“I is bathtub guardian. The child will not drown on my watch.”
I flexed and wrote about Faye Resnick for The Guardian, a real publication, please share on all your social media so that they’ll pay me to do it again, because they paid me real money:
Connie Britton’s delightfully trashy portrayal of Faye Resnick on FX’s The People v OJ Simpson has brought new interest to her infamous book Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted. A mega-bestseller in its time, it is now long out of print. Read now, it is exactly what one would expect a hastily published, “collaboratively written” tell-all about an abusive LA marriage to be. If a ghostwriter were assigned, today, to create a novelization of a very depressing late Eagles song, it would probably result in a very similar artifact.
LIBRARIAN CONFIDENTIAL (this is all so charming and brought back all my childhood library love):
What would you be doing if you weren’t a librarian?
It’s hard for me to imagine what I could possibly enjoy doing that wasn’t connected to libraries. I have always, in my library jobs, been part of municipal government, and I have to admit, I love being part of the divisions providing community services. I love connecting people in our community, and I love helping people see their strengths and take advantage of their interests. I have been a library director for the majority of my career in libraries, and I think I am pretty good at it; lately, I have begun to see the benefits that could come from moving up in local government, and working to strengthen our creative communities and in empowering residents through all the community services departments. So it’s not very romantic, but I’d probably be even more of a bureaucrat than I already am, but in the best sense of the word. Though, if money were no object I would totally have a bookshop in a cool place with a cat that served really fantastic food, kind of like the bookshop in The Storied Life of AJ Fikry. Or Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore.
Jacqui Shine wrote about the hair on The People v OJ Simpson:
Hay, who built eyebrow wigs for Travolta, laid photos of the men’s brows over one another. “I worked to find the little differences that occurred on the upper part of the eyebrow,” she says. “Shapiro’s brows had a little tiny triangle,” which she re-created for Travolta with “a little brow toupee.” For Lane’s F. Lee Bailey, the transformation was even greater. “Nathan has dark hair, a very low, well-defined hairline, and dark eyebrows,” Hay says, while Bailey “has a receded hairline and white brows.” To change the shape and coloring of his hair, Lane agreed to shave his head. The stylists painted his eyebrows before fitting him with eyebrow wigs. (These tiny mohair-and-angora wigs are so fragile, Hay made eight sets for each character who wore them.)
“People don’t realize how many wigs are on the show,” says Mekash. Virtually every member of the main cast is wearing some kind of hairpiece. They’re essential, Clark adds, in changing an actor’s silhouette so she is “received as the character from all angles.” (Exceptions were Cuba Gooding Jr.’s O.J. Simpson and Kenneth Choi’s Judge Lance Ito — in those cases, the stylists adjusted the actors’ beard lines with makeup and careful shaves.) Yes, Courtney B. Vance’s mustache is his own, just darkened and reshaped, but Victoria Wood, an L.A.-based ventilator who is known for her work with black hair, built his hairpiece for his role as Johnnie Cochran.
I spent an hour of my life watching a documentary about Pulp’s “Common People”:
Nikki’s incredible adoption series takes on being gay and adopted, and “The Half Dad”, which was AMAZING:
Well, I now have a new crushing terror:
People who struggle to swallow can easily choke. They can breathe food or water into their lungs and develop aspiration pneumonia, or get so little food to go down the right way that they become dehydrated and malnourished. Their teeth may start to rot as the mouth’s natural flushing system falters, while their emotional and psychological health begins to decay as they withdraw from public life.
If it gets bad enough, they may have to switch to a fully liquid diet. And in severe cases, they may have to survive via a feeding tube inserted through their abdominal wall and into their stomach, as Anderson eventually did for 18 months.
Peter Belafsky, director of the University of California at Davis Voice and Swallowing Center and an adviser on Anderson’s case, says the hardest-hit patients can choke on up to 1.5 litres of spit every day – the upper limit pumped out by our salivary glands. “It’s like being constantly waterboarded,” says Belafsky, because of the sensation of drowning that it produces. “That’s the best way I had a patient describe it to me: 24 hours a day being waterboarded.”
Girls and women with autism and how we fail them:
Brooks, a graduate student in disability studies at the City University of New York and a journalist who writes about gender, sex, and autism, has experienced this gender bias first hand.
“Somebody told me about this research study for adults on the autism spectrum and asked me if I wanted to participate,” she says. “When I looked into it, they said it was only for men — they say that they have fewer women [on the autism spectrum], so they want it to be statistically significant.”
When I was kid, I knew what the worst parts of me were—my hair and my mouth. My hair was nappy. My lips were big. Nearly every kid around me knew something similar of themselves because nearly every one of us had some sort of physical defect—dark skin, nappy hair, broad nose, full lips—that opened us up to ridicule from one another. That each of these “defects” were representative of all the Africa that ran through us was never lost on anyone.“Africa” was an insult—African bush-boogie, African bootie-scratcher etc. Ethiopian famine jokes were all the rage back then.
I have never ever wished so hard I could dance in my LIIIIFE:
Brb calling an editorial meeting where we all get tap shoes
yessssss
I just started taking tap classes! It’s full of 60+ yo women who rock, and I just stumble along behind them, but it’s so fun!
I have had two bouts of tonsilitis in the last month, which I’d never had before, and both times I had one night where it hurt so much that I couldn’t swallow as a natural reflex. As I was falling asleep and needed to swallow saliva, I had to wake up, brace myself and concentrate hard on deliberately swallowing. Reading the swallowing article was a much more visceral experience than it would have been a month ago!
Among other reasons, one of the things that made me stop the more illegal substances was that they made my jaw lock up and my mouth go dry, which had the strange effect of making it really difficult to swallow. And this for some reason would cause me to panic (no idea why…) and it was horrible.
Not being able to swallow sounds like a small problem, but when it happens its really terrifying!
I had a really bad case of the flu last year, and for me it always begins with a sore throat. At one point, swallowing hurt so much that I literally started crying. I have a high tolerance for pain, but just couldn’t take it. It was like my throat was lined with razorblades and barbed wire. And the worst thing was (like you mentioned) that I had to force something that should be a reflex.
Hooo boy, I am scared to read that swallowing article – “razorblades and barbed wire” is exactly what it feels like whenever I get a cold, and it turns me into a mess every time. There are certain types of pain/sensations that for some reason are SO FRUSTRATING and for me, that’s one of them. It just feels like there’s nothing you can do – hot liquids, sprays/lozenges, pain meds, none of them work well enough for me to not be hyper-aware of a reflex.
The last couple falls I’ve had allergies so bad that I feel like I have a ball of cotton stuck in my throat – constantly. It’s so persistent that I’ve been to doctors multiple times to get checked for a physical obstruction. I’ve tried different combinations of allergy medications, but the one that worked just made the cotton ball feel like it turned into a ball of glass shards. So I deal with the cotton ball feeling – and sometimes it gets bigger and chokes further up the throat.
That’s what it was like for at least a couple of weeks after my tonsils were removed. Then it turned out my tonsils weren’t to blame for me getting tonsillitis and sinus infections and various other things constantly: joke’s on me! I have an immune deficiency! Oh, how I laughed.
*shudder*
I had recurrent tonsillitis as a child, and this is bringing back a horrible memory: one time I had to vomit, and my throat was so swollen and sore that the vomit came out THROUGH MY NOSE.
I always know immediately when I have strep, because for me the way it always manifests is that my tonsils swell to giant proportions. Which means swallowing is exactly like you described: something I have to gird up my loins and do very deliberately (usually with my eyes squinched shut because it huuuuuuurts.)
I had a random throat virus that did this once–and my doctor just said “it’s not strep, go home,” and my dad was there even though I was 23 (because I was still living at home and didn’t drive) and he walked up to them and said “Can you at least give her some pain meds???” because I was crying every time I swallowed. I got some codeine and tylenol and that helped immensely but I mostly just slept it off, waking up every four hours to take more and drink a glass of water.
When it happened again a year later I had a better doctor–and he gave me a short run of prednisone. I was better the next day.
That wig article is just fascinating. It really is. I am weirdly interested in reading about hair as a signifier in culture (traditions of covering hair, body hair removal, age-related hairstyle changes, hair as a racial issue, you name it and I will read it) and it is just thrilling to me to see how closely the hair wranglers on that show are adhering to the truth. And how important it is to create that air of verisimilitude, and what an important aspect hair is to recognizing someone as a character and that identity.
Hair in cultures is so interesting! One of the things I would love to see on The Toast is a history of womens hair in the Abrahamic religions; They all seem to have a tradition of women covering their hair at some point and I’ve always wondered why and how this came about? (Like I know ‘Modesty’ is a big reason, but why? Why was women’s hair considered immodest? was it a wider cultural thing that was reflected in the religions of the time and just stuck around?)
The wig article makes some great points about wigs on film, they can be really amazing and add the extra level of realism that the story needs, or they can be terrible and completely ruin the watching experience (I love/hate noticing wigs when watching TV/Films, its so hard to look away once you’ve noticed!) Like Fantastic 4 put a truly terrible wig on Sue Storm and its impossible not to notice.
I’ve forgotten a lot, but “Modesty” is born out of long hair being related to “fertility”–I assume long, strong locks is a sign on overall health which is a sign of fertility. So cover that up because long luscious hair means you are a ripe for the sexytimes… Speaking of that, Rape of the Lock is still one of my all-time favorite English poems. I think about it a lot.
Also, I know that long hair has to do with WITCHES. It’s where we keep our magic power.
For as much as I absolutely loved the movie “Carol,” there’s a shot where Cate Blanchett’s wig/weave shows during a close-up and aaaugh CANNOT UNSEE.
Here, have a mesmerizing video of a guy making a wig. https://youtu.be/MquwBBHuU6M
So fascinating!
I read “how important it is to create that air of verisimilitude” as “hair of verisimilitude” and was going to scold about bad puns.
I think you mean EXCELLENT puns
One of the fantastic things I learned from reading Clarissa is that jewelry made of a deceased person’s hair was a thing. A big thing! Amazing to me.
I love hair jewelry! I wrote a whole article about it for the Toast last year.
<3 <3 OF COURSE THE TOAST <3 <3
Looking at that article about autistic women like
Gender essentialism is a fucking cornerstone of autism diagnosis and anyone who says otherwise is misdiagnosing.
OH. OH. That last sentence is such true truth
Will be watching that doc on Common People as soon as I get home. That song is… frequently on in our house, shall we say.
An hour of my life is the least I owe that song.
Mmmhmm.
OMG, I clicked SO EXCITEDLY. I love Pulp, I love the ever living hell out of that album and I Spy is basically my favourite thing EVER.
A while back I was reading a New Yorker article about the Greek debt crisis, and the finance minister, and there in the middle of this article that was half global finance, half politician’s profile, they casually tossed out the idea that “Common People” was written about the minister’s wife, Danae Stratou, and I had to take a serious break because that was MUCH MORE INTERESTING and why didn’t they focus on THAT!?
Sure, I *should* have been more interested in Greek debt, but come ON!
*gasps* I see she did study at St Martin’s College!
WHILE HE WAS THERE!
I feel like if newspapers consistently LED with this fact, there would be a great deal more interest in the Greek debt crisis.
Thanks to the joy of working at home I will be watching it as soon as I have sat through a tedious meeting on table formatting.
I love Pulp! Both the music, and Jarvis Cocker’s extremely sexy voice. My brother got me into them before he decided that they, too, were Too Mainstream for him.
J.C. is the same age as my mum, which weirds me out about my crush sometimes (also, they are both from Sheffield!). But I mostly fancy him in videos from around the year I was born, so I guess that’s… only a ten year creepy hypothetical age difference, which is probably fine, yeah?
tl;dr I have the hots for Jarvis Cocker possibly in real life but 100% in a hypothetical time-travelling situation and my brother is a hipster
Jarvis Cocker’s voice was 110% absolutely integral for my sexual formation. And that line: “I’ve kissed your mother twice/now I’m working on your dad”. *swoooooooon/sploooooooooooooosh*
Love britpop, love class analysis, what’s not to love?
My husband’s two generations out of the coal mines of Yorkshire. Class analysis is A Topic at our house. Pulp’s from his hometown. This song comes up frequently.
