Sansa was 9 pounds 7 ounces on Dec. 3rd. Yesterday, she weighed 13 pounds, 8 ounces. She’s getting the job done.
How the climate change deal was Republican-proofed:
Under US insistence, the 31-page agreement was explicitly crafted to exclude emissions reductions targets and finance from the legally binding parts of the deal. Other areas of the deal, including five-year review cycles, do carry legal force. That would free Obama from having to submit the deal to Congress.
The other exclusion zone was any clause in the agreement that would expose the US to liability and compensation claims for causing climate change.
It was linked in the comments last week, but if you missed it, Patrick O’Sullivan’s narrative of his abusive childhood and how it DIDN’T make him better at hockey is really incredible and brave and gut-wrenching:
A few years later, his dream finally came true. I was selected in the second round of the 2003 NHL Draft. The NHL assigned me an entire security team for the day, but I knew it was useless. He made sure he was seated right where I could see him.
So when my name was called and I pulled on the Minnesota Wild sweater, I knew he was in the building watching, and it made me absolutely furious. Not because of all the pain I endured. But because I knew that he believed, in his heart, that all his abuse was validated. He thought he was the reason I made it to the NHL. The ends justified the means.
well i learned something today (the whole thing is actually really great):
They went to take a break at the Dew Drop Inn on LaSalle Street. Out of the studio, Little Richard immediately started hamming it up for the scattering of daytime drunks. “Boosters, rounders, pimps, whores was hanging around,” Blackwell said. “That’s all you gotta do is give Richard an audience.” He went to the piano and banged out a raunchy ode to sodomy that he used to play at the dodgier clubs on the circuit: “A wop bop a loo mop / A good goddamn / Tutti Frutti / Good booty / If it don’t fit / Don’t force it / You can grease it / Make it easy.”
And a good goddamn, thought Bumps Blackwell—now that is what I need to get on record. Blackwell brought in a local songwriter, Dorothy LaBostrie, to write some family-friendly lyrics. “Good booty” became “aw rutti,” and then there was a girl named Sue and a gal named Daisy.
Toronto Life‘s look at the ethics of crowdsourcing live organ donations is really good and balanced:
The Melnyk saga was unprecedented in Canada—and it made people angry. There are hundreds of people waiting for liver transplants, and Melnyk got his because he was able to exploit his fame. His critics accused him of gaming the system. And he isn’t the only one. The University Health Network handles more live liver transplants than any other institution in North America. Most of these are between family members or friends, but in recent years, doctors have witnessed several individuals in need of life-saving transplants launching public campaigns, forcing doctors to grapple with the ethics of organ donation in the social media age. Patients find themselves in a precarious situation—one where their ability to create a splash on Facebook could determine whether they live or die.
Nikki saw Hamilton, yo, and it CHANGED HER:
Oh, and we sat right behind someone who went to the same high school as Phillipa Soo! “She’s like a local legend, we’re all so proud of her!!” she gushed, and I just nodded vigorously like YES I WOULD THINK YOU WOULD BE. (The only cool person from my town is Ginger Rogers, and she wasn’t really from there, she just moved there later in life. And she was a Republican, which I don’t like to bring up because I love her, but it’s true.) I exhibited great congratulations-worthy restraint in not pouncing on the person from Philippa’s high school and demanding to know all — I still feel that little twinge of regret, you know, because what if I had, and then she had introduced me to Pippa after the show, and then we had become really great friends? (Which I hear happens all the time when you speak to someone for thirty seconds after performing in a three-hour-long musical.)
now this hepped up bitch thinks she’s Queen of The Internet
I have to say, I have never really enjoyed Leonardo DiCaprio, but I am pretty excited to watch a brutally realistic bear mauling in a movie, because I am a bit of a bear mauling enthusiast.
In other pop culture news, Chris Hemsworth was very handsome and charming on SNL again.
Just because Sansa is here doesn’t mean I love Carmella any less:
Carmella is getting so big!!! Sansa is getting EVEN FLUFFIER.
eta this is exactly what I needed to cheer up this Monday morning of drenching rain and thirty-degrees-above-normal temperatures, I am terrified for animals and agriculture
I am so terrified of and furious at the weather. But I’m really trying to focus on being mad at how warm it is, rather than my absolute terror.
Yeah, no snow and 10 degree weather in mid-December in Ottawa is…. not right.
I’m going home to Syracuse for Christmas, and I have been obsessively checking the weather everyday looking to see if it will even be cold. And then I get sad every time. (Although there is a small chance there will be snow the night I get in! I am going to put all of my hope into this one thing.)
I’m also going home to Syracuse for Christmas and I have abandoned all hope of snow. I don’t know if we’ll go to Lights on the Lake, but if we do it’ll be weird doing it without snow, since my dad always makes us wait for a snowy day.
It’s also irritating because it LOOKS like dreadful gray cold weather outside, at least here in chicago. Snow would fit right in. But then I *open a window* and warm air comes in.
The gloominess makes it so weird. If we’re going to have terrible winter darkness, we might as well have some snow for the little light there is to reflect off of.
EXACTLY. It has rained almost non-stop here since noon yesterday. I was really, really hoping for some good, ol’ fashioned Rochester snow next week, but… 🙁
I probably won’t go, it just doesn’t seem right. My girlfriend and I are going to the Zoo Lights here in DC tomorrow and it’s supposed to be above 60. My brain just is getting really really sad about it.
I saw a cherry tree blooming this weekend in DC, and was so sad over the confused plants, and scared for what that means when it is spring again.
Same, though I kind of can’t help but be terrified too. My friend heard spring peepers last night and lilacs are setting buds. We’re in Northern Michigan, dammit, this is not supposed to be happening.
mmhm, I went hiking on Saturday and was shocked that 1) no one else was on the trails enjoying the warmth before Real Winter arrives and 2) things were really, really green, and squirrels and deer were plentiful, and birds were singing. it’s spooky.
I miss the very particular quiet of snow, how it muffles and softens sounds.
I’m in New England–same things here, and a flowering cherry near where I work is in bloom. I basically feel horrible all the time now.
MY BEES WERE FLYING TODAY. It’s fucked up!
WHAT. That is ridiculous. 🙁
I am terrified for my children and my children’s children! The other day the Toronto star did this article and while the dystopian scifi lover in my is somewhat pleased, the parent in me is horrified: As politicians and climate scientists debate the issue in Paris, babies are coming into a world that may be altered drastically by climate change. A look at best- and worst-case scenarios.
I am wearing flip flops today. FLIP FLOPS. IN PENNSYLVANIA IN DECEMBER. And yesterday I saw flowers on some cherry trees. This is NOT RIGHT.
Right?! I wore flip-flops to a CHRISTMAS PARTY last night!
Oh yeah, here we’re having the hottest start to December in 100 years or something, going to be 42c here on Saturday! And right now there’s a thunderstorm going on and it’s still so hot, ugh.
Southwest UK feels warm enough to be early October. November felt like September. It’s really weird. Though I should probably be thankful I’m not underwater like parts of the North. :/
Is queen of the internet better than being president of god?
And a beautiful and terrible queen she is too. Long may she reign.
Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love HER and despair!
ETA: I see this is addressed below…#readingfail
It is a thing that bears repeating.
And, lo, we shall carry the News of Our Queen throughout the world.
For all your bear mauling/Hugh Glass needs: http://us.macmillan.com/herelieshughglass/jontcol…
(I have some concerns about how this movie treats historical events, but then I’m one of Those People Who Can’t Be Taken To Movies, so.)
I was once on a flight to Germany and Little Richard was in first class. His band was flying stand-by. He was wearing heels. It was the best flight of my life.
Queen of the Internet good grief
I was just saying to myself the other day that the major problem I have with the Toast is how damn humble Mallory is.
Nikki’s enthusiasm is so fun to read on a Monday morning.
Bear attack movie sounds like the American Western version of Passion of the Christ. Now with 100% more ursine-related suffering!
Just yesterday my boyfriend – who is one of those people who has to see all the Oscar best picture nominees – was lamenting that bear movie was getting buzz because he thinks it looks grim and miserable. Plus he knows I won’t see it with him if that is actually the case.
I was kind of onboard for a realistic bear-mauling, but when I read the rest of the article about everyone just hacking on each other, I was like… nope. That is way too much.
After last week’s discussion about Spotlight, and reading some of the original Globe articles we went to see the movie on the weekend.
Someone was asking about self care/going to see it, and I offer that it really focuses on the journalists’ investigation.
I don’t know if “enjoyed” is how I would describe seeing it, but I was enthralled, and it felt very true.
I talked to some other friends who have seen it (some of whom were also former servers) and they said pretty much the same thing. I think I’m go to go see it this weekend.
Let me know if you want more details in advance.
Agreed. I’ve been telling my friends, and the class I teach, that it doesn’t depict any abuse and abuse specifics are barely discussed. The one time (to my memory) that abuse is discussed it’s clear that it’s coming, because Sacha is pressing a survivor to share details.
It’s such an important movie, and very well done. One thing that makes me happy about the focused nature of the movie is that it leaves plenty of scope for future movies showing the abuse crisis from different perspectives. We all need to make sure that story is told, retold, and never forgotten.
I appreciated the focus on how they looked for the shuffling and the ways treatment and discipline (if any) were obfuscated.
That interview with Mallory is great, I love how transparent the Toast is about money, etc etc… BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY:
When Mallory invoked the Bert vs Ernie comparison, it made me feel that maybe not everyone knows about Chaos Muppets and Order Muppets? This is the most important article ever written: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/low_concept/20…
Thank you for posting this. I had not seen that article despite trying to read everything Dahlia Lithwick writes. I haven’t even finished the article yet, but I had to come back here and say: “Order Muppets . . . tend to be neurotic, highly regimented, averse to surprises and may sport monstrously large eyebrows.” IT ME. But I’m a Chaos Muppet when I drive or attempt to bake.__That whole article was filled with win. The bit about Faux Chaos Muppets (“Like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, we sow chaos throughout the land. But like the good doctor, we do so in an effort to better organize the world.”) feels so true.
Great, yet another possible identity crisis to mull over. Am I a Chaos Muppet? Or an Order Muppet? Or a Faux Chaos Muppet? And why do I feel like the best way of sorting this out is to sing about it?
HERE FOR THIS.
I haven’t read it yet, but I will devour with gusto as soon as I have finished correcting spelling and grammar mistakes in copy that has already been proofed and approved by the client (SIGH. Websites man.)
Thank you for this! I’m an order muppet that aspires to chaos. Wisdom and happiness from muppets is my other aspiration and their current show makes me sad. It is not as silly or joyful as the muppets deserve.
Ah, order that aspires to chaos sound like me as well. I was thinking I was Order with Chaos in my heart.
I am a Chaos Muppet down to my blue, furry felt bones. When I was a kid, I didn’t even understand why there WERE Muppets besides Animal and Gonzo the Great.
OK, everyone, important question: how would you classify Rowlf? He’s a musician so it seems he’s more chaos than order, but at the same time he has such a calming presence. As an Order Muppet whose favorite muppet has always been Rowlf, I think about this all the time.
Yeah, Rowlf is an Order Muppet, you can tell because he doesn’t exasperate other Order Muppets.
Rowlf is one of my faves too, he’s such a perfect straight-man to the others’ wackiness but he doesn’t STOP the wackiness from happening. He’s really a lil island of serenity. Order, I guess, but not strict regimented order?
