so I’ve been around kids, and trust me, sometimes you just need a break and/or need something to keep them distracted so that your entire interaction with them in that moment isn’t a power struggle, because sometimes you just don’t have it in you.
That said, I can’t even imagine taking a kid (who is old enough to eat real food) out to a restaurant and not giving them anything to eat, or only sugar to eat. My ~favorite~ was the summer I worked at Chipotle, when people would bring in little kids and get them just a bowl of rice, which would then get flung all over the floor. That shit is sticky and hard to sweep up.
Yeah I totally get that I’m idealistic, I don’t have kids, I’m allowed to be. I will continue to judge you all, and then I will have children and do all the things I said I’d never do, its the circle of life.
Parents and kids can either be the worst or the best customers; Some of the best people I met when waitress were parents or their kids (On little boy had a crush on me and always asked his mum if they could ‘go see the lady’ <3 AND HE HAD CURLY HAIR AND GLASSES), kids are not a problem in restaurants at all, I didn’t even mind a bit of food on the floor or having to wipe down a highchair or two; But some of the parents, oh my sweet jesus. If you are enjoying a massive burger with all the trimmings and you’re child is bored, hungry and sucking on sugar packets (seriously, and then the parents put them back in the jar.), you have a problem. And if you do decide to bless your child with some food, and said horror child proceeds to throw it everywhere and scream the entire place down, at least make at attempt at picking it up, or apologize, because you are an asshole.
Yup. Also don’t have kids, but also? Some kids don’t want to engage with you all the time, some kids didn’t want to engage with you all the time *before the Internet*, and the world didn’t end. I brought two paperbacks damn near everywhere as a child*’, and I grew into a more-or-less normally socialized adult and have a loving relationship with my family, although, being WASPy, we probably wouldn’t use the word “loving.”
If you’re around people every day, you generally need breaks from those people.
*And by “as a child” I mean “up to the present day, including to my college graduation, because goddamn that shit takes six hours”.
No, you are not alone. I and pretty much every college professor I know (other than maybe the Economics & Computer Sci ones) also feel young children don’t need tech in the class. And older kids could stand to use them a lot less. Computers are great at home — it’s great to have a class devoted to programming, maybe — but you do not not not need a computer to instruct other subjects. Little children need to learn with all their senses, and they need to learn by interacting with other people — math, verbal skills, history, science.
It will not take anybody a long time to learn how to type or learn how to use a computer. But learning how to think 3D and in a sustained fashion, and interact with others — crucial.
As a Freshman Academic Adviser at a very high-brow college, I spent hours every fall explaining to freshman that they would internalize information much better and get better grades if they would just take notes by hand during lectures and discussion groups. And sometimes they would be surprised — nobody had ever told them that before. And/or their high school was proud of having outfitted every student with iPads (iPads — not laptops – !!). Really sad.
rant over 🙂
ALL OF THIS! Coding is just a language,you can pick it up with a few weeks intensive training; but the logic and maths that underpin programming, will literally melt your brain if you don’t have a solid base (at least it does with me, guess who doesn’t have a solid base?)
So many schools show off about how much tech they have in the classroom, but I don’t think they are really thinking it through. Sure providing text books on an ipad is probably a good idea, and allowing and teach older children to use the internet for research is probably a fine idea; but there are private schools now where the kids never write anything down, ever, its all typing! They have 1 hour of ‘handwriting class’ a week!
I know there’s a growing backlash against Steiner education, and I went through it for a period and hated it (for other childish reasons), but the older I get the more I think that they definitely have some good ideas when it comes to holistic and though-out education.
For many of my high school aged students, their only access/exposure to a computer is in their classrooms because they don’t have a computer at home. It does make a difference, and for some of them, it is necessary.
Yes! Not everything needs to be taught from earliest childhood! Not everything is even suitable to be taught in early childhood! Some things are so much easier for adults or teens than for children that spending precious childhood hours on those things would just waste the kids’ time.
Also, the “everyone needs to learn to code” is such HUGE lie. No we don’t. The coding languages will change so much between a kid’s time in middle school and their high school graduation that there’s basically no point. What they need to learn is how to think like a computer. Everyone needs to learn logic, how to think in algoritms. That’s actually important. And we also need to learn how networks including the internet work, how a computer works and how to do basic problem-solving, like what you do when your computer gets an unexpected error message or the program won’t install.
*sploosh* all of this.