Have you heard the William Shatner version? It is GLORIOUS.
http://youtu.be/ainyK6fXku0
That song reminds me so much of being drunk and out dancing in the mid-to-late ’00’s.
I’m having A Day. Or rather, A Week. I don’t even have enough time for The Toast 🙁
But I saw Zootopia last night (for some ridiculous reason or another, it’s called Zoomania here in Germany), and it was great! And I hear back from an internship today, so at least I’ll know if I have the job or not by tonight.
Also, is anyone else having trouble with IntenseDebate lately? I haven’t changed the settings and yet I don’t receive e-mails about replies anymore.
I got some yesterday but not all of them.
THERE ARE GAY! BACK-UP! TIGER! DANCERS! In Zootopia.
(Also, every time I saw a hamster actuary in a suit I LOST MY MIND.)
I thought they were lemmings!
Oh, the music show! The app! The song! So catchy.
I have not seen the movie but I have watched the music video over and over again because it is catchy and cute, and those tiger dancers are the BEST.
I fell. out. at the tigers. I mean it helped that I was a little buzzed,since we were at Movie Tavern and I ordered myself a Not Your Father’s Root Beer Float to go with my popcorn but still. Best kids’ movie I’ve seen in a while.
I have only gotten some e-mails lately.
I had no real knowledge of Faye Resnick before listening to the Bitch Fest podcast and listening to Danielle and Casey rip into her every time she appears on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (also, it is the best podcast ever I love every time they try horrifying Real Housewives products)
every time they plug whispering angel (“has the angel whispered to you?”) i crack up
I have never watched an episode of RHOBH, but I love Bitch Sesh. Casey Wilson dogging on Adam Palley and teasing Jerry O’Connell about Fuller House is the best thing I’ve heard in weeks.
Just started listening to Bitch Sesh last night (and I’ve currently listened to…8 eps) so when I saw that Nicole had written about Faye Resnick, I assumed it was Real Housewives-related.
I had a dream last night where I was teaching my boss’s children how to dance (editor’s note: I do not know how to dance) and I said, in the dream: Dance is just movement with intention.
So I am now ready to teach dance to anyone. I think, in the dream, my rates were pretty reasonable.
My favorite job ever was when I worked as a library page in high school (read: shelved all the books). I love libraries; they are the best.
I worked as a library page too! The librarian was notoriously surly but I won her over with jokes about YA novels and she became a loyal ally who covered for me when I was skipping class. I heart librarians…
Libraries ARE the best. The ones in the interview sounded especially great; I wish my local libraries had more outdoor space associated with them. The one I go to most frequently is pretty close to a park, but it’s more of a collection of sports fields than anywhere you’d sit down or go for a walk.
That was my high school job too! It was so much fun, except I kept getting distracted by the books I was shelving and reading them.
Did that in both highschool and college. Oh libraries how I love thee, let me count the ways.
My first job was also at a library! I was 15 and monitored the computer area in the Children’s Room. This mostly entailed helping little kids put the Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo CD in the computer, but I would also help the librarians out by doing little tasks for them, like helping make the newsletter. My personal statement for college actually ended up being about how much I loved being in a library.
Growing up, my super-strict Pakistani parents did not let me do the normal American teenager hanging out with friends at the mall thing. The library was pretty much the only place where my parents would drop me off and let me hang for hours without checking in. Luckily, my friends were also big nerds, and so some of my best times from high school include spending marathon days studying for AP exams at the library, walking over to the pizza place nearby to take breaks, getting shushed by the librarians and older patrons when we would double over laughing about something we had decided was hilarious. I have so much affection and nostalgia for that library now, and how good and freeeeeeeee it made me feel.
This was my HS job too, and also the BEST first job. And I am zero percent surprised that so many toasties chose Playing with Books as their first jobs.
Gov Snyder is testifying right now. I want to punch him in the face.
Please do, if you have the opportunity.
Yeah if people want to get enraged, the @FlintRising twitter feed is keeping track of it, and also suitably furious at him.
We will all start a GOFUNDME for your defense
Haven’t even read the links yet and just need to say that I would like an adorable fluffnugget with ears please, immiediately.
The article on dysphagia is terrifying and fascinating and also includes some of the strangest stock images. What, for example, are they trying to get across with this?
Magic act gone awry? Or something about incontinence. One of the two.
maybe both?
It looks to me like that vase is cosplaying one of the creepy children from The Others. That can be the only explanation.
Waterboarding is done by placing a wet cloth over a persons mouth and then pouring water on the cloth, so it’s not a symbol so much as an exact representation. (I wish I did not know how waterboarding is done.)
Yeah, i looked at that picture and my first thought was “waterboarding,” and all the reasons for that connotation is enough depressing material for one day.
It would be a better world if fewer of us had cause to know about waterboarding.
Guys! I’m never on time for these!
I know this is more OT stuff but I just had a couple of experiences tonight where I really felt, for the first time in a while, like I’m on the right path. I got a bit of validation from people whose opinion I value, and I impressed someone it’s really important for me to impress. Sometimes all it takes is a compliment and some mood lighting for me to feel like there’s a cosmic sign that I’m doing the right thing.
How is your week going?
Glad for you! It’s so great to get encouragement from someone you respect!
Please tell me I will find a good place to live and my parents will be able to fix their house instead of having to either sell it or stay in it without fixing it so it falls down around them. I’ve been so anxious about it I’ve been having dizzy spells and nausea and that feeling you get right before a migraine, but with no migraine (yet).
oh man, I long for that feeling!! Go you!!
I work full time and am in a masters program nights/weekends, and this is midterms. So my week has been full of sleep deprivation.
Last night I had a test, and I’m taking this class with a professor who is absolutely notorious for assigning way more than can feasibly be accomplished in the allotted time and then heckling you about it. (It sounds terrible, but it’s fine once you *know* that’s the way it works – my first class with him I almost dropped out of the program thinking that I was just a failure). The test had 3 problems. I finished 1.5, wrote pseudocode for the others, and then time was up and I turned everything in and went out and had a drink.
I’m actually really pleased about that. I’m in my last semester and I just sort of feel like “no, you cannot ruffle me.” It was a similar sort of sense that I am doing the right thing – I no longer doubt I belong in this program or profession.
Yay! While loving yourself is great and all, I am a big fan of outside validation and cosmic signs! Congrats!
My week has been a bit up and down, but this morning was beautiful, I’m wearing new pants (which, if you’re gonna wear pants…new pants are good), and it’s my Friday.
Things are gonna be ok! High five!
I’m so happy for you! That is the best feeling. 🙂
My week is going much better than expected – I have two closing shifts this week, each one followed by not just an opening shift but an *extra-early* opening shift for an offsite meeting. I managed the first set okay yesterday, although I was pretty cranky by dinnertime; today I embark on the next one. Wish me luck.
Sansa’s lifeguarding strategy is to jump into the water and either slosh it all out or soak it all up like a fluffy sponge. Seeee? Is no more water to drown in; water is allllll in dog!
Maybe it’s just the angle of that picture but that bathtub looks huge and glorious and I would like to come over and have a bath and be supervised by Lifeguard Dog if possible, please?
Seconded!!
It looks giant! Does Nicole really have a bath big enough for a small child to swim around in?
Does Nicole’s small child really have such long, cascading locks? Amazing.
THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT CONVERSATION BETWEEN LIN-MANUEL AND WILLIAM DANIELS AKA MR FEENY AKA THE ORIGINAL JOHN ADAMS IN 1776.
I AM DYING.
IT’S ALL TOO MUCH FOR ME TO HANDLE
Amazing. Thank you for sharing!
Yaaaaaaaaay!
“You know, Lin-Manuel, I saw the “60 Minutes” piece about Hamilton, and I was so impressed. The way you put his story into music, into—I don’t know what you call it. Be-bop? Rap? It really grabs people. And it has to grab people. Otherwise, it could be kind of boring just to talk about history.”
This is like the urtext of a grandpa comment. Some excellent grandpa-ing right there. 😀
Thank you for linking the interview because it was delightful! And I am not really a musicals person at all.
William Daniels is the grandpa we all wish we had.
>I don’t know what you call it. Be-bop? Rap?
To be fair I’ve listened to the first CD of the cast album twice and have both times waited patiently for the rapping to start
That line killed me. I am posting from beyond the grave.
Thank you, bless you for this. This made my morning.
AKA THE VOICE OF KITT IN KNIGHT RIDER (if you are an Old like me)
This is 100% what I needed this morning and it was everything I wanted it to be. When Lin-Manuel says, “You helped raise me too, sir” I may have teared up a bit.
I KNEW THAT’S WHO HE MEANT BY JOHN ADAMS.
This is AMAZING.
The whole bit where Nixon’s people wanted them to cut Cool Conservative Men? OF COURSE THEY DID.
sweet jesus
Aaaahhh that was great, thank you for linking to this!
A website I’ve now forgotten said that Audrey Hepburn wanted Julie Andrews to have the part, but was told it was either her (Audrey) or Elizabeth Taylor.
I know a couple who have seen both the stage and screen versions of My Fair Lady, and one person preferred Julie Andrews and the other preferred Audrey Hepburn in the part. Considering that this casting meant we got My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins, I’m happy with it.
This is AMAZING
why is Lin-Manuel’s hair so silky in that photo…. <3
MISTER FEENYYYYY!!!!!
Sorry to Open Thread a Link Roundup but my fiancee broke up with me last night.
Additional context: her mother died a week ago, for those of you who have been following along.
She told me I don’t have to move out though. Which is good because we are two months into a lease and I am flat broke after having sunk [a large amount of money] into moving in with her and proposing to her.
IDK I am a little worried she’s going to hurt herself…. She cried all night and asked me to be her roommate instead of her fiancee because apparently I am her best friend and the only one who understands her and IDK, I just feel kind of dead. No idea what to do.
I’m so sorry. I hope things start to look up soon. Hoping for the best for you. I can’t pretend to know how to advise you but we will be thinking about you!
Oh, my gosh, honey. So sorry. I usually tell people that if they are broken up with they need to accept it, but she is actively grieving and my mom said she regrets making so many big decisions in the year after she lost her mom. I would just be there for her and not make it hard for her to walk back if she realizes that was the reaction of bereavement. But I know NOTHING ABOUT YOUR RELATIONSHIP.
Thanks Nicole. Actually I feel like you comment on my threads a lot, so maybe you do know something about my relationships? Which is neat. It’s like having a celebrity comment on your life 🙂
Last night ex-fiancee also sent a text ending a 13-year friendship so we are maybe not dealing with peak levels of emotional stability right here. She said she was “having a nervous breakdown” too.
That said, I need a few days to figure out whether to move out or not. I am dealing with a lot of mental health problems and I’m not sure I can be her friend through all this while she works it out.
It makes a lot of sense that she might be reacting to her mother’s death. She might be feeling like she needs some radical changes to feel better, and the juxtaposition of a recent engagement and her mother’s death might be too much. Grief combined with big changes is a lot to handle!
If you want to be her friend, be supportive and kind. Take care of yourself and find ways to help. Encourage other friends to pitch in with emotional and practical help. When things settle down a bit, you might want to gently nudge her into seeing a therapist to work on her grief. See someone yourself, if you can, or ask friends for help because you need some support of your own.
If you can’t handle this, it will suck for her that you’re stepping back. She will very likely feel that you abandoned her when she needed you. It will be more honest to let her down now, at least, just be prepared for the consequences if you have any hope of getting back together. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but she has let you know what she expects so there’s probably no way around that. You can try to ease the blow by getting other people to be supportive and discussing your reasons might help her understand you.
I’m sorry that you’re in this horrible situation and that your fiance has lost a parent. You have some hugs and sympathy, if you want them.
Well, I have never lost a parent. But I have been raped, assaulted, depressed, and suicidal. And I guess I just feel like a big part of being an adult is understanding, no matter what you’re going through, that the end result of telling someone you can’t be friends/lovers/etc, followed by hours of screaming and crying at them… sometimes results in that person stepping back for a while.
