On Sunday, I am leaving to go to Canada for a week to get more Blind Items of Rural Southern Ontario for you, so I will PROBABLY pre-load a link roundup for Monday but Tues-Fri will be whatever Mallory and Nikki decide they want to do with that time slot (their own link roundups, strident feminist rants, nothing, open threads, cat pictures, etc.) and I am excited to see my family, and also Beyonce on Wednesday.
This story is getting passed around on my timelines with a lot of stuff about how we need to fix health care and medication costs WHICH WE SURE AS FUCK DO, but I am really, really uncomfortable with the way we talk about “mercy killings” and desperation, particularly when the victim is disabled, PARTICULARLY when we have no idea what the victim wanted:
William J. Hager, 86, said he had run out of options.
His wife, Carolyn Hager, 78, had been ill for the last 15 of the more than 50 years they were married. The cost of her medications had become so burdensome that they could no longer afford it, he said. So on Monday morning while she was sleeping, he shot her in the head, he told the deputy who came to their Florida home.
The killing in Port St. Lucie and Mr. Hager’s explanation were detailed in an arrest affidavit and by local news media. Mr. Hager was arrested and charged with first-degree premeditated murder. But the case appeared to also highlight the difficulties faced by older people who are retired or on fixed incomes and struggle to pay for their medicine when they are ill or in pain.
At the sheriff’s office, Mr. Hager told deputies that his wife had a “lot of illnesses and other ailments which required numerous medications,” which he “could no longer afford,” the affidavit said.
I am an ethnically Chinese man who is married to a white woman. Her family has been very welcoming toward me, but, on occasion, they still say racially inappropriate things to me. They make “Chinese fire drill” jokes, suggest I write birthday cards in Chinese, and ask my wife if she’s comfortable being driven around by an Asian. I tend to join them in the assumption that “this is being said in good fun,” since I don’t genuinely believe they dislike me or my ethnicity. However, this behavior does annoy me, and I don’t feel like my Chinese heritage should be reduced to a party trick for their amusement. Quite frankly I don’t see these jokes ending anytime soon. My question is: Is this the sort of thing that warrants a family meeting where I air my grievances, or is this something I just need to come to terms with?
look even Jack Donaghy did this:
For most major presidential campaigns, it is a routine act: you conduct opposition research on your own candidate. The reason is obvious; campaign officials and candidates want to know what they might have to contend with once the you-know-what starts flying. But not Donald Trump. At least not at the start of the campaign that would lead to him becoming the presumptive GOP nominee. According to a source with direct knowledge, when Trump was considering entering the presidential race early last year, his political advisers, including Corey Lewandowski, who would become his campaign manager, suggested that Trump hire a professional to investigate his past. But the celebrity mogul said no and refused to pay for it.
New York Magazine profiled Ask a Manager!!!!
The point being: Uncertainty has a way of morphing directly into anxiety, which is no doubt part of the reason Green’s site has remained so popular for so many years. For ambiguous situations (say, a receptionist who won’t stop hugging people), Green provides clear, straightforward answers (“Just talk to her. And do it now.”). She also understands that sometimes people need specific suggestions on the kind of language they should use to broach these uncomfortable subjects. “Sometimes I think they know that they probably have to say something, but they cannot imagine how to say it in a way that doesn’t sound really rude or aggressive or adversarial,” she told Science of Us. “So I think a big thing that people get from the answers to those sorts of letters is advice on the language — like, here’s how you say it, and here’s how you can frame it.” (For the huggy receptionist, she lays out the outline for exactly what the letter writer could say to make the hugs — finally, blessedly — stop.)
I finally read the Blac Chyna piece and it’s amazing (I have seen only three episodes from the first season of KUWTK so you do not have to arrive knowing anything):
For many people, arguably Kris Jenner among them, it may seem as if Blac Chyna came out of nowhere: the PR equivalent of Venus rising fully formed from the foaming sea with an engagement ring in one hand and a pregnancy announcement in the other. But look closer and you’ll start to notice Chyna everywhere: dancing in rap videos, sitting courtside at NBA games, making appearances on your favorite reality show, in the pews at the biggest celebrity wedding of the decade. While no one and everyone was watching, Chyna was making calculated moves to close in on her own empire with a precision and finesse that not even the Kardashians saw coming. This wasn’t a PR breakthrough. It was a coup.
And so the Kardashians, a family often accused of stealing black men, black features, and black culture, got beat at their own game by a black woman. And not just any black woman, but a video vixen who was never supposed to see the inside of the country clubs the Kardashians frequented growing up.
This is a great look at how and why black and Hispanic kids have been left out of the historical literature (and ongoing diagnoses) of autism (our university hospital is doing a special push to try to identify autistic kids of color earlier, including the very simple step of Spanish. language. pamphlets. about. autism.):
Thus in 1984, psychologist Victor Sanua, a pioneer in cross-cultural studies of mental conditions, could — and did — credibly insist that autism is “rarely found” in black and Hispanic families — or even in the populations of continents like Africa, South America or Asia. Instead of focusing on possibly confounding factors like lack of access to health care and diagnostic resources for people of color, Sanua proposed that autism was “an illness of Western civilization” that was related to “high technology,” rather than a “universal phenomenon.” (This kind of language would later be echoed by those determined to find the cause of autism in some toxic aspect of the modern world, such as vaccines, pesticides, or even Wi-Fi.) These theories became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Autistic children of color would often end up getting diagnosed with something else — typically, generic “mental retardation,” a conduct disorder, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
In related news, this hashtag is great:
I thought I had something funny to put here, but instead, let’s just come together and SCREAM ABOUT OKLAHOMA’S BULLSHIT ABORTION LAW FOREVER. Fallon is all but guaranteed to pass that bill right before she and the legislature defund public schools to build a fucking reflecting pool at the Capitol, because Oklahoma’s legislature is batshit insane.
Oh hey, neighbor! I didn’t realize you were in Oklahoma. I’m in Kansas. Let us grieve our legislatures together.
Thank Jeebus, I’m not /in/ Oklahoma right now, although my college is. I spend summer in the pro-choice, Democratic haven that is Indianapolis.
A+++ shade right there.
I was raised in Indiana and my parents live in Indy.
I’m in Missouri! But Kansas City, so right on the border of Kansas, which has likewise gone batshit insane.
I am desperately trying to figure how to get the Burgomaster and myself the fuck out of the Midwest. I hate abandoning Lawrence (I’ve lived my whole adult life here!), but I am getting old and tired and I don’t know how much longer I can stay.
Oh you are so close! There don’t seem to be too many of us Toasties in the Missouri / KC area! Maybe we should do a western Missouri / Kansas meet up, so we could give each other comfort in having to live in batshit crazy states. I’m gonna be here for awhile, as I am a lawyer and I’m licensed in Missouri and Kansas and I absolutely refuse to take another bar exam. Even though my husband works from home and could live anywhere.
I would def be up for a KC or Larryville meetup. Drop me a line sometime at clevermanka68 at gmail!
I’m still thinking that buying an island and creating a Toastie Haven is the way to go.
Hi, neighbor! I’m in Manhattan.
I’m visiting Oklahoma right now (in-laws live here, husband’s job is based here, though we live in another state) and I have been RANTING for two days about this. Last night I talked to a woman who used to work for the man who is now the state finance secretary. He’s a respiratory therapist without any training in finance, I learned. “My paychecks always bounced when I worked for his company,” she said. No wonder the only thing the state government can manage to do is pass illegal abortion laws.
As an Oklahoman, I sincerely apologize. I am at my wit’s end about what to do.
Contact your governor and representatives. Even if they don’t change their mind, they know that they don’t have the support of their constituents.
I’ve done all of the above. And I vote. Oklahoma has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country, so that doesn’t help at all. /sigh/
I legitimately cried for an hour and a half yesterday after reading about this and the SC law and the defeat in the House. I’ve been looking for organizations that help fund the travel for women to get to out of state centers, but the only one that I have been able to find is Texas based: http://fundtexaschoice.org/
I’m trying to get my parents to airlift abortion pills into my campus, since presumably out-of-staters who do this are only subject to federal law. Or maybe we could copy drug smugglers and set catapults up on the Kansas border?
I’m with you. I felt so sad and tired last night after reading the news. Having re-read Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” for another project recently (and, also, having been alive but flying with only coach-level birthrights for a few decades), I’m not surprised about the legislation backlash after marriage equality. But still.
flying with only coach-level birthrights
Stealing this forever, kthx.
Speaking of airline metaphors, I once encountered a huffy businessman in a nice suit, no socks, and Italian loafers who was quite huffy in the security line about having to wait (it wasn’t really that long). He seemed so much better than the rest of us, so important, really. But that line led to only one terminal, meaning that when all was said and done, the only planes we were all getting on were those of Spirit Airlines. A rickety, flying city bus is truly the great equalizer. Amen.
Dammit, SC. We were doing so well at being the less embarrassing Carolina for a while there. (Although that was more from NC’s efforts than our own.)
My only solace is that such restrictive bans have a tendency to be challenged, and I think if Clinton gets a Justice or two, we could really hammer RvW home. I think we’re safe in the long game, but it’s disheartening how many women will be hurt in the meantime.
:hug:
I have a monthly donation going here:
National Network of Abortion Funds.
I think you can also go and select a specific fund in a specific state to donate to–looks like in Oklahoma it’s Roe Fund.
Everyone here in OK is frustrated. Even my way more conservative friends and coworkers are frustrated. Schools are going to four days a week or asking parents for donations to keep art teachers on staff (!) or shrinking bus service routes so you have to get in line at 3 am to sign up for after school care because of the huge increase in need. It’s ridiculous. On behalf of all of us, I’m sorry.
I grew up in Oklahoma and my brother is leaving the military this summer, so he called the wrestling coach at our high school to see if he could regain his volunteer position as assistant coach (he has full time employment lined up that he can do from anywhere). The coach told him “I would love to have you back, but… don’t come back to Oklahoma right now.” Not just because the wrestling program might not exist soon, but because Ok in its current state is not a place to choose to live when you have the choice of living anywhere.
My boyfriend is from Louisiana so basically both of us are in constant states of rage about our home states (although I like to remind him that his state at least put a new governor in charge who might be able to fix some of the damage).
It’s so hard to leave, too. Your brother should get out while he can, use his free final move to gtfo. My father was in the Army at Ft. Sill (how I ended up here) and they got out of here as soon as they humanly could, the lucky bastards. I’m glad that my partner and I will only be here a few more years while I finish grad school. And I feel you so hard on the home state rage. Every time I hear anything about Oklahoma on the national news I just brace myself. “What now?! What could it possibly be now?!”
Schools going to four days a week?!?!?!
Yes, many, many school districts (especially in smaller cities and rural areas) have gone down to four-day school weeks to save money on utilities, bus services, etc. There’s a school where teachers have to pay for their portion of electricity costs for their shared staff fridge. Another where they took out half the light bulbs to save electricity. The bigger school districts seem to be eating most of the cuts through layoffs of admin staff, not replacing leaving/retiring teachers, and increasing the amount of distance away you have to live to get bus service, but the smaller ones don’t have that kind of wiggle room and are having to make really ridiculous decisions that shouldn’t have to be made.
Goddamn, that is some bullshit.
AUGH! SCREAMING FOREVER. I have been moved back to Canada for TEN YEARS and still… still.. every time Oklahoma shows up in the news it is for SOMETHING WORSE. And it makes me crazy.
Places I will not move: [back] to Kansas [until the state gets its shit together], Oklahoma
Places I live though: Texas
Nearly cried, I was so angry, while leaving a voicemail for our batshit governor.
She’s probably sipping a martini in her fucking Panhandle hot tub while phoning somebody from the Trump campaign to see how he wants a potential VP to handle this kind of thing.
This is ACTUALLY INSANE. I don’t even know how to handle this level of bullshit. I mean, I live in blue-state-haven New York, but WHAT THE FUCK.