Even current university/college computer science courses are already already out of date (source: current programmers, comp-sci grads, current lecturers and so on), so whatever makes it through DofE bureaucracy and onto the curriculum for 10-11yo’s will definitely be out of date by the time they supposedly need it in the mythical future ‘job market’. Why can’t schools/governments understand this?
I just hope that by the time I have kids going to school this will have made it into the public conscious. Teach children to be smart and resourceful and they can to the rest themselves as teenagers/college students.
There is also the issue that youth will always be more comfortable with modern tech than their teachers, so you’ll always end up with kids teaching the teachers in ‘computer class’. (My only computer class, in 2005/6 was how to open and save a word doc and how to open internet explorer. We spent the class checking our emails and going on Bebo, while the teacher got to grips with the course material.)
My boyfriend and I have talked about this a lot – he’s a computer and gadget guy, so we’re always going to have a lot of tech around, but we also know we’re going to enforce boundaries with our (hypothetical) kids. Our mutual pet peeve right now is those commercials where some food is so good the kid *puts down their phone * – um, if you don’t want your kid to use the phone at dinner, don’t let them bring the phone to the table. Kids aren’t just going to know how to behave around tech, they weren’t adults when they started using it like a lot of us were.
I had a hour-per-day limit as a kid, too. But I think it’s not super-useful to think of “screen time” as a category any more. Back in the ’90s, it pretty much meant “TV and video games” which was a pretty specific mode of entertainment.
But the difference between screen-based activities and other ones is hopelessly blurred. You can read a magazine but not a blog? A book but not your Kindle? Have a friend over but not go on Facebook? Etc.
I agree with you, mostly. But keep in mind that for some families, all types of screen time must be limited. Families with special needs kids often find that exposure to any activity on any screen saps a sensitive child’s energy for managing their own emotions. The jury’s still out on what is the exact culprit, but we’re leaning toward blaming the rapid eye movement required, and the brightness of the visual stimulation.
The next time I have the care of one of these special needs kids, I want to experiment. I want to give the kid text-only screen experiences in longer intervals than usual and observe the behavioral result.
Yeah, that’s a good point. There are some specific aspects of screens that are unique to them, and it makes sense that some people will react differently to them.
But I think the typical fight between parents and children regarding “screen time” is more social and moral than physiological or psychological. Which is why “research and write a paper” was not screen time, because that was ‘productive,” even though it is physiologically more like texting than reading a book.
I am at least in favor of letting kids play with electronics during things that require a lot of adults to stay sitting and listening and not interacting for long periods of time. A couple weekends ago was my oldest cousin’s wedding, which was a wonderful time for all involved–and my four-year-old cousin was CONSTANTLY running around. She spent most of the rehearsal dinner crawling around under the table I shared with my cousins, and during one speech, she suddenly took off sprinting for the hallway that led to the restaurant adjacent to the rehearsal dinner space. From reports after the rehearsal dinner, this was not the only time she did this during the evening. But when we let her play puzzle games on our phones, she would sit still and concentrate for ages and ages.
I’ve been thinking about it too! Like someone else said below, I spent my childhood buried in books, which means sitting indoors for looong stretches of time, not playing or socialising. But somehow that’s okay because books are moral, just like expensive whiskey is “better” than cheap vodka. At least you have to act to make things happen on an iPad, it’s better than passively pointing your eyeballs at the TV.
Buuut what I’m actually wondering is, what do adults WANT kids to do? What else, except playing with kid-friendly computer programs, are kids in these cultures actually allowed to do? They’re already supposed to stay indoors, or otherwise in sight of their parents, refrain from moving quickly or being noisy (=they should preferably sit down and be quiet), and not change anything in the house, do anything that could be “unsafe” or really do stuff on their own. So, apart from watching TV or playing around on the computer or on their phone, what can they do? Are they supposed to just be in stand-by mode? Maybe the reason kids use their phones so much is that phones have to fill the entire “what do I want to do today” vacuum, because nothing else is allowed?
You can’t read or draw or hang out by yourself in the back yard all day every day, and I say that as a person who LIKED reading and drawing. Kids in car-dependent areas, where children aren’t allowed to go outside, get lonely and bored out of their MINDS. Then they’ll whine to their parents, because they’re basically being kept in house arrest and the adults control their entire environment (hmm maybe whining isn’t a kid thing but actually a prisoner thing), and then they get their few energy outlets and communication tools (i.e., the tech stuff) taken away because those are considered “privileges”. Uuughghghhh.