You are correct. And maybe “a while” = forever. You wouldn’t be wrong to respond that way. You also wouldn’t be wrong to give her some space and then come back to the subject later. You will figure out what to do, I am confident. We got your back.
This is a very wise thing to know and I am glad you know it.
I’m somewhat confused by your comment, because I don’t think my comment said or implied that you couldn’t step back or that her reactions couldn’t have an effect.
You didn’t say in your other comment that there were “hours of screaming and crying at [you]”, only that she cried all night. I don’t know how I could have assumed that, even if I wanted to make assumptions. I don’t, because I don’t know you or her.
Either way, my comment and most other comments here saying the same thing are still valid. I know I rambled a lot in my comment and maybe my point got lost in that, it was just: she reacted a certain way, based on that reaction and the larger picture of your relationship you can either stay or step back for a while or forever. It just depends on what you want from your life.
Was it because I offered advice on what to do if you stayed or because I talked about her grief?
I hope you’re not saying that because you reacted to trauma a certain way that she shouldn’t be hit so hard by this or should react like you did? Since you’re a member here, I don’t think that’s what you’re saying?
Knowing that your girlfriend screamed and cried AT you for hours sounds really bad. I still don’t want to make assumptions but it sounds like both of you could use with some time away from each other, at the very least.
While I was looking for the comment to reply to, I saw hellebore_’s comment. It is a good comment and I agree and that’s the spirit I’m trying to comment in. That is, I don’t want to judge her (or you) from where I am.
I’m sorry if my comment sounded like I was pushing you either way, discounting anything about your relationship, or taking sides. That was not what I intended and not the point I was trying to make.
I hope this makes everything clearer now, if my comment sounded off somehow.
I am so sorry.
You don’t have to know what to do yet.
This!
I’m so sorry this happened to you. I hope you can spend a few nights with a friend or family member so that you can sort out what your plan of action is. Your ex doesn’t get to dump you and then take advantage of the fact that you care about her by using you as her support during this tough time. You gotta rally Team You (which includes all of us here at the Toast!) and figure out how to move forward with your life.
Much love and internet hugs <3
Yeah, I think that’s the best plan.
We’ve had a break before. Last time she talked about breaking up, I took her at her word and got my stuff and left. That night she called me drunk and weeping and begged me to take her back.
So who knows, maybe that will happen again. All I know is she’s wreaking havoc on my rental history. Not to mention my emotional stability lol. So I am feeling pretty done.
Obvious disclaimer that I don’t know you or your relationship, but – that’s not okay. You are not a toy, to be discarded and then picked up according to fiancee’s whims. I was on the side of accepting this as a part of bereavement, but since it has happened before, it seems like a trust issue.
I know it’s really hard to leave relationships you’ve invested a lot in (emotionally and financially). But living together post-breakup is nigh on impossible. Neither of you will be able to have healthy relationships outside of each other, and it sounds like the relationship you have with each other is not the greatest.
My ex and I had a pretty toxic relationship. We broke up, but we’re stuck living together. And it meant we weren’t broken up. We still slept together and had horrible, horrible fights. The only reason we were able to break the cycle was he went to jail. It’s terrible to say, but I think it’s the best thing that could have happened – otherwise we would probably still be together, making each other miserable, becoming more and more abusive.
You’re not me, I know. Maybe you can set up and maintain healthy boundaries. But that seems an awful lot to ask of you – for you to try to deal with your own issues, deal with those boundaries, and help her through this time.
I don’t think you need to move out today. But I think you should be looking to move out soon. Maybe that means living with family, maybe that means living in a shithole with a hellish roommate, but trust me, anything is better (even abject poverty) than living with an emotional vampire who treats you as her own personal comfort object.
Man, that sounds horribly confusing and conflicting. In general, it is Not Really OK for people to break up with you and then ask you to remain their support structure, and normally I’d strongly recommend distancing yourself. But given that she’s so recently bereaved, life is probably not making a whole lot of sense for her right now, so if you feel that you can continue to support her and would like to do so, then that would be a brave thing to do. (Though it would also be totally OK if you didn’t feel able to.) Set the boundaries you feel comfortable setting, and remember that you get to change them later if you want to (as does she.)
Whether you do or not, do make sure you take care of yourself, and that you have other people to look after you. You need people who will let you process your hurt and upset when you start to feel it, and who will remind you that you are also important.
*gentle hugs*
Oh, man. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how tough that must be. Seconding that no matter what you decide, remember that you have to take care of yourself. You can have a lot of sympathy for what someone’s going through and still not cast yourself in the role of the one and only person in charge of helping them— that’s usually not a good dynamic for anyone involved. Infinite hugs. You’re going to get through this.
I agree with everyone, be gentle with yourself. And you do not have to know what to do just yet. More will be revealed as a little time passes. Hugs to you.
oh, how awful, [internet hugs] for you. I have no advice, but want to reassure you that you are always 1000% welcome to vent at us.
I am so, so sorry. This sounds completely devastating. I agree with the commenters above that she might just not be thinking very clearly right now and is probably trying to process a lot of different emotions and making sense of her life right now. But you still deserve to take care of yourself and be taken care of– is there anyone you can go to right now, even if it’s just a few hours, to try to process what is going on?
Social, I’m so sorry.
I think you are correct that you need to take some time before making decisions. It is good that your ex is not requiring you to move out, so you have some time. I think you are also correct in questioning whether you can be her friend just now.
More Social For The Win: keeping your own mental health problems in view. You would be correct to make your own health a priority over hers. She’s an adult and can take care of herself, as hard as that is right now while she’s grieving. And you are the *only* one who can take care of you.
I don’t know enough to say for sure, but my instinct is that you will do well to focus on finding housing elsewhere, eventually. I think any flavor of relationship you have with your ex in the future will be best served by separate homes. Even if you become a couple again.
But most of all, I think what’s best for your mental health will be separate living space. I understand that may need to wait, but putting an end date on your cohabitation may be what’s best.
I trust your judgment. I support your decisions, even if they differ from how I imagine your situation. ::Toasthugs::
RoseCamelia thank you <3<3<3
I just called my old landlord, who is amazing, and asked her if I could stay in my old place for a few days. It’s still vacant. Technically it’s even still mine because we had a month of overlap on the leases, and after that I told landlord she could keep my deposit so I was covered in case something happened this month. Crediting this to some damn fine INFJ intuition. I will be late on April rent if I decide to stay because, I have no money right now. But that part I can figure that out later.
You hit the nail on the head. Separate housing, at least temporarily, might fix a lot of our problems. Something in my relationship with ex-fiancee seems to work much better when I have the fallback of another place. We did this thing for 8 months where I lived with her and still had the old place and in retrospect those were the best times in our relationship. I could go through our respective mood swings (she and I have between the two of us four…. 4!!! mental disorders) and still feel safe and covered if anything fell through.
The thing that kills me is that I just feel like I should have grown past this level of dysfunction in my life… I’m 26… this is 20-year-old behavior… on my end too. Anyway, tonight I’m going to take an air mattress and sleep at my place.
Thank you so much for your support. We’ve never met in real life, but you have been a friend to me.
26 is not old enough to have everything figured out. 105 is not old enough. We are imperfect beings. You are going through so much you should not be beating up on yourself in this way. Full stop. A lot of things are not making sense yet.
The option of your other place is the best one for now. Crisis collision course is hard on everyone and there is history there that you are right not to ignore. Be gentle with yourself and choose distance for now. I am not in the habit of giving unsolicited advice, but I hope you don’t mind my chiming in.
Oh, damn, Social, I’m so sorry this has happened to you.
I’m very very glad you’ve got the option to go to your old place. I think getting some physical distance is very wise. Do you have folks you can reach out to for some emotional/logistical (moving, small loans?) support?
As always, we’re here. You can always email me at lauren at my username dot com if you need to talk or vent or anything. <3 toasthugs for you.
You are doing exactly the right thing. Getting into your own space will be a big help.
I know, my ex and I lived together for six months after our breakup because we couldn’t sell the house.
Getting into my own apartment was the biggest relief imagineable.
Peace and good mental health to you.
I’m so sorry to hear your rough time has compounded, and glad you’re making yourself and your mental health the priority right now.
If you are the person I think you are, you were the person where your girlfriend was demanding a lot of commitment because she was going through rough stuff with her mom (And brother?) is that you? And there you were, stepping up with the commitment.
If so, extra huge hugs, this sucks no matter what, but if I am remembering this correctly you have been through a real whiplash of a year and that’s completely unfair and I just want you to know that as a stranger I validate any feeling you have of, “this is SO UNFAIR WHY ME”
I’d recommend therapy. For you, for her. It’s a strange messy horrible place you are in right now, and I think there’s no right way to be- whether you pull back or stay present in her life, it’s just going to be hard for a while. Get yourself someone on your team as soon as you can, and if you can, persuade her to have someone to talk to on her team, so she has someone else to turn to besides you, as you build those boundaries if you need to.
I’d also really strongly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0097CWNSO/ref=d…
I tell everyone in a breakup about it, and it’s because it really helped me with that panicky, can’t breathe, what is my life even about feeling that happens, where you can’t even imagine what to do next. This is a very step by step, here’s what to do next book and I credit it with a real good bounce back after a 4 year relationship came crashing down in the nearly engaged stage.
Yes, that is me! Her mother began to get really sick around Christmas and this is when she proposed and asked me to formally move in. So yes, I did those things. And proposed to her too.
Haha thank you. My life is kind of always a mess because I am mentally ill or just make bad choices sometimes or maybe both, plus I have an abusive family whom I do love and try to maintain relationships with. I’m in therapy and on meds. So oddly enough, thanks to those two things I am more stable than I’ve ever been, despite what’s going on now.
Appreciate the rec too 🙂
I have a spare room if things get worse, or if you need to get out of town for a while. I’m in Southern California. dangerflakes at hotmail.
Hang in there. Sorry you’re going through this.
You are a very good person. .
Wow. Thank you. I’m working with my old landlord to try to get covered on the housing front. But this took my breath away. Thank you for the offer.
Oh, I am so sorry to hear this.
Try not to be too hard on yourself or on her. Losing a parent is an exceptional state of grief, one that is hard to understand from the outside no matter how close you are to her. I wouldn’t judge her or think things she does right now are indicative in any way of her long-term character, because they’re not — that would be wrong not just in an ethical sense but also in a factual one. Yet at the same time, she may take a while to come out of this state, so you do need to take good care of yourself in the meanwhile and maybe take a little distance now.
This is a very good, practical response, thank you. I am taking a little distance tonight and maybe through the weekend.
Once the storm passes (and I don’t know how long this could take… maybe years from what I understand about grieving) she may have a better picture of what she wants and needs.
As a person who unfortunately destroyed a relationship when my own mother died, I just want to chime in here and say that everything the gang is saying is spot on and even if it hurts to see you walk away, one day she will likely develop the perspective necessary to understand how much her behaviour hurt you. I am grateful that my ex walked away from me because I am haunted by having hurt her and glad it didn’t go any further than it did.
I am so sorry. I hope you get all the space and understanding and support that you need.
I’m so so sorry. This is a terrible situation.
Seconding all the things others have said (therapy, this could be her reaction to grief but that doesn’t make it okay, all). I don’t know your relationship and I don’t know what exactly is best but I hope you find it. We’re all rooting for you.
Social, please contact me at rmcd 1974 [at] hotmail [dot] com.
FUCK FUCK FUCK. In a country that won’t let me watch the “Common People” documentary, and Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service has just been suspended until October.
FUCK.
another terrifying medical thing I read about yesterday: people can apparently get strokes from having their head in the basins at salons. Who knew?!?!
Anyone else catch Zouks saying “Heynong man” in the latest Brooklyn Nine-Nine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpdzoOA7kvU
YES
FYI HE WAS ON THIS WEEK’S REPLY ALL PLAYING “YES YES NO” AND MAKING FUN OF ASSHOLE BRONIES
I immediately had to go re-listen to that CBB bit afterwards. “Did you just say ‘Hey, NONG-Man?'”
This is the best kind of world’s colliding!
I did not catch that!
I confess I’m not in love with the Zouks character – what is the point of him? Gross love interest for Rosa?