I want to be Rowlf. And if I cannot be Rowlf, I want to live with Rowlf. And this is roughly why.
Rowlf is a non-interventionist Order Muppet. I think one can divide the Order Muppets into those that fling themselves/get dragged into the void of the Chaos Muppets around them (Kermit, the ur-interventionist), and those that hold chaos at arm’s length (non-interventionist). The non-interventionists either opt to snark/judge (Sam the Eagle) or to serenely let the chaos slip past them like a mountain stream around a boulder (Rowlf). The need to elaborate upon the Chaos Muppet/Order Muppet taxonomy brands me forever as a true blue Order Muppet.
I just sent my work wife this link with the question: “WHAT KIND OF MUPPET ARE YOU,” and she simultaneously sent me a site that calculates your monthly salary after tax, so I think we’ve answered the question.
Aaaaaah, this is so great. Chaos Muppets 4vr! Although am grateful to have found my Order Muppet, thus enabling me to shed all Faux-pretentions and just _be_ a chaos muppet.
I’m reading the “And by all that is holy, don’t marry your same type if you can help it” bit and thinking “uh oh, I think we are both Order Muppets, the balance is off!”
Then I realized this is why pets are great. They restore balance to skewed muppet systems.
What would Rizzo the Rat be? Probably Order, since he’s always paired with Gonzo? But he’s a schemer, so that seems a bit chaotic…
Rizzo is definitely order. He balances Gonzo and Yolanda. He’s a striver and he makes plans and takes others into consideration.
This is so good. I’m definitely an Order Muppet and I think I married one too.
Can we sort some Muppets? I’m having trouble with these:
Oscar
Grover
The Count
Grover: 100% Chaos
The Count: Order
Oscar…I really want to say he’s a faux Chaos. He sows chaos, but it’s because he likes things to be a certain way.
Oscar has to be faux chaos because you cannot deny those eyebrows.
oh man, see I think Grover is 50/50. He’s does confuse things, but that’s because he’s very literal and responsibility minded.
I think it depends on how old you are! I remember Grover as the 100% chaos muppet from my childhood. He had a sensitive streak, but no responsible/rule following tendencies at all. But I noticed watching with my kids that Grover is now like a Mary Sue stand-in for preschoolers: He likes chaos and commotion and fun, but he also likes structure and rules so things don’t get tooooo crazy.
I think Oscar’s chaos! He’s not just grouchy, he’s moody. you never know how angry he’ll be that you tried to talk to him or be nice to him.
The Count is a tough one. Counting everything is orderly but I feel like order muppets would be like “oh no, here’s the Count, we can’t move along until he’s counted everything and caused a thunderstorm.”
My father is an Oscar. I see him as believing that he’s an Order Muppet– and that all the chaos comes from other people, and why can’t he just be dictator of the world, everything would be much better– but having a heart of chaos and volatility much as you describe. Sometimes, talking to him, you get Pleasant Oscar. Sometimes you get Vituperative and Dangerous Oscar. And you can’t tell ahead of time which it’s going to be.
I give Oscars a wide berth.
I identify strongly with Gonzo in that we’re both constantly trying and failing to get our shit together, so I think I’m Team Chaos. And I’m definitely not married to an Order Muppet. We take turns pretending to be Order Muppet so that our lives don’t spiral out of control. It’s fun!
When I was a kid I had a storybook about Bert and Ernie setting up a lemonade stand, and Bert did all the work but Ernie was the fun-loving showman who got all the credit (and had no idea he was hurting Bert’s feelings). I related to Bert on such a deep level in that book that it was actually painful for me to read, I’m an Order Muppet forever, the end.
Oh that is BRILLIANT. And it really clarifies some relationship issues I’ve been having. Partnering with an opposite type is a good guideline, but as the archetypal Faux Chaos Muppet that seems impossible. Is there such a thing as a Faux Order Muppet? What would that look like? The debate about whether Oscar is order or chaos seems to fall under Faux Order Muppet, where he likes routine and wants everything just so but is unpredictably moody at the core.
I think what you need is an Order Muppet who longs to be a Chaos Muppet (I say this because my mother is a faux Chaos Muppet and my father is a goofy Order Muppet and they are wonderful together.)
Hey, my parents are also a goofy Order Muppet and a Faux Chaos Muppet! And still doing well after 40 years. Hooray for awesome parents!
I think mine has gone further into Order Muppet territory than he ideally wants to because of current life stuff. His best self is spontaneous and subversively humorous, and he almost went as Ernie for Halloween (i would’ve been Bert. We ended up going as Tina and Louise Belcher). Also he would totally have giant Order Muppet eyebrows if he didn’t pluck them, which I think speaks well for the balance. Really our only problems are my discomfort with happiness and the fact that I’m irritated he’s rejected all my Christmas present ideas (he wants something “useful”) and he’s irritated by my obviously facetious suggestions and then I’m irritated he won’t just TELL ME what he wants and I literally just now realized that he’s irritated I’m not trying to surprise him. So that’s halfway fixed.
Thanks! Feeling better about this.
Is it bad that I know I’m an Order Muppet, but I desperately wish I could be a Chaos Muppet?
Or like I feel like everyone who knows me would say I’m an Order Muppet (My eyebrows are borderline) but inside I’m really a Chaos Muppet pretending to be an Order Muppet to combat my Chaotic tendencies because I have to be a functioning Muppet because all the other Muppet left me on my own to run the entire show.
Patrick O’Sullivan’s piece is heartbreaking. I hope he’s found happiness and peace, and that his article reaches the people it needs to reach. Sports culture is so wrapped up in borderline (and not-even-borderline) abuse, and it’s tragic.
That article was amazing. What a frank, heart-wrenching piece. Every parent needs to read it.
What a sad, sad article. It’s amazing Patrick O’Sullivan didn’t develop a drug or alcohol problem to escape, or attempt/commit suicide. I cannot imagine living through that kind of abuse, for that long, with everyone aware and no one doing anything at all about it.
I wonder what his relationship with his mother is like today?
The bit where he talks about realising that his mother was never going to step in and do something was devastating. That must make the possibility of a decent relationship very hard.
Oh god yeah. That part broke my heart.
Heartbreaking and I imagine incredibly difficult to write and publish. But bless him for doing so. I hope it’s read by the people that need to see it.
I’m envisioning Leonardo thinking, “What if I got mauled by a bear and survived through my own grit? What about THAT, Oscar people?”
(sorry for the edit spam, apparently all html code has leaked from my brain)
I almost hope that Tom Hardy gets an Oscar for the movie and Leo doesn’t, just because I am mean and it would be funny.
Oof, that organ donation piece and the ethics of it all. I understand the fury of reactions to Melnyk’s campaign: there’s something so discomforting about a wealthy man essentially being able to buy himself the attention to get a new organ. But at the same time, every social media campaign, every high profile case, raises awareness for donations, and helps others on the list …
And the fact that they say they are only doing live donations at all because so few people have signed up to be deceased donors! The live donor issue is very complicated, but I don’t understand how so many people decline to be organ donors after they are dead.
We need an opt-out system. It is truly ridiculous. Dead people should not have more rights than living, sick people, in my opinion, but an opt-out system would accommodate people who feel strongly enough to do five minutes’ worth of paperwork in order to keep their organs.
Wales has just gone opt-out, I hope the rest of the UK follows suit soon.
Yes, I really hope we do – it’s great that Wales have. I think it’s ridiculous that we’re not opt-out already: only the people who feel really strongly about it will choose not to donate, and so many more lives would be saved. (I know one person who’s had a liver transplant and one who’s had a lung transplant. It’s so important, and it infuriates me that people don’t bother to register.)
Agreed. I think we should probably also explore the possibility of establishing markets in organ donation.
Counterpoint- http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/85/1/07-02010…
I don’t think capitalism, an inherently exploitative system, is the ideal solution here.
I think that colon at the beginning of the URL is screwing up your link. I copied and removed it and it’s working fine.
I agree with you/the WHO that there is a chance that legalizing a market in organ transplants could result in further exploitation. But I guess I see this as somewhat akin to efforts to prohibit drugs: there is an existing market in organ sales, but it’s a black market, it’s restricted to the wealthy, and the unregulated nature of it sets up situations like the woman described in that link. Much like prohibiting abortion, the result is that poor people suffer and the wealthy are able to evade the law. Given that, I would rather see a regulated, above-ground market in organ transplant than the current system.
As for the inherent exploitative nature of capitalism…yeah, I don’t have anything for that. It is an exploitative system. We should be working to end it. But it’s not going anywhere soon, and if we can bend parts of it to help people, I think we should.
I edited my comment to fix the link, thank you!
I think there are so many other alternatives that could help the problem before resorting to markets. For example the opt-out system for dead organ donors suggested above and tried out in Wales. Also science is advancing for the growing of organs.
I think the comparison with drugs is perfect in some ways because at least Colorado has shown that legalisation has done little to fix racial disparities in arrests
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/25/co…
and legalisation has largely led to wealth for those who already had wealth and privilege, it hasn’t generated wealth for the poorer communities who had been selling drugs illegally.
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/michelle-alexander-…
So, yes, legalizing marijuana hasn’t solved racial disparities (although, based on that article, there was a drop in percentage of arrestees that were black from 22% to 18%). But legalizing it has resulted in a huge drop in the total number of people arrested. 39,000 people were arrested in 2010, and 8,580 were black. 2000 people were arrested in 2014, and 360 of them were black. There is still a racial disparity, and there is still work to be done, but that is a huge improvement in total number of people arrested.
(Also, this fucking cop. ““Racial disparities exist in other laws. What does that mean, that homicide law, rape laws, weapon laws are racist? There are other factors going on here that we need to address,” Gorman said.” IT MEANS YOUR LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENTS ARE RACIST AGENTS OF A WHITE SUPREMACIST STATE, YOU FUCK. “The law, in its majesty… blah blah blah”. What a prick.)
And it is a problem that legalization hasn’t resulted in wealth for people who traditionally took all the risk to deliver something the community secretly wanted. But when I weigh that against ~18,000 fewer people with arrest records for selling weed, I think it’s not a great argument against legalization.
Final and: I do think opt-out systems and continuing work to fund research in growing replacement organs are necessary and are pieces of solving the problem. But I also think exploring market-based options could erase a significant amount of the current shortage.
And as mentioned in the WHO article, a very large number of cases of kidney disease are preventable. The top two causes in Western countries are diabetes and hypertension, and diabetes is also top in middle income countries. Both of these diseases can be well-controlled and sometimes prevented with proper primary care…which leads back to an argument for better basic health coverage. Of course this would not eliminate the need for transplants, but could be a significant part in any plan to decrease the gap in supply vs demand.
As it stands, dead people seem to have more rights to their bodies than living women.
Why does Ontario have such low opt-in rates? It’s so easy! You check a box when getting your health card!
It’s so shit. I remember getting into an argument with someone about it in Biology at school – he was saying that while he could see all the benefits to organ donation, he didn’t want to sign up because he “felt weird about it”. YOUR FEELINGS WILL NOT MATTER ONCE YOU’RE DEAD.
My parents were always against the idea of being organ donors until my mom had a brain aneurism and spent a week in a coma in ICU teetering on a pretty serious brink of will she/won’t she. During that time, my dad and I had a really touching conversation about the concept and he said he realized that if parts of her body (or his) could help others live, then why wouldn’t they want to do so? He explained his feelings to her after she recovered, and convinced her as well, and they both proudly signed up as donors.