She vetoed it. In other news, pigs were seen flying over Tulsa.
RURAL SOUTHERN ONTARIO IS READY FOR THE RETURN OF NICOLE.
Also Alison Green is amazing, the end.
Now you can get flat badger lies on your lipstick! http://triflecosmetics.com/home/13-lip-parfait-ra…
I am sad that it isn’t in a color that suits me.
How mad to you think my toast care package recipient would be if I sent them that lipstick and only that lipstick?
If your toast care package recipient is me NOT MAD AT ALL
THERE IS A PUG LIPSTICK! AND A RACCOON! *throws all my money at them*
AND THEIR SISTER SITE SO SUSAN HAS CATS AND FLAMINGOS: http://sosusan.com/en/lips/93-lipopout-cats.html
NOT JUST A PUG A “GUILTY” PUG
PUG LIPSTICK HELP I AM GOING TO BE EVEN BROKER
Parents of infants: did you use gro-bags for your babies when they were v smol, and if yes how many gro-bags would you recommend getting for each size/stage?
I initially read this as talking about the kind of bags you grow tomatoes in.
I resent your unthinking assumption that my baby isn’t a tomato. #notallbabies
Me too.
Same. I thought ‘Oh, that’s how they get babies to grow bigger. Sure, makes sense.’
Kindergarden: literal not metaphor. Seems legit.
Our lives were saved by the SwaddleMe (similar product). I’d say get at least 3, more if you can afford it, because babies leak constantly, and there is no despair like the despair of not having a clean swaddle.
I believe this is also what we had (they were hand-me-downs and I’m not certain) but they were very nice. Three or four should do it – I’d hold off on getting bigger sizes, because there comes a time when your baby learns to roll over onto her face whilst swaddled, and then you cannot swaddle anymore, because she cannot roll back, and everything is terrible and she won’t sleep so well for a whole year after that, but what can you do? The only pain you can save yourself there is to have not yet bought any swaddles for the next size up.
Also I just looked up Gro-Bags and they are a different thing entirely – we did have a couple of those, but the baby hated them. We just went with fleece footie pajamas and turned the heat up (67 F was the coldest it could be and not have her wake up extra from being cold… ybmv).
YBMV? Superb acronym
thank you, i just made it up! (i think)
(67 F was the coldest it could be and not have her wake up extra from being cold… ybmv)
ahhhhhhh noooooo. Babies. Why.
FWIW my niece and nephew both slept in sleep sacks until after a 1 year old; My niece is 17months and she’s still in hers at night, she gets fussy if you don’t get out of it once she’s awake, but other than that I think she’s pretty happy with it
Yes, up until about 18 months I think. We lived dangerously and only had one at a time, but did get heavier tog ones if it was cold. My kid was a champion blanket kicker-offer so those grobags worked well.
We had I think 4 of the Halo kind with the velcro, which was a good number (I remember a handful of times when we ran out and little dude had to flail instead of sleeping, but it didn’t happen all the time).
oh yeah I think we used these, except they were called “sleep sacks”. I think we had about two or three for each phase though.
If that’s the garment with sleeves on top and a sort of sack for the legs and feet, they are fabulous up until the day the baby starts trying to crawl, so don’t invest in many over the 9-month size; watch the baby and find out what he/she likes.
The ones I mean are sleeveless padded little sleeping bags like this, apparently they are better than blankets as less kickable?
(Because you aren’t supposed to have blankets in cribs unless they’re very tightly tucked, which was always more than I thought I could manage, or possibly not at all.)
We used those from when our daughter was about 2 months old until she was about a year. For 0-3 months I strongly recommend getting the kind that swaddles. They were the only way we could get her to sleep more than 45 minutes at a time (and I know lots of other parents with similar stories).
When they were very, very small, we used the Miracle Blanket. AMAAAAAZING.
Once they learned how to roll over and/or how to escape the MB, it was onto the Halo sleep sack. I used that with each of them until about 10 months, since they learned to stand and learned that they HATED having their legs confined in any way.
Yes, they were great, and IIRC they were sized 0-9 months so they last forever?
My general rule with baby clothes is just get a couple of anything to start because you/they might decide they actually hate it in practice. (Did I know I would hate pants on infants before I started dressing one? Nope!)
The old method of keeping babies in gowns/dresses for their first few years had a lot of merit.
I have a strong opinion that is tangentially related to your question. And it is that Woombies are the only swaddler you will need, ever. The advantages are 1) they are inescapable, 2) they are easy — just zip and go, and 3) it is hilarious when your baby looks like a caterpillar/peapod.
To answer your actual question, we did not use the grobag-type sleepers very much, especially when the baby was very small. We swaddled until about 4 months, then used a Baby Merlin Magic Sleepsuit (also hilarious looking) for a month or two, then tried sleep sacks but ended up using just pajamas. We do live in a warm climate and our baby is kind of an all-weather kid (never seems to get hot or cold). On the other side, my sister’s kids both slept in sleep sacks until they were 3 or 4 — basically, until she had to make them stop because she couldn’t find big enough sacks.
So, I guess my advice is to get at least 2 (so you have a spare in case of leakage), but you might not use them until the baby is 6 months+ (unless you don’t plan to swaddle) and don’t buy a huge number until you see whether your kid is into them or not.
Ahhhh, the Baby Merlin Magic Sleepsuit, aka her Marshmallow Suit! That thing has saved my life since baby girl started escaping the swaddle. I dread the day I have to get her to sleep free of any restraining contraptions.
Today in badassery (well, yesterday, and really 2010): “Lone Gurkha takes out 30 attacking Taliban.” As a friend points out, it sounds like the Wee Free Men, who like to be surrounded by enemies because it means they’ll hit one no matter where they strike.
I love that there’s an award called “Conspicuous Gallantry.”
In all, he fired off 250 machine gun rounds, 180 SA80 rounds, threw six phosphorous grenades and six normal grenades, and one Claymore mine.
Pretty sure you can’t get much more conspicuous than that.
Yeah, I’d skip a dude who put his coat over a puddle for me if I could get one who knew how and when to toss HE.
“one Claymore mine”
jesus
“Dammit there’s still more of them, I’ve got to throw something at them…ah-ha!”
(please read the article because it adds that, after throwing all of his grenades AND a land mine, he killed a guy by hurling his machinegun tripod at him and knocking him off a tower)
Look, you build up a “throwing things at bad guys” rhythm, you run out of explosive things, it’s not like you can just stop throwing things. It’s important to ease out of that slowly.
(I also wish I’d initially thought to link to Eddie Izzard’s “London getting bombed to shit” bit)
We found a pile of my great-grandfather’s RAF stuff and there was a book full of awestruck jokes and stories about Gurkhas. It’s great.
Share! Share! I am 100% HERE for Gurkha stories; everything I’ve read to date has been impressive.
ETA: George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here includes one anecdote about how serving with the Gurkhas could be tricky: GMF and another soldier were on night guard and were not spotted by a fellow platoon of Gurkhas returning from patrol. His fellow cautioned him to tell nobody but the commanding officer for the evening, because the Gurkhas, jealous of their reputation as the best night stalkers in the regiment, would have viewed their failure to spot a guard as unacceptable, and their leader would have resigned his commission in disgrace.
And you can’t help thinking that, when that book came out, somewhere in South Asia an extremely elderly gentleman hung his head in shame and wrote a letter renouncing his pension.
Nae King! Nae Quinn!
The best part of that article is the photo at the end of the man with his grandfather, who is so proud he looks like he’s about to start actually glowing.
Today in (Feminist) History! [Archive]
(Sorry today’s is short, long busy exhausting week + bad morning.)
On this day in 1932, Amelia Earhart was the first female pilot (and second-ever pilot) to fly a solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Leaving from Newfoundland on May 20th, she traveled over 2.000 miles in almost 15 hours to land in Ireland the next day. She received the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross for this achievement, but also set numerous other records as well. In 1928, as part of a three-person crew, Amelia was considered the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an aircraft at all, though on that flight she only kept the plane’s log. That year, she also became the first woman to fly solo across the North American continent and back, and in 1931 she set the world altitude record at 18,415 ft.
Though some people may now think of her as a stunt-flier, much of what Amelia did involved trying to change the perception of people when it came to women fliers. She worked as an associate editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, working not only towards greater acceptance of aviation in general, but especially for women. She promoted commercial air travel, did lecture tours, wrote books, and became an official at the National Aeronautic Association, where she worked towards the establishing of separate records for women fliers. She also created a group known as the Ninety-Nines, the members of which were all female pilots that worked to advance women in aviation. Always a strong advocate for female pilots, when the Bendix Trophy Race of 1934 banned women fliers, she refused to fly in Mary Pickford (screen actress) to open the races, in protest.
Of course, what Amelia Earhart is best known for now is not any of her achievements, but her final flight. In 1937, while attempting to make a circumnavigational flight around the world, her plane disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean, near Howland Island. In her last radio messages she said that she was lost and low on fuel. It was the last anyone ever heard of her. Neither her plane (minus a tiny piece of the engine), nor her body, were ever found, but Amelia herself inspired an entire generation of female aviators.
Aw, I love Amelia Earhart! Thank you! I hope you have a nice relaxing weekend after your long week!
I’m glad, and thank you! I am planning to sleep a lot this weekend which is perfect for me.
This…is short? Seriously, these are amazing. So amazing! And I am very grateful for them.
I am…maybe thinking about starting my own blog to (hopefully) offer some sort of online community to Toasties (and others, obvs) after July 1. Would you be at all interested in doing these for clevermanka.net? Wouldn’t have to be a daily thing (I realize that is a huge undertaking) but perhaps something as minimal as a round-up of Awesome Feminist Moments For (Month)?
I’ll be putting some deets about my ideas for the blog in today’s OT.
Awww, thank you!! I usually add a bit of other things to the bottom of these, but last night I was like uuuuuuugh too tired, and also there weren’t as many interesting women born today, so alas.
Oh, that sounds nice! Yeah, I might be up for that. I think I do want to keep writing these for the archive and/or some kind of tinyletter, but I could maybe do a weekly or monthly roundup for your site!
So sorry you’re having a hard morning! Thank you for doing these. I love them and hope you take up clevermanka’s offer! (Also, clevermanka yay good idea!)
Amelia Earhart was ::not:: treated well by Gore Vidal in his memoir.
I will fight him. (I know he’s dead I’ll still fight him.)
Anyway I haven’t read his memoir but I’m assuming it’s because of the alleged relationship between her and his father and of course he’d treat AMELIA badly over that.
Amelia also invented the first luggage specifically designed for air travel! If you have hardback luggage or luggage that fits in an overhead bin, know it’s design roots go back to Amelia’s luggage! Also, she had her own clothing line that was basically “how to dress like a 1930s soft butch” that was unfortunately not popular enough to continue even though the clothes were excellent.
“how to dress like a 1930s soft butch”
Somebody please take all my money to revive this…
It was great! She incorporated all of these airplane details like: shirts made of parachute fabric, wing nuts for buttons, belt buckles made of ball bearings. It was considered “sportswear” for “active women.”
Here’s an article about it: https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/blog/amelia-…
For a second I read that way too quickly and ‘fly in Mary Pickford’ somehow became the idea that clearly Mary Pickford must have been some kind of transformer who went from screen star to biplane.
All of the big silent film stars were also Transformers. It’s one of those little-known facts of the entertainment industry.
Douglas Fairbanks? Autogiro. Buster Keaton? Steamboat.
“Nope, you can’t have Mary Pickford unless you also allow other women in. That is the choice you made, fuckos.”
Man, that “mercy killing” story is one of my deep-seated fears as a chronically ill person. Will my medical costs one day cause any partner of mine to *murder* me to relieve the burden that I already feel like most of the time?
Bummer City. Population: this gal.
I am so so sorry, it is such a blind spot for so many people who automatically put themselves in the position of the murderer and not the victim.