One of the things I wonder about with kids and tech is if there isn’t sometimes value in having to be a little bit bored. I would very contentedly have read everywhere, including the dinner table, if I were allowed, but I also think over time it was valuable for me to learn to be patient through a conversation amongst the “grown-ups” that wasn’t centered around me. (And eventually I figured out if you were quiet and not wiggling and whining the grown-ups were more likely to say the juicy stuff in front of you.) Likewise, I also think it was kind of valuable that on our eight hour car trips to the grandparents’ house, my brother and I didn’t have the option of just sitting quietly in headphones watching separate DVDs or something–we had to interact in a way our age difference (almost five years) meant we didn’t all that much at home. I even think having some boredom in my life helped me learn to entertain myself with just my imagination. Granted, I was a pretty quiet and pliant kid to begin with, and maybe I’m underestimating how much stress it takes for parents to deal kids who are much more expressive in their boredom.
I was a kid before screens were available at all times, and my parents still threw the available tech at us when we were going to be in a car or an airplane for a long time. We had piles and piles of books on tape. When we moved across the US and my parents decided to make a road trip out of it, for two weeks, the broke down and bought a pair of Gameboys so we wouldn’t murder each other. We *also* played plenty of games where we had to interact with each other – the Alphabet game (though my brother was only 5 for that particular trip, so I played that one with my parents), 20 Questions, we had a book of board games that came with sticky pieces so they wouldn’t go flying (Klutz Press, of course), and even used my brother’s plastic bugs to re-enact the OJ Simpson trial (as interpreted by a 9-year-old and a 5-year-old). You can’t actually listen to books on tape or play Gameboy *all* day (and while I wasn’t forbidden from reading, at that age I still got carsick if I did), but my parents probably would have had to strangle us if we had been forced to take out our boredom on each other at all times (even with the electronic and non-electronic distractions, we still fought).
Holy crap Tom Arnold looks great. Like he looks younger than he did 10 years ago.
Oh man, I am enjoying the Pizzolatto/Fukanaga stuff SO MUCH. Pizzolatto is such a diva.
I especially love that he’s complaining about critics reviewing a “work in progress” (i.e. episode by episode), when, let’s face it, True Detective season 1 would’ve gotten fewer rave reviews if people had seen the whole season at once. Season 1 worked really well on an episode by episode basis, and it wasn’t until the end that I realized just how much hot air it was (admittedly, the Rust/Marty interactions hold up).
BTW, I’m not watching season 2 (not yet anyway; maybe not ever), but weren’t we promised a post mocking episode 2? I seem to recall something like that…
I really need that mocking post in my life. Honestly, at this point I’m just watching the episodes thinking, “What will Nicole have to say about this?”
Meeeee tooooooo!!!! I have many mocking feelings in need of an outlet.
I think the most damning thing about season 2 so far is just that it is so goddamn boring. I have very little idea what is going on and I can barely be bothered to try to figure it out.
I don’t like to hassle our toast overlords, but I have also been checking every day for more True D S2 mockery! What am I keeping up with the show for if not this???
Also I did not know about the “work in progress” complaint from Pizzolatto and that is comedy gold. Thank you.
if you’d asked me to rate season 1 as a “work in progress” it would’ve gotten a “10/10 would watch again!” up until the finale. the last 5 minutes of the last episode was like watching an Andean Condor take a massive poop all over your newly washed car. Marty/Rusty FOREVA, though.
But how else would you review a TV show? That’s how they work!
Toastssssss. Husband emailed his CV to a recruiter for a Montreal firm on Sunday and the guy emailed him back yesterday morning! He asked for a writing sample and Husband was like “Here are a couple of articles I recently had published in a national peer-reviewed journal.” I am very pleased with this development and hope it continues to develop along the same lines.
Yay congrats! It sounds like your husband has applied to the only firm in the world to answer emails in a timely manner – he must be truly blessed by Our Lady of Good Fortune.
Yeah, my relatively tech-savvy grandmother gets very sad and frustrated by everyone using their devices constantly at family gatherings, and that article hit the nail on the head. Personally, I think we as a society will figure out an etiquette for device use. I was/am a rabid bookworm, and growing up, I usually preferred reading to being social. But I always had a very clear sense of when it was appropriate to read a book and when it would be rude. How often I paid attention to this was another matter–one of my friends still complains that I always read books at her house when visiting, and Mom always had to insist that my sisters, Dad, and I put our books away when we started dinner so we could bond as a family. So I see a lot of parallels between my experience growing up with books and the complaints people have about kids’ use of devices.
Oh, “no books at the table” was definitely a house rule for us, too.