I don’t want to be super whiny first thing in the morning, but it is totally not okay to ask public librarians what the weirdest thing they ever saw was. (In the LitHub interview series.)
Public libraries are halfway to being homeless shelters these days because so many other social services have been cut. Also, public librarians usually work by privacy codes and other policies that tell them not to talk about patron behaviour in public. Between those two (and human decency), it is OUTRAGEOUS that one of those interviewees answered that question the way she did: http://lithub.com/librarian-confidential-polli-ke…
Really, I don’t think there’s a need to excuse yourself. “Don’t talk about patrons around other potential patrons (i.e. – EVERYONE)” is rule fucking number one. I supervise graduate student public service workers. I tend to be extremely laid-back and celebratory of their learning processes, but, oh my god, I have I made it really clear what I would do if I ever caught them making patrons joke or disdain fodder.
I’ll stop here before I start ranting about ALA Think Tank.
good LORD has nobody in Think Tank heard of confidentiality, patron or employee or otherwise?
it is totally not okay to ask public librarians what the weirdest thing they ever saw was
It would be awesome if someone went down the truly geeky path, though: “Oh, my God, it was about five years ago but it still makes me laugh – someone had shelved Knittlework: A History in 004452.9! Haha, I know, right?”
I frequently talk about the ridiculous choices my fellow Oxfam volunteers made when choosing which section to shelve books in. THAT IS NOT ITS GENRE, DID YOU EVEN LOOK AT IT? (Most awkward was the time when I found a book – in the stockroom, thankfully, not on the open shelves – which had been placed in the children’s section, presumably because it was a poetry collection titled “Child’s Play”. I opened it to a page that started “They hanged a man who raped a child”. NOT FOR CHILDREN.
Once in Chapters I found Lamb by Christopher Moore in the Religion section. I was VERY amused by the thought of someone looking for a serious book about Jesus and buying that instead.
I once found an illustrated edition of Droll Tales by Balzac in the children’s book section of a bookshop. I had to point out to the manager that kids would not be interested in stories of cuckolds, no matter how well illustrated. Sigh.
This has brought joy to my evening.
Earlier this year the engineering library found a book in their stacks that had been missing from the campus library at which I work. The title: 101 Bundt Cakes.
I think that there are and should be distinctions made between the information requests that patrons make and the books that they check out or web sites that they visit–all of which absolutely should remain confidential–and public behavior, because as we know libraries are public spaces. In particular, I don’t think that there should be any “privacy code” when a patron harasses a librarian, including when a patron makes inappropriate “information requests” (such as asking a librarian to read sexually explicit passages from books aloud, and insisting that a particular librarian needs to be the one to do it. True story.) The story that you link to may very well have been reported in the local paper.
Yeah, we have a patron who’s notorious for asking only the under-40 female staff to help him open/print attachments from his email and it’s ALWAYS HIS GENITALS.
I had a librarian mistake me for a homeless person once. She was very nice. Gave me a membership and whispered I didn’t need to pay.
So Shonda Rhimes has a pilot called ‘Toast’, which I am going to assume will consist of a Mallory, no fewer than 2 Nicoles, a Jaya, a puppy who is the proper heir to Winterfell, and a lot of hypothetical boyfriends/girlfriends. They will travel down the slut road together and expose the truth about Ronbledore.
http://tvline.com/2016/01/28/pilot-abc-shondaland…
I NEED IT NOW
I don’t know who the 2 dudes pictured are going to play, probably either dads or deleted commenters.
I like the deleted commenters option. One will offer unsolicited advice about dealing with white nonsense and the other will try to mansplain Objectivism. Our heroes will promptly throw them both into the sea.
Two Monks!
I *think* you mean hypothetical boyfriends/girlfriends/tousle-hearted progeny. Biebs in the canon, yo!
Fear not, for Biebs will arrive in season 3, much to the shock and dismay of both Nicoles and Jaya.
Naysayers will accuse Justin of embarrassing Canada; Mallory will point out that her nightmare son isn’t as embarrassing as Canada’s addiction to bitumen or the uninterrupted violence of settler colonialism. Then she will punch Jack White in the face.
(Can you tell I have nothing to do at work today?)
Your slow work day is a blessing for the rest of us here.
This is the best comment ever.
Oh this sounds so terrible.* It’s an entire vehicle for Shonda Rhimes to write monologues that all sound exactly the same no matter who is delivering them.
*The actual show sounds terrible. They hypothetical show with Mallory, Nicoles, Jaya and a puppy sounds delightful 🙂
In her defense, Aaron Sorkin does the same thing and his monologues are the Platonic ideal of Mansplanation…
With recurring appearances by Matt, Liana, and a Mysterious Bartender, and guest starring Roxane and various Toasties, y/y?
Like Tino, the bartender will be constantly referred to but never seen.
Roxanne and her boyfried Channing Tatum will have recurring guest star billing as Mulder/Scully style private detectives.
Matt and Liana will contribute Roger Rabbit style cartoon accomplices.
Episode 3 will explore the dissolution of Bette and Tina’s toxic relationship as witnessed by Mallory for reasons that have yet to be explained.
An endless stream of Toasties shall be on hand for bit roles. I volunteer to be the butler.
Hahahahaha, I love that the main pairing from The L-Word somehow ends up in the mix.
YES.
YES PLEASE
Speaking of Shonda Rhimes, I just read this great article about the movie Crossroads, which starred Britney Spears. Did y’all know that Shonda Rhimes wrote the script, and that the movie was directed by a woman? And that Taryn Manning (of Orange is the New Black fame, among other things) and Zoe Saldana co-starred?
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/shonda-rhi…
I’ve never actually seen the movie, but the article was very interesting (and now I do want to see the movie).
OMG I am totally going to watch that.
The wig game on People vs OJ may be tight, but that piece they put on Leonard Roberts in the Marcia Marcia Marcia episode was WHACK AS HELL. How did they do my boo like that?
ETA: Look at this tragic nonsense. Leonard is the handsome gentleman of color who is not Chris Darden. You know him from Buffy, Drumline, Love Jones, and just being amazing.
Internet dance videos are MY FAVORITE THINGS. These ladies are getting added to the YouTube list immediately. Does anyone else have favorites? I’m kind of obsessed with Willdabeast and his classes.
If you haven’t yet discovered Urban Dance Camp videos, well, apologies for the loss of all your productivity for a day. (Hilty and Bosch are unreal.)
Hilty and Bosch are so ridiculously amazing.
Alllll the internet dance videos. My favorite part of this one is watching all the people from around the world doing the routine.
The Montreal Swing Riot hosts a competition between Lindy Hoppers & Street dancers every year and it’s always great. This video is long but worth it: https://vimeo.com/142215364
I’ve seen a couple of those Montreal videos and they give me hope for the world, somehow.
Tricia Miranda for AMAZING hip-hop. Her dances are always amazing and watching all the class do the combos is incredible, so many talented people.
Kate Jablonski (Beyond Worlds) for contemporary/modern — these kids are like middle/high school age and they are SO talented — and Kate is an AMAZING choreography with fantastic musicality.
And YANIS MARSHALL for all around sexy, beautiful, high heel, R&B dancing. Bask in his glory.
The When You Work At A Museum tumblr has an annual “dance off” competition. It is… highly entertaining 🙂
I’m REALLY into Korean dance studios at the moment. Check out Girin Jang and 1MILLION Dance Studio!
M’y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npuVa2Gly5E
Yak Films https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRRnAhmB58
Question! So I saw Nicole post something about Learned League on Twitter. I looked it up and it seems AWESOME. I am a former high school quizbowl/trivia nut and it seems like a really fun (though difficult) pastime. However, I noticed it’s invite-only to participate and the only person I ‘know’ in it is Nicole. Are any other Toasties LL members? Is it super exclusive? How might one go about trying to join?
I was curious about this as well but forgot to mention it. I love trivia but no longer have the time for bar trivia on weeknights, so I’m always looking for new ways to get my fix online.
Email me, we can talk about it.
I’m on it! You wouldn’t be able to join for this season, but they have “seasons” every couple months. They last 25 days, weekdays only, and the biggest rule is to not forfeit so you’d have to be sure you’d be available to submit answers (even six “I have no idea”s in a row as a last ditch) every day for those five weeks. If you’re interested, you can ask me any other questions and we can find a way to stay in touch so I can let you know when the next season is starting.
This sounds PERFECT to me – I’m uncomfortable in bars, but I love trivia. I have shallow knowledge of an infinite number of things. I’m looking into it!
I do it! I really dig it, even though I am terrible! I like the defense aspect of it too (you assign points to your opponent of the day). You need to referred by a current member, and I’m happy to give a referral to a Toastie (but I only have one per season.)
I’d like to try this — I used to do a lot of it in high school. Do you think you might sponsor me? If you might, I will check email here for the next couple of days: raw.cooked [at] gmail.com
Just sent you an email with more info!
Hi! I am an LL rookie this season, thanks to a referral from another Toast commenter. Rookies can play for free, so I haven’t encountered this yet, but there is a pay structure after the rookie season – something like $25/year for the most basic level. At that point, each person can refer one new player per season.
It’s super fun and I fully intend to sign up as a regular member after my rookie season, so at some point I will be able to refer people. Others among the Toast commentariat sometimes post available referrals as well.
I would maybe like a referral too? I mean, I already do a lot of test-like things in the morning, but the drawback of that is that you don’t have the competitive aspect. Full disclosure: am pretty competitive.
I am now far too aware of my own swallowing. My life is over.
There’s this hilarious book where the main character is a hypochondriac and she’s recruited by a group who use their neuroses for good…ish. At one point she’s kidnapped by a serial killer and escapes by making him aware of how weird swallowing feels–is it really supposed to feel like that? No, you probably have a degenerative nerve condition. If you free my hands I can do some tests to see how bad it is….
This sounds great! What’s the title?
Mind Games by Carolyn Crane!
Its my one weakness! I would be powerless to this person!
Like do ever notice how your skin feels? Or how much you blink? That can’t be right.
I sometimes become very aware of my tongue, and it is weird. Obviously replying to this means it has happened again and I have a meeting in 3 minuted during which I am going to have to try not to choke on my tongue while speaking.
YES! Tongue awareness is the worst, like it doesn’t fit in my mouth? Whhhyyy
I used to get it really bad with my toes for some reason as a kid; it would lead to complete meltdowns about wearing shoes and my toes touching eachother and my mother had absolutely no idea why I was so insane (My toes don’t feel right mother, how can you not understand this!)
It’s the relationship between the tongue andthe teeth for me. Is it supposed to touch all of them? Have they always felt like this? Are my teeth moving? Why is my tongue so puffy?
“Why is my tongue puffy and how bad is it” is something I constantly have to watch, since the dust in my office can send me into anaphylaxis if I’m exposed to too much.
Ugh I have a popcorn bit stuck in my gums right now and it’s making me uncomfortably aware of my entire mouth. This is truly the worst. *dramatic flop*
I get the tongue thing too! It is the worst! I will decide the reason I have a headache is that I press my tongue too hard into the roof of my mouth, but can’t remember what I usually do with my tongue when I am not aware of it, and so I try to let it gently rest in the bottom half of my mouth but still find it pressing against the top anyway. Probably I do the tongue-pressing thing all the time but only notice it when I have a headache, but who knows? Ugh, tongues!
I sometimes freak out about hair. Like, I am fine with hair but then sometimes I’m on the bus or in a crowd and I look around at all the hair (head hair) and I think “oh gross this hair is all just like….GROWING out of people’s heads” and then I have to distract myself very quickly.
People are so gross. Dead stuff hanging out of head is only the tip of the iceberg. (TOENAILS.)
A hairdresser once pointed out to me that hair? Growing out of a person’s head? Beautiful, enticing, we run our fingers through it, etc. Hair? That’s been cut off or otherwise is not attached to the person? DISGUSTING.
But when it’s on someone’s head, that means that 1. I can see who it belongs to, and 2. it’s not stuck to the bottoms of my feet.
I rented an apartment once that had not been properly cleaned after the last tenant and opened a bathroom drawer to find a drift of beard clippings. I almost died on the spot.