Caregiver fatigue is real! Life is hard! DO NOT MURDER PEOPLE. Call CPS or APS and say I am seriously contemplating killing a person in my care.
Yes! It’s a terrible situation for everyone involved, and oftentimes is harder on the caregiver who can’t do anything to resolve the situation.
It’s such an easy thing, too, to NOT MURDER SOMEONE.
I’ve had people say to my face “if that were me I’d kill myself.”when they learn I have MS. Then they say how “brave” I am.
It’s a pretty short road from there to “You are disabled and therefore should be killed.”
This is dangerous way to think.
YES. No, no they wouldn’t kill themselves because they’d still be the same person who treasures their own life and everything they can do in it.
Oh my word. People are horrible. I hope you freeze their very souls with just a glance after comments like that.
Please tell me you are training Belle to growl very ferociously whenever such a thing is uttered in her presence.
Belle will be trained to growl and give them serious wolf face
I’m a middle/high school teacher (kids 12-18) and I spend a LOT of time reminding them that when we say, “I would kill myself” it’s actually a punishingly real thing to say, and most likely NOT AT ALL TRUE, and if it is at all true, let’s talk! and words have power, etc. Not that your life needs to be a teachable moment for everyone, but thanks for posting this because it gives me another road into those conversations with my kids.
Also, I agree with folks that your dog (I’m assuming) should have some serious growling skills. You can smile beautifully and your dog can freak the fuck out. It’ll be like she’s your daemon (from His Dark Materials).
Ugh. I have lupus and I hate the word “brave.” What they are saying without realizing it is, “You didn’t kill yourself upon finding out. Good for you. (pat on head)” Ugh. I hadn’t even thought about the obvious next step …
Hi, Long-time lurker, first-time poster …
Yeah, my mom is chronically ill and reliant on my dad’s income/insurance, and this is one of my nightmares. (I do not think it at all likely to happen, but tell that to my lizard brain.)
This happened in my town this week. A husband shit his terminally ill wife. Only in this case he killed himself too. Very sad.
This is what’s so infuriating about people in the rantosphere who get all frothy about health-care rationing and death panels. Hello! These things are ALREADY HAPPENING.
Right there with you. Excuse me, going to confirm my partner will flee and abandon me rather than murder me.
I will join you in Bummer City because that is also something I secretly fear.
I will also join you as a resident of Bummer City. I’ve always been afraid I was to blame for my parents’ financial citation because they would always talk about how expensive having me is. Now that I’m an adult, this is such a real fear, that my partner will decide I’m too much or somehow ruining their life. And then literally kill me.
Toasties, I think you will appreciate this: I am visiting Tulsa at the moment, and had a chatty Uber driver last night who started talking about a recent librarian convention in the city. “I was driving and they were having a huge librarian convention with librarians from all over,” she said, ‘And they are the biggest lushes.”
Literature and booze just go together, it is a scientific fact! I’m not a librarian, but I do have a literature degree, and there is nothing I love more than getting drunk with fellow nerds and having long, semi-coherent discussions of sexuality in Bob’s Burgers or how much “Heart of Darkness” is a metaphor and how much is just straight-up the terror of the Belgian Congo. Then I feel classy instead of just, you know, like a lush.
I have a religious studies degree and have only set foot in my local library three times this year but would be 100% down for non-sober discussions of sexuality in Bob’s Burgers.
[very Gene voice] Heck, I’d do it sober!
I know Tina’s sexuality gets all the attention (as it should!) but I actually really like Bob’s. His orientation of “mostly straight” speaks to me on a spiritual level, and I love how he is pretty open to the idea of a same sex relationship (if he wasn’t married, obviously).
100% agree. He has such a chill attitude about it that is wildly refreshing coming from an otherwise straight dude.
Let’s discuss the sexuality in Bob’s Burgers right now!
Bob: Bob is definitely bi, or “mostly straight.” I read an amazing fanfic where Bob’s first kiss is a boy. It was the sweetest. I admit, I want this to be true because I’m on that not-quite-straight spectrum myself, but I haven’t fully figured it out.
Gene: Gene is genderqueer, right? And maybe gay? Sometimes he identifies as a boy, other times he insists on being one of the girls. I love him.
Jimmy junior is definitely gay, yes? Or maybe he’s just terrible. But truly, there’s no one he cares about as much as Zeke. And this is confirmed by recent episodes (“Stand by Gene”).
YES! Let’s do it!
I love Bob’s sexuality, I relate to it on a spiritual level. I love how flattered he is by the same-sex attention that he gets, and never gets into the weird macho reactions TV loves to throw out there. The Thanksgiving episode where he tells the poultry guy it would never work because he is too good-looking (and then says ‘I’ll call you!’) kills me every time. And I love how no one really makes any big deal out of it, it is just how Bob is. I get the impression that he would totally be down to have a boyfriend if he wasn’t married to Linda. That idea is so rare on TV (where happily married couples are rarely shown as having any kind of sexuality outside of their current relationship) and I think they pull it off really well.
Gene definitely reads as genderqueer to me, and again, I love that it is never a big deal, it is just who he is (“I’m pretty!”). I could totally see him as being someone who is pretty fluid on both the gender and sexuality spectrum.
Jimmy Junior is definitely gay, yes. Poor Tina! What are people’s thoughts on Zeke, though? I tend to read him as straight, but I know other’s who see him and JJ getting together, and I admit that is totally possible.
(Also, can we point out what a freak Louise is going to grow up to be? I totally see her and Logan getting together and having some kinky times)_
Zeke certainly acts straight, but perhaps he doth protest too much. I feel like Zeke will be down for anything in a few years, can’t knock it til ya try it, sure, why not?
I never want Gene to be defined or “come out” as anything. I love that this show sort of exists in a universe where labels don’t exist. Like…in so many shows, his character would be working up to figuring out what he is. Or hinting meaningfully without ever using words so that queer folks can grasp at subtext but the show never really has to own it. But instead he’s just gleefully doing his thing and I looooove it. He’s so happy and not angsty about it.
I just re-watched the Boys 4 Now episode and Louise slapping Boo Boo…hahaha…yup, Louise is gonna be fun when she grows up.
Totally agree on Gene just continuing to be Gene. And everyone just continuing to accept him. And yea… Louise is gonna have some good times when she is older.
I also really love the way Bob deals with the kid’s relationships in a way that is awesome parenting without ever veering into “overprotective dad” mode. His advice to Tina about going to the dance with a boy that just wanted to go with her was so spot on. And he didn’t hesitate to tell her that she was being a jerk by stringing two boys along. But he mostly lets her do her own thing. He is super upfront with Gene about how wrong it is to only date Courtney to get to hang out with her dad as well. And they treat their kid’s relationships as important, and never condescend to them about how it’s “just a crush”. Bob and Linda are great parents.
One day, Louise is gonna be the best aunt to the others’ kids.
Ah, God, Tina!
Did anybody see the most recent episode where she was in the glee club, became the soloist and “Mono Girl”? (Frond is trying to scare the school into never kissing again, and she gets disinvited to a “Spin the Bottle” party). Bob handles it SO WELL, he is totally supportive of her wanting to kiss all the boys and letting her know her body is her own. I may have cried.
Yeah, I definitely feel that Zeke could be down for anything 🙂
Gene! Yeah, I feel like there’s no need for him to come out or angst. He just exists, and the family just accepts him for what he is. Then again, he might like the drama of coming out (“This is me now!”)
Oh I am sure it would be dramatic, just in a good way. But I agree, Gene could just continue on and be totally fine 🙂
I also related to it on a spiritual level. It means so much to me. Bob and “Everyone has gay thoughts” Ben from Parks and Rec are my touchstones for bi-ish people in opposite-sex relationships.
I actually don’t know about Zeke! I sort of want him to end up dating Tina! I think he actually likes her a lot, and he’s expressed interest before…
Louise will definitely have a freaky side. She and Jessica (the girl from the sleepover) have a great, competitive vibe, as she does with Logan, of course. But I also love the idea of her and Rudy, which is very different. He loves to get up to shenanigans with her, and she is very protective of him as she is with no one else –and he’s almost part of the Belcher family. My SO is convinced they are meant for each other.
My mind is getting BLOOOOOWN right now because I’ve never even considered these things before about these characters. It makes me like the show a lot more.
I love love love Bob’s Burgers, mostly because of the reasons above! I also love how ridiculous their body types are. They totally could have done the “tiny waist, HUGE head” thing a lot of cartoons do, but I adore that everyone is more-or-less teardrop shaped with no chins. It makes it even funnier when a character is supposed to be super good-looking, but they all kinda look the same.
Obviously it has it’s issues, though. These episode with the trans* sex workers was…bad. Just bad (although Bob’s confession that he ‘might have done coke. and if I did I really liked it’ was pretty funny). I’d like to think that they have gotten a little better with keeping Marshmallow around and giving her the same “it is what it is” treatment that everyone else on the show gets. (I also love Bob’s line “Marshmallow isn’t handsome, she’s beautiful” and her response “blush!”). But it still has it’s issues.
Season 1 doesn’t count, right?
But yeah, I love that Marshmallow and the roller skating guy just turn up from time to time and nobody blinks.
For me it is really just that one episode! It is so frustrating! And Episode one is probably my favorite first episode of any show(I was hooked from the line “You are my family, and I love you, but you are all terrible at what you do. And I want you all to know: I would fire you if I could”).
I love how the show portrays a bunch of weirdos (pretty much every character) and get never really turns them into spectacles. It’s nice!
Their mysterious folkways were captured in a documentary!
That’s just Midwinter.
Annual is apparently crazier.
I went to Midwinter parties and they were EXCELLENT.
If they spent their days fighting with IT, dealing with tiny budgets, yelling at students to be quiet and trying to convince them not to cite Wikipedia, they’d drink too!
Seriously, librarian shit is why I drink.
And how I discovered my love of good gin.
Gin twins! *heart eyes* (everyone I know hates it. More for me!) Obsessed with Caorunn right now
I am working my way through a bottle of Death’s Door, which is ok and regional for me, but not my favorite. Give me Aviation or Whitley Neill anyday.
I THINK it was an Oklahoma librarian conference, and given the current Oklahoma education budget situation, I’d be in an alcoholic stupor 24/7 if that were my job.
I was once offered an academic (non-librarian) job in Oklahoma and turned it down on the basis that I’d be in an alcoholic stupor 24/7 if I had to live there very long. This was even pre-education budget situation.
We are! We can drink out any convention city they throw us in.
A San Francisco hotelier once testified to his love of library conventions, right before ALA descended on his facility. “We LOVE librarians. They always honor their reservations, they’ve gone to their sessions when cleaners need to get in… and they drink like the merchant marine.”
I love this story so much.
I am so proud of my people right now.
And I bet they’re polite drunks, as well.
My state’s annual library conference moves from city to city each year, as you do. Because we’re always encountering new hotel/restaurant/bar staff in these cities, there is the inevitable moment when one of them says something like, “When I heard the librarians were coming, I assumed it was going to be really quiet. It… it has not been that.”
This just made me think of the Hamilton sing along they had at…annual? midwinter?…that someone tweeted about and then Lin Manuel RTd it: https://twitter.com/jenunexpected/status/68630743…
We are not quiet.
When I started my Library and Information Studies MA, the course director described librarians as “gregarious”. I was slightly taken aback, but I think she’s right.
Oh man, I am going to YALSA in November and I had been planning to ask about a Toastie meet-up closer to the time (surely some of us are going/already live in Pittsburgh) AND NOW I AM SAD ALL OVER AGAIN! Dang. I’m going to have to go join the subreddit, aren’t I.
I have never been as drunk as when I went to library school. We had the wildest parties and it was AWESOME.
Plus, my family and family friends are all librarians. We know how to have a good time.
OLA was just last month! And yeah, any library conference is that way, but combine how far-flung rural librarians can be with our current budget crisis, and yeeeeep. Drinking and bitching mightily over everything and anything.