I think theoretically it was a rule at my house too, but one that my parents very quickly gave up on enforcing because telling Little Winterbymorning to put a book down for 5 minutes was a completely futile endeavour. I used to read while walking down the street, until it dawned on me that even in a quiet residential neighbourhood that was a good way to get hit by a car.
I once hid a book under my seat and partway through dinner, dropped my fork so I could go down there to get it and just stay there reading. My parents still tease me about this.
I love child logic – “They’ll never notice that I dropped down to get something and then just failed to return for many minutes at a time!”
It always seems to work for kids on TV! So much more sneaking around than I could ever get away with in real life.
“No books at the table” was a rule I had to learn after I moved out, because it was most definitely not a rule at home. It’s funny (read: annoying) because my bf gets ticked if I read while we’re eating or whatever, but he’s constantly on his phone.
No books for me at the dinner table, in the bathroom, or after my bedtime. I broke all those rules, though parents would let me get away with it if it was a new Harry Potter book or something.
As an adult, I almost always read while brushing my teeth. Sometimes magazine articles, sometimes whatever’s on my phone, sometimes an actual book.
This! I know that when I am interacting with someone I shouldn’t be absorbed in my cell phone, any more than I should pull out a book–unless we both pull out books/cell phones by mutual agreement.
Yes! I used to get in trouble all the time for trying to read instead of interacting with people. It was just like the complaints now. Yes, kids will get distracted by something. You have to teach them social skills and boundaries.
(But really, one of my favorite memories is when my grandfather took my little brother and me to a baseball game. I brought a book and read the whole time while the rest of the family cheered. On the ride home my brother slept, and my grandpa talked to me about my reading. Sometimes it all works out.)
Seriously, its about manners people! It seems we’ve reached a point where it is again acceptable to pull out you’re phone while at dinner with someone (apparently this was a thing in the 80s when phones first came along), can we go back to the blissful 00’s time when being on you’re phone when in company was super fucking rude.
I remember my grandfather lamenting that I was reading while visiting them rather than listening to his stories.
Yes, for sure. (See also, that photo of a 1950s train car full of guys reading the paper, for use anytime someone complains that we all have our noses in our phones and don’t socialize in public.) I also think of the times I went to a friend’s house or vice versa as a kid, and we watched TV and barely talked. Or, like, think of how many conversations you have at the breakfast table, over the paper or a book, and giving half your attention isn’t really rude. Reading a book alone at a restaurant? Not rude at all!
It must be a lot harder to set boundaries with phones & similar, though, given how they’re everywhere and we use them for everything and lots of folks are actively rude about it…
When I was in middle school, my friends and I used to get on the phone with each other and watch tv shows “together”. We didn’t talk, except in commercials, it was just neat having some kind of company while we watched Just the Ten of Us or whatever other crap we were obsessed with.
Oh god we did that too. Only with Buffy and Pokémon.
Can we talk about how now the thing that’s considered rude is not to be available on your phone 24/7? I’m not a person who takes it out when I’m hanging out with friends/at my book group/having dinner with my family/chilling and watching a movie on my own/in most moments of my life, which means some texts don’t see a response until the next day. Man, some people consider that just the greatest offense. How *dare* I?
THIS THIS THIS.
mmhm, and seeing people in person has adapted to this – running late or making tentative plans means you’ll text to meet up, or sometimes a person will put “I’m at the bar, come hang out!” on Facebook, which means at least one person HAS to look at their phone. I prefer putting it away, but it’s often not even an option.
And the thing is, I don’t have a car, and the bus that runs near my house runs every 30 minutes during the day, every hour at night. Which means that, unless somebody who is also going to that event is going to pick me up, or it’s super close to my house, I’m probably a 30-minute walk away. So not only do I have to be attached to my phone, but I can’t just go do spontaneous things in other parts of town.
As someone who lives somewhere with poor mobile phone coverage, this bugs me too. Also I have a tendency to leave the phone in the kitchen after dinner so if anyone texts after 9pm I often don’t see it till it’s to late in the evening to respond, or indeed it’s the following morning.
I read this book called “Scheherazade Goes West” by Fatema Mernisse, an older Muslim feminist from a North African country (I think Morocco). There were SO MANY interesting anecdotes. For example I remember one where she said that she didn’t truly get just how emphasized thinness is in the West until she went to an enormous clothing store to buy a skirt and the staff snottily told her that they didn’t have a skirt in her size, and she asked “not even one skirt, in this huge store?” and they said no, not even one.