The worst part isn’t that it’s growing. The worst part is that it’s TOUCHING ME. MAKE IT STOP. No, don’t cut it. Just make it stop touching me!
I am frequently very aware of how my skin fits over my bones and it is very distracting and disturbing.
I am 36 and still sometimes breath and swallow at the same time and then choke. Like at least once a week.
I occasionally became overly aware of my own breathing. I am not thinking about it, then suddenly I am, then suddenly I am aware that I am consciously thinking, “inhale…exhale,” THEN I am aware that this is weird so I stop, and then I promptly forget to inhale and get a wee titch dizzy.
Have we talked about this already? http://jezebel.com/cunty-cuntish-cunted-and-cunti…
Heaven help me, I love this word because it’s one of the few ones left that shocks both sides of the aisle and therefore functions as a proper swear word.
This makes me cunting happy.
I feel like cunt is a much more acceptable word in the UK and Ireland (sweet jesus to the Irish love Cunt.), but its still my go to when I’m really pissed at something. Fuck has become far to diluted to really portray the sheer frustration and anger that cunt can put across.
My brother went to university in Scotland (we’re English), and came home with “cunt” being a very normal part of his vocabulary when he was talking to friends. I remember one time when he had a few mates over and they were all cunting this and cunting that, and I said very calmly, “Nothing wrong with cunts” and they all looked HORRIFIED like *I* was the one who’d brought up lady gardens. Heh.
So interesting. I feel like it’s the one (common) swear word I’ve never actually said. (But I always try to remind myself to give UK books/shows a pass when it comes up.) I can never think of it now without picturing that 30 Rock episode (“The C Word” – season 1). I kind of love broadcast eps that are clever about dealing with a word and not actually saying it, so I really like that one (though in general I am 30 Rock agnostic).
Relevant
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the word “cunt,” as it has a sturdy, strong sound to it. Once, years ago, I was in a sex toy shop, there were some vulva-shaped lollipops near the counter, and I said to my friend, “I want to get that!” and he was like, “What? No. Why?” and I was like, “Because they’re cuntilicious!”
And since then “cuntilicious” has been a thing with me, like a “stop trying to make cuntilicious happen. it’s not going to happen” thing.
Same, I really like it in a sexual context – I really don’t like the word pussy, and vagina is too clinical and also factually incorrect if you’re referring to the whole assemblage. But as a swear word I find it pretty objectionable, because cunts are fantastic! Although I have no problem with calling someone a twat or a prick, so I guess I’m a hypocrite
Nikki, thank you for the adoption series. The Chelsea Summers one (“Half-Dad”) is scarily close to my family story. It took me a long time to appreciate my dad’s (step-father’s) parenting, but this this this:
People say that you can’t choose your family, but people are wrong. You can choose your family. My birth father made choices not to be part of my life over and over again, every day for years and years, and one day I made a choice not to welcome him into mine. My dad and I made our choice to forever be part of each other’s lives decades ago, even if we can’t recall exactly when.
oh, thank you so much for reading the series; that means a lot to me! Chelsea’s essay is amazing, isn’t it? Hers was one of the first pitches I accepted. The best thing about editing this series is being introduced to so many great writers I’d never had a chance to work with before. The web team at Catapult is so wonderful, too, and I feel like they really get me and what I hoped this series would be!
I’m not adopted but that passage got me too. I have a friend who could have written that line. After 26 years of pretending I don’t exist, you want to be my dad? Sorry, I already have one.
Not LR related but is anyone else having a particularly emotional morning/yesterday? Last night my heart was squooshing tears out of my eyes because I miss academia, and I just found out a coworker’s doggie died and I don’t know what’s coming next. Even seeing Merrick Garland overcome yesterday morning got me. Am I alone?
Not feeling any emotions besides grouchy right now, but if it makes you feel any better, when I first got my job this fall, I cried every day about not being in grad school anymore 🙁
It does. Being able to walk 15 minutes to see to my dearest advisers was such a wonderful, beautiful thing and I couldn’t have known how hard it would hit me that it’s not possible anymore.
I definitely understand. I do feel like my sadness has worked itself out a bit during the last few months (maybe especially now that the sun is shining more often), but also I have a plan to go back to grad school hopefully, and I keep my mind on things related towards that like studying for the GRE subject test, applying for/writing a paper for a conference, etc. It helps..
I do feel like I lack a purpose outside of grad school. I don’t think that will ever change.
I’m in your boat. I got a tooth problem last night, and I am so sad about it that I am incapable of any kind of action. I have literally been sitting in my car for two hours rather than doing any of the various and sundry things that need to get done.
It’s especially ridiculous because this particular tooth problem has been a long time coming, so it’s not a surprise, and it’s not painful, so that’s not an excuse. I am just so overwhelmingly SAD about the state of my mouth and the fact that, barring a lottery win, I’m not going to be able to do anything at all about it. And I’m really scared that my (previously unaffected) visible teeth are going to go next and then I won’t be able to get a job when I finish my nursing degree, because no one in the Ozarks will hire a nurse with what looks like meth mouth.
So I’m just sad. Irrationally sad.
<3
Not irrational. Being unable to take care of yourself – whether physical pain is a factor or not – is a wholly terrible thing, and I am sorry you are feeling that.
Yes but I’m hormonal. The discussion yesterday about the prodigal son made me cry real tears. I don’t remember who (sorry) but someone commented about how glad the father was to see his son……..and I’m welling up again.
I felt that, too. It is an inherently powerful story – much of the commentary here was profound and deep – and I cry real tears when I stop to think about unconditional love, too.
I once saw Desmond Tutu speak, and it moved me utterly when he kept saying “God loves you” with such grace — written out can’t possibly be as powerful, but he said “God loves you . . . God loves you, God loves you” . . . with emphasis and explication that every single soul is given unconditional love, no matter what, despite what you may do or feel, it is always always there. I don’t believe in God in the literal sense, but I do believe that God is love, that the capacity for unconditional love is how we transcend ourselves, and that contemplation of that is the work of devotion.
Seeing the prodigal son as the recipient of this kind of love — that was the insight, that is what is true, and what is so hard not only to give but to receive, not to be forgiven for a thing but to be loved, always loved, always worthy of that love.
Yes! I heard someone talk once and one of the things they said was “you are the beloved of god” and it really hit me what that means, like, think about how you feel when your parent or child or lover or friend is happy to see you? The way their face lights up? That’s how god feels about you. Everybody, no matter what. (this is making me cry again.)
I also don’t believe in a personal god, or I do believe that I don’t know what god actually is, and I don’t think you can really use talk to explain it or whatever. Whatever. I love the prodigal son story. Parables aren’t to be parsed out once and for all, yo.
If you want an astrological explaination, the moon is in Cancer today and tomorrow. Cancer is a pretty emotional sign and the moon is all about our deepest feelings surfacing, so it makes sense that you might be feeling Some Stuff that’s ordinarily not as intense. We also just had an new moon eclipse in Pisces, and we’re in the month of Pisces, all of which is about our hidden emotions, family and romantic connections and our spiritual selves. You’re for sure not alone in feeling vulnerable right now.
My mom is a Cancer. She is 100% heart (for good and bad). I hoped someone in the know might drop a stars-related clue, and thank you for this! I am also considering laying out a Tarot for myself this evening. It will be the first chance I’ve had (that is, time alone) in several days, and I wish to invite my intuitive side to reflect on some things I’ve been mulling over. I’m a little bit afraid of what might come out of it. I was also grabbed right in the gut by yesterday’s LR commenter echoing (from the Ephron link) that the story you are afraid to tell is the one you should be telling. Which is to say, I have some things to write about. It’s like I’m trying to find gravity while being thrashed about by the tides.
“the story you are afraid to tell is the one you should be telling” is a perfect summary of what the Pisces eclipse was all about. New moons are a time for reflection and renewal, a starting over and a rexamining of old wounds. Eclipses are a challenge, asking us to look deep at the worst parts of ourselves and identify areas to change, and Pisces is all about The Feels, man. I’m glad I can be useful!
I found myself weeping yesterday over a) a gifset of the Obamas being affectionate anf b) misogyny and imperialism in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, so.
can we be bffs?
Nicole, you are perfect and can do no wrong but please reconsider putting bathtub pics of your kids online.
Not because of OMGPREDATORS, or not entirely, but because there are many children who will grow up to be the kind of adults who do not want childhood bathtub pictures of themselves online, and you have no way of knowing if your daughter will be one until she has grown up.
Full disclosure, I think I’m more uncomfortable about the photo than I otherwise would be because you’ve also shared quite a lot about your daughter’s dx and your battle to get appropriate care for her. I get why you would want to do that but – in later years your daughter may not want that to be public. Who lives who dies who tells your story etc.
While I’m generally on the same page as you; Children are people and may be people who don’t want their childhood photos online; I don’t this particular picture is all that problematic, there’s not much identifying features of the child (the dog is another story and there must be Sansa-philes at this point who are covertly sharing Sansa pictures and detectiving to track down where exactly she lives. Not me of course… just other people)
In fact I’ve noticed that Nicole is quite good at taking pictures of her adorable family and awesome dog, without featuring her children’s faces, which I presume is a deliberate decision on her part?
YES if I didn’t live in such a tiny flat I would totally try and dognap Sansa.
It’s true that the face in the photo is mostly obscured, and I’m sure that’s not accidental, but I still think it’s probably a good idea to err on the side of letting your children choose which of their bath pics go online.
Maybe this is triggering my “unsolicited parenting advice” buttons, and I don’t think you’re coming from a bad place at all, but I also think Nicole’s a pretty thoughtful person who’s very likely considered the points you bring up already. Especially because she’s already talked about not sharing specifics of her daughter’s diagnoses and all of her public discussion of it that I’ve seen has been focused on the system, not the child.
I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m in a Facebook group where just the other day a woman was having trouble understanding why posting pictures of her baby’s testicles might be problematic, I just think most people tend to think things through a little more.
Oh god, I definitely do not mean to imply that Nicole is a parenting moron who needs a random internet commenter to help her not fuck up her kids. It’s more that, knowing from Nicole’s writing that her kids’ privacy is something she takes seriously, I thought the perspective of an outside observer might be of interest.
It is entirely possible I was wrong about this and if so I am confident Nicole will joyfully disregard me.
I know! And I’m sure Nicole doesn’t need me, another rando internet commenter, riding to her rescue! 😛 Just wanted to register a vote for benefit of the doubt. BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT ALL AROUND.
The Toast has the best internet arguments.
Ha, for real.
“I just wanted to let you know that there’s a potential for somebody to be upset by this”
“I have alternate viewpoints to offer on this”
“Ok, but what about this point?”
“I don’t think we need to be having this discussion, because Nicole’s probably on top of it.”
“That’s a good point, just glad we all got our feelings out there. High five, good buddy.”
<3
My heart grew three sizes that day.
Varied opinions and backgrounds! Thoughtful, well-reasoned discussion of alternating viewpoints! Respectful disagreement and mindful listening! Active comment moderating! <3 <3 <3
Hi hi! I am in no way offended! I definitely deliberately picked a picture that could be either of my kids and displayed neither face nor “parts” and I routinely go through Twitter and delete things about her dx, which again, I have never specified, and am doing these things with very very conscious and deliberate thought processes, and this IS an excellent example of a Toast Argument.
Hey! Thanks for the reply, that all makes a lot of sense. I hadn’t realised about the Twitter editing but I think it’s a great way to balance you getting the support you need/helping support others in the same place with respecting your daughter’s right to her story.
Ahh and now I am all verklempt about how respectful and thoughtful the discussion here is.
SAME! HUG!
I’m a Librarian/Archivist. And I became a librarian for a few reasons:
1. I love learning. I don’t care how useless it is, I want that sweet information. I’m an info junkie.
2. I was an English major who didn’t want to teach high school english.
3. I love history. History is bizarre and cool and a lot of time shit happened that you wouldn’t believe, but it’s fact.
Like for several years there was an argument in congress about dyes in Margarine. Could you dye it to make it look more like butter? McCarthy had popular support at the time. Poland escaped the black plague because it allowed exiled Jews to live in their cities and they brought with them different and arguably better cleanliness standards. Dutch clean is all about dairies. During a 100 year period, the city of Avignon in France declared itself a republic twice, was besieged, forced to empty it’s moat which then refilled at the end of the month because of flooding and then became the home of the Papacy. Like, wtf, history?