Yeah, I fully understand the outrage and the anger, but if I were in his situation, and had his money/connections/leverage, I would do the same thing. It’s exploitative, it’s gaming the system – but can you blame someone for doing something like this to keep themselves alive when the alternative is that they die within the week?
I can’t really blame them.
My grandmother did the opposite: she ended up with kidney problems in her early 60s, and refused to be placed on the donor list. She felt that she shouldn’t get a kidney that someone else needed more.
We all disagreed, as she was incredibly important to us, but I don’t think she ever regretted it. She spent 15 years on dialysis before she died …
Anyway friends you will all be happy to hear that I did very well in the wudang fencing competition I participated in over the weekend, though now I am very sore and covered with bruises.
those are bruises of HONOR, my friend
bruises of something anyway
Congratulations! I can imagine how sore you were the next day (and the day after that, which is usually the worst for soreness in my experience, as the pain has sort of settled in and made a home for itself).
Today is the next day; tomorrow is hopefully going to be the one where the bruises fade into that kind of pleasant ache that bruises sometimes have. Fingers crossed.
Toast people: I saw Hamilton. And nobody said a goddamned peep during the show or did something weird and disruptive, which has literally never happened to me in a theater before. I can’t tell if I was too busy sobbing to notice or if everyone was too entranced to remember to have a chat about Aunt Gertrude’s cat’s glaucoma in the middle of the second act. Either way: MAGICAL.
Over the weekend, my husband uttered the sentence, “we should go to New York and see Hamilton.” I concur.
How do you evoke this happening, because the Heir and I are balls-out Hamiltonfans right now and Mr Ipo is very patient with us and doing a lot of quiet eye-rolling. The Heir is four and told me he wants to go to New York City to see Hamilton instead of Disneyland.
Play it every time you bake/cook, talk about it incessantly, interrupt him reading at night with especially interesting parts of the Ron Chernow biography, drunkenly bring up Hamilfacts during conversations you feel could use more pizzazz? It worked for me.
ummmor you could come to Chicago next year and bring the Heir and hang out with ussss
My husband really wanted to see it but he says I overplayed it and now he’s less interested. :/
Patrick O’Sullivan is brave and his account of his childhood was amazing. My own dad was not nearly as bad, but I definitely saw echoes of my own childhood (substituting football for hockey) in his words. So, so many kids have parents who confuse “pushing them to be great” with “creating the kind of hell that only kids can know” and I hate it.
It can really stay with people too. A friend nearly ended things with her (wonderful) fiance because her mother kept telling her as a girl that anything less than a millionaire overachiever in a prestigious job for a husband wouldn’t be ‘good enough’ for her. Luckily she saw sense – in fact her fiance has taught her the value of self-acceptance for who you are, not based on what you achieve.
Encouraging children really is a difficult tight-rope to walk; there’s the other side of it too where no encouragement at all can have ill-effects (also active discouragement).
I can imagine having pushy sport parents being hell (And I’ve seen a fair share of them in the Horse world), but I came from a completely non-competitive family, but I am very competitive, and unfortunately athletically un-talented; no one ever told me that you can work to get better at sports, I sort of just assumed if you didn’t win straight away you should just stop because you’d never win (see any team sport I ever tried to play)
I also refuse to sing in public now because when i said ‘Mummy I want to be a famous singer’ I was told ‘But you can’t sing.’
I wonder if anyone has ever gotten it right?
Probably not… but there are gradations of “getting it wrong”, and the abuse described by O’Sullivan is on the extreme side of that.
Yeah I haven’t read the article yet (But I am commenting on it anyway because my opinions matter.) because I really don’t want to go there right now.
It is disturbing that the narrative of ‘strong, pushy, successful’ parents is so prevalent, because it vindicates people who just plain abusive.
I felt this way about the Tiger Mom book by Amy Chua, to be honest, as did many other Asian American folks who grew up with aspects of that and saw it conflated as “oh, it’s not abusive, it’s just our culture!” -_-;
There’s got to be at least some people have gotten it right, if for no other reason than by accident. I mean, it doesn’t seem like rocket-surgery to land in some healthy place between, “never try to get better at sports, if you aren’t good now you never will be” on the one hand and “nothing is ever more important than beating everyone all the time forever RAAARGGH.” There’s a lot of space in there!
This has just reminded me how I came up during the beginning of the ‘everyone tried and you’re all winners’ school of thought how much this infuriated the competitive asshole in me.
I didn’t mind losing, I wanted to know exactly how much I lost by so that I could WIN next time. But they kept just coming up with more convoluted ways to say that ‘everyone’ is a winner and we are all exactly as good as each-other (which I could obviously see wasn’t true because I came dead last in the race and yet I have a worthless gold medal.)
Yeah I don’t know, though, if you could see you were a loser, why is it a big deal that they wouldn’t admit it? I know a bunch of people that have had problems with this, but I haven’t yet met one who mistook a participation ribbon for first place. I got a feeling that, broadly, the dangers of this school of thought are made more of than they really deserve.
(I say that, though, but my parents disdained awards of any kind — ribbons, trophies, grades — and as a consequence I actually have no idea how to evaluate my success at anything, so. Maybe I’m the person who doesn’t see a difference between a participation ribbon and winning the race — they both seem like equally arbitrary ways to waste my time.)
I’m with Jon Bois on this one:
The hyper-competitive parents among us seem anxious to usher their kids into the grand socioeconomic machinery of our world. One day they will learn: those gears and sprockets? Those aren’t there to wheel you along. No, no, no, they’re there to crush your bones. When that happens, it will not be an accident. A man in safety goggles will scribble into a clipboard and grimace and nod. The end.
Why one would want to hasten their child’s introduction to this machine is beyond me. Trust me, you don’t have to be the one to teach that. The world will take care of that for you. What the world won’t necessarily teach, as evidenced by all the grown folks who tragically haven’t learned it, is self-appreciation.
This is where the “political correctness has run wild” folks speak up. Fortunately, I am not only a member of the P.C. police, but the leader of a P.C. military junta, and I countermand their authority. (I am also smarter and taller than them.) A participation trophy can be a seemingly small but surprisingly meaningful gesture. When the machine eats you up, as it is built to do, your spirit is all that will save you. Love yourself.
Brilliant. Where can I sign up to the PC military junta?
I think you have to start your own. Maybe start with a PC book club, then move up to organizing a junta.
I’m older (47), and at the end of all of our little league seasons we had a team dinner and all got trophies. I never, ever viewed them as “we won!” trophies, or anything like that. They were markers for me of times that I was on the field, with other kids, and part of something. They pointed me back to the times I actually enjoyed my sport. I cared a lot more about those than the “distinctions” that came later on for me in football, those barely registered.
This doesn’t mean I’m not competitive, either. I am, but I somehow figured out how to not be a dick to others about it. In spite of my dad, not because of him. I am pretty sure I learned it from my friends.
Jon Bois is great. He did a very long read imagining Tim Tebow in the Canadian Football League as a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts that was hilarious and performed the stunning feat of making Tebow seem semi-sympathetic.
The problem is that the participation ribbons often take the place of constructive criticism. There’s rarely enough “hey, you showed up and tried hard, good job, now here’s how you can improve your performance next time.” Instead, you get either “here are the winners, they matter, everybody go home now” or “everybody wins! Suggesting that somebody did something poorly will crush their spirits!” It gets really frustrating to receive false, hollow praise, rather than guidance on how to improve.
(“But why didn’t my science fair project get a higher rating? Why won’t anybody tell me anything?”)
I mean, I don’t know, I feel like that has got to be really dependent on what exactly you’re talking about. I mean, should science fair projects be set in competition to each other? Science is a collaborative enterprise; as long as you did a reasonably good attempt at a science project (i.e., as long as you tried), even if your idea was wrong or seemingly irrelevant, I don’t know, that seems like a pretty good reason for everyone to get a ribbon? I’m not sure that science projects actually should be ranked.
And I guess it’s true that this can take the place of constructive criticism, but I have been in a couple science fairs in my time where there were winners, and I didn’t win them, and no one gave me constructive feedback. Or, anyway, no one gave me constructive feedback on science projects, I did get constructive meta-feedback on the nature of adjudicated competitions in which it’s impossible to establish a clear winner via a fixed set of victory conditions, which is that they’re bullshit.
Sometimes people complain that little kids in, like, Little League or whatever all get trophies, or they all get to bat or something, but I don’t know, no one ever suggests that after about the age of seven. If you’re seriously into playing little league, there’s plenty of feedback channels for you to improve, you just have to genuinely be interested in Little League. Otherwise, I don’t know man, is it such a catastrophe if seven year olds go away from the teeball game thinking that they’re all winners? Who gives a shit if they never learn to be better at teeball?
Ah, I’ve found the disconnect here. I don’t mind a setup where everybody gets a participation award and that’s it; the problem comes when there’s a first place and a second place, but everybody else gets “hey, you showed up, well done” awards. Because theoretically, giving an award for effort is awesome, but if there are also awards for being the best, the participation award just becomes another way to reinforce “you are either one of two winners, or you’re all equally not-winners.” Because we can’t all be winners if there’s an additional structure to emphasize that all efforts are created equal, but some are more equal than others.
I guess so, but I don’t know. If you run the Broad Street Marathon in Philadelphia, you get a t-shirt whether or not you win. Everyone gets a t-shirt just for showing up, because it’s a big deal to show up, it’s a big deal to finish a marathon, it’s honestly a big deal to get halfway through a marathon and quit, in my opinion. But a guy also wins the marathon. I think it’s probably okay for people to be proud for having finished the marathon, and also to have lost it to someone else, so they know they can do better. I think honestly it’s probably okay for people to be proud for finishing the marathon and not care that they didn’t win, and not even really care that they’re never going to win.
I don’t know; I guess I don’t accept the ontology that people are “winners” because they win a competition? Running a race is a really specific set of conditions, and then winning a race is a specific set of sub-conditions, and so I’m not sure that we really ARE reinforcing a broad condition of “some people are more equal than others”, so much as creating a world in which there are multiple different levels and ways of “winning” depending on what you’re doing.
I agree. There are activities that are competitive by nature, including most sports, and that’s always going to be obvious to people who do those things. Getting recognized or honored or thanked for your participation isn’t going to obscure the fact that someone won.
For things that aren’t so obviously competitive, introducing winners and losers can be kind of opaque and confusing. I did marching band in high school: we would go to a parade and do our thing, we either would or wouldn’t get an award for it from judges we never spoke to, and then we would go home and practice and more or less guess what would give us a better chance next time. I would just as soon have foregone the prizes and instead based our rehearsals on what our director thought we were doing well or poorly, which is what we did when rehearsing for concerts the rest of the year.
Band is such a weird thing to be competitive about, too, because you make music. You can’t win at music. Did it sound good? Hooray, you did it!
It was especially weird because we were always just marching in some small town’s summer parade for their own particular Yay Our Town Days, in between the fire trucks and the float made by a local HVAC repair company. If ever there were an environment to just celebrate showing up, that should be it.