BUT what I was going to say was that once she was talking to a European friend, and the friend’s phone rang, and the friend answered the phone, and Mernisse thought this was undescribably rude and weird. How could a phone call be more important than an established real life conversation? And I was so surprised, because I (being a Westerner) have been raised to give phone calls priority. It’s okay to answer the phone quickly to say you don’t have time to speak, but you HAVE TO drop whatever you’re doing and answer the phone. It’s a system! Whenever you need to say something time-sensitive or extremely important, you use a phone call. You’re guaranteed to get through, as long as people hear the signal. If we didn’t answer the phone every time it rang, it wouldn’t work, so the price you pay for instant access is that you too can be accessed instantly. But Mernisse had assumed that the European friend would shut off the annoying signal and call back later, honoring the deal with Mernisse (“we are talking now”).
edited to add: Seriously, this is an amazing book, she’s great, everyone should read this. Now I’m remembering this chapter on women’s intelligence and how surprised she was when she realised that Western men seemed to prefer their women a bit dumb, while in Muslim history attractive women are supposed to be really smart. Just look at Scheherazade, she’s supposed to be a real catch, and they take pages and pages to describe how eloquently she speaks, how much she knows, how wise she is, and so on.
Oooooooo. I’ve added this to my to-read list.
Yeah, I think we will figure it out, but we need to be more aware of the fact that a lot of us are really really bad at multitasking on our phones. Like, yeah, I can listen to a conference call I’m not a big part of and play Candy Crush, but I can’t read anything (even twitter) because I can’t process the two different language streams simultaneously.
I also have friends who are on the autism spectrum who use their phones as a way to retreat when things get too much, or a way to channel their need to stim/fidget, but unfortunately a lot of older adults find that rude.
I also think that sometimes kids would be better served if we were handing them books instead of devices, but that’s another discussion.
My mom has a box that phones go in during family dinners. The grandkids aren’t old enough for phones (all under 5) but it helps keep my younger siblings involved in the conversation. The box is near enough to the table that we can hear a phone ring, but no one can look at their phones during family time.
Phone-prison!! I always thought this was a good idea, and had to do it a few times with my ex because he was always on his phone. always.
There’s also the game you can play at dinner parties (esp. in restaurants or bars), all the phones go in a bowl, and the first person to pick up their phone for non-emergency reasons has to pay for dinner (or by a round). Never had to resort to this extreme, but its in my toolbox.
Suuuper excited to read Joel’s piece about Flame Con! Also, holy shit how is Comic-Con this week i am so unprepared
SAME HERE. I am not ready AT ALL. I feel like part of me is nervous because I’m going for the first time and in a professional capacity but also summer has been going far too fast and I can’t believe it’s already here :O
Side note: maybe we could do like a Toastie SDCC meet up? I don’t know how many readers of The Toast are going, but that would be pretty cool.
There’s at least two or three of us going. I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday and I’d be happy to meet up sometime Sunday afternoon (my Saturday is totally booked thanks to Hannibal/a meet-up).
COSBY
I know, right? UGH.
I got to go to Momofuku Noodle Bar in NY this weekend! Two words…shrimp buns. Pro tip for my fellow foodie toasties – 4th of July in Manhattan is the perfect time to go to NY to eat at any restaurant. We got to sit at the bar overlooking the kitchen at Noodle Bar and I watched exec chef Tony Kim encouraging and developing a woman chef making the ramen that night. She was truly badass slinging the noodles and perfectly plating all of the giant noodle bowls all while having the chef taste her food experiments in progress. You could tell she was the rising star of that kitchen.
I love this story!
You love your children more than life
you’ve eliminated gluten
you and your husband or your wife
because there’s no disputing
your choice to go full paleo
or maybe vegetarian
you heard it on the radio
from late-night libertarians
But now Jim Carrey is your guide
for raising healthy kids?
you’re taking on Bill Maher’s side
and going off the grid?
Jenny McCarthy’s medical license
is printed on the air
do not take her vaccine guidance
despite her awesome hair
So please do not endanger others
a selfish act indeed
for all our fathers and our mothers
paranoia vaccine’s what we need
Once here on campus I was almost run over by a student, wearing Beats headphones, texting, and riding his bicycle. Dibs on his kidneys.
You can console yourself with the fact that he paid a lot of money for headphones that are cheap garbage.
Fingers crossed that the BC wildfires can be contained. We also have horrific wildfires going on in northern Saskatchewan, with more than 100 fires burning and over a dozen communities evacuated.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/unprec…
Signal boost for donation information, if that’s ok:
http://saskatoon.ctvnews.ca/donation-information-…
That Chris Farley trailer got me, too! 🙁 That film looks wonderful/sad.