4. I’m a know it all. Libraries are a place where this trait of mine is accepted and beloved.
5. I feel safe in a library. I walk into a library building and I feel calm and accepted. The library is my spiritual home. It’s like getting a big hug from information when you walk through the stacks.
BIG HUG FROM INFORMATION. I love, that’s exactly how it feels. Walking down aisles and running your fingers over spines, reading titles of things you’ll probably never read but are happy to know exist…mmmmm.
The original article, and this comment especially, make me REALLY want to drop everything and become a librarian, despite having a stable job I mostly enjoy. Are there any *downsides* to being constantly surrounded by books and obscure information and being valued for one’s know-it-all tendencies?
Well, the job market is crap, especially if you can’t move around the country. You’ll probably be underpaid and over worked, and any tech douche you ever date will be like “But libraries are dead.” Everyone will think you know everything about everything and when you don’t know the 1965 line up of the Yankees, they’ll be like “BUT YOU’RE A LIBRARIAN.” Being asked to diagnose weird patron diseases, particularly skin ones (no, you should really see a doctor for that one, you might have necrotizing fasciitis).
And in academia, you get to be more than staff, but not good enough to be faculty all while fighting budget cuts that you eventually get blamed for when you cut subscriptions.
But I can’t imagine a job that better suits me.
Oh, the patrons who want us to substitute for (much-more-highly-paid) non-librarian professionals. IANAL, IANAD, IANATP (tax preparer), and I legally cannot do these things, and sorry, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been coming here, and if you really are going to talk to your neighbor on the library board about this, I would be happy to explain the same to them. Yes, here’s a pencil and paper so that you can write down my name. Have a nice day!
And you have to have an MLS, right?
An MLS or MLIS, yup.
My BF is a librarian and the first few months half of our conversations went like this:
Me: I bet you know a lot about XYZ because of your job.
Him: actually, it’s a common misconception that librarians do (library-sounding task.)
Me: what do you do, then?
Him: (trails off into a list of complicated and inscrutable office tasks)
I still don’t fully get what his job is?
I work in a public library, and as was mentioned above, we see a lot of people with nowhere else to go – they might be homeless, or underemployed, or a kid who doesn’t want to go home, or so many other bad situations. It can be tough to deal with the public day in and day out and maintain the level of empathy you really need to have. I work with teens, and while I love them and find teenagers to be some of the most fascinating, unfairly-maligned people in the world, it can be exhausting. I have good benefits but I’m not exactly highly paid. I still wouldn’t trade my job for anything.
And even if you live in a suburb where there aren’t a lot of homeless people and the teens are too overworked with college prep to be annoying – working with the general public is, well…
I really, really love and value that libraries are a place where anyone is welcome to spend time and we’ll never ask you to spend money to be here. I think that is super important to a functioning society, and I know it makes my own life better. But oh man, there are some people who walk right on the line between behaving appropriately enough to be part of a functional society and not. And the library is where they go.
Hi, are you me? Also an English (and history) major who hated the “So, are you gonna teach?” question. I worked in a bookstore for basically minimum wage for a couple of years post-graduation and finally realized that I might as well go to library school, which surprised absolutely no one who knew me growing up. Most of the space in my brain is filled with random historical trivia and I worry constantly about coming off as a lecturing know-it-all. I just wanna share all my cool history facts!
I thought you said Librarian/Activist.
That too.
Yes– this is the absolute best job I could ever dream of. I talk to people, I help people find things to make their lives better, I help solve problems, sometimes kids give my knees hugs.
“Poland escaped the black plague because it allowed exiled Jews to live in their cities and they brought with them different and arguably better cleanliness standards.”
THIS IS AMAZING PLEASE TELL ME WHERE I CAN LEARN MORE
There are two ideas here:
1. We don’t have enough data from Poland.
2. Orthodox Jewish beliefs place a high priority on cleanliness, which would cut down on flea infestation in that specific population. This in turn would lead to more places to get clean, theoretically.
It’s probably a combination of 1 and 2, but no one really knows due to either lack of records, destruction of records or lack of interest.
Thanks!
I feel that this is a useful historical note to add to the “should we allow foreign immigrants in our country” debate. Sometimes that can save you from epidemics!
All of this. Librarian is one of the few careers where my overwhelming interest in everything still gets to be relevant. And sometimes I get to tell someone about a book that was really important to me and they come back to me and tell me they read it and it was really important to them too, and I feel like I made the world a better place.
Hey, are there any Bronx Toasties out there? Can any of you recommend places/areas to find parking that are near the subway?
This question is relevant because I have the extremely good luck to have gotten Hamilton tickets for Wednesday, I will always associate The Toast/Nicole with kindling my Hamilton love. My manfriend and I live in Connecticut, and because of various work things, we are going to drive down to the city and back on Wednesday. I was thinking it might be a good idea to park in the Bronx as we get into town and take the subway into Manhattan. Pro tips would be welcome!
Just park in Manhattan? I think, after the show, you will be thanking yourselves that you don’t have to ride on the subway forever to get back to your car *and then* drive back to CT. If you take either of the highways through Manhattan, it’s not so bad traffic-wise (or terrible, all a crapshoot there). Otherwise, probably a garage near Yankee Stadium? Is Metro North an option?
Thanks! I take your point. I am a cheapskate, so I was worried that garages in Manhattan would be insanely expensive, but I will look into it! Something near the stadium sounds good, too.
I don’t know the Bronx well enough to offer anything, but I do know that if you want to park along the L train in Brooklyn, there’s always plenty of parking in the vicinity of the Morgan stop. My brother lives over there & since it’s insane to get from my park of Bk to his, I usually drive, & never have any trouble.
Thank you!!
I live walking distance from Yankee Stadium, though across the river in Manhattan. There are a billion garages near the stadium, which shouldn’t be expensive if there’s no game that day (I think it is not currently baseball season? who knows; I only pay attention when my subway train is full of drunk Yankee fans). You can then take the D train to the Rockefeller Center or Bryant Park stops and walk across Times Square to get to the Richard Rogers.
If you’re looking for street parking, that same area may have some available, or upper Manhattan (145th St and up) is usually not too difficult in that regard.
Perfect, sounds fantastic. Thank you!!
Drive to the nearest Metro-North station and park there. Grand Central is an easy walk or cheap cab ride from the Richard Rodgers, and you won’t have to worry about your car in the wilds of the Bronx (where I grew up and still spend a lot of time). And HAVE FUN!!!
Thank you!! I am so excited!
Oooo, dysphagia, thanks for linking to that article. My sister has eosinophilic esophagitis, and she has to stay on top of it because people with advanced cases definitely have to go the feeding tube route. I basically monitor her like someone who’s business it is to monitor other people’s health because she does not pay attention to whether she’s having a flare up, and she would be crushed if she had to get a feeding tube. And I am way more interested in stories about not being able to swallow than I was 10 years ago.
Ooh, would you mind talking about her/your experiences with her eosinophilic esophagitis? I was diagnosed with a mild case a couple years ago and I’m…currently procrastinating on scheduling an upper endoscopy to check whether or not it’s come back.
I could talk about that ALL DAY. Do you have any specific questions?
I will write below a summary (that will still be long) of her experiences. She had been, for years, having trouble swallowing sometimes. The food just wouldn’t go anywhere. She’d have to excuse herself to go throw it up. We kept telling her to get it checked out, but she thought she just ate too fast. But one day when she couldn’t get even water to go down, I made her promise to see a doctor.
She got a referral to an FANTASTIC GI doctor, who happens to specialize in this kind of thing. He did the scope and dilated her esophagus for her, put her on Nexium, and sent her to an allergist who could do the patch test for delayed food allergies. Sure enough, she had quite a few. She’s been having acid reflux for years, but she’d never thought it could be anything serious. (side note: after that, I got tested for food allergies, cut out the things I was allergic to, and my reflux decreased dramatically. I’ve never had the patch test done, though).
Have you done the patch testing? It’s fun! Yeah, if you haven’t done it, that’s where they put gauze on your back with tiny bits of pureed food and leave it there for a few days. You should definitely do that in the middle of August when it’s already torture to skip showering for two days.
So, she was not the best about avoiding those allergies at first. But then, about seven months after she was diagnosed, we had to leave a pizza place because she had an episode. After that, she was careful. When she went back for a follow-up scope, her EoE had progressed farther than it should have. Still not an advanced case, but more than he expected to see at her age. So he dilated her again, and she’s been much more careful since then.
Lately, she’s been having reflux again, and I’ve been pushing her to get patch testing again. She’s been avoiding it because why wouldn’t you, it’s unpleasant. And she has to take a few days off so that she doesn’t have to deal with her coworkers’ well-meaning but merciless teasing about have food taped to her back. But so far it seems that if–IF–she stays on her medication and avoids the bad foods, she won’t have to deal with the feeding tube situation until she’s much older, if at all.
It’s none of my business, but not knowing anything about you, I definitely think you should go get checked. I don’t think it really goes away, only the symptoms do. I mean, I think you could always have a re-emergence of symptoms. At least, that’s my understanding.
Thank you so much for the reply!
Several years ago I was having persistent problems with feeling like food was suck in my throat. It never was actually stuck–my GI doc didn’t find any strictures–and I’m still not sure whether the feeling was actually due to EoE, or just GERD. (When I went to the GI and described my symptoms, she was like, it’s *probably* GERD, but there’s a slim chance it’s EoE, sooo let’s do an endoscopy to be sure) But biopsies did find eosinophils (I think around 30 per high powered field, or whatever the measurement is) so she referred me to an allergist and the three of us began working on it.
We did:
-Proton pump inhibitor (which I’m still on)
-Skin-prick food allergy test (it didn’t turn up much–two or three very mild reactions)
-RAST blood test (also didn’t turn up much–based on both test results the allergist told me to try cutting out peanuts and almonds)
-Swallowed budesonide/splenda slurry (which was both expensive and gross)
We did an upper endoscopy after I’d cut out the almonds and peanuts and been on the budesonide a few months. It came back clear. Was it clear because of the steroids, the lack of peanuts and almonds, or for some other reason altogether? No idea. That’s what this upper endoscopy I’m currently procrastinating on will help to answer.
I know I shouldn’t be procrastinating on it, and that it can get a lot worse, but my case has been so mild, and there’s so little information on the subject, it’s been hard for me to feel urgent. From what my doctors have said, I thought it was kind of like eczema (which I also have, go me!)–there might be something external triggering it, there might not, fuck if we know, you can avoid stuff we know will probably irritate it, you can treat it with steroids, but in the end it might disappear or reappear for no apparent reason.
I think you answered most of my questions. I really wanted to hear about what sort of tests/medications/maintenance someone else had gone through. I’m going to try to remember to schedule that upper endoscopy, and if it comes back positive I’ll talk to my allergist about patch testing. She’s mentioned it before, but it sounds annoying as hell and I get the feeling that she wanted to exhaust all the other options first.
If it helps you make up your mind, my sister did not have any skin prick allergies when she first did the testing, only the ones that showed up on the patch test (but now she has a ton of regular IgE-mediated food allergies). So you might not have delayed allergies, but not having IgE-mediated allergies show up doesn’t mean you don’t.
Good luck and keep up posted! I am very interested in your health situation, stranger on the internet.
Haha! It’s good to know someone is interested (instead of listening politely as I throw increasingly complex words at them)!
Your sister’s experience with allergy testing does help me make up my mind. Part of the reason I’ve been procrastinating so much is that I’ve been dealing with an increase in asthma/environmental allergy symptoms, which felt like a more immediate problem. Now that I’ve started the allergy shots, though, I have no excuses!
You had me at “eyebrow wigs”
” I would totally have a bookshop in a cool place with a cat that served really fantastic food”
I don’t like to burst anyone’s dreams but I have enough experience in this area to say that any cat willing to work for bookstore wages will not be competent or qualified to be a food server.
Cats in general are more likely to take your food. My old grey man will snatch a waffle right out of your hand.