Last year the ALA was in downtown San Francisco the same weekend as pride. I can’t imagine that was a coincidence.
(And what a pride it was, right after the supreme court marriage ruling)
Oh my god, there was a library convention in Portland a year or two ago, and I was still on Yik Yak (an anonymous social media where the posts are based on your location) and close enough to the convention center to see their posts. So many jokes about Danskos and cardigans. So many references to drinking heavily.
Not only heavily but competitively!
Also one person complained about panels where people just read off their Powerpoint, and everyone agreed, with lots of swearing.
Anyway the whole thing just made me love librarians even more.
I am not linking to the xoJane piece everyone on Twitter is talking about, but it is a literal nightmare and you can discuss it here as much as you want.
Okay I just looked it up out of curiosity and not only is it indeed a literal nightmare it is also just terribly written.
oh my god you weren’t kidding what the fuck is that mess of an article
I don’t have Twitter! Can someone clue me in?
Here’s the archive link so they at least don’t get the clicks http://archive.is/LFGx6
aaaaaaaaaaaaaah yikes
i made it two paragraphs in and then noped right back out
i do not want to know any more
I didn’t have Twitter either, so I went to xoJane and made a list of a few headlines that sounded potentially nightmarish to see if I could guess what it was. On the bright side, the article was on my list. On the downside, that means it’s just as bad as it sounds from the headline (or worse) . . .
Right? I scrolled through and COULD NOT TELL which one was (the most)nightmarish.
It’s nightmare turtles all the way down!
I know! I was scrolling down and thinking, What is it?? It could be ANYTHING.
My list of most likely candidates was (because this is about as far down as I scrolled):
I Couldn’t Poop Anywhere But My Parents’ Home Until I Moved In with Nuns (That reads less like a headline and more like a Mad Lib.)
My Husband and I Have Already Had Two Wedding Ceremonies, But I’m Not Satisfied — I Want Another
My Former Friend’s Death Was a Blessing (I have decide I don’t have the mental fortitude for this after all; I will just read everyone’s reactions here instead.)
UNPOPULAR OPINION: School Dress Codes for Girls Help Prevent Sexual Assault
Why Would Straight Men Become Gynecologists for Any Reason Other Than Getting Paid to Grope Women?
I also realized that their capitalization conventions for headlines is very inconsistent, especially with the word “and.” Which for me is apparently like grammar equivalent of seeing someone whose shirt tag is sticking up and you can’t fix it for them.
I would believe that any/all of these are somebody’s idea of a perfect xojane parody article (along with one that’s called like “it happened to me: I went to the moon and talked to an alien” and then the actual article is about going to see Interstellar and meeting somebody from another country). But alas, they’re REAL.
There’s a small township in Pennsylvania named Moon. I sort of doubt anyone from another country lives there but it could happen!
Missouri has a lot of random town names and I like to collect them. Perennial favorites include Useful, MO, home of the Useful Cemetary, and Louisiana, MO, which has streets named after the states. There’s a hospital on Georgia St, Louisiana, MO.
My mom was born in Louisiana, MO– possibly in that very hospital! I’m also a fan of Tightwad, Licking, and Cooter. I spent a lot of time in my youth looking over the MO highway map during road trips to visit family.
There’s also Airport Drive and Hurricane Deck.
Licking, Missouri!
i once had a summer internship at KOMU-TV, and was camera operator when the news anchor dissolved in a fit of hysterical giggles as she tried to introduce a story coming live from … that memorably-monikered town.
There’s also a Mars, Pennsylvania! Pennsylvania, underrated for its weird place names.
We’ve got a North, South Carolina, which is obviously located southeast of Due West, South Carolina.
These all sound like Reductress headlines! I would read all of those if they were Reductress articles but as it is I’m like CLEANSE IT WITH FIRE.
I play a game with my partner called “XOJane or Reductress headline?”
She hates this game.
That GYN article was some good discussion fodder for my friends list. We all don’t give a rip what the gender of our GYN is, it turns out.
so you… made these up, right? Like a joke? A joke of made-up bad headlines because there’s no actual way this could be a list of articles on an actual website, right?
…right?
Am I totally ret-conning xoJane, or did they once upon a time have worthwhile content?
Does anyone else remember LIKING xoJane?
I also vaguely remember a time like this! There were very nice articles about young women discovering body positivity and DIY tutorials??
I think there was initially some residual goodwill because of people’s fondness for Sassy and Jane magazines, but I remember it going to shit pretty quickly.
I thought you were making up fake xojane headlines and was going to like it because it was hilarious.
Oh, I wish I had made this up. I ad never actually been on xoJane before today . . .
I read the “I want a third wedding article”. My favorite part was when she says “You might think I’m a crazy person, but let me explain.” The explanation proceeds to just be. . .I had two weddings, but that wasn’t good enough because ME ME ME.
I ended up reading that one earlier because I knew I would hate it. And I did.
(I’d just come out of a conversation that started with someone asking me how if we’ve finally set a date yet. I think someday I might actually get frustrated by that enough to tell one of my well-meaning coworkers that the real reason we postponed an extra year was so that my fiancé’s father would be out of jail before his only kid’s wedding. Oddly, reading about this women’s ridiculous wish for a third wedding made me feel better.)
HOW is xojane still around, and we’re losing the Toast?
(Integrity doesn’t pay, I know.)
Same here!
oh my god
Christ Jesus, how fucking horrible. The fact the writer apparently has a modicum of self-awareness makes it… I don’t want to say makes it worse, because even without that it would be the lowest thing, but adds an extra layer of awfulness. I mean “It’s hard to share my thoughts and tell Leah’s story… and not judge myself on some level for exploiting an awful situation. ” – yes that’s what you’re doing, and it’s terrible. Also the writer includes the fact that her friend wasn’t dating and hadn’t had any relationships as proof of how ~tragic~ her life was. Lord preserve us from people like this.
I honestly don’t know how you could write an article saying ‘My friend deserved to die’ and still think you come out of that as good and moral.
Perhaps The Toast has spoiled me with A+ content all the time, but I read so many things that my reaction is 1–why did someone decide this was a good thing to write, 2–why did several other someone’s decide this was a good thing to publish? There are SO MANY other amazing voices out there to tell stories that truly NEED to be told!
Honestly, the decision to publish is just mystifying to me. Like… genuinely, why? What possible value did you see this story bringing to your site/the world? Okay, good work, you got some ad impressions, also now the BEST thing anyone thinks about your publication is “oh yeah, those guys will print any fucking monstrous garbage if they think it’ll get them hits”. THAT’S YOUR BEST CASE. ALMOST CERTAINLY OUTWEIGHED by the people thinking “someone on the editorial staff thought this piece was relatable or sympathetic or in some way not monstrous!!??!” and “wow, it is fucking cold to play both ends off the middle like this, ‘oh your story is fascinating we’d love to publish it’ and ‘oh look how monstrous this writer is come rip her apart’.”
Same here. That article is not just garbage — it’s actually poisonous. I feel a little worse for having read it.
The haunting part for me was how she kept judging the parents, who lost one daughter to cancer and apparently had another daughter who was schizo-affective but an adult in her majority, so it’s not like they could do *that* much about it without her consent since she’s over 18. Their second daughter dies — and this person judges them repeatedly in a national publication over it from a position of zero knowledge except hearsay from friends and Facebook stalking?
Also, she was super-judgmental about her friend having been unable to consent to the sex work she was doing. “I just felt sick about the whole thing. But because somebody was taking advantage of her, not because I’m judging her. Except that I totally am, because how very dare she be so taking-advantageable.”
Clicks is literally the only thing I can come up with.
Well, people spouting monstrous garbage is a proven money-winner. I mean, the appeal of a lot of reality shows and Jerry Springer, Dr. Phil, Judge Judy, etc. is to see people being outrageously horrible in ways you previously thought were unthinkable, right? And then there’s usually someone who tells them how horrible they’re being. With xoJane and and all the other rage-clickbait articles, the whole internet gets to take the position of moral judge! Yay. :/
If your end goal is having people click on your site, then you publish what gets you eyeballs. Doesn’t matter if they’re hate reads or not, if they’re on your site and getting served ads, mission accomplished.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/09/happened-to-me-ha…
I know, this week I’ve been like, hmm, maybe I should look at some other sites today, to try and see what it will be like when I can’t hang out at the Toast all day. It has not been going well.
Yes the lack of a relationship and the fact that she didn’t respect her own property. Definitely better to die than be messy. *rage*
Ugh and the part about relationships: “I feel like she probably had no concept of how to be in a relationship.”
This whole thing is presumptuous and awful but that line makes me wonder how well the writer even knew her “friend.”
Oh, also getting on her high horse about relationships when she *clearly* still felt resentful that this woman once made out with someone author had a crush on. Along with passive aggressive ‘I forgave her’. Like, that’s really not a big deal to adult humans, I swear, it’s not A+ behaviour (if friend even knew about the crush which… maybe she didn’t), but to include that in a litany of evidence about ‘Why this person deserved to die’ is quite something.
Right? And don’t forget the other part of that sentence “But I never looked at her the same way.” I’m not sure that counts as forgiveness. You are not magnanimous because of this.
RIGHT? No part of this article makes the writer look like a good person or presenting a thoughtful outlook or really even AFFECTED at all? They barely talked, they weren’t involved in each other’s lives anymore, WHY was she qualified to write an article about this woman’s life and death?
“Oh yeah, I knew her once and had opinions on her. Definitely worth writing this.”
She’s basically saying “We didn’t talk much but she seemed like kind of a mess for the few months I had her added on facebook, good thing she died before I had to see another obnoxious status update”
She’s vile. She’s exactly the kind of shallow, judgy person who expects to be congratulated for how ~progressive~ she is based on pretty much nothing. Someone who probably believes that if you’re well-liked, you’re a good person, which means that if people don’t like you, you’re bad.
But just, how do you see someone obviously suffering and proceed to act like a middle school mean girl? How do you go through life believing that someone being different from you means they’re disgusting?
Wow. The writer appears to want to exorcise her guilt over being unkind to her friend, and I suspect she will eventually regret her defensive lack of empathy. xoJane, on the other hand, has no excuse for publishing this.
HALF A PARAGRAPH IN and I just. No. Why.
I read these comments and the post’s title and decided to go back to enjoying the wicked mandolin stylings of Chris Thile, MacArthur Genius grant recipient.
Because no.
Chris Thile is always a better choice.
Especially when Aoife O’Donovan comes with! Her voice is the dreamiest I swear. Let’s hear it for Crooked Still’d artist radio on Spotify.
And thank you for posting that because heck yes this is some good station.
I read the title and then had to take a deep breath and stop.
And then I went back and read the whole thing. I don’t even have the ability to be mad because the whole piece is just such a trainwreck. Atlhough, I’ll be honest, I’m glad this isn’t a bad mental health day.
Just read that, and holy shit.
I mean, I am bipolar (II) and usually single and I can imagine someone writing something like that about me, and it’s just so… mean. Why would you say that?
oh, i hope you see how so many of us here have thought, “yikes, big parts of that article could be about me” and then wash that article right out of your memory.
Ugh, what a terrible article — a piece of sludge. I am shocked it was published.
“It’s hard to share my thoughts and tell Leah’s story — or at least her story from my perspective — and not judge myself on some level for exploiting an awful situation.”
YOU REALLY SHOULD HAVE GONE WITH THAT FEELING.
“I can’t understand how a parent would let their child go on like this.”
oh, FUCK YOU.
If I were the family of the girl who passed away, I would sue this author for character defamation. I’m not sure it matters how anonymously she posted it. This was sickening to read and the author is much more mentally disturbed than her friend ever was.
It actually wasn’t anonymous at first, she removed her name from it. (I only know because Mara Wilson is tweeting about it.) And I agree with you.
For real. And that’s the nicest outcome. I have a relative who died by suicide after a prolonged struggle, and if anyone defamed his memory like the author did to her “friend,” I would be tempted to a) find their car and other property and b) fuck shit up.