Music was my introduction to what a competitive adult life might look like. Auditioning for orchestra camp? Sure. It’s just fine with me that the camp wants a certain baseline of skill. Being encouraged to audition *again*, after having met and gotten to like the other people at camp who play my instrument? Now we’re getting into the territory of hurt feelings, taking it personally, and messing with nascent friendships. I’d rather sit “lower” in the section than some teacher thinks I should than alienate people I care about. This is not the only reason I decided not to be a professional musician, but it is *a* reason.
yeah, and I get that there are places where music becomes super-competitive — there’s only one first chair violin in the New York Philharmonic &c. — but I think we do a huge disservice to kids if we intimate that getting the first chair at the New York Philharmonic is anything at all like the point of music.
That’s what my HS marching band did. Not always, there’s a bunch of trophies on a shelf from before I was born (and I graduated almost 20 years ago) but some time well before I got there they changed. If you wanted to play, show up to the practices and put in the work, you were in, no auditions. We did parades, exhibitions, and some high profile stuff, but never competed. The school firmly believed that music was for everyone. (to the point that instruments could be rented from the school and I’d bet money that if you couldn’t afford it they’d find a way to make it work quietly)
As far as I know they still work that way and are well respected through the area. I mean, we still had things like section leaders and first chairs and you always knew who was good and who was mediocre, but for a mediocre kid like me, it was just so important to be part of something like that that I’m forever grateful the school and the band directors did it that way.
Your comment made me think of a couple of things that I’ve been proud of in which I wasn’t the winner, and there really wasn’t a competition in the first place. The first would be the different musical groups that I’ve played or sung in; I got a letter in high school for orchestra, but it wasn’t like we won competitions, and I wasn’t one of the hardcore musicians who competed for conservatory spots or anything. But I helped contribute to the group effort, and if wearing a letter jacket had been a cool thing to do in my school (it wasn’t, at least at that time), I totally would have done it.
The other is some of these long bicycle rides that I’ve done, and even though some people may try to “win” them, that’s not what they’re there for, and my goal generally has been to do a little better than what I did the previous year, in speed or distance. I’m sort of competing against myself, but what I’m really competing against is that sense of inertia that tries to tempt me with saying that I don’t need to do a training ride today.
Yeah, I guess my thing is that when I hear people complain about the “everyone gets an award model,” my feeling is that what they’re saying is that “no one has a right to be proud or feel good unless they WIN”. And I know that’s not necessarily it, that maybe they’re really worried that this sort of self-esteem boosterism can go too far in the other direction, but I really think that we’re a long way from everyone having too much self-esteem, no matter what the WSJ says about Kids These Days.
I don’t think giving Participant awards and merit awards necessarily equates to “All efforts are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Unless the coach/arbiter of prizes decides to frame it that way, which is definitely a problem. I see those awards as acknowledging that there’s a gradient of success, but that putting in the work is a success too. (I was on a neighborhood swim team because my friends were, and I religiously attended the practices; at competitions, ribbons were awarded for first through seventh place, and I STILL got almost exclusively “Participant” ribbons. But I still kept those ribbons as markers of the races I’d been in, even though I took no pride in my [nonexistent] ability as a swimmer).
I think every kid needs to learn how to be a good teammate and being pretty much the worst swimmer on a swim team will teach you that.
solidarity with bad swimmers on the swim team
It’s not like it personally destroys kids to not get first prize (I mean, unless it does, because they have to go home to parents who will ensure that they are destroyed). Either way can work (or really, really not-work) but seeing as nobody’s going to eliminate competitiveness from our civilization altogether any time soon good to let kids try to be the best, work towards a set target and bar to clear, and learn to deal with not always being the best sometimes.
I remember both growing up and coming in an honest honorable mention was infinitely less insulting than everyone working hard (or not) and all coming over the finish line to the same ‘eh well you tried, good work :|’. It sucks when you try really hard and just aren’t good enough, and it’s annoying when you’re good and someone else pulls ahead over some bullshit like being related to an official the judges wanna suck up to, but the latter just came across like you’d failed from the start for the incurable flaw of being a kid who adults think can’t handle honesty.
Well, I agree that we’re never going to eliminate competitiveness, but is it a thing that can, or should, be marginalized?
I don’t know the answer to this, but I am saying that I was on a soccer team in middle school where everyone was really competitive, and none of those guys went on to become professional athletes or anything. Our soccer team never even won a game. And so this competitive environment, where everyone was striving to be the best, seemed to me to produce a bunch of fucking dickheads whether or not they won.
I guess the question that I have is, you know, we take “competitiveness” as an axiomatically good value, but to me it seems like it produces a lot more dickheads who fail to be the best than it does dickheads who succeed at being the best, so is it actually worth it?
We’re not going to marginalize competition itself until we eliminate, for starters, money, and then start working on whittling away every other achievable index of personal happiness that bears any semblance of being in limited supply. But there’s psychotic unpleasable perfectionist helicopter-mom competitiveness and there’s healthy competition, just like there’s well-intentioned enthusasm for the kids’ work whether or not it is objectively The Best and there’s indifference because they’re just kids, fuck it, who cares, give em all a gold star to shut them up and send em home.
In a healthy environment it’s not an irrecoverable disaster if you’re not the best, it just means you’ve got a problem to solve and need to figure out how you can do better next time. Maybe you never defeat all your foes and see them driven before you, the invincible god-king of the little league field, but you learn the system and how to get results from it, which is something you can’t really do if there’s no external measure of success. Maybe you realize that if you can’t win a single game ever no matter what you try, it’s probably not a problem of you and your team of junior untermenschen it’s that your coach is some kind of deadweight, which is also a valuable lesson for later life.
I think, “fuck soccer” is also a pretty valuable lesson to learn for later in life. Actually I think there’s a bunch of lessons here, like “games aren’t fun when everyone is a dickhead,” and “losing this soccer game has had literally zero impact on the physical reality of my life at all in anyway”, and also, “there’s no reason for this to impact my sense of self-worth at all, and it wouldn’t if everyone wasn’t such a dickhead about losing”, and “what is the actual point of playing soccer in the first place?” those are all pretty good lessons.
And if “you play soccer because it’s fun to play soccer in a game with other people,” the good news is that “places on the pick-up soccer team” aren’t really in limited supply, because you can always add a new team and all you need for a soccer field is a square of grass.
I don’t really like soccer though, so who knows, maybe that’s not what people get out of it.
This is actually a really interesting point – kids don’t just learn one thing from playing sports or entering science fairs or whatever, they learn several things, many of them having nothing to do with whether or not anyone or everyone gets a trophy, and most of them far more valuable than any of the many iterations of trophy-giving would teach them — whether they won or lost or got a participation ribbon.
The winners/losers vs. consolation prize alignment is probably one of the least important parts of how you introduce kids to competitive activities, or at least, my childhood would suggest so, since supposedly I got a billion participation ribbons and I honestly can’t remember a single one of them. But I remember learning about how terrible it is to be stuck on a team with an asshole coach who’d rather be working with big kids and can’t be bothered to encourage the third-graders, and by contrast how nice it is to take an econ class with a teacher who’s honestly excited about the information even though you and your partner lose the “Baby’s First Free Market Economy Startup” contest because all the other kids blew their fake money on the candy bars one kid’s mom bought him with real money.
I think you mentioned meta-learning abovethread and that’s basically what I’m talking about, I think.
Part of the problem is that many, many people confuse “being an asshole” with “being competitive.” They aren’t the same thing. Look at Ashton Eaton. Gold medalist in the decathlon in 2012, and by all accounts a super nice guy. Constantly praising fellow competitors. And yet, you can see his desire to win. He exudes competitiveness, but also manages to not be a jerk. The problem is that being a poor sport is often forgiven in people who win, even though nobody actually likes them much. Look at Achilles, for pete’s sake. Dude was the archetype of this kind of “competitor” and he was basically a whiny manbaby who just also happened to be good at spearing dudes in the giblets.
Well, Achilles was also deeply disenchanted but Agamemnon’s wrongful usurpation of power during the expedition against Troy, displacing the kings of the individual city-states and positioning himself as a kind of High King of the Achaeans, which was anathema to figures who were essential tribal chieftains.
But I take your point, and I think that this gets to my issue here, which is whether or not this big question of “do participation trophies ruin the competitive spirit of our children?” is really a question of “is reducing the emphasis on competition maybe going to have the positive effect of reducing the number of people who act like dickbags about it?” I think we too easily rely on the idea competition is axiomatically good, and therefore any effort to reduce the emphasis on it is necessarily bad; but I guess what I am saying is that, because so many people confuse “being a competitor” with “being a dickbag”, maybe we were actually already over the line in terms of encouraging competition.
This.
Kids are not stupid, if they tried really hard on a project/race and little Johnny drew a picture 5 minutes before class/walked to the finish line; they know that they should get different results, so being told that they’re just like the kid that barely tried is annoying, so eventually they learn not to bother because they’ll get the praise/result anyway. (This might sound harsher than it is, but this is definitely how I thought as a kid, and it set me up for some hard truths as a teenager)
I was going to write a long rambly thing about my thoughts on this, but this perfectly articulates the problem I have with this whole philosophy.
As an adult I have realized this is because I need a benchmark to work towards (I got a 10, but so-and-so got a 15, and they did XYZ different/better than me, therefore I need to improve my XYZ and next time I’ll get a 15 too.) and I live for constructive criticism (As a school child I desperately wanted percentage/letter grades like US tv, instead I went to severely ranking-adverse school where it was right or wrong and everyone is great!).
However as a kid all I could articulate on the subject was ‘If everyone wins then what is the fucking point in trying?’ or on my better days ‘If everyone wins, then no one is the winner, which means that I won’t get to be the winner one day’
I find nothing more insulting than when someone tells me ‘you did really well’ when I know for a fact I didn’t.
ETA: Brainwave; my entire problem with education/sports as a child summed up in one whine ‘BUT WHY WON’T YOU TELL ME HOW TO GET BETTER.’
As an adult I have realized this is because I need a benchmark to work towards (I got a 10, but so-and-so got a 15, and they did XYZ different/better than me, therefore I need to improve my XYZ and next time I’ll get a 15 too.) and I live for constructive criticism (As a school child I desperately wanted percentage/letter grades like US tv, instead I went to severely ranking-adverse school where it was right or wrong and everyone is great!).
This is kind of a toxic attitude, though, because in real life, you rarely, if ever, get that kind of feedback. In the vast, vast majority of professions, it’s not even really possible. I can’t get 10/15 on my programming for the day, while the person who sits across from me gets 12/15 and the person to their left gets an 8/15. We’re all just programming. I can’t think of any profession, honestly, where there’s a verifiable, reliable way to measure performance across the board. I have a friend who is a very talented cardiologist, and so they will get many difficult cases. More of their patients will die, because they are hard cases. Does this make my friend a bad doctor? My lawyer friends who are public defenders lose a lot of cases. Does that make them bad lawyers? Is my friend who tends bar at a crummy dive a better bartender than my friend who tends bar at a fancy cocktail joint?
And this isn’t just a theoretical danger, because this mentality (“There is a way to accurately measure human performance, just like school grades!”) leaks into actual human evaluations. “Jim wrote 2k lines of code, Jane wrote 1k lines of code, so Jim is 2x better than Jane!” Right? Well, wait, Jane’s shit was clean and elegant and Jim’s was a mess of spaghetti code that I had to spend a week and a half debugging, so Jane’s was better. But also wait, Jane was writing a super basic CRUD system for our internal blog and Jim was writing a brand new firmware for some custom hardware we’re building. But also Jim’s been coding for a decade and Jane’s a year out of a CS program that didn’t do much hands-on work.
And don’t even get me started on how we evaluate teachers. “If test scores work for students, why wouldn’t they work for their teachers!”