This is my favorite comment ever of all time.
I need to see a photoshopped feline barista/cashier/bookseller (because let’s face it, wee bookshops can only afford one or two employees, tops) IMMEDIATELY. Surely there are talented graphic designer Toasties who can make this idle dream come true! OOH…I’ll accept a drawing, too.
I’m on a train to Boston on St. Patrick’s Day and people are very, very talkative and in lots of green, and it’s way more social than I expected at 10:30 in the morning.
Irish Toasties, happy St. Patrick’s Day! I just realized I don’t know anything about the holiday other than what’s in the 30 Rock episode.
St Patricks Day: Religious holiday for the patron saint of Ireland (Who was actually British, sort of, and took credit for the lack of snakes on the Island that was actually caused by the Ice Age. Made up a metaphor for religion using a shamrock.)
Paddy’s day in other countries: Culturally appropriative excuse for people to drink too much and portray racist stereotypes.
Paddy’s day in Ireland: Public holiday, excuse to drink too much and pretend to be racist stereotypes in order to take in that sweet sweet tourism money.
ALSO, in America, the only holiday where it’s socially acceptable to physically harass people for not participating in said holiday with their wardrobe selection.
This is literally the only reason I’m wearing a green shirt today. I don’t think I’m going to be pinched in my workplace, but better safe than sorry.
…What?
Stop America. Stop. People in Ireland don’t even take it that seriously. (Not kidding, was working in a cafe on Paddy’s day one year, and I wore a green top; walked in and the, also Irish, chef asked me why I was wearing green.)
Oh yeah! I mean, it (people pinching you for not wearing green) mostly happens in school, of course. And maybe once isn’t a big deal, but if a bunch of people decide to have fun with it, you have a target painted on your back all day, and it’ll influence what you wear next year, I’ll tell you that.
My ex literally could not believe the pinching was a real thing.
Well, of course most kids jump on an excuse to get away with pinching people. A pox on whoever came up with that, though.
My third-grade classmates were vicious on this subject.
My name begins with an O’ but we are not culturally Irish, or, like 1/36th Irish, tops. I do not classify myself as Irish-American. I’ve been wearing black on March 17th since forever so people will leave. me. alone. Actually, I’m taking my partner’s name when we get married, and all my feminist friends are surprised/outraged, and the real motivation is so people will stop harassing me one day out of the year.
oh, that’s too bad. I usually get out of the festivities with a dry “No, my last name is X, I do not need to celebrate my Irishness any more than that.”
I just read the new Prudie column and there is a woman whose sister wanted her to change her hair colour for her [the sister’s] wedding and then threw a tantrum when instead of dying her hair, she wore a wig.
I love Mallory’s answer. “But underneath…it was ALL BLUE AND PURPLE!”
Demanding people change themselves for or excuse themselves from wedding photos is one of those recurring [eyes wide in voyeuristic, judgy, horror] advice column Things and I love it.
Ha! My cousin asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding & then, right before, told me that I had to wear stockings to minimize the visibility of my (very beautiful) leg tattoos. I bought a pair of nude fishnets & gracefully accepted compliments on said tattoos allllll day from wedding guests.
Stories like these always make me realise that I’m very happy to have such a good relationship to all my siblings, and that they would never pull stuff like that.
omg Mallory is the best, cracking up at her response.
I was quite astonished at her going so far as to buy and wear a nice wig! She’s so much more accommodating than I would have been, but then again she’s the one who probably has to be with her at holidays and special occasions the rest of her life. (Oh, dear god, imagine if this woman gets pregnant…)
This is tangential, but you know what, I am missing “Hey Ladies” right about now.
Ali (was that her name? Too lazy to look it up) would so demand the others accomodate her every wish. Maybe we’ll get a flashback to the Winklevoss wedding someday!
She probably sends a voucher calculated to cover 1/3 of the cost of tattoo removal. “Since you’re flying coach to the resort, you can totally cover the rest with the money you saved lol!”
oh god if only.
Ohhh, the ex who says the LW isn’t allowed to date existing male friends. *creeped the fuck out*
that whole letter just was…too much for me.
dear LW, in six months, you will be like, “Haha, get back together with that loser, AS IF.”
I so wish the Bride Sister had been the one writing in for advice, so it could then get passed on to the Bad Advisor: http://thatbadadvice.tumblr.com/
I so wish there were more Bad Advice in the world. I love that blog.
Oh. My. Gooooooodddddddd.
“How Can I Best Force My Sister To Give Me A Detailed Accounting Of How She Spends Every Hour Of Her Worthless Day?”
I am lost forever. I can’t stop hate reading these. Send help.
EDIT:
“My sister lives across the country. She has been married for 33 years. They’ve raised two daughters who are now adults, but she’s been living the most boring life ever.”
*horrified screaming*
” I don’t know how she could be happy doing nothing but cooking and cleaning for all these years…she has never had to live through things like illness, job loss or divorce like I have.”
I mean, it sounds like her boring-ass life is working out ok for her, really.
Right? RIGHT?!?
I, uh, may or may not have read the entire archives several times. Including the links to the original posts with the actual advice that was given these people.
I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have done this more than once.
O my. I just lost my day. ty.
Man, I’m so happy that my SIL was excited about my attempts to get the purple streaks in my hair the right color to match my bridesmaid’s dress. I didn’t get quite plummy enough, but it still looked cool, and we were an awesome bridal party, purple hair, tattoos, and all.
As with most TNC pieces, almost every line of that is quotable.
Oh My God. This is glorious.
I love how wide-eyed/low-key horrified the ladies in the front row are compared to the relaxed/bored ladies in the back.
If one wanted to draw conclusions about who might have needed this lesson more than the others… IJS.
I relate to the lady with the elbow on her desk in the middle. She’s going “Oh, yeah, I totally know all this stuff, I am Very Experienced In Life, uh, just gonna listen in case the teacher says something I can make fun of on Twitter later, ha ha, shhhh I’m concentrating.”
I think that’s Clara Bow, so yeah.
I love all the knowing smirks.
Also a stereotypical conclusion could be drawn about the nerds who sit at the front of class versus the cool kids who congregate at the back…
I really want to know what copulative act they are reacting to here.
Unfortunately (and #Actually), this is a scene from the 1929 Clara Bow movie, The Wild Party. (Though maybe in the movie, it IS a sex ed class?? I mean idk)
I was about to reverse-google-image when I saw this and then I was like…nah, I don’t care if it’s not real, I’m gonna headcanon it.
You are a better person than me; I was 100% going to reverse-google-image it.
DGAF. Headcanon.
I kind of assumed that was the joke?
I see; time to step into the Shame Cave
I could be wrong! I often am.
I’m sorry but (DO NOT READ AHEAD IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW)
it’s not a sex ed class in the movie. Maybe my memory just isn’t what it was, but at least I don’t remember that. What I do remember is a character being called out for plagiarism in an Anthropology class by a professor (who is a douchebag, in my opinion).
Oh my god the woman in the upper left taking notes with extreme intensity. She is going to master this content for sure.
There is no such thing as an uncool tap dancer anymore and I am HERE FOR IT.
Definitely read that as lap dancer and wasn’t sure what link you were referring to.
I have mild to occasionally-moderate dysphagia as the result of surgery for oral cancer. I wear an obturator like the one described in the article, but I was lucky enough to avoid chemo and radiation.
Learning to swallow with an immobile plastic *thing* replacing your soft palate is a weird experience. Strangely enough, I can eat a lot of things (like bread or other starchy things) more easily without my prosthetic in than with it. (Starchy stuff tends to stick to the back of the obturator and choke me.)
Even five years on, there are plenty of foods that are problematic or totally off-limits: rice comes with a fifty-fifty chance of heading down my trachea, highly-carbonated things have to be drunk very slowly, and spicy food is tricky, because the shreds of pepper or whatever can become lodged in the contours of the obturator and cause pain. Poppyseeds and blueberries are right out; the seeds lodge in the folds of what’s left of my throat and are excruciating.
Still: I’m very, very fortunate to have had only a nine-month period of learning to eat and drink again, and my salivary glands and so on are fine. I mostly manage without trouble. . . . .but I’m going to have to read that article slowly and with plenty of breaks for deep breaths and sniffles.
My dad had a stroke just over a year ago and had to learn how to swallow again (among other things). It was very eye opening. Even now he still has to be careful.
I can only imagine how much harder it must be to learn to swallow with an artificial palate. I hope you are doing well and haven’t had any other cancer issues. 🙂
Thanks, and so far, so good!
I’m a neuroscience nurse and work primarily with stroke patients, and from what I see, the coordination of muscles after a stroke is much tougher than learning to work with a prosthetic. I mean, all my muscles and nerves are communicating; they just have to adapt to a *thing* that’s there. Re-coordinating muscles and rebuilding communication pathways takes longer.
Strangely enough, I have a phantom palate, in much the same way that people who’ve had amputations have phantom limbs. I was a singer before I was a nurse, so lifting my soft palate was a sensation I was very familiar with. I just tried it, and yep, I can feel it moving around even though it’s not there. I think that’s helped a lot with rehab.
Best wishes for a continued recovery for your dad! I hope things are going well for him.
I think I am in the minority but I hate tap dancing. HATE IT. It absolutely ruined So You Think You Can Dance for me. It’s just so loud and not very graceful. I appreciate it but in no way do I ever want to see it.
I don’t mind it, but I don’t really get it, either. I can’t tell the difference between a terrible tap dancer, a really excellent tap dancer, and someone who’s pretending to tap dance accompanied by tapping sounds that were added in post. I’m glad people are out there doing their thing and having fun, but it just means nothing to me.
It does always make me think of this one commercial type thing they used to play during Saturday morning cartoons, though? Where this girl is at her grandmother’s house (or something?) and she’s like “But the audition is tomorrow, and I still can’t tap dance!” and then she finds out her grandmother did tap, and her grandmother teaches her how to do it, and it ends with her going out on the stage at the audition and tap dancing. This really, really bugged me when I was a kid, because when she goes out on stage, she’s in costume, and the ONLY thing she’s doing is tap dancing. So it doesn’t appear that it was, like, primarily a singing/acting audition with an added “please be able to tap dance” req; it looks like it’s JUST a tap audition, in which case, if this girl couldn’t do it, why was she even going to this audition?? And also, who wears a COSTUME to an audition??
–Although now that I’m typing all this out, I’m realizing that maybe the ending was supposed to be the girl in the ACTUAL SHOW, with the implication that she’d aced the audition? God, I wish I could find this thing on youtube. Anyway, they showed it like every week.
As a former percussionist, I understand. I appreciate the very nuanced, very difficult, very rapid variations in rhythmic sound. I also appreciate that I could not hear half of it before I studied percussion. I would have found it boring before developing that part of my “ear” (or the part of my brain that analyzes that kind of sound).
I kind of know what you mean- although it’s weird. I love LOVE Savion Glover & Gregory Hines and the kind of tap dancing that is about using the feet as a percussion instrument while also telling a story with the rest of the body (which might be the type SYTYCD had) but I can’t stand what I think of as “hoofing” as in the big grin girls-in-a-line style that has no emotion, just spectacle.
Good tap is really really hard and I don’t think there are a lot of choreographers who can do it. I think it’s probable the choreographers on SYTYCD are really tap-weak.
HATE IT here too, even my guilty pleasure of watching glee and adoring their earnestness when Tina Cohen-Chang would tap I would just grit my teeth. Can’t. Stand. I see that this takes so much talent and practice but I can’t bring myself to love it. My only real exception is Astaire/Rogers but that’s an insanely high bar.
On the other hand, The Hot Sardines have a tap dancer in their percussion section and it’s pretty cool to see them perform live because he’s sitting in his chair tip-tapping away, and occasionally getting up and doing spinny tappy moves to create the right percussion noises along with the drummer.
Come over here and sit with me! I am generally underwhelmed by most dancing but by tap in particular. (Also repetitive little noises burrow their way into my brain and make me want to scream.)
nicole. dear. dearest nicole.
i’ve always thought it was cute and funny (safety issues aside) that you insist on referring to that wolfbear as your “dog”. but now you’re calling a swimming pool a “bathtub”.
words do mean things, you know.