One of my priests lost her son to suicide several years ago. I think I would commit actual violence if someone were to make this comment about her situation in my presence.
oh god I can’t even pick a “worst” quote, there are so many terrible ones!!!!
“She supposedly hit her head and drowned in a bathtub. Sadly, I really believe knowing who Leah used to be, that she would have wanted to die that way. ”
“It sounds horrible to say, but her death wasn’t a tragedy, her life was.”
“Judging Facebook pages, we all compare ourselves to other people, what they have, what they don’t, and their accomplishments. This girl had nothing to live for.”
I’M STOPPING NOW BUT YOU CAN IMAGINE HOW IT KEEPS GOING
“It sounds horrible to say, but her death wasn’t a tragedy, her life was.”
YES, YES THAT DOES SOUND HORRIBLE TO SAY BECAUSE IT IS HORRIBLE TO SAY, WHAT THE FUCK
It reads like something a fictional villain would write to let the audience know that this show is not for the faint of heart.
I have no idea how long this will be but I need to get it out there, that article was like an effing trigger.
So…it’s better for me to die than have a messy apartment and no romantic relationships? I’m not worthy of redemption, care, concern if I don’t clean up after myself? I haven’t gone on a date since December 2014 and there are dishes on my coffee table and a pile of clothes in the bathroom. If I’m in a depressive-ish episode, it’s hard to muster up the energy to bathe.
My ex was a neat freak. (He refused to sit down and spend time with me after an emotionally fraught pelvic surgery unti he had vacuumed my carpet, because he couldn’t stand the pet hair. “How can you live like this?!” he said, while I struggled to sit up because of the incision.) He had a system, he had rules, and heaven forbid you didn’t have the same. He treated me…poorly. In his mind I did not deserve respect because I refused to waste my precious spoons at the time on cleaning. (I also have ADHD, so, I have a laundry list of things I’ll waste spoons on.) Was I healthy? No. But did that mean I could be coerced into sex? Because it was the least I could do, given that I was such a terrible, horrible, no-good slob burden. He never said “you’re disgusting,” but he never had to. It was in everything else he did and said.
So now I live with a roommate who has her own room, and I try to do better, and in some ways I succeed! But none of that matters, I guess? Because people like this writer are everywhere and I am terrified of them. My father, my supporter and childhood champion, mocked me as I moved out of a summer apartment where I’d lived in depressed squalor for three months and TOLD HIS BOSS ABOUT IT. SO THAT THE FIRST TIME I MET HER, SHE WENT “Oh, nice to meet you! Heard you’re a slob.” Thanks Dad! Glad that outweighs literally everything else I’ve done in my life to bring you joy!
I am so afraid of neat freaks, you guys. So many of them are convinced it’s so easy to clean and that anyone who doesn’t (because it’s always a CHOICE, you know) is Disgusting and Needs Help and is Stunted Somehow. Doesn’t matter if the slob in question is brilliant and kind and thoughtful and working really really hard on just staying alive. They have no worth as a person if their dishes aren’t done every day.
(I beg pardon from the tidy Toasties among us, because I don’t mean to say that having high standards automatically makes you a judgmental crapstain, but it can start to feel that way when those high standards get used as grounds for emotional abuse. Tidiness on its own is something I envy. Teach me your ways!)
Oh so much love to you- there is nothing like the way the abusive control freak gets inside your head and takes over your inner voice. And to have your dad participate- ugh.
I am so, so sorry your dad treated you that way. There’s no excuse for that.
No one, no matter what they call themselves (“neat freak” or whatever), has a right to criticize another person’s home to their face. It’s basic adult decency, come on. If you’re staying with someone, or just coming over for a meal, offer to help clean up, but don’t make them feel shitty about it.
Thank you. He’s old school, which is to say horribly out of touch, when it comes to depression/anxiety/ADHD. He was also unaware of the events of that summer–I had no friends in that town, my long-distance ‘boyfriend’ was gaslighting me and my ‘best friend’ was helping, I was drinking every night in my bed alone.
It’s been three years since The Apartment Incident and he has improved…somewhat. He still thinks it’s a personal failing that I’m emotional, or lazy, or anxious, but I can see him forcing his brain past that reasoning into “who gives a crap WHAT it comes from, the important thing is that we fix it.”
It also doesn’t hurt that I managed to get and maintain a full-time job in software development, buy a house, and pay the student loans (including his portion) while struggling with my ‘failings’. But I basically had to earn being taken seriously from my own family.
That’s what I end up thinking about most when reading this xoJane crap. I got taken sorta/kinda seriously because I forced myself to do the thing and check off a lot of boxes on the Old School “You’ve Made It” list. At the expense of my health. What about those who cannot do that?
Who is taking them seriously?
*flees internet, makes soothing cup of tea*
I’m sorry that people who should be on your side were so very, very not on your side.
Thank you for being so kind, all of you.
I’m sorry. That article is garbage and the writer is vile.
Argh, that is sucky that people have been awful to you. I am fairly neat, and I don’t feel like it’s a virtue at all. Mostly I’m restless and hyperobservant, so a muddy paw print snags my eyeballs and I can’t forget about it. What helps me is to have podcasts or music or tv going that I can have my back to, so I can be entertained and get shit done. I have music playlists for energy, and save my most tasty podcasts for a treat while I do something SUPER tedious, like scrub the stove/smoke sucker/upper cabinets.
My cast-in-stone rule is, before I go to bed–garbage/recycle/compost out, dishes in dishwasher, floors swept. Then I get up in the morning and don’t have to do anything but drink coffee and feed critters.
My favorite Nigella Lawson story is when an interviewer asked about her kitchen, and she said, (paraphrasing, because I can’t find the article) Oh, yes, the tv people have to come in and clean it from top to bottom before they film, and they complain about it every time. I can’t be made to care. She’s awesome.
You know, I would be interested in reading a thoughtful take on the internet phenomenon where friends who in the past might have totally fallen off the map are now airing their crises and declining mental health on a very public space. I have a friend from college whose Facebook feed has become truly disturbing in the past couple years– routine suicide threats, a lot of very unsettling and incoherent rants, rambling personal attacks on anyone he’s not feeling friendly towards today– and I talk with our mutual friends sometimes, like should I hide his posts? Should I try to keep interacting with him to maintain this friendship? If we tell him how concerned we are, will he blow up at us, or will he withdraw further? But exactly none of those conversations have ended with any of us going “I hope he dies, that will clear it all up.”
So the person who wrote that piece is a nightmare, no question, but I’m way more disappointed by her editors. xoJane has, over the years, proven themselves to be the least responsible editors I’ve ever seen. They’ll publish all kinds of terrible terrible shit if it’ll get lots of pageviews and discussion. And I think that editors on a site that publishes a ton of personal essay from people who are new to writing for the internet, they have a responsibility to not publish this kind of thing! Just – ugh. Nightmare of a piece, poorly written, poorly edited, and just such proof that xoJane is an irresponsible publisher who I never want to work with.
To me the whole thing screamed ‘I am finally realizing that I was horribly judgemental to someone who is dead and I’ll never get a chance to make peace with her so I’m going to cling even more fiercely to my past criticisms because reality is too depressing to bear’. xoJane arguably exploited the writer’s emotional vulnerability by agreeing to post this.
The title had me thinking this was going to be a real life version of “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” and it was DEFINITELY NOT THAT
I hope she and the Christmas Village man marry each other so that Christmas Village Man’s wife can move on to a happier life.
And then I hope this woman steps on one of his tiny buildings.
Did anyone see — they published an apology for this article.
“I deeply regret the hurt that this article has caused and understand that it has perpetuated stigma and diminished the lives of people with mental illness.”
Um, yeah.
Even the daily fail thinks she’s not a very nice person:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3598887…
They’ve put up an apology but it’s bunk and the commenters are calling them on it. Yesterday when they received an extremely bad response from their audience they closed the comments down; now that the REST of the internet is equally disgusted they have them open again. SO disingenuous.
Here is a science article about why you wanted to eat your baby in the first place: http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0923/Why-do…
Last night my husband and I did a live performance of Movie Yelling: Civil War in our living room. I played Nicole, he played Mallory. Our audience consisted of a single cat who walked away less than five minutes in. It was really great.
relationship. goals.
When I worked at a daycare there was one baby whose head smelled like buttered popcorn to me. I can’t explain it, but he’d be in my lap and I’d lean in and boom, artificial buttery goodness. He was also a super adorable little creature, so if I could have gobbled anyone up, it would have been him. Obviously because of boundaries I would never have kissed one of the babies, but I did occasionally mush my cheek against his cheek because he was too cute.
a)if you google apparently baby poop smelling like buttered popcorn is common. What?
b)seriously daycare workers don’t get to kiss the babies? Our daycare people always did because who can take care of babies without smooching them sometimes?
c)I learned the other day that binturongs also smell like buttered popcorn, and that they also have a delicious flumpy galumphy walk which you should watch youtube videos of.
Yes, breastfeed baby poop. Good thing you didn’t kiss it, that baby was covered in POOOOOO…
There was no formal rule against it, but I just thought that was a tad too much closeness for someone who isn’t their parents? There was much mushing/tickling/cuddling/hugging, though.
One girl who didn’t work with the infants would come in to visit them occasionally, and one day right after she’d been out smoking, I was sitting with Lil’ Butterhead on my lap and she walked right over and kissed him on the mouth. I probably should have reported it but I was so shocked that she would do that, I didn’t think of it.
The clarifying note at the end of that article is quite charming, in an “I can’t believe you had to add this, no, wait, I can” way.
Nose twerking.
Someone please explain this to an old person. Or get off my lawn.
Yes! Please! Inquiring minds need to know!
The first time I saw this I watched it without sound, so I thought the nose was supposed to be a panda…
Same thing as every other Buzzfeed or NYT “Youth Culture” piece: 3-12 people between the ages of 13 and 27 did a thing for shits and giggles, somebody noticed them posting about it on Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram, and a “reporter” made a quick buck by aggregating their posts with a paragraph or two of context on top.
As someone who can wiggle my nose, I sort of want to do this… My day has come!
I’ve been lurking here on and off for a while, but I spent a good chunk of yesterday re-reading the children’s stories made horrific series and it occurred to me that Strega Nona would have been perfect for it and now I can’t stop thinking about that so I had to share it.
I mean, without tweaking the story at all, you already have a town that’s flooded by pasta to the brink of destruction, like a tastier Vesuvius. The Pastacalypse, if you will. Then as a punishment the apprentice is forced to eat all of the pasta. I feel like a person could really do something with “forced to eat enough pasta to smother a town.”
You know a funny thing about Strega Nona? Tomie dePaola, the author and illustrator, has got a lot of stories of people coming up to him to tell him how grateful they are that he made this story about the folklore of their childhood, and how they’d been told stories about Strega Nona when they were little kids, &c., but actually he made her up!
Do you suppose they had her mixed up with Baba Yaga somehow?
I mean, I guess it’s possible, though obviously Baba Yaga isn’t Calabrian. I figure there’s a number of factors involved: 1) the book, when it was first published, said “an old story retold” (this was a lie), 2) a lot of people probably heard the story in their childhood without rigorously investigating the provenance (you know how little kids are, always just believing things that they hear instead of doing their research), and 3) maybe a minor body of similar or related stories about Italian stregas that got attached to Strega Nona (the story in the first book, for instance, is a pretty common motif of the Wizard and Pupil [Aarne-Thompson-Uther 325]).
So I mean, obviously it’s not *that* weird, Strega Nona is meant to look an awful lot like a folktale, and parents don’t typically work very hard to distinguish storybooks from “genuine” folklore, and Baba Yaga is part of a tradition of witchy old ladies throughout Europe, so.