I think the example I used was probably a bit to quantitative; and I completely agree that there is very much a ‘too far’ with this kind of analytical evaluation.
From a sports perspective (which is where I was going with that) its more, I got 10 points, and they got 15 by being better at this aspect (throwing? I’m not good at mainstream sports) so if I work on that aspect to then maybe I’ll get a higher score.
I meant it as a personal attitude, I definitely don’t think this kind of thinking should be used to compare people to each other! What it means for me now as an adult is that I need an example of what ‘good’ looks like, in order to compare myself against it and see what I should be working on. For example at Uni, I kept getting really low grades in one class, but I didn’t know how to get any better, because I didn’t know what this teachers version of ‘top marks’ looks like (and there was no published criteria. but that’s a rant for another day).
And I agree, that kind of feed back is really hard to get in the professional world; but a recent example for me is salary, its hard for me to come up with an ideal salary without knowing what my job in other companies pays, and what people doing a similar job to me are being paid. And even people earning 3x my salary, I can look at them and say ‘Ok, well this person has X amount of experience on me, and has done these kind of project so that’s what they get paid; so I should get X in comparison’ (I know that’s usually not how it works, but it helps me come up with a number and be confident about it.). I also read a lot of job descriptions and compare myself to the criteria to see the holes in my experience, and be confident in my current experience.
I don’t think is a philosophy that everyone should be following, this is just something that I’ve developed and articulated recently to help me deal with the massive holes in my development, education and confidence. And as a kid I desperately wanted feedback, that I wasn’t getting, I wanted to know how good I was then, and why I wasn’t better and what I could work on to get better (It didn’t help that I had un-diagnosed ADD through most of school. My teachers just complained that I wouldn’t ‘apply’ myself, but in reality I didn’t know how and no one would teach me).
I was also just a competitive asshole who wanted to be the only winner (and seriously, I was the *worst* winner. Its probably for the best that they didn’t give out proper medals at my school, I would have shoved it down someones throat while gloating.)
IDK man every office I ever did a programming thing in it’s always been completely and incredibly apparent almost immediately who was better at doing what, and usually as time went on we’d just get clearer and clearer divisions of labor cause Rajat can do things with the database off the top of his head I never knew were possible while I can write a functioning script in a couple hours that would take Mike a couple days, while he knows where everything goes on the network and can do compliance checks, and we all try to learn from our betters at the things that are important cause nobody wants to get stuck in the hell of being the guy who gets the idiot work pushed off on them. A workplace where everybody does everything because everyone’s a star at all tasks and at least they’re trying hard sounds like a fucking nightmare.
Ok, so…who is the best? I feel like you’re kinda making my point for me, here. My point wasn’t that you don’t make divisions of labor, but that despite everybody being a programmer/engineer, there’s no objective way to say which of you is “the best” at programming. People have different levels of ability in different areas, are weak in other areas, but in the broad category, there’s no consistent way to compare each other and attempts to create metrics to do so tend to just result in people trying to game that metric, rather than just working to be the best they can be.
So if you insist on only ranking performance and outcomes by one specific, intentionally vague classification it becomes pointless and difficult to measure?
Clearly this is a flaw in the very concept of gauging oneself by one’s peers.
My high school gym teachers actually taught us how to do things, like how to dribble a basketball and how to hold a tennis racket and so on. That was definitely where I learned that I could get better at sports by practicing. I didn’t become a sports-y person then because I had already been ground down by eight years of lousy elementary school gym, but I think it was one of the things that led to my playing a handful of intramural sports in university.
So basically, yes, I also wanted to be told how to get better.
I know a parent who got this right. He asked his child, who loved sports, what she wanted to do.
When she was small, the answer was usually a variety on “I want to play more games!” He enrolled her in Little League, school basketball, school volleyball. Eventually the answer to “What do you want to do” became more like “I want to throw with better accuracy”. So he taught her how to practice for that result. Then, and this is crucial, left her alone to practice on her own. Or not. Her choice. He gave her no new drills to try until she asked.
When the girl was in high school, she said she wanted to play less, without letting down the teammates counting on her. The father helped her choose which sport(s) to eliminate. He also waited for this request before explaining how the sports world would expand (regionals, state competitions, national, all-stars) to take up more and more of the year for the better players, like her. He helped her find the wording to tell her coach herself that there would be limits to how much she was willing to practice, how much of the post-season she was willing to contribute to. And made sure she initiated this conversation at the beginning of the season.
What the child wanted. At every step. With attention to team commitment. And limits on time.
Ngghh I’m actually attracted to a random Father I heard about on the internet.
There’s also the lesson in there (that this girl obviously learned) that its ok to ask for help, or ask for what you need.
A+ Dadding. Copy-pasting this comment to share with my husband as a general parenting philosophy.
My judo dojo is working on developing out kids program, and one thing our head coach has really emphasised is coaching towards the right thing at the right age. With the kids under about 12-14, we’re teaching them how to train-how to show up, put the work in, and learn. Competition falls into the “if they want to” bucket. At 12-16 ish, we’re teaching them how to compete- competition specific techniques, how to deal with the body’s response to competition, but without focusing on winning. Once they’re 16 or so, then winning becomes a goal- but before then we just want them to develop strong skills and still enjoy the sport as adults.
Yeah, I think there actually is a really strong pedagogy out there — and probably has been for a while, I’d be willing to bet at least since the seventies — it’s just not necessarily widely known and accepted for how to maintain that balance between pushing kids when they’re about to fall out of practice due to laziness, and not pushing them genuinely against their interest. SO. I don’t know, my parents didn’t instill a strong competitive spirit in me either, who even knows.
Honestly, judo is so physical it’s frankly not safe for a kid to be out there if they don’t want to be there, because a huge of part of them staying safe is paying attention, and the way reluctance manifests physically is not good from a falling correctly/ not being stiff/ etc. front- if the kid doesn’t want to practice, it’s okay for them to not be there- hopefully some time off helps them find their motivation. And if it doesn’t, well, plenty of adults quit judo too- it’s not for everyone. With the older kids, we’ll pair then with an adult and hope they find motivation in the challenge while working with someone who can keep them safe, but sometimes kids just need time off, too.
This is a good structure and I wish it were applied to more things.
Love this! Age appropriate training!
So much of learning a sport/skill is not actually about the skill itself and is more about learning how to learn! And teaching how to compete, its so often over-looked!
I’m just going to sit in the corner now and day-dream about what I’d be like if I’d found a coach who would have taught me all of these things and what it would feel like not to constantly have to plaster over holes in my basics.
re. getting it right: being a sporty person from an unsporty family, I think I’ve seen some shades of from other folks. I think it’s a balance of pushing kids to stretch beyond themselves by committing to something for at least a season (so they don’t give up beyond a bad day, or a bad game) but making it very clear that if they’re absolutely miserable, they can stop. The latter is making me think about a little girl who was breaking powerlifting records (because how many little girls are doing powerlifting?!?) and how the parents were like “every day we tell her she can stop if she wants to..”
I think it really depends on each kid and their temperament as well, and parents just have to be very honest about how they’re seeing their kids react. And some parents, like Sullivan’s father, are never going to really see what’s going on.
I totally agree; I think its about listening to the kid and showing/telling them that they can push themselves, but its also their choice to keep going.
I think where the disconnect comes is when its about the parent and their ambitions/goals and not the child; My parents really didn’t care about sports at all, and wouldn’t/couldn’t engage enough to encourage me, where-as other parents are determined that the kid is going to be good at X sport/instrument/academic subject, and the kid doesn’t really get a say in it (and if this starts when the kid is young enough, the kid see’s it as a way to spend time with parent/ or a thing that makes parent happy, and doesn’t really think about it too much until their much older and already over-invested in it)
I keep thinking about the Williams sisters, they seem to have turned out pretty well, but I read somewhere that it was their father who decided they would play tennis and be the best players in the world (because that would make lots of money); Similarly with Malcom Gladwells kid (I think?), that he proved the 10,000 hours theory with, he decided that the kid would play chess and started teaching from when they were a baby. The kid didn’t really get any say in that
Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success gets at this issue. I’m not completely familiar with it, but my understanding is that encouraging your child’s efforts rather than praising her results is a good starting point.
Yeah I’ve been hearing more about this recently; praising children on their effort rather than any intrinsic ability.
I read somewhere that there’s a gender break-down to it too; boys learn that you can try hard and get better, but girls are praised on their intrisic abilities (‘you’re so good’ ‘you’re so smart’ etc); so when learning goes past their natural ability, boys try harder and girls give up. So I’ve been trying to praise the children in my life equally on effort, saying ‘you tried really hard’ or ‘you’re getting better’, rather than ‘you’re so smart’
I’ve had riding coaches tell me similar things about students; the ones who aren’t as talented at the beginning usually end up as better riders because they learn early how to work hard and get better, but the naturally talented ones coast on talent up to a certain point and then don’t know how to improve once they reach the end of their natural talent.
Although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with children learning that there are winners and losers in sports, so longs as they also learn that winners aren’t better people than anyone else, they just did better on that day, and that they can also work hard and be winners one day if they want to
My dad had a running joke that for christmas/birthday he would get me a fur-lined bucket as a present, so that I could carry a tune in it.
Later on I went to theatre school and though it was straight theatre we still had to take some singing classes and I had panic attacks. My folks thought they were “just teasing” about singing/clumsiness/etc but it caused me real, debilitating insecurity.
So I’m never going to tease my kid, nor will I ever push him in terms of any competitive activity… but I’m sure I’ll screw up in some sort of other way.
Don’t get me started on ‘just teasing’ children. It runs deep in my family (i.e. my family are psychopaths)
PSA: Children do not understand sarcasm. Children do not understand ‘jokes’. Children understand the literal meaning of what you say. If they say something to you it is genuine, don’t fucking humiliate them.
‘Joking’ to your child that you’re not their father isn’t ‘funny’.
My half-sister recently did something like this to my 3yo nephew after I’d helped him build up some confidence to ask her for a snack (He was feeling very shy) and it brought back so many horrible memories I nearly skinned her.
In other news my mother now tells me I should sing more because its really good for you. I had to explain to her the reasons I don’t sing (her.)
Good on you for standing up to your mom and standing up for your nephew! I didn’t substantively say anything to my folks about it until my early 30s. They took it really well though! Still, my kid is now 3 and I feel like I have to make it very clear to them that there is to be NO TEASING HIM and I’m very scared that they won’t be able to hold themselves back if I’m not around.
Thanks; its getting harder to be angry and cruel to her as I get older and realize that she’s actually a person who was probably trying her best, and not the cruel demon my teenage angst painted her as.
If your kid is old enough you can teach him to shut it down; I remember the deep feeling of humiliation, and I really didn’t have the confidence to shout back at them; but maybe your kid would be able to shout at them ‘that’s not funny’ if they start teasing. (depends on your family though, I think I tried this once as a kid and it just made them meaner because they were getting the reaction they wanted)
I feel like the teasing runs in working class family (at least in Ireland), any time a child tries to do something they hear ‘haha you’re shit, don’t try, stay where you are in life’, where as more affluent children hear ‘well done, you tried and you can do anything’
Like other people said though, I think there’s a value in pushing somewhat. But you have to strike a balance on it. I expressed interest in baseball in second grade, and my dad signed me up for it. Then I went to two days of practice and decided I hated it and wanted to quit. My parents said, essentially, that you signed up for it, you’re finishing the year, going to the practices, going to the games, all of it. They also said that if I hated it the whole time, I wouldn’t have to do it the next year. My dad started dragging me out to play catch in the backyard and work on my swing. And I whined and complained for a month or two, but then I started to get a little better, and I started to like it, and then I played baseball for the next eight years, and in intramurals, and now softball in adult leagues. And I followed that pattern with a bunch of sports – I played football, wrestled, swam, played basketball, whatever. I hated some, and I quit some, but the rule was always that I had to put in a season and actually work at it, and my parents were kinda hard-core on that part. They were always ok with me not starting something, or not continuing something I didn’t want to do (after I’d given it a fair shake), but they weren’t ok with me half-assing commitments.