I am ashamed of my level of envy around that tub. I mean pool.
I am so in love/envious of Nicole’s entire house. Is that weird?
Every time I see a photo I am amazed by how big and fancy it is.
I am so jealous of that swimming pool/bathtub.
I am not jealous of the tub, not being a tub person, but LORD am I jealous of the snuggly fuzzy direpup. My dog just sits with his face poking through the shower curtain while looking at me worriedly.
I will never watch or find in the least entertaining or fun a TV show about the most famous domestic violence murder of our time, even one which addresses seemingly every other issue (but avoids the main one). I watched the trial like everyone else, but this is different, and I’m kind of appalled at how much women especially “like” this show. Anyone with me on this?
I hear you. I have similar feelings about many shows. This is a good place to ask those questions. I just asked it the other day about The Americans. I am also finding that my previously suppressed/repressed/oppressed rage about all kinds abuse is leading me to all kinds of discoveries about myself, getting me interested in studying new topics, giving me a voice, self-esteem and Power. Glorious personal power.
Yep, 100%. I also can’t imagine what it’s like for the surviving family to watch so many people make so much money off of their pain.
I’ve seen three episodes so far, and I’m watching it because I was too young to really be aware of the trial as it was happening. It’s interesting to finally understand the context of a lot of cultural references that I’ve never really understood before. But I wouldn’t say I’m having a fun time seeing it. I don’t really get why people who are old enough to remember the real thing would be watching/enjoying it.
Yes, this. I am not old enough to remember the trial, so I am pretty fascinated by the series (though not enjoying in a certain sense). I tried to watch the first episode with my dad, who said, “I know all of this” and promptly fell asleep.
I don’t have TV but I’ve been reading about it here and listening to some reviews and cast interviews, and while it has been interesting to gain new perspective about some of the people involved (Marcia Clark in particular) it has also brought back a lot of terrible and frightening memories of the crime, the media circus, and a horrible argument my mother (who was a true crime junkie & thus obsessed) got into with a good friend who argued that the victims deserved what they got because NBS should not have been dating outside her race (the friend was a WOC). My mom died before the verdict came back, and I don’t think that rift had been healed. So, yeah, hearing about it every day is kind of weighing on me.
Totally with you.
Then again, I refused to watch Breaking Bad because I refuse to watch a show about a man who hurts a lot of people through crime (even if it doesn’t start out that way) and his wife is the one who people think is evil, and lots of my friends think I’m weird for that…
I am not watching the show but I do listen to the Real Crime Profile podcast (which I heartily endorse also for a great analysis of the “Making a Murderer” doc and case), and they take serious issue with the show for precisely this. The former FBI profiler actually worked with someone who was on the OJ case and saw crime scene photos, the woman from Scotland Yard does tons of domestic violence work, and it’s really clear that they are appalled at the way this is being cast as Entertainment rather than Domestic Violence / A Murder With Actual People Who Were Victims And Not Just A Celebrity Car Chase. So I’d recommend it for a good detox.
Dysphagia sounds so scary. I had a friend who had an oesophageal issue which meant she struggled to swallow and to not regurgitate food after eating; it was very shit. (She has since had surgeries that have made a huge difference.)
http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/c…
This kind of sums up my attitude to St Patricks Day, and its the way a lot of us feel tbh
I’m trying to figure out where the “Kiss me I’m Irish!” thing came from. Yes the Irish are kiss-greeters & farewellers in the European tradition but otherwise they’re not big on PDA. I mean, *really* not big on PDA. (As far as I know that is, most of the Irish people I’ve known technically were nuns or priests or middle aged business people. The Irish Youth could be totally different.)
Yeah I have no idea on that.
I mean ‘Kiss my ass’ is kind of and Irish thing, but I learned about the Kiss Me I’m Irish thing from American TV.
And yeah, PDA is a no-no in Ireland unless you’re hammered and then its just sort of disgusting.
That was a beautiful piece.
I should not have read the comments.
When asked if I did anything for St. Patrick’s Day (while I was getting tacos, of all things), I pointed out that I don’t celebrate the feast of St. Barnabas, either. Which is to say that there are an awful lot of people who are neither Irish nor Catholic, but still have this compulsion to act like morons on St. Patrick’s Day.
My dad sometimes has trouble swallowing, so he has to keep a water bottle with him at all times so he doesn’t choke trying to swallow air. He’s described the sensation of waking up at night convinced he’s drowning. It sounds terrible.
Oh snap, Ta-Nehisi Coates is full on with this:
“It’s possible that the producers were not, themselves, personally racist. This has no bearing whatsoever on anything. In America, racism is a default setting. To do nothing, to go along with the market, to claim innocence or neutrality, is to inevitably be a cog in the machine of racist hierarchy.”
Jaw dropped, perfection.
There are many limitations and problems in autism research now (as ever), but I’m very proud to say that my lab is part of a major multi-site project specifically studying girls with ASD. We also do a lot of work with sensory over-responsivity, which weirdly hasn’t received much attention before about five years ago. It’s scary to me how many times I’ve seen scientists and professors (not those who specialize in autism, thankfully) discuss autism as a “lack of interest in social relationships” or similar.
Woo autism research! Autism is not the main focus of my project, but I am doing some work with autism models related to attention & sensory processing. I think the sensory stuff is fascinating from a neuroscience point of view and you’re right, it’s way less discussed.
Come sit by us in the autism blogosphere, especially tumblr. We’ve been talking about it for years! Then again, for a lot of spectrum adults, sensory stuff is often the primary problem: we’ve had decades to learn your strange non-autistic communication styles and adults self regulate better than kids, usually, but I.can’t exactly reason with my nervous system to process correctly.
Lazy wording/mistake on my part, I meant in the sense of mainstream autism neurobiology research, which is often very disconnected (often problematically) from clinical research and more importantly the actual experience of people with ASD/on the spectrum.
It makes a ton of sense to me that sensory stuff remains a more persistent problem (that reminds me a lot of schizophrenia, where traditionally the dramatized symptoms of hallucinations and delusions are not actually what cause people the most problems, since they can learn to work with/around them, but rather things like cognitive deficits).
A reminder to myself as ever to not be too cloistered in my ivory tower and to think about how these things that I tend to think about abstractly actually manifest.
What’s crazy to me, as a speech-language pathologist (the profession in America that is primarily charged with dysphagia management) is how long it took for her to hear dysphagia. Most hospitals have one of us, and most doctors and RNs besides know enough to refer a swallowing issue to a dysphagia specialist!
Can I just take this opportunity to envelop you in thankful, grateful Internet hugs for what you do? I work with SLPs all day (acute care stroke nurse) and they were and are, to a person, *so* helpful with my own recovery from a palatectomy and subsequent obturator drama.
People, be aware: speech-language pathologists are the people you go to for speech, cognitive, and swallowing issues. If you ever have doubts surrounding those issues for you or anybody else, get you an SLP on the case. They can be literal lifesavers.
Thank you 🙂 I’m glad to hear my kind was helpful! Hugs back for being an acute care stroke nurse, speaking of helpful professions xx
Oddly enough, in places like Japan, it’s dentists that cover dysphagia. It actually ends up being a country-to-country variable based on who they think has enough functional knowledge of the neurology and anatomy/physiology involved. IMHO, SLPs are better suited!
Aww as an SLP this really warmed my heart!! I work primarily with adults with intellectual disabilities and the dysphagia management we do is really holistic, called mealtime management, looking at balancing safety and duty of care with quality of life. The article did seem to really come down hard on SLPs for not considering quality of life but I would say that really depends on the care setting.
ETA: oh man but hats off to you for the work you do… I did a practicum in a stroke ward and the nurses there were absolute troopers 🙂
I’m an Australian SLP and yes, we too do dysphagia management – part of our core training and what we do in hospitals as well as disability and aged care services – so yes, that really surprised me too! The woman in the article was from Brisbane and they certainly have many SLPs up there in the health system. It’s about 50% of my caseload in disability. I wonder what happened there??
I just saw my dream job posted, it showed up randomly and unexpectedly on an unrelated website, I am supremely qualified for it, but it doesn’t work in this version of my life and now I am experiencing extreme wistfulness for What Might Have Been.
Anyone want to talk about The Americans?
Putting spoilers in a reply.
POOR MARTHA. Alison Wright is doing an incredible job.
One of my favorite things about this show is that in the scene where Phillip opens up to Martha about what’s bothering him, as he has so far failed to do with Elizabeth, it’s not clear to either me as a viewer or I think to HIM as a character whether he is actually being intimate with her or just giving her enough of a sense of intimacy that she wants to carry out the mission he immediately drops in her lap.
Anyone else nervous about this Nina’s husband thing? I am having Kalinda husband flashbacks, and it’s not good.
Oh my god, Martha. I just want her to go back to her parents and get away from everything in DC, but even that can’t work for her either now. Her reaction to Philip telling her about Gene was just heartbreaking.
Alison Wright really does have a hard job to do with Martha and she does it so well.
And I don’t think Philip really knows what his motives are any more. He obviously wants to talk about his feelings, about everything, and he’s practically screaming out for the opportunity to do so. I think he took the opportunity to be intimate with Martha because he really, really needed it, even though in the end it was motivated by his need to get her help with the mission. And yes, I agree that it isn’t really clear to him as a character either. Honestly, I was clutching a pillow through half the episode solely because I was terrified that one more thing would happen and Philip would fall apart completely.
And I am straight up super worried about Arkady.
Oh yes, I love Arkady and I am so worried about him too! I feel like after defying Oleg’s father, he is just in for it one way or another. But do you think Oleg actually “likes” Tatiana or he is playing her somehow?
I hope whatever happens with Paige and the pastor clarifies things for Philip a little and gives him a chance to pull it together and focus on action… or something. He can’t keep going like this, I agree — the smallest thing seems like it could push him over the edge into total meltdown.
Have we ever seen either Elizabeth or Philip totally breakdown? After Gregory died, I remember Elizabeth crying when she was finally alone. Maybe after Martial Eagle? In a way, it could be good for one of them to go catatonic even if just for a minute — sometimes better to let it out. Then again, in the wrong time and place, that could be very, very bad.
I think Arkady is going to suffer for being a good boss in a situation that doesn’t reward caring for employees half as much as it does playing the politics. Turning down Oleg’s father might be the last straw, but I think he’d be doomed anyway at some point. And I think Oleg likes Tatiana fine as a coworker, but all the chatting and friendliness has to be a game of some kind, surely, especially since Tatiana was the one responsible for the (non) defector, right? Oleg is also gonna be on the line, I think, and I’m surprised how kinda sad that makes me because I really didn’t like him at first.
And I can’t remember if Elizabeth’s ever broken down beyond some tears. I’m not sure she’s been pushed as far as Philip has in terms of what she can tolerate yet, but it seems only a matter of time for them both. I keep thinking that Elizabeth gets a lot of strength from being a True Believer, but it’s a fragile strength. Once she gets really disillusioned – and I’m certain she will and soon – she’ll fall so hard.
Poor Philip, though. I don’t really quite understand what drives him to do his spy work, but obviously it isn’t enough any more. And he’s not even together enough right now to consider defection either.
Has anyone heard about that ad exploit? Have the ads in The Toast been affected by it? I usually have ads enabled because I want to support the site, but I’ve temporarily blocked them on all sites because of it.
That photo completely messed with my sense of perspective. I couldn’t but parse the bathtub as a sink (probably because my city-dwelling brain can’t conceive of such a spacious bathroom), which made me very confused about the relative sizes of your dog and daughter. Even though I now get what’s going on, that’s all I can see.
Yes! For some reason that jezebel article was really enjoyable to me since I haven't heard the adjectives in a really gendered slur context, unlike the noun. I really do think it's how it's introduced. I'm the same with bitch. Love it if women use it (properly), men get the side-eye. If they're used to equate women = bad, I don't like it. If it's used as a general insult/negative or positive emphasis, I generally like it.
Come over here and sit with me! I am generally underwhelmed by most dancing but by tap in particular. (Also repetitive little noises burrow their way into my brain and make me want to scream.)