Yeah, I mean when I was five or six, the fact that they both have two names ending in A would have been enough to make them run together for me. I didn’t pick up on cultural signals, like the book’s pretty obvious markers of Italian-ness, until a little later.
well, there is an Italian folklore tale like this, but it’s the Strega Giubia, not the Strega Nona. If you love Baba Yaga like me, you’ll enjoy this too.
Once upon a time there was a witch called the Strega Giubia who was always skinny and had very very long legs and always wore red socks. She had a broomstick to fly on and also her legs were so long that she could go from tree to tree and never set foot on the ground. She liked to eat children and whenever she smelled a particularly tasty one she would snap him up. She was depopulating the towns! Until finally, one mother decided to save her child. She made a wonderfully delicious risotto with saffron and sausages, and put it in the window. The witch smelled the delicious odor and came to her cottage to eat the risotto. She ate and ate. She was so absorbed in eating the risotto that she didn’t know it was nearly dawn. As she kept eating the risotto, the sun rose, and it burned her up to death! The end!
And then everybody burns bonfires in late January to celebrate her end! Northern Italy.
Ah, this is great, thank you! What a twist ending!
General Toast PSA: Here’s a badass lady biker http://www.gearchic.com/
I’m a little bit in love.
This is awesome.
So many hearts for this! My major #lifegoal is to be a Motorcycle Granny when I reach my dotage.
i ate a baby
Your own baby, right?
In fairness, some babies are highly munchable.
Well of course, it’s rude to eat other people’s babies unless you ask first.
you can just lick them if no one is looking
I took a single cognitive linguistics class in college about children and language development and came away from it with a whole new respect for toddlers and the word “no.” Very good, my tiny dude, you are starting to differentiate the self from the other and have realized that your internal wants and needs can directly oppose external ones!
I wish I had taken that class. Maybe I would do less snapping of “For Christ’s sake, [mini-Canard]!”
It’s okay,you’re teaching Mini that you,too,can oppose others’ desires. Important lesson in,I’m gonna say,empathy?
I used to worry about snapping at my kid, and then I figured that it is probably better to learn that yes, you can push people past the breaking point at home, when you are young.
It would be easier if my husband weren’t basically St. Francis. I don’t want to be Bad Cop all the time!
Wait, are you married to my husband?
(To be fair to you, I am able to be fascinated by adamant small children because I don’t have any that I am responsible for.)
For about a year I’d run into the same father/son duo at the coffee shop I’d go to after going to the gym and the little boys favorite words were “no” “can’t” “won’t” and “don’t”. It was pretty impressive.
This is amazing.
Yeah, I’m kind of rooting for Blac Chyna. That article is great and really paints her in a much more positive light than she is perceived.
I also love that she pissess of the Kardashian clan so much.
#schadenfreude
I’m rooting for her too! I hope that she really does have some affection towards Rob. That guy can’t handle more pain!
I have literally no familiarity with the whole situation, but I thoroughly enjoyed that article. I hope she bosses all over them.
(Also I kept reading her name as Blanch Chya. And I’ve only just realized its Black China. I am a habitual skimmer and its awful. I though it was FireBlot for at least 3 HP books.)
[LOLing quite loudly at Fireblot]
I don’t follow the Kardashians any more closely than I have to but ever since Blac Chyna revealed she was dating Rob in January I have been legit mesmerized by the way that relationship has unfolded. I have only the deepest respect for Blac Chyna and wish for only good things to happen to her.
Really? I felt baffled by why I was supposed to praise the idea of someone getting into a relationship and having a baby as a combination of revenge/social climbing. It seemed and still seems absolutely disgusting to me as framed in the article. Rob Kardashian is a person; so is the baby. Also, I’ve already forgotten but Kylie was what… 16? 17? when the relationship with Tyga started. That makes the idea of her as a target of revenge extra gross. Tyga is the one who left Blac Chyna, and Kylie was a literal teenager!
Now, since I don’t know any of the people involved, I prefer to believe that the article’s framing is wrong and that Rob and Blac Chyna actually happened to love spending time with each other and either have fallen in love or believe they have. They were already in overlapping circles, so it seems equally believable to me that they really have feelings than that Blac Chyna is cynically using him as some kind of revenge/marketing plot. But if she’s doing the latter? That seems really gross to me, not admirable or funny or winning some kind of petty games.
Speaking as a disabled person, I find using “her prescriptions were too expensive” as an excuse for murder disturbing. It’s not a ‘mercy killing’ because he wanted to stop caring for his wife or buying her medicine! Our lives are not of lesser value because we are disabled. We aren’t partial people.
I’ve read this twice and I still don’t know what’s going on. A lady who beaned her husband with a frog, told everyone and got away with it? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/w…
It is super disturbing. (I have a great deal of sympathy for people – usually women – who kill abusive partners, but this sounds more like straight-up murder.)
‘I’ve killed him. I’ve battered him with a stone frog which was at the side of the bed. He was just driving me mad. Every night he would get into bed crying and weeping, saying you don’t fancy me.’ ”
Chalkley took none of this seriously. Who would? As Wales Online described the inquest testimony, Chalkley “said she put the comment down to Mrs Sabine making it up, because she had heard nothing on the news which would tally with what she had said during their conversation.” After the telephone call, Chalkley said that death by stone amphibian — “Watch out or I will frog you” — became something of an in-joke among her family members.
I feel like if my friend’s husband disappeared and they SAID “I’ve killed him”, I might be a little more concerned.
Further stuff, which mentions but dismisses the possibility of abuse: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wal…
I wonder how that conversation played out. Like: “Oh, so that’s why he’s not around? Makes sense. These are lovely scones, dear, you really should give me the recipe”
Back in Britain years later, Sabine would tell friends that she once worked as a supermodel, or she was the ex-wife of a millionaire, or she had, in fact, been a famous singer in Australian nightclubs.
It sounds like she was an unreliable narrator is other parts of her life, too. I can totally believe that people in her life are so used to hearing her say bizarre things that they also dismissed her confession.
Well…. that was… strange.
I don’t even know which part is strangest… that she and her husband abandoned their 5 kids in Australia? That she killed her husband and hid his body in a garden shed? That her friends apparently always thought she was joking about everything? Or that her neighbor thought it was a good idea to borrow the skeleton from her dead neighbor’s garden shed for a prank. (But it’s definitely not the stone frog).
Exactly! And that no one thought “well, these cupboards are fine to dig through for props, nothing our dead friend ever said would give us any reason to step away from the rotting smell”
The lady had impressive jewellery and gloves. That BBC copy editor really knows their stuff, great pic for a story about a surprise murder that everyone knew about.
ngl definitely misread that as “17 year old” at first and Nicole’s reaction makes the same amount of sense either way
Last day of advertising for the Toast Post Summer Care Package Exchange!
If you would like to participate, please email the following info to toastsummerexchange(at)gmail(dot)com:
-Your name and address
-Your username here, if you’d like to share it
-Care package preferences/interests
-Any allergies that might be applicable
-Oh, please note if you’re okay mailing internationally (I am going to try to mostly match people to others in their same country, but I’ll see how it goes.)
Just to reiterate: I’m thinking a small box of care package items such as snacks, books, fun bath products, stickers. I’m thinking about ~$20 value, but I also plan to pair people by type of care package where possible, ie crafty people with crafty people, food people with other food people, “don’t care, I just like getting mail” people with same.
I will probably start emailing people their matches next week. Also included in those emails will be more info, such as a mailing deadline.
Yes, deadlines! That’s a great idea. I mean it: somehow stuff is so much easier to get done if you know it needs to be done by a certain time.
Yes, I figured with something like this, it would be best to set a mailing deadline. That way it’s easier to figure out if anyone doesn’t receive their package.
I hemmed and hawed over whether or not I wanted to throw in with this, and it turns out that a sign-up deadline was just what I needed to decide “yay I love mail!”
I gotta like… spreadsheet everybody, and match them according to interests and location etc, so yeah. Deadline. It’s a good thing. To others reading this: Please let that encourage you to sign up!
Hiya, are you sending out confirmations? And do you have an idea of when we can start shopping/crafting/gathering? (I might be a little excited about this)
I hope to start sending out emails with your matches next week!
Hurray, thank you!!!
That was me too! Just signed up thanks to the deadline.
Look, I got excited about dispatches from Southern Ontario, where my spouse is from. Then I read the two entries in that category with delight. THEN I read that this “Southern” Ontario is in fact between Belleville and Kingston!? THAT IS EASTERN ONTARIO. IF IT’S NORTH-EAST OF THE GTA IT’S EASTERN. THIS ONTARIO PARKS MAP SHOWS THAT BELLEVILLE CLEARLY FALLS IN THE SOUTH-EAST PARKS SECTION: https://reservations.ontarioparks.com/OntarioPark…
*huffs and puffs from a large city north-east of Kingston* Southern Ontario is very specifically the lower part of the whale’s tail that is further south than much of the northern US. Ok. Good. Glad we’ve sorted that out.
To be fair, though, I guess it IS on the southern EDGE of Ontario. And, like, rural Ontario is pretty similar all ’round. Except for Gananoque, which is its own brand of special.
Well, in fairness, as someone who is in Belleville right this second, lots of people in Ottawa and the Valley and Cornwall get salty about people along the corridor calling it “Eastern” because apparently their argument is that “the weather is different” (apparently once you enter the snow belt north of 7, it’s a Different World). AND I have met people from Southwestern Ontario who get irritable at people from here calling it “southern” so basically no one here can ever win.
> basically no one here can ever win.
That’s probably true. I grew up out west and to me ‘out west’ means ‘west of the rockies’ where to most people here it kinda just means ‘west of Ontario’. But my spouse who lived for a time in Kamloops ALSO gets mad when I generalise the lower mainland to mean all of BC because GODDAMMIT IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY RAIN IN ALL OF BC ALL THE TIME.
So what I am saying is complaining about how we refer to geographical areas is the form of conversation in Canada second only to complaining about the weather.
(I guess a bit more precision ie. southwestern vs. southeastern would go a long way.)
The gist of it is that “people get shitty over where you call the place you live” so fuck it, I’ll call it what I want to call it and if someone doesn’t like it they can come live here and change my mind.
Oh I thought this was a US thing, and I honestly thought is was a Massachusetts thing before that because my great aunt used to tell the story of her mother travelling to California by train and when asked if she took the northern or southern route she replied she’d taken the southern route; from South Station through Wellesley (for context, from Boston through a town three towns over and a little to the south, on the way to California).
Looool. I am from Northwestern Ontario (like, further west than Thunder Bay) and I call anything further south than and including Sault Ste. Marie ‘southern Ontario.’ I know that this is massively wrong and yet this is how my mind conceptualizes Ontario.
I’m in Toronto, and anything north of Barrie is “the North” to me. I think we are equally wrong and ridiculous! Haha.
Vaguely similarly, I live in Ottawa and after living in Montreal for several years, I often forget that Ottawa is in fact part of Ontario.
Ditto, I also forget sometimes that most of Ontario isn’t a 15 minute drive from Quebec, lol.
My grasp on Canadian geography is weak, but as someone who has spent hours trying to explain to people where exactly “Upstate New York*” is, I feel this pain
*Spoiler alert: it’s not Poughkeepsie!
I had the exact same reaction to this thread for the exact same reason.
The paper ontario road maps have the south part of the province on one side (basically anything south of sudbury) and the north part of the province (anything north of sudbury) on the other side. So kingston is in southern ontario if you go by the paper map.
Generally, kingston falls in eastern ontario. Southern ontario is south and west of toronto (niagara falls, london, owen sound, windsor etc).
Yeah I’d die on that hill.
Yes! I am from “Midwestern Ontario” (Owen Sound + environs) and it is geographically south of this “Southern Ontario” of which the OP speaks.