Toast friends! I know it’s not open thread but Friday is SO far away and I could really use some Toastie love right now.
My boyfriend and I were in Montreal last week to see the World Cup semifinal between the US and Germany, which was AMAZING… but our very cute hotel turned out to have bed bugs. We were there for four nights but I didn’t notice the bites right away so we didn’t pay much attention until right before we checked out. I did find a single bug near the bed though so we’re sure that’s what it was. We drove home with all of our stuff in trash bags and put everything that could stand it into the dryer, but there were a couple things that we couldn’t do anything about (electronics, leather sandals, wallets, that sort of stuff).
I ended up having a pretty severe allergic reaction to the bites that was very distressing and has thrown me into a fun little anxiety spiral. I went to the doctor and they put me on a steroid that’s helped a lot with the swelling and itching, but I can’t stop worrying that we somehow brought the fuckers into our apartment and/or car despite all our precautions. I don’t think I’ve gotten any new bites in the week we’ve been home but the general uncertainty has been occupying my thoughts… most of the time, honestly.
I would characterize myself as a mildly anxious person, I guess? Like, of the That Sound in the Night is Definitely a Murderer and My Dad is on an Airplane Right Now and What If It Crashes variety, but this obsession is a whole new level for me.
Anyway. I know you guys can’t really do anything but telling people makes me feel a tiny bit better so HERE I AM.
Oh my god, what a total shitstorm. I am so sorry this happened to you. It sounds like a really good sign that you haven’t noticed any new bites, though!
Delurking to provide you my anecdote that will hopefully cheer you up. I spent one night in a hotel that I thought was fine the whole time I was there, through check out. The angry, insanely itchy welts showed up only a day or two later ( I am nearly, but not completely certain it was bedbugs, as I just did internet research and otherwise froze up in panic). The welts kept spreading throughout the next couple days, and I guess after 2-3 days of spread, I broke down and freaked out to a friend. She told me that her SIL in her backpacking adventures came across a place with bedbugs, but the bedbugs did not travel with her, and it’s relatively rare for bedbugs to hitch rides to a second location. So I postponed torching my place to the ground for a couple days to see how things might develop, and after the first 3-4 days after being exposed to bedbugs, the spread stopped, no new bites appeared, and I did not have to move or set anything on fire. So, for what it’s worth, I know of at least four people (because I took my trip with a friend, and my friend’s SIL was also backpacking with her then fiance) who have stayed at places with bedbugs but did not bring those awful creatures home with them. Good luck, I think your anxiety is totally justified in this case, but also, I think you’ll probably be ok?
Thank you!! This DOES make me feel a little better.
My experience with the bites was very similar — took a few days to appear at all and a few more before they turned into enormous swollen welts. Gross, uncomfortable, AND upsetting. Mine are still fading, which doesn’t help with the anxiety since I can still SEE THEM THERE ALL UP IN MY BUSINESS.
I sort of regret the amount of time I’ve spent reading about this on the internet, because while it did teach me some good precautions, it’s also (like anything else) biased in favor of people who have had unusually terrible experiences. Nobody goes online to be like “I had some bites at a hotel but nothing happened after” or “I had three bedbugs in my house but I got rid of them and it was fine.” Five minutes on a bedbug forum will leave you convinced you’re going to get bedbugs just by stepping outside your house, but if they were really that easily spread, everyone in the universe would have them… right?
In any case, every bedbug story that isn’t whacked-out internet hypochondriac fear mongering really does help. So thanks!
I have also had a similar bedbug experience and it turned out fine. I only stayed one night in the hotel where I think I got them. We spent one night there on the last day of this trip, and my bites showed up the day after I got home so the stuff I had in the hotel was even sitting on the floor of my bedroom for a day before i realized. I was almost covered in bites so that place must have had a quite a few. Once i realized I washed and dryed as much on high heat as I could and the rest when into garbage bags and lived on the balcony for the winter (the exposure happened in the fall). I probably didn’t need to leave it out that long, but I didn’t want to risk it. Anyway, here is another story, that while crappy, did not result in any transfer of bugs to my house or my friends house.
I did end up shopping for my wedding dress covered in gross bed bug bits which was kind of embarrassing.
That’s really good to hear!