But you’re parents also supported you with time/practice to help you get better so that you enjoyed it (not many people enjoy doing things they’re not good at) . I totally agree that a little bit of appropriate pushing is great.
My mum signed me up for a bunch of activites over the years (most of the stuff I showed an interest in, so longs as there wasn’t significant set up costs), but then pretty much left me out in the wind on my own. So I didn’t practice at home (It never occurred to me that I should practice hockey outside of school, and I didn’t understand music well enough to be able to practice on my own) and I didn’t really know how to make myself improve, so I didn’t, and then I gave up. (I’m not blaming my mum here, she didn’t really know how to encourage/support me apart from signing me up for classes and buying me equipment when we could afford it. Also unfortunately my big passion, and what I was good at, was horse riding, the most expensive sport known to humankind)
Sounds like your parents hit a really good balance!
Some of the worst stuff I’ve had to overcome from childhood was debilitating insecurities caused by adults “just teasing” me. There is a line between “friendly teasing” and repeatedly reinforcing a feeling of failure in a child’s mind.
Precisely. I still fail to recognize compliments. I automatically assume they’re sarcastic criticism. Because that’s all I heard at home for 20 years. I loved school because adults there were kind to me.
Oh man! I sent you an email a while back and now I’m worried you thought I was being a sarcastic jerkwad 🙁 I wasn’t!
Nononono. This is my problem. Do not take on responsibility. Please don’t give it another thought.
I assume kindness in all that you say/write. I have learned over the decades to first consider the source. If it’s someone who has proved trustworthy, has been consistently kind to me and to others — that’s you to a tee, Dave — I feel safe and protected.
The old insecurity/self-loathing is the default with strangers and those I do not yet trust.
My parents got it exactly right with music lessons for me. Juuuust enough pressure that I stuck with it, but never so much that I resented it (and it is still the love of my life).
HOWEVER, they let me quit soccer after one season and I still give them a hard time about it. MOoooommmmmm, I could have been athletic!
It’s an interesting conversation, but I feel like it bears repeating that O’Sullivan’s childhood was one of unremitting physical assaults from his father. That’s not really about failing to walk a difficult tightrope–it’s just abuse, using athletics as a cover and an excuse for the abuse to continue.
Yeah, I think I said it somewhere; I haven’t read the article yet (I will at somepoint when I’m feeling up to it), I just wanted to spout my opinions about things with a tenuous link to the actual subject on hand.
(I’m trying a thing where i allow myself to behave more like a man and not worry about what people think. Also know as acting like a blow hard asshole. Hi.)
I support experimenting with that attitude in general, but maybe also start taking note of some situations when it’s not really the best thing, like when we’re talking about subjects that the patriarchy likes best swept under the rug?
YES. Not that we can’t have this discussion on The Toast, but it’s weird to me that the original topic has been completely brushed aside: Sullivan endured a lifetime of unimaginable hell at the hands of his father. Whether or not participation medals are valid is just laughably unrelated to the real crisis of how sports culture enables abusive parents.
Selma had not read the piece, and I honestly do not think she would have started this convo if she had, the contrast is too jarring. It is a perfectly fine convo to have, but it does NOT suit the topic at hand.
I agree, and I reiterate I’m not specifically criticizing anyone. It’s just making me sad because that article was a hell of a brave and necessary essay to post publicly, and it’s just all too familiar to see the conversation immediately diverted to “so anyway, how harmful are participation trophies?”
Yeah. It bummed me out a little to watch that happen.
I just want to jump in and say that really wasn’t my intention; my original comment was just the first thought I had and then failed to really articulate: that there’s two extremes when it comes to (regular, non-abusive) parents and sport.
And yeah, the whole discussion just ran off into a tangent of its own, that is much easier to discuss, but not related at all, even to the narrative that pushy parents are ‘good’ parents.
This past week I had an insanely frustrating and upsetting social engagement with my show-offy, rude, inappropriate, tempestuous, short-tempered, almost-NHL dad and then I got home and read Patrick O’Sullivan’s account of his childhood and that under-the-skin anger, like you can SEE how short the fuse is? Well, I sobbed all night long. I was not abused and in no way do I mean to conflate my childhood with the horror show O’Sullivan describes, but I FEEL YOU on echoes.
“Final approval was held up for an hour over typos and a dispute over a single verb – shall or should”
I suddenly feel an intense emotional connection with the people who hammered out the climate change agreement.
And then thinking about having to translate that nuance into hundreds of languages. Oof.
I’m studying translation and interpretation and I could feel my blood pressure rising the entire length of this article. The UN’s translators and interpreters are BOSSES.
In my translation class in college (just the one, lol) we had a visit from two UN interpreters who were super specialized into interpreting spoken French to spoken English in real time — not English-to-French, not captions, not in “blocks” of speaking that they translated the gist of afterwards… just that one thing, which they had to get hundreds of hours to training to do after becoming fluent in French. It was so impressive. And terrifying.
IIRC, unmoderated groups tend to spend their time based on how easy it is to have an opinion on the topic, rather than how important the topic actually is. It’s very very hard to come up with a good climate change plan, but everyone can chime in on The Great Future Tense Debate…
Also known as ‘I don’t know anything about this subject, but I’m being paid to be here and I better say something so I’m going to choose something small to bang on about constantly so that people think I’m contributing.’
Honestly, I’m surprised it wasn’t longer – legally-speaking, the difference between “shall” and “should” is huge.
From my experience with international meeting communiques, you are 100% right.
Ooh, ooh there is a great kids SF book that has a huge plot point around the wording/translation of a multispecies law (must vs. should): The Stolen Law by Anne Mason. The linguist protagonist helped inspire me to major in that later.
And this is EXACTLY why I am no longer in the international area of my job.
An amazing awesome mouthwatering international secondment that I was fully qualified for appeared at my work a couple of months ago, and a lot of people were encouraging me to apply for it.
It involved 18 months of setting the policy agenda and working up meeting papers/eventually communiques for [massive high profile international meeting].
Not. In. A. Million. Years.
I’m not going to see that Leonardo DiCaprio movie, but I am grateful for its existence because of that time a few weeks ago that the studio had to deny that the bear mauling scene is actually a bear rape scene, leading to headlines like ‘Leonardo DiCaprio is not raped by a bear in new movie’, which is so bizarre, I love it. Also the fact that rumour was predicated on the fact we all know Leo’s SO DESPERATE for an Oscar that he’s going to do more and more difficult films until the Academy finally goes ‘Oh fuck it, you literally cut off your own hand as part of this role so the Oscar goes to… Matthew McConaughey!’
I saw the preview for both that and the Moby Dick movie in the theater and had an acute attack of peevish misandry.
Admittedly I was there to see the Bond movie, so probably brought it on myself.
I am pretty excited about men being attacked by animals this holiday season.
I took a break from watching movies headed by Famous White Men for a while (it started 3 years ago and is still ongoing, sooo…) and for a very long time DiCaprio was the only exception to that (well, and Matt Damon in the event he ever decided to get back in the Jason Bourne saddle) but by this point even Leo can’t get me to go see a Famous White Man movie. So a soft pass on The Revenant, unless I find out it has an actual plot or something.
Yeah, Jeff Wells got into trouble saying The Revenant was “not for women”, and on the one hand I always want to counter statements like that, but on the other I have literally 0 desire to see this movie. It just seems so aggressively, preposterously testosterony.
Right? I don’t really want to watch chick flicks OR manly man man movies. I want to watch people movies, mostly.
Every time I’ve seen the trailer I’ve thought, “I have no desire to see gratuitous gory manfeels action movies with no women in them.”
Yeah well something that’s ‘not for women’ is too good for women, while movies made for women which are ‘not for men’ aren’t good enough for men so…
Does ‘not for women’ = just really fucking boring?
From what I can gather, its a man in the snow, and something to with a bear?
Yeah, no interest what-so-ever.
I think that’s an accurate translation.
I am interested in this movie, but only because I heard about the historical event it was based on and it is absolutely, completely bonkers. This whole “it’s not for women” thing isn’t helping though.
Oh, I think “not for women” and “not for men” are nonsense things to say. You may be one of the women this movie is for!
As a cinematography nerd, I want to watch it so bad! Emmanuel Lubezki is the best. Stop saying bullshit like that, people!!!
I am probably the the woman these movies are for. I loved In the Heart of the Sea (the book) and adore westerns and US Western history. Slightly worried about the Revenant because Innaritu films sometimes drag pretty hard in the exposition before you get to the good stuff…
I think Wells was saying that it was too gory and graphic for every women ever to handle purely from his own anecdotal evidence that the woman reviewer he was with ducked behind her hands a few times during.
And nuts to that, I can definitely handle the gore. I have no problem with gore whatsoever. But yes, it does look like a hyper-machismo sausage-fest and, given that I spent most of Birdman desperately wishing there were no women in it so I didn’t have to feel my blood pressure rising for the way their characters were treated the whole way though, maybe that’s for the best…
I want to see it just knowing what hell the actors went through to realize this monstrosity and spite Wells. But I don’t because the director seems like a massive douche and I’d rather not support him.
What a silly sentiment. I love horror movies, but just think this looks dull and have been impressed with Leo exactly 0 times (although I wasn’t not impressed with him in Catch Me if You Can, best I can say). Also, I found Birdman dull.
I honestly don’t want to see it for two reasons: I fucking hate too-real survival shit, because it’s gross and I don’t wanna, and two, I cannot handle the intensity! I know Leo will do anything and he will be scary and it looks SO INTENSE I won’t be able to breathe the whole damn time!
I kind of hope he just keeps doing ridiculous shit in terrible Oscar-bait movies and … never gets anything. Just because I’d like to see how far he’d go.
He’ll probably push himself so far that a role will eventually be the end of him. Then he will win a posthumous Oscar.
This would make me ridiculously unhappy. He does a damn good job, imo, and I’d like to see him actually get some recognition. There are plenty of people way less deserving.
Me too. I feel a bit like I’m watching someone offer an animal a bit of food only to yoik it away when they tentatively go to grab it. It was pretty funny to begin with, but I’ve crossed a threshold now and please just give the poor thing the food, you know? It really wants it.
My dearest wish is for Leo to never get an Oscar as punishment for the “Pussy Posse.”
Last night I had a dream that I was on a committee at work to decide on a charitable cause for the company to take on next year. I suggested that we support a high school production of Hamilton and everyone agreed that was a great idea. I said that I couldn’t help with the singing (even dream-me knows my limits), but that I would help with costumes and managing the cast.
Ugh I’m really hating the patriarchy today, and general right-wing horribleness. In not unrelated news, the anxiety about impending Family Holidays has struck too 🙁
But Mallory is indeed Queen of the Internet, and Sansa has a dipped-in-ink nose, so that’s all good.