As a fellow Canadian, I appreciate this post. Why do Canadians love arguing about geography so much? I say that as someone living in BC who will throw down at the drop of a hat over 1) whether Prince George counts as Northern BC (it does!) and 2) whether Ontario can be described as “eastern Canada” (it is! don’t give me this “central Canada” crap, central Canada is Manitoba and Saskatchewan and don’t tell me to look at a map they’re full of lies)
Hahaha see I was born in Ontario, grew up out west, but have lived back in Ontario the longest now. To me, “eastern Canada” refers exclusively to the Maritimes, “out west” is exclusively BC, and everything in between is “central”. So I’m probably just wrong all around.
Also had no idea that anyone might not consider PG northern BC! I guess it’s people who live in the smaller towns north of it? (Kinda like how I think of the Muskokas as northern Ontario, but Thunder Bayians look down on that.)
I think we argue about weather and geography because it is legit important in our daily lives. Like, an ice storm or a drought can really fuck shit up, personally and financially! One needs to knowing how cold or warm it’s gonna be in order to plan appropriate clothing! Being ‘northern’ anything can really impact the time it takes to get around and get food/mail/essential services! We’re a land of extreme climates and our well-being is often based on resources, so it only makes sense that’s what we’d small-talk about.
Well, I agree with you that “out west” is just BC and mayyyybe Alberta although we don’t like to be grouped in with them on principle, so I’m gonna say you’re right on that one 😉
It’s pretty much just the people in all the small towns north of PG who scoff at the idea that it’s “north” because northerners love getting into pissing contests about who is more remote, “oh, it’s -30 there? How nice, are you wearing shorts? It’s -40 here” but I love arguing about the weather and geography. You’re right, it actually matters up here!
YES THANK YOU
In OT news, I broke up with my boyfriend last night, so… that happened. 🙁
(Hugs) and comfort food and fist bumps for doing a hard thing that was right for you.
[[internet hugs]]
I hope you;re feeling as ok as you can, but we are all here for rants & request for animal gifs.
Does anyone have any bunny gifs? Bunnies are my favorite animal.
No gifs, but did you see Wednesday’s xkcd?
<a href=”http://xkcd.com/1682/” target=”_blank”>http://xkcd.com/1682/
I did, and it’s now my new desktop background at work, haha! Of course ‘bun’ is a serious scientific term!
Our 1.6 lb rabbit is definitely a Queen Bun.
hugs!
See also: 33 Bunny Gifs
Oh wow. I need to acquire some flower crowns for my buns now.
everybun needs a flower crown, tbh
I didn’t attempt actually putting a crown on, since I didn’t have an assistant, but here is Bunkins enjoying some edible flowers.
tumblr had great commentary for this:
A: “1 sqft of bun”
B: “Fun fact: a group of bunnies is called a fluffle.”
C: “1 SQFT OF FLUFFLE”
Oh, actual gifs now:
If you need some more indignant rage this morning, make sure to check out the latest entry in the ~arthouse critic reviews mainstream movie~ genre.
“Would it kill one of these movies to have a plot that pivots on a desire or emotion, rather than earnestly deployed pseudo-techno-jargon? Wouldn’t Captain America: Civil War be a more interesting movie if Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) fought over, say, the affections of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), whose approval they are both clearly jockeying for anyway?”
uh, nnnnnno…….???
I was literally about to make this exact comment!
clearly I need to refresh the comment page before commenting…
… Okay what, Black Widow has no interest in either of them on anything but a professional level and never will. The hell? Ugh.
I’m pretty sure she barely even has a professional interest in Tony.
Because that would be so much better and more intellectual than having them fight over a deeply-held philosophical disagreement about the balance between liberty, power, law, and collective and individual responsibility …. a disagreement in which Black Widow has her own opinion and makes up her own mind.
Yeah, right.
I regret that I have only one thumbs up to give for this comment.
I mean, he’s kind of sort of right that they’re both looking for approval from Nat, but that’s because Tony is looking for approval from everyone and Steve respects Nat and values her opinion. So movie critic dude goes very wrong by assuming that if a man cares what a woman thinks, it must be because he wants to get in her pants.
Maybe he should watch Twilight.
BURN
Sure sure sure because the trope of two dudes fighting over a woman, as though she has not the agency to decide for herself or be like “lol nah” to both of them, and that they have not the maturity to let her decide or to handle not being The Chosen, is a super fun time and makes for really interesting movies.
I for one have not seen that plotline NEARLY enough. Can we wedge that into more films?
WHAT BLACK WIDOW HAS HE BEEN WATCHING.
I’m not whollllly opposed to pretentious pearl-clutching stagey confusion over blockbuster movies, and I’ve even been known to indulge in it myself. HOWEVER: “Wouldn’t Captain America: Civil War be a more interesting movie if Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) fought over, say, the affections of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson”
NOPE. I have not seen a single Captain American movie but I can categorically say there is no movie so bad that substituting its plot for a “two manly dudes fight over a girl” would improve it.
…and a REAL pretentious snob who likes ~innovative~ and ~avant-garde~ and ~genuinely poetic~ films wouldn’t even think of suggesting it. What a poser.
I went to Captain America: Civil War looking for something, perhaps a bit of kinship with the people who hand these blockbusters millions of dollars every year. Like many critics, I see most films via screeners, Blu-rays or theatrical screenings, and I work from home, feeling detached from society. I sought a teensy bit of magic, perhaps fetishizing the idea of the “common person” in that offensive pseudo-intellectual way for which people resent critics for indulging.
. . . Wow. Okay, dude.
Is this guy, like, a duke or something? Who else says “common person” with a straight face?
From what I can tell, the kind of guy who thinks a more compelling and original plot would have been two dudes fighting each other to win a woman-prize?
You know, that kind of guy. The terrible kind.
(But, yeah, I hoped even most dukes today would maybe have the self-awareness not to actually say, “I’m looking for magic by indulging in some fetishization of the ‘common people.'”)
yeah the nesting attempts to be self-aware and self-ironizing are dizzying: See: I know that you know that I know that I’m being a douchebag but it’s also not fair for you to resent me because look I how smart and self-aware I am!
(also, I’m pretty sure there are too many fors in that last sentence. The first for should go, I think, and then you’d have a pretty elegant, and slightly elliptical sentence. As it is, it just screams hypercorrection for fear of ending a clause in a preposition.)
Yeah, it’s a terrible sentence.
“a critic who usually watches arthouse films alone”
Oh sorry I couldn’t hear you over the sound of me clicking “x” so fast there was a sonic boom
Him being alone seems to be a recurring theme in this review. I think it might get more actual words than the plot of the movie.
I watch arthouse films alone all the time and I still thought he was a pretentious ass.
I also had a blast at Civil War
Oh yeah, it’s not like I and my loved ones haven’t indulged in some arty movie alone time. I’m just like, a little repulsed by the idea that that’s somehow an ~important identity~ or ~relevant to whether or not you liked this particular non-arthouse movie~
Not to get nitpicky about what is clearly a horrible situation, but one thing that stood out to me in the article about the man who murdered his wife is that he called his children to let them know what had happened after he did it (in the morning I assume), and then didn’t call the police until the afternoon because he wanted them to know first. What the heck did he say to his kids??? How were they supposed to feel about all of this, and how could knowing that your dad killed your mom before the police did make the situation any better??
so many questions about whether the kids knew he was planning to do it (I hope they’re not legally implicated!), if he’d asked them for help before, if they would back him up on the whole “she said she wanted to die” thing…ugh, no good answer to any of them.
Yeah that’s the other thing, I HOPE he asked his kids for help and explained to them how bad it was before it got to the point where he killed his wife, but I just can’t imagine a situation where they find out about this and aren’t horrified. I really hope they didn’t know that it was something he was considering, too, because that’s kind of just as bad.
So the Redskins are definitely gonna stay the Redskins. Thoughts?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/im-droppi…
That they better change their damn mascot to a fucking potato, and sad resignation that that is as likely to happen as them changing their name to something Not Effing Racist.
oh gosh there is a whole Question here about how many people, and WHICH people, need to find something offensive for it to be worth changing.
And this part:
Even 9 in 10 of those who have heard a great deal about the controversy say they are not bothered by the name.
What makes those attitudes more striking: The general public appears to object more strongly to the name than Indians do.
In a 2014 national ESPN poll, 23 percent of those reached called for “Redskins” to be retired because of its offensiveness to Native Americans — more than double the 9 percent of actual Native Americans who now say they are offended by it.
…makes it feel like, if I think “nah, it’s still offensive and gross,” am I not accepting the old “but these guys are Native, and they say it’s okay” defense, or am I ignoring what Natives actually said? (sheesh, it’s like they were TRYING to set a Good Liberal White Person trap.)
Also, as interesting as it is reading about the poll questions and results and stuff, “most people don’t care what a sports team is called” is a very dog bites man news story, isn’t it?
Yeah, I no longer know what to think. And it doesn’t help that my dad is gloating, because this has been his position for years now and we’ve had so many arguments about it.
According to some Native American activists, they mostly polled unenrolled, self claiming Native Americans for their stats which means it could be someone who is descended from an “Indian princess” (I can’t look at the data myself because of a paywall but while they quote enrolled members in the article, the poll screened only on the basis of self-report. “It asked questions only of people who identified themselves as Native American, after being asked about their ethnicity or heritage.”).
Unrelatedly, why is no one descended from the tribe’s screw up families? Like “Yeah, my ancestor couldn’t hit the broad side of a dead buffalo from 2 feet away.” Nah, it’s always a friggin’ princess.
yup, I’m thinking…ok, I know a thing or two about survey data, looks fine…I know nothing about the specific context of polling Native Americans but something feels very…off. Just getting a very defensive “look! we have NUMBERS! data and logic are on our side!” feel from the whole thing.
Adrienne Keene had a good takedown of it http://nativeappropriations.com/2016/05/wapos-new…
I feel like there’s a separate line of thought, which is “would I as a person not from this community feel comfortable saying around someone who is?” and my answer to that is no, clearly not. Although I don’t know if a significant percentage of Washington Football Team fans (I’m married to one and we try to avoid using the name) agree with that. (He still slips though, I think out of habit.)
I also have a Native American friend who also grew up in DC metro, and if anecdotes go for anything, she hates the damn name. I feel like if it’s something I don’t feel comfortable saying around friends, and many other people feel similarly than maybe it shouldn’t be part of a multimillion dollar franchise? IDK, I’m a Ravens fan.
Big yes to your first point. I feel very uncomfortable calling them by name. We’ve started calling them the Washington Racial Slurs, Slurs for short, in our house. I feel like the team name has become so normalized that it helps people ignore the fact that it is clearly terrible.
It is so normalized, particularly if you live in MD/DC/VA! I mean, my husband and I called them Washington (or DC) football at home, and then I’ll still catch him using the second half of their name in conversation with fellow fans (strangers) and friends and I’m like -_-;;;. I’ve slipped up once or twice in the past few years as well, so glass houses and all of that, but I think there’s also this dynamic of “I’m a fan and even though I hate the name, I don’t know if the other fan I’m talking to agrees so…..”
Washington Racial Slurs, ahahahahaha oh man that is amazing. You should make knockoff merchandise/signs. Big points if they’re featured on camera at some game. It could really catch on!
Over at A/V Club, the commenters call them the Washington Redacted.
yep, this is why the poll language about “are you offended” / “do you find it offensive” rubs me the wrong way. Whether someone is personally offended really has very little to do with why it’s a bad name.
idk, my reaction was “well, it still offends 10% of the reporting population, so maybe we could not continue?” I mean, above all else, do no harm, right?
Toxic narratives are something that i am thinking about a lot, lately, and the ways that i contribute to them. If my options are to continue to hurt people’s feelings via my insistence that feelings SHOULDN’T be hurt by my actions versus not doing that… why would I not?
A dj on my local scene thinks and talks about these things, including being a member of an oppressed group that identifies with racist representations, and what that means and does. http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts…
Incidentally, Tribe Called Red are _great_ and you should definitely see them if you can.