Ugh, guys, my (very awesome and sympathetic) landlady suggested I call a local pest control place and talk to them, thinking it would help me feel better, but instead I got this totally gruff and annoyed-sounding guy who brushed off most of my questions and just kept saying that they can travel in anything and you wouldn’t even KNOW for three months because you could bring a single bug home and it wouldn’t necessarily bite you right away. This doesn’t… sound right? But either way it is NOT HELPFUL.
I mean I guess that is theoretically possible, but you took a bunch of precautions so that seems not that likely. My bug experience was almost 2 years ago and we have not had an issue.
Maybe try and be a bit extra diligent about washing your bedding and keeping clothes and stuff off the floor so there are fewer places for them to hide (that is was we did for the first couple months, but I am a slob).
… which hotel was it?
(I used to live in Montreal and am desperate to know!)
Montreal Central — it’s a cute little hostel/hotel hybrid (we had a private room) in the Latin Quarter. Would’ve been a great place if not for the bed bug apocalypse!
Ugh, sorry that happened to you. So unsavoury!
Hey, I can’t speak for bedbugs, but I’ve got a little input on steroids used to treat rashes — I had to take them once due to a very unpleasant reaction to some Japanese cold and flu medication. Nothing super terrifying, and they achieved the desired results in that they helped limit the rash, but! They kicked my depression/anxiety (already at high ebb due to a rather unpleasant holiday) into high gear. Once I went off them again it all settled down right away, no lasting effects, but just, if you find yourself feeling a little more anxious or depressed than usual, be kind to yourself. Steroids can be mean.
Ah, thanks! I have never been on steroids before (that I can remember, anyway), so that could very well be contributing. I’m five days into a seven-day course of prednisone, so this would be right in the thick of it.
Ugh that sucks so bad! I’ve had a few bedbug scares and it’s the hardest and shittest feeling. Things you can’t wash you might be able to freeze! I’m sure you’ve seen that in your internet times, but it has worked for me. I second the stores of exposure with no hitchhiking – that has happened to friends of mine as well. Good luck! I hope you can treat yourself to a bottle of wine and that eveything turns out okay.
Condolences—that’s horribly creepy. Bedbugs are like a horror movie villain! With extra ew.
I hope your all stuff is clean and the bites go away with no other effects. Your quick thinking in bagging everything for the trip home must help!
Chiming in on a couple notes – steroids (prednisone, in my experience) can make anxiety feel a little more intense, and also, if anxiety is a problem for you pre-bedbugs, please take good care of yourself in the wake of the encoutner. A good friend of mine had bedbugs in her apartment, and I’ve watched her experience textbook PTSD. It’s been hard to watch – after all, (sarcasm) PTSD is for people who have been to war and such! etc. etc. – and she’s been resistant to dealing with the problems the lingering anxiety has caused her. I hesitated to write it in case the fear of anxiety was, in fact, anxiety-causing, but I figure it’s better to be on alert than not.
Thanks. I am hoping things calm down a bit for me once I’m off the medication. I AM kind of anxious about the idea of continued anxiety, in addition to lots of anxiety about the bugs, which is not a great feeling!
Bedbug paranoia is a well-nigh universal experience if you live in certain US cities, so you are not insane. Really.
this piece on books & dating, y’all! It’s half “don’t date men who don’t read books by women” and half just real sweet and sad. Don’t read the comments!
And it reminded me of that certain breed of OKCupid user who would see something on your profile and attempt to engage you in debate about it. (For me, it was always that question “is a woman obligated to shave her legs?” which I marked as important, because any dude who strongly prefers non-fuzzy ladies isn’t going to want to date me. But so many men wanted to know why don’t I shave and how did I decide that and can you actually meet guys that way and and and and and. At the time I’d roll my eyes and delete but now I think I’d reply with “It’s not a discussion question, it’s a screening out incompatible people question. Because this is a dating site.”
I also feel this way about men who profess not to like any female comedians.
“The flaw, of course, is that this thinking is in line with the idea that you can build up credit in exchange for someone’s attention, that if you get enough Good Guy Points™ you can cash them in for dinner and a movie.”
OH MY GOD. So true. I get lots of Star Trek quips. I brought it upon myself.
Also, thank you for linking to this article. I saw it a few times and finally clicked on it this time. It captured the up and down, the weird uncertainty and dread, of it all that I’ve been feeling so much lately.
Oh, man, I relate to that article so much. I have something about that in my “What I Often Think About” section: “Recently, I’ve also been thinking about why so many guys on this website have no women in their “Favorite books” section. Are you all just sheltered or…?”
One time a guy messaged me and said something to the effect of “I think most people just read books by people they relate to. What’s wrong with that?”