The climate change deal was Republican proofed to make it useless. Is that what we’re saying here?
Also, I had a really hard time explaining to my husband why I am constantly leaving my office keys locked in my office. It’s because girl business clothes don’t have pockets, so I don’t have a convenient place to carry them. Basically IT IS THE FAULT OF THE PATRIARCHY.
POCKETS.
I constantly have to carry around my phone and lip balm, and thus end up leaving them on random surfaces, and then everyone thinks *I’m* the weird one.
Its a bloody conspiracy to make sure we spend even more money on bags.
Look, everyone should have pockets, but everyone should also have bags, because bags are pretty much just more pockets and they still haven’t invented my goddamn Deep-Pocket Cloak (+2).
Cloaks are so *in* right now. Cloaks + pockets is clearly the next logical step.
I have my grandmother’s heavy wool cloak, and it does in fact have pockets. It’s actually closed-in at the sides, with the sleeves hiding that fact, and it has pockets in there, in which you can put your mittens.
Not that I’ll be able to wear it this winter, because it’s far too warm to wear if the temperature is above freezing.
Plus then you could pretend you’re Kvothe! He always has a gazillion pockets in his cloak!
It’s also that I feel weird carrying a purse to meetings within the office. Mostly because then I leave MY ENTIRE PURSE in random conference rooms. Actually I don’t ever leave my keys anywhere else but on my desk, in plain sight, waiting for me and the office manager to arrive in the morning.
Omg the amount of crap I have to carry to a meeting. Even when its a 5 min catch up.
I stand up, pick up my laptop, then think I should probably bring my notebook and pen, just in case. Then I remember its super cold in the meeting rooms so I grab my scarf, then I need my water and lip-balm because I’m going to be talking (and I have a legit vaseline addiction). And once I’ve finally set off I have to come back and grab one of my phones because I’ll probably need something that’s on it. I usually grab a cardigan too.
SO MUCH STUFF. Just to be a functioning adult woman.
I had a funny memory come back to me today on this very thing! When I was a kid for some reason I thought the sign of being a real grown up lady was carrying lots of small things in your hand (keys, lip balm, loads of other shite), and I then endeavored to do this all the time. I now realise this was because none of these women had useable pockets (and why my mum never did it because she was a butch-ass lesbian who had sensible mens jeans with pockets. I also thought ‘butch’ was a compliment for many years. I was a confused child.)
Occasionally a male coworker will catch me taking my phone out of my bra and verrrry casually look away. Not my fault lady blazers have no pockets!
And then in every picture you have the strap of a bag marring your outfit, argh!
I so wish I coyuld sew because then I would add pockets to everything. (Here’s how to add pockets to skirts: http://www.shrimpsaladcircus.com/adding-pockets-t…
No, I think it’s the opposite – I read it as saying that it’s basically a powerful soft-influence document? There’s very little that’s sufficiently binding that it can be struck down right away, but there’s a framework there that can be used to push for hundreds of small changes and for greater changes in the future.
Hm, I hope that’s true. I haven’t read the article yet but just looking at that “not binding” part I am worried…
Yeah, that’s about the best we can hope for — Republicans or not, I’m not sure an ironclad treaty with legal consequences for transgressions would have passed, and as skeptical as I am about climate agreements, something is far better than nothing at this point.
re: pockets –
I have this jean skirt I got from j.jill which is amazing because it’s nearly knee-length and is cut to sit above my hips instead of on my hips (I have a long waist so most skirts want to sit too low and then ride up until they’re too short, but anyway) and it’s really comfortable and it has pockets!
but these are the first honest-to-god useful pockets i have ever had. they’re enormous. they’re like mom’s bag-of-holding pockets or something, i don’t know. i lost my keys in those pockets twice in the same day back in october. spent over an hour searching for them all told. and they were in my pocket the entire time. (and both times, i had specifically patted myself down to check my pockets! but these things were so huge i didn’t realize how far i needed to search.)
so, basically, i’m so used to having rinkydink useless pockets that when a company actually gives me useful ones, it’s bewildering and things get lost.
also if you need a nice jean skirt that’s knee-length and has huge pockets, j.jill might have one for you. (it was a little more expensive than i would normally consider, but it is clearly of higher standards than any Target jean skirt i’ve seen)
omg a skirt for the long-torsoed??
yes, and it is lovely! i had been looking for a longer skirt for ages last spring, and almost didn’t go into the shop because their style is usually too…idk, just not my thing, it’s my mom’s thing. but i was desperate for white capris, and happened to see the skirt and it’s my favorite. i can pull it on and off without doing the zip/button, so i think it’s just a square shape with a small taper at the waist so it doesn’t fall right off, but that’s mostly perfect since a stronger taper is what makes skirts want to ride up, and the length is enough that it hides my bike shorts underneath (i think it’s meant to be below-the-knee length, but it hits right above my knees.)
It’s a unicorn skirt! I am super happy for you!
(have just spent 20 minutes on j. jill website ogling the Tall sizing after realizing duh, that would probably solve the long-torso thing)
ohgod i ALWAYS forget about the Tall sizing. they have “petite” and “woman” in actual shops, but not Tall, so it never occurs to me to look at that section of websites.
on the other hand, when i worked in retail and we had “long” sizing for trousers, the waist part never actually changed – just the length of the legs, so that may have prejudiced me.
i’m going to have to put a sticky note on my forehead to remember to look at the Tall sections next time i’m clothes shopping, i think!
ugh, SERIOUSLY, though my dumb shape is dumb so I have to buy short-length pants or hem regular-length pants but my torso and arms are like LOL LOL LOL HOW MUCH MIDRIFF/WRIST DO YOU WANT TO EXPOSE TODAY so: tall-length tops + leggings = happy houblonchouffe.
Designers who can’t put functional pockets into women’s clothing don’t deserve my money, and they don’t get it. (I would like to see a ginormous mass boycott of pocketless clothes until the fashion industry gets the point, but until that happens, I just make a point of not rewarding stupid patriarchal bullshit bad design with my hard-earned cash.)
But then we’d all be naked and cold.
Seriously. I very rarely buy clothes because I cannot stand buying illogical ill-fitting pieces of tissue that don’t last past one wash. But unfortunately that means I have nothing to wear.)
(Can we all agree to make the cut-out on torso’s thing die? Please. I’m really tired of seeing lovely a-line dresses in shops and picking them up only to find its fucking backless or side-less or some other stupid idea. see also romper-suits. )
If we could also kill tops with giant lace inserts on the back, and those stupid “cold-shoulder” tops, I’m in. I just want to cover my bits and be able to wear a bra!
Just kill all the stupid gimmicks that they come up with every year to try and make all women buy all new clothes.
I just want a basic piece of clothing that fits me and covers my actual body.
Just because all the hot young things in Hollywood are wearing it (the Kardashians? I have no idea) doesn’t mean actual women in their real-I-need-to-cover-my-boobs lives want to wear it. We would like other options please.
Yep. Either they should make tops that can be worn with bras no problem, or I should be able to go braless however often I please without ever worrying that someone may be thinking it’s inappropriate. I’m ok with the latter, but not quite sure we’re there as a society yet.
The years I had to wear a suit every day, I had pockets. But only because my jackets must be tailored to fit a very short torso and ridiculous bust. Therefore, if I’m paying a tailor for work on a jacket, he has orders to add a pocket to accommodate a car key, a credit card, and a 20-dollar-bill. Each tailor was told I’d withhold payment until I had that pocket.
The only reason i don’t leave my keys etc everywhere is because i paid my mother to make me business skirts with pockets. And wear mens jeans which have usable pockets even when they are the same size as women’s jeans. So yeah I Blame the Patriarchy too.
I have long thought that if I were ever to become in charge of fashion, my first and only edict would be to have more skirts and dresses include pockets.
Mallory is actually the Galadriel of the Internet, I think.
Ayn Rand’s LotR, in which Galadriel takes the ring of power when Frodo offers it, and uses it in her own self-interest to expand boating lines to The East?
NOT DARK BUT BEAUTIFUL AND TERRIBLE AS THE DAWN!
wait maybe just beautiful and terrible – don’t think anyone can read children’s stories made horrific/anything Mallory has ever written and be like yup definitely not dark not at all evil nope.
We do, in fact, all love her and despair.
I, for one, welcome our new benevolent internet ruler.
ALL HAIL MALLORY, QUEEN OF THE INTERNET!
OK SO yesterday I was in a cab on my way to a Sleater-Kinney concert and we passed by Lin-Manuel Miranda waiting to cross the street. I have now reached #peaktoast and will shortly be taking to the sea.
Wait, Lin-Manuel walks places and is not borne everywhere on the shoulders of his admirers? That seems wrong.
You went to the same Sleater-Kinney show as a coworker of mine! (She drove up to NYC from North Carolina for it because she is a person willing to drive long distances to see live music.)
Yay! I obviously don’t know how she felt about it but for me it would have been totally worth driving all that way. They were SO GOOD. And also Fred Armisen showed up at the end and sang Rock Lobster.
Did you shout “yay Hamlet”? I’m not sure I would have been able to restrain myself.
I REALLY WANTED TO but he had headphones on and I didn’t want to bother him and I basically just wimped out. Also I was too busy flailing at my boyfriend and going “LIN! LIN! IT’S LIN!” to which he replied “what are you talking about who’s Lynn” and I just shouted “YOU KNOW! LIN!” a bunch more times in a slightly unhinged manner. You’d think after months of all Ham all the time he would know exactly which Lin.
“WHO’S LYNN”???
He should be fired
I can’t wait til the open thread to share this great compliment I got from a co-worker recently. Been making friends with this fairly new employee, a smart guy, having some good talks – we’re going for coffee and he’s like “your brand of feminism seems really hostile to men…” and I was like “Oh good! You noticed!” and we moved on to another topic.
Excellent misandry
A+ misandry, 5/5 would weep again.
The perfection of this comment will bathe me in a golden glow and carry me throughout my day. Thank you.
I am in awe of you.
I just finished a three-month-long project at work, my boss is taking off the last two weeks of the year starting Friday, and I am settling in for a good three weeks of smooth sailing / personal projects / Toast reading at work. ALL HAIL.
YESSSSS. That’s what this time of year is for, in perfect worlds. Enjoy it! Make sure to come back and tell us the best things on the Internet!
Adele tour dates?
Adele tour dates.
(I am a teensy teensy bit unreasonably-irritated that she couldn’t line up her Chicago shows with the opening of Hamilton in Chicago; rather, she is in NYC that weekend, COME ON ADELE, WHY ARE YOU MAKING PLANNING NEXT YEAR SO DIFFICULT)
Hyperventilating.
Just put the tix sale date/time in my calendar! Thanks!
I saw a meme the other day though that was like, “but what do people do at an Adele concert? Sing along while crying and texting their exes?” Which… seems like what people would do at an Adele concert. I don’t know. Has anyone here been to an Adele concert? What is the atmosphere like at one?
All the parents (heck, all the humans) should read the Patrick O’Sullivan piece: “You know when you actually get good at sports? When you’re having fun and being creative. When you’re being a kid. When you don’t even realize you’re getting better, that’s when you’re getting better. If you’re not engaged in what you’re doing, it’s as helpful as taking the trash out. It’s just another chore.”
So having a weirdly Puritanical, “suffer now, be rewarded later” mindset towards KIDS playing a GAME is counter-productive? It’s almost like he’s suggesting that joy is a better motivator than fear.