I just moved to ~Washington Football Team~ territory a little while ago and I’ve since learned that the team name/logo are VERY entrenched and that trying to get rid of it/change it is a much more difficult task than I anticipated. People who aren’t Native Americans just barely have a concept of NAs even existing (see: Navajo Nation vs Urban Outfitters), never mind that they should feel bad about using them as mascots.
(Also, the poll in that article is stupid and has already been proved crap elsewhere.)
Yeah, I grew up in that same territory and holy crap. The team’s insulting nickname, for when they do bad, even mocks the genocide of Native Americans and people think it’s just a joke. So funny.
Meanwhile that genocide is why my mom knows nothing about her father’s family…
I just don’t understand. The same poll found that TWENTY PERCENT of Native Americans polled find the word ‘Redskin’ disrespectful of Native Americans. Why is it okay to be like “Eh only 1 in 5 Native Americans find the name disrespectful and only 10% are offended, those are acceptable odds.” That’s still a lot of people! (Assuming the survey methodology is legit.)
OT, but I need some advice. Last October I had some blood tests (CBC, Ferritin, Iron and Iron Binding) and the results were not good–apparently I’d been running an iron deficiency for a while. I started taking iron supplements, had the tests redone in January, I was doing a lot better but my ferritin was still low. I kept taking the supplements, got more blood tests last week, and my ferritin result is the same as it was in January.
Has this happened to anyone else? Is a persistently low ferritin level even something to worry about, if everything else is within normal range?
O hi, me. I, too, have chronically low ferritin levels, as does my mother, as did hers (we all had the same GP for a while, which is how we know). As long as you aren’t experiencing the kinds of side effects that low iron produces (chronic fatigue, weakness, shortness of breath, diziness), you should be juuuuuuuuuust fine. Just keep on with your supplements (once my hemoglobin levels were back up, i found a multi-vitamin did the trick), and you should be good. Maybe add more nuts to your diet, if these are not already your go-to snack? They are high in iron, too.
Wow! It’s reassuring to know that this might just be some weird genetic quirk and not a symptom of something more serious (no idea what that might be, but that doesn’t stop me worrying about it!). I am having some problems with exhaustion and minor dizziness, but I already experienced a boost in energy a couple months into taking the supplements, so I don’t think what’s left is related to iron levels.
You just reminded me of a nutty snack I like! Thank you! I already have all the ingredients but I’d still managed to forget about it.
Tit for tat – I have been being terrible about taking my multi-vitamin, and this reminded me why it is important, so thank YOU ^_^
Well, ferritin is a protein that stores and releases iron in your blood. It’s possible that if your iron is better but still low, that could account for the lower ferritin levels. If your doctors are concerned, they’ll let you know.
But I am not a doctor, I’m just a nursing librarian, so ymmv.
Thanks! I’m not sure how much I trust my doctors on this–unless I make an appointment, the main method of communicating with my PCP is 1) call and leave my question with a someone at the office, 2) someone at the office talks to the doctor, 3) person calls me and relays what the doctor says, 4) I ask for clarification about something and the whole process starts over again. I end up not feeling very confident about what my doctor is telling me because it’s all being filtered through someone else and I can’t convey my concerns directly to the doctor.
I’d make an appointment and prep with a list of questions. You also might want to look for a second opinion with another doctor, if you’re still concerned. If you feel better, you’re probably ok, but your peace of mind is important and answers will probably help.
I was having similar problems this past fall/winter and not responding to oral iron supplements at all. Are you taking them with citrus? Should you double the amount? I tried these upon the advice of my doctor and they didn’t work, so the next suggestion was that I have celiac disease. I just had a biopsy to confirm that this week. My ferratin levels have been better since I had an iron transfusion in February, but we’ll see if going gluten free helps in the long term! I should note that I want having any gastro issues and was quite sceptical of the celiac suggestion at the beginning.
So I’d agree with getting it checked out further! Gluten free sounds like no fun, but apparently continuing to eat it when you have celiac can do real damage, even if it’s not making you feel sick!
I should add that I’m in Canada so the biopsying and doctor’s visits were free, except for one blood test, which was covered by insurance. If that all sounds expensive where you are, you could always do more research and then try going gluten free for a bit to see if it helps?
I’ve had iron deficiency/low ferritin as well, and it took a lot longer (6-8 months, if I recall correctly) for my ferritin levels to come back up into the normal range even after my serum iron levels were corrected by taking supplements and upping dietary iron. Did your doc recommend a followup blood test in a few months to check again? If you’re still tired and dizzy on an ongoing basis I would definitely keep following up – directly with your PCP, as EvilOverLibrarian suggests below. Good luck!
She probably will recommend a follow-up test whenever someone from the office gets around to calling me. I only know my results because the practice has a website I can access to see them. It’s good to know that my ferritin levels might get up to normal if I give them more time. Thanks!
I have chronically low iron numbers across the board, and low ferritin in particular seems to run in my family. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about as long as you don’t feel bad. I pretty much never feel anemic, even though my numbers are always low.
Part of the problem is that human bodies don’t absorb iron very well so it can be tricky to supplement effectively. Iron absorption is blocked by calcium, but helped by vitamin C and there are some kinds of iron that are more easily absorbed than others (can’t remember off the top of my head which ones, but you can look it up). I think, from what my sister told me,that ferritin is a measure of your body’s long term iron storage, so it is possible that your body doesn’t store iron well, but that if you keep up your regular iron numbers it will be ok. That would also seem to jibe with you feeling a boost in energy even though your ferritin numbers are still low. Good luck!
Dang that Blac Chyna article is ENGROSSING. She does seem like a pretty savvy businesswoman, and the point that she’s gaining fame the same way the Kardashian’s did is a good one. I don’t follow a lot of celebu-gossip or anything, but I can’t deny I’m interested in this.
I can’t read it right now, but I added it to my Pocket SO. FAST. I’m counting the hours until I can read it on my deck with a glass of wine the size of my head.
Does xoJane ever reject anything?
I hate to see what they do.
(I have read some good pieces there, so maybe they just figure anything that gets clicks is good?)
Decency and common sense?
Only if it’s too boring (aka decent, respectable, too many ethics and good journalism).
Dearest Toasties, due to moving and vacation out of the country, I have not been able to load comments for the last two weeks and thus have not been able to mourn/soothe appropriately. I have heard tell of a Toastie Slack group: how can I join?
Hey, do join us! Email ppyajunebug at gmail – you’ll get an invite. Once you’re in, #slack101 and all the other fun channels will help out with the intro!
email ppyajunebug at gmail for an invite!
check out Toast Twitter or hit up https://twitter.com/ppyajunebug
There is also a subreddit (not toxic like main Reddit): https://www.reddit.com/r/ToastCrumbs/
Come on over!
Edit: this was supposed to go to @britomartian … ugh.
My baby didn’t loooove being swaddled like some do, but it was still helpful.
I used the Halo sleepsacks and SwaddleMe. I didn’t like SwaddleMe– baby could get his fingertips out the bottom, and would hulk rage out of the swaddle. Halo is expensive, but worth it.
Whichever brand you go with, I’d do two newborn size, two small. Baby started rolling really early– like < 2 months– so then we couldn’t swaddle anymore.
I went out last night after work like an adult and not a soul-dead parent and saw Jaya and Matt read from Dad Magazine! And, living that Toast life, I bought both Dad Magazine and and the Hamilton book, which is GORGEOUS and I won’t show my kids yet because I don’t want to have to explain everything before I read it.
Speaking of Hamilton, someone linked me to this ten-minute video of Hamilton promo B-roll footage and it’s amazing: https://www.dropbox.com/s/f5xrgi1dubiv0a3/Hamilto…
This video is the best — thank you SO MUCH!
HA! I was there too! I loved that we were all from The Toast and all awkwardly avoided each other 🙂
That smile Lin gives Renee during “Helpless”….Unf. Dead.
I’ve decided that I’m getting my dad Dad Magazine for Christmas.
Someone’s been reading Reddit relationships too much and thinks every close sibling relationship is incest.
She was an associate editor to Cosmo??? Awesome Amelia Earhart trivia I did not know! They better have a bust of her in their main office.
(this was supposed to reply to burningupasun, of course)
I bought last minute tickets to Beyonce yesterday and I am going tonight! I am EXCITED! But also worried because I bought tickets in the nosebleeeds in an outdoor stadium and the weather is CRAP today!
IT WILL BE WORTH IT BRING A BLANKET AND RAIN PONCHO AND GET READY TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU A BEAUTIFUL STRONG HUMAN BEING AND BEYONCE LOVES YOU.
Sorry, still a little Beyonce hung over from the other night. But go go go you will have so much fun. Report back!!
Oh I’m going! I have packed many layers and rain gear. If that fails, I guess I drink the cold away?
Years ago I saw the B-52s in the rain and it was a BLAST.
I have had some fun rainy concert experiences, but those were more ground level. Being up in the cold arse wind plus rain is more what I’m worried about. Maybe we’ll be able to squirrel our way into some empty seats in the lower bowl part way through.
It looks like the rain has calmed down! Fingers crossed for you!
(Meant as a response to the Redsk*ns kerfuffle:
Native Appropriations had a great and thoughtful response, like they always do:
http://nativeappropriations.com/2016/05/wapos-new…
Adrienne K. 9ever.
YOU GUYS I AM SCARED
Yesterday I used my last Tazo hibiscus passion teabag to make iced tea. I open link roundup and there’s an ad for Tazo hibiscus passion iced tea. I didn’t tell the internet this! I didn’t even tell boyfriend we need more teabags.
THE ADS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE MY BRAIN
The day after Mallory’s possum rant, I turned on the tv (live, broadcast tv) for the first time in ages to see if there was an update on something in the local news, and the FIRST THING that the screen showed was a story about someone finding a possum in their toilet. Like, the picture was of a grinning possum emerging from the bowl. If you ask me, the reason The Toast is closing down is because Nicole and Mallory have now achieved peak saturation of Toasties’ lives and their work is done. Thank you.
They’ve reached their goal of invading our brains to amass a zombie army of queer librarians to do their bidding
Unfortunately for them, queer librarians have never been particularly biddable.
i was thinking about cold, heartless Vic today and whether our mobster friend got his pet rabbit (ears so big and soft like oven mitts, or what oven mitts should be soft like) and feel that everyone should be reminded of this bit of Toast excellence from 2 years ago: http://the-toast.net/2014/07/04/mobster-really-wa…
I like to imagine I live in a world where the biggest secret we could find out about The Donald is a massive collection of ceramic cookie jars.
you guys that second Prudie letter tho
it’s Nina and Lance
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rEAqtqQpcO8
St. Louis person here!
If you’re not having fun hearing it, then it can’t be in good fun.
I and a few other people tried desperately to explain this to somebody in our Equality and Diversity training session earlier this week. (“No, even if you don’t mean any harm and think it’s a fun way of breaking the ice, if someone is hurt by your banter you should stop.”) He strongly disagreed.
I am loking forward to blind items from rural southern Ontario. (Speaking of this: how does one pronounce Ontario? I’ve always pronounced it “on-TEAR-io” (as in tearing paper, not teardrops), but a colleague says “on-TAR-io”. Help?)
I say “on-tair-io”, but then I’m a southerner raised in the south and midwest who came back here by way of Oklahoma and Canada, so probably the best description of my accent is “confused”.
The way you’ve been pronouncing Ontario is correct. *nods*
The way you've been pronouncing Ontario is correct. *nods*
It me too! The other day I was thinking about how much I love clutter, and I came to the conclusion that I would gather sticks and rocks to scatter around if I were forced to occupy an empty room. Actually I already do that. I love *things.*
You might want to try or ask your doctor about Proferrin. It works much better than other iron supplements for me. https://www.proferrin.com
She vetoed it. In other news, pigs were seen flying over Tulsa.
Licking, Missouri!
i once had a summer internship at KOMU-TV, and was camera operator when the news anchor dissolved in a fit of hysterical giggles as she tried to introduce a story coming live from … that memorably-monikered town.