THROW YOURSELF AWAY, DUDE.
“…and I certainly can’t relate to women or people of color, they’re so foreign to me!” [has shelf of books about dragons and wizards]
It always cracks me up when people assume that hairy-legged women can’t get men.
According to several articles and quizzes I have perused, I’ve had more sexual partners than 98% of people my age, and they were mostly men. Admittedly I am not as hairy as some women, and let’s be fair, I live in Oregon. But…it’s never, ever been a problem. Not once.
Epigrandma
granny and gramps
now get cramps
because they’re being ignored
When they were young
they held THEIR tongue
when THEY were being bored
have we discussed the update to the AaM office sex club???
http://www.askamanager.org/2015/06/update-i-walke…
Holy shit. If I were the LW, I would get the hell out of there.
That’s the most absurd part – the only reason that this follow-up conversation happened is because the LW didn’t raise hell in the first place. If you were the LW, your judgement would be so bad that you wouldn’t realise that this is a bad place to work. S/he literally thought that s/he wasn’t allowed to do anything about office sex if both employees were on their lunch breaks, because that’s how the world works. And now everyone’s acting like it’s fine, and the LW’s bizarre worldview is confirmed – this isn’t a big deal, the workplace is great and everyone’s happy.
I don’t understand the manager’s manager’s reaction, or why the manager, who at least seems to agree that it’s WRONG, seems to be taking it in stride, too. I hope none of these people have responsibility for anything important.
Burn it all. Just fucking burn that office to the ground.
That was highly, HIGHLY disappointing.
It must be fake, right? It has to be.
So, to provide a sense of scale – I live in the upper midwest/Great Lakes region of the United States, over three thousand miles away from Vancouver. I am looking out my office window right now at very visible smoke. I’m asthmatic and I coughed all the way from by bus stop to my office this morning (we have an air quality advisory). All the best to you, B.C..
You can probably blame the northern SK fires for that – the last I heard, the smoke from them was reaching down as far as Kansas. We’re 400-500 km south of the fires and over the weekend it was hard to see across the street; I can only imagine what it’s like up north. Stay safe with your asthma!
Yep, I’m in Minneapolis and our air quality last night was at a record level of bad (I can’t remember if the number is really really high or really really low…whichever is one is the bad one), due to Saskatchewan’s fires. It’s better today but my asthmatic self is still feeling the effects. I can’t imagine how bad it is close to the site of the fires! It felt like breathing poison.
Toastitas! Today is the day that Ava Duvernay’s documentary about Venus Williams and her fight for equal pay comes out! I am going to watch the hell out of this: http://www.avaduvernay.com/venus-vs/
Here in the West Kootenay region:
“The fierce forest fire currently descending towards Highway 3A in Six Mile continues to spread, and onlookers are concerned that it may reach their homes by noon today. Though an evacuation alert has been circulated by the Regional District of Central Kootenay, residents are still hoping the hellish conflagration could pass them by with the help of fire crews.”
Facebook has been really helpful in terms of livestock evacuation, with people offering trailering, emergency shelter, etc.
Can I bitch about mansplaining a bit? Please? Especially when they talk out of their ass.
There’s a Tube strike tomorrow and I posted on FB earlier, joking that it was armegeddon is coming, because everyone goes a bit mad. Let me re-iterate, it was a joke.
My ex (Who does NOT live in London, unlike me.) just commented ‘It’s ten years since the 7/7 bombings in London’. AS IF I DON’T FUCKING KNOW THAT. and also that’s got nothing to do with it fuckwad.
Sorry, but I know The Toast will understand.
I am fully prepared to admit that I enjoyed season one of True Detective (although looking back, a big part of that was all the social media buzz- there were so many people to talk to!) but I am also fully prepared to admit that while the backlash was inevitable, I cackle with glee every time I read an article about what a whiny talentless diva Nic Pizzolatto is. YES, MOCK THAT MAN.
God, I had such a freak-out over that NY Times article yesterday. My poor son. China is not here, my son is not my brother who has struggled with addiction for decades. Also, my grandparents sucked big time and never spoke to me past a cursory hello, how’s school, so whateva. Whateva!
The BC wildfires have made air quality a mess up here. It’s not burning so badly on the Oly Peninsula. There is one in the rainforest, which is a good indicator of how the drought is affecting the area. Many thanks to the fire crews in BC working to stop the fires.
No, I also feel like there should be at least one hour a day when I'm not looking at a screen, and I kinda feel unnerved that that isn't always true for me.