I appreciate the recent trend in players coming forward to talk about the great personal cost that can lurk behind the pro sport experience. It means predators won’t be able to hide much longer.
It made me crazy when Theo Fleury opened up about how his coach sexually abused him for years and people were like “yeah, but you got into the NHL you ingrate”. How can people not see that this is not a price worth paying?
that girl thinks she’s the queen of the internet / she’s got the hottest trike on-line
I’ve got news for you: she is!
😀
sometimes my boyfriend sings this song to our cat
Comedy Bang! Bang! (specifically the Time Keeper) Hamilton = perhaps the most niche thing to ever exist and I am loving it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MwpM0sDbrE
Also, see today’s episode for an embarrassment of riches. Ho-Ho! *blech*
http://www.earwolf.com/episode/2015-holiday-spect…
Realtalk I’ve always thought the concept of having a soulmate seemed far-fetched (how could there be one perfect person out there) but whoever created this Art is making me believe in fate. With the Arrested ref in the username, too! Clearly a mind at work 🙂
I’m not sure if I can watch a realistic bear mauling.
Almost 10 years ago, I took a storytelling seminar as part of an adult immersion program in Quebec. We had an informal contest between the students. Guess who won? The woman who had been mauled by a bear. She was going for a job interview at a fly-in resort and decided to hike up the mountain to it with a friend. On the way, they ran into a female bear with cubs. And got attacked. They managed to fight off the bear and run back down the mountainside despite missing large chunks of their arms and legs (she showed us where she had no muscle left!). Luckily, a hydro worker happened to drive by just as they emerged on the highway. So he called for help. And she got the job. No questions asked. The resort owner felt so terrible about her getting mauled. Even if she hadn’t told the story well, we would have still crowned her the winner because she tangled with a bear and lived.
Oh my (*sitting goggle-eyed at my desk*). I am forever traumatized by Emma Donoghue’s novel “The Bear” and the thought of being near a bear gives me the same shiver-horrors that alligators and snakes do.
oh man, that is wild! i’m glad she was okay. related: my stepfather and his bff worked at yellowstone back in the day, and stepfather was always telling me so many great stories about their zany misadventures that eventually i asked why his bff had never come to visit. stepfather looked me dead in the eye and went, “he got eaten by a bear.”
ANYWAY i laughed in his face, because i’m a nervous giggler, but he proved it by pulling this book off the bookshelf that was all about famous bear related deaths in the USA. and it was true! they only ever found his legs and stuff. the dude did get eaten by a bear! aaaand that’s the story of why i’m terrified of nature.
OMG.
Mr. Chemicaldefect has spent the morning on speakerphone with the govt health insurance people, who have been condescending and acted like we were greedy for trying to figure out a way we could afford dental insurance. Then I read an article about how the maternal fatality rate in the US has more than doubled since the mid 80s, and I’m just so fed up with this country. Last night Mr. Chemicaldefect was talking to his mom, who started telling him in detail about his sister’s morning sickness (we already knew she was pregnant bc she told us but it’s been a secret, nobody else knew until a couple days ago I guess) and I was surprised by how upset I got. I don’t want to be the subject of family gossip. I don’t want people calling each other on the phone and going “let me tell you about Dr. Chemicaldefect’s GIRL PARTS ISSUES LETS TALK ABOUT HER VAGINA”. If I get the job I interviewed for last week, we can move to a state where we don’t know anybody and just avoid seeing family for the next 7-8 months and then tell everyone afterwards and it will be fine. If I don’t, though, we’re stuck here with my parents who will be absolutely horrible about it and will also tell everyone because first grandkid. Mr. Chemicaldefect’s parents are likely to be equally horrible, mainly bc they are quiverfull and will probably congratulate me on such bs as “changing my mind about wanting babies” and “understanding what the gospel says about babies” and other garbage. Mr. Chemicaldefect assures me that if they find out, he will lay down ground rules with them and I really appreciate that but I still think i will die of shame if someone like grabs at my stomach or something.
TL;DR I would like to take the bunnies and a good internet connection and go live alone in the arctic.
You sound like you might need DWIL. My in-laws are only borderline pushy, but it’s helped me realize it’s okay to draw lines. As those ladies (and occasional dudes) would say, you’re HBIC of your own life and body and you don’t have to apologize for that.
Ugh. Just ugh. So many good thoughts headed your way.
I…had a dream last night that I moved to New York solely to see Hamilton. I think I have a problem, Hamiltoasties. I don’t want to wait until it opens in Chicago! And either way, how the hell can I afford it? /Hamilton problems
Thanks for imbedding those Jos Truitt tweets. I got into an argument with a guy at a bar recently about Caitlyn Jenner (he was in the she’s a republican gay hating monster and aren’t I a hero for using her preferred pronouns when she’s such a bigot camp) and that first tweet sums up the point I was trying to make so elegantly.
thank YOU for posting this, I was struggling to parse those tweets and this illustration makes it click.
Pity the poor billionaires who are finding it so hard to buy elections and keep getting their money fleeced by GOP operatives. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/gop-…
This kinda makes me want to become a Republican candidate for things, just to flush wealthy Republicans’ dollars down the drain every election. We need to make some false-flag Nader-ish Republicans who lose every election, spend tons of money, are always close-but-no-cigar, “Stay hopeful!”-types.
It’s an economic stimulus program!
Ah, the sweet smell of schadenfreude. I would pay cash money of my own to see a tape of these people as the election results came in during Election Day ’12.
You guys it’s not even Christmas yet and I feel dead from food consumption.
I had to leave the cookie exchange yesterday (at which I acquired approx. 8 lbs of Christmas cookies) to attend Hanukkah dinner, which of course featured oysters (not kosher, but hey) and latkes and brisket and pickled herring and brussels sprouts and the most glorious amazing cheesecake I have ever had and it has been wonderful but I literally woke up this morning and said “my eyeballs feel bloated” and they do. Brain too. Send help.
Toasties, I must share my favorite misandry song of the year. You can find it on Spotify or, probably, YouTube: “This is War” by Lone Wolf (I know, right?). Sample lyrics:
She stole my twenties from me
My face has never looked so thin
I hide behind facial hair but people aren’t stupid, they can see what I’m doing
I’m trying to pretend I won this war between my brain and her brawn,
But this is a war I won’t be coming home from
She’s facing due north when she’s facing due east
She’s got parking violations dating back to ’63
She’s got a ladder by the stairs
She uses it to sharpen her teeth
Gaaaaah!!!!!
You are making me extremely anxious about my upcoming coaching season!
Nicole/Mallory: I’m seeing really gross “Promoted Content” (that is in no way related to the toast or toast-like places) right below the “more by Nicole” boxes and right above the Comments section. It’s a new place for ads and I think it weakens the actual related content
We will be fiddling with the nature of the content (it should not be gross, and please email links/screenshots as you see them if the content is BAD) but it will not be related to Toast stuff, it is just good old advertising and we need the money.
Which is to say that we will want to pinpoint and eliminate unpleasant ads in that location, but that location will stay, because it is very very lucrative.
Also, I totally clicked on the WHAT DID THESE EVIL PEOPLE LOOK LIKE AS KIDS? one bc I, for one, am a captive of my desires.
A woman posted this in my abortion recovery group. It’s sad and a little terrifying. Bless Dr. Hern for his ministry.
http://www.statnews.com/2015/12/04/abortion-docto…
Almost 50% more Sansa in two weeks! GOOD WORK, SANSA.
No wonder she’s so sleepy.
So, for any toasties that are parents or coaches of athletes, the USOC has a program/ presentation called Safe Sport that I believe is free for anyone to access (although you may need to set up an account) that discusses abuse in sports, how to recognize it and how to report it. They estimate that one in three elite athletes experiences some form of abuse during their training. I was required to take it as part of a coaching certification, and I found it really enlightening to see such a clear acknowledgment of just how vulnerable athletes are in the coach/athlete relationship- the power imbalance there is a real and dangerous thing. I think there are coach and parent targeted versions.
Also, the CDC has a free concussion training presentation if that’s a thing on your radar.
Now that I’m at home with my bookmarks- links for the lazy (or those unsure if they’ve googled correctly):
http://safesport.org/
http://www.cdc.gov/concussion/HeadsUp/Training/in…
Serena. Sports Illustrated’s 2015 Sportsperson of the Year. First woman since 1983. She conceptualized the cover photo herself.
And icky internet people think it should have been a horse and not, you know, AN ACTUAL HUMAN.
No, they just rate a horse higher than a woman. (still icky).
Higher than a BLACK woman, even, which makes it even more icky.
http://www.si.com/sportsperson/2015/12/14/serena-…
Oh, don’t worry, last year (or maybe it was 2013) in Australia Sportswoman of the Year was actually awarded to a horse, no joke, they gave it to Black Caviar. #burnitalldown
Yup, I mean, the horse is a mare, what’s the problem?! vomit
That Little Richard story. Wow.
I think Martin Luther was mostly a dick, but he was onto something with regard to having a bit of fun among friends to keep the devil away, I think. I am a total introvert, but I find when I am morose or struggling, being with some friends and having a drink helps.
I’m pretty sure he was doing the patented religious-figure move of giving himself cover to do the stuff he wanted to do while still accusing others of being wrong for doing roughly the same stuff – but I agree that taking a moment to let go of the unhappy things you can let go of to get solace from your friends is a good idea.
I think the additional 50% of Sansa is fluff.
Little Richard in Down and Out in Beverly Hills.
this is coming 12+ hours late AS USUAL but I played ice hockey in HS and even for women, the idea that you had to be physically tough and endure whatever and just KEEP PLAYING and deal with it was omnipresent. That article was incredibly moving and I hope he never has to see his dad at a game again. I also was interested in the fact that his approach to hockey remained so positive, and he didn’t take his frustration and fear out on the ice—I think that’s pretty easy to do, and I’m further moved that he retains such a clear view of how he wants to play the game.
also did any other toasties play teen lady hockey, let’s chat
So, wait, is Nikki from the Medford area? *jaw drop* That is where I consider home. The Toast is the center of the universe.
<img src="http://i.giphy.com/eyWS9FCO2VAqc.gif" />
Yup, I mean, the horse is a mare, what's the problem?! vomit
Is it bad that I know I'm an Order Muppet, but I desperately wish I could be a Chaos Muppet?
Or like I feel like everyone who knows me would say I'm an Order Muppet (My eyebrows are borderline) but inside I'm really a Chaos Muppet pretending to be an Order Muppet to combat my Chaotic tendencies because I have to be a functioning Muppet because all the other Muppet left me on my own to run the entire show.
I just want to jump in and say that really wasn't my intention; my original comment was just the first thought I had and then failed to really articulate: that there's two extremes when it comes to (regular, non-abusive) parents and sport.
And yeah, the whole discussion just ran off into a tangent of its own, that is much easier to discuss, but not related at all, even to the narrative that pushy parents are 'good' parents.
Depends on whether she wears a bra or not.
I think if we were to meet, we would either become best friends, or kill each other within 10 minutes. Probably the best friends option.
I am not a killer, which makes best friends seem likelier. Also, you strike me as a person who has a lot of interesting choral music stashed away, and I am a person who would benefit from way more sight-reading practice.
One of the many things I love about the Toast is that it's filled with people who consider “you strike me as a person who has a lot of interesting choral music stashed away” to be an amazing compliment. So thank you, friend.