Seconds before disaster.
If your in-laws respond in this way to your decision to adopt a child, you are 100% in your rights to never speak to them again/set them on fire:
However, my husband’s parents have not been as enthusiastic as I had hoped. The week after we announced our plans, they gave me a ton of brochures about in-vitro and fertility treatments, as well as information about embryo adoption. I politely explained that the same condition which makes it difficult for me to conceive makes it more likely that I’ll have a miscarriage. I also explained that we had already submitted the first part of our application, and were committed to adoption.
Explaining all of this seemed to put the issue to rest, until the holidays. While we were visiting them, I accidentally overheard my husband’s mother say some pretty unkind things about me and my body (the same condition which limits my fertility also makes it harder for me to manage my weight), as well as suggesting that my husband should divorce me and find someone who can give him children. She doesn’t know I heard her say this.
In the months since then, my inlaws have insinuated that they don’t (and won’t) consider adopted children to be “real” grandchildren, even asking me point blank why I would want to take care of “someone else’s child”.
On coming out as a gay children’s book writer:
The realization usually sparks all kinds of curiosity about the life of that flesh-and-blood person and there is always — no matter the school, no matter the region — a child who raises her hand and asks me, with an absolute un-self-conscious need-to-know, “Are you married?”
The easy answer, in the beginning, would’ve been a simple “no.” Well, not a simple “no,” but a true one. I wasn’t married. But I wasn’t married only because same-sex marriage wasn’t legal. I wasn’t married because the love of my life was another man.
The first time I was asked was at an elementary school in Houston. I’m not sure how long I paused after the question, standing silent in front of my PowerPoint staring at the gap-toothed child who’d asked me. I remember the thoughts that passed through my head at that moment, because they passed through my head again and again in visit after visit over the years.
I am quoting two parts of the essay bc I love this so much:
In many cases, I was the first “out” adult these kids had ever met. In Norman, Oklahoma, a little boy waited until after the presentation to talk to me. With nervous glances at the other kids still standing around us, he told me that he was gay and that he was happy to see how confident I was, how it made him feel like he could be confident. “Like I could have a good future too,” he said.
Joseph Boyden (who is a phenomenal indigenous author, check out his novels) on Attawapiskat, colonialism, intergenerational trauma, and despair (it is, unsurprisingly, a difficult piece to read, and references child sexual assault):
I first tried to take my own life on my 16th birthday. It was a serious attempt. I lay down in front of a car speeding toward me. I believe I understand what it is like for an Indigenous youth, albeit a mixed-blood one in an urban setting, to feel despair so crushing you don’t want to live anymore. The difference is, I was immediately swarmed with the best medical attention. When I was able to walk again, I was made to see a psychiatrist for the next number of years. I was given medications and all form of support and counselling and help. Why are the people I love up north not getting this same help in times of deep crisis?
Yes, these are rural places and the costs of physical and mental health care rise in these areas. But remote areas like the Cree homeland of Mushkegowuk lie atop some of the richest diamond and chromite deposits in the world, and companies like diamond giant DeBeers have huge extraction operations like Victor Mine, not far from Attawapiskat. I have no doubt that the Victor Mine site has top-notch physical and mental health care facilities. The mine couldn’t operate without them. DeBeers has the obligation to keep its employees, who toil 90 km from Attawapiskat, in top physical and mental health. They would be shut down if they didn’t. DeBeers certainly wouldn’t let that happen. Yet the people who have the most right to profit from what is being taken out of their homeland live in Third World conditions amidst another wave of attempted suicides with no accredited mental health workers living in the community. This past Monday, after the state of emergency was declared, 13 youth were taken to hospital who’d made a pact to kill themselves. Something is deeply broken, not only in the community, but in how we allow business to operate as usual.
So many colleges treat students who report their assaults like this, and it’s mind-bogglingly wrong:
“You still get investigated. That’s what’s so frustrating,” Barney, who gave the Tribune permission to use her full name, said. “I was raped, and I waited four days to report because I was so terrified about my standing at BYU.”
Barney is one of several other students who say the college effectively punishes people who come forward with their stories, including one who woman who says she was kicked out of school because officials learned she was on acid during her alleged rape. They argue the school should grant immunity to those who file sexual assault allegations.
But at a recent rape awareness conference at BYU, the school’s Title IX coordinator Sarah Westerberg said her office would “not apologize” for referring abuse cases to the Honor Code Office for additional discipline.
“In a room full of rape survivors, she said, ‘We do not apologize for this,’” Barney said. “I said, ‘You don’t apologize for threatening to kick a rape victim out of school?’”
I wonder a lot about women (men too) who find themselves in this position:
I’m a woman in an industry that’s typically male-dominated. Recently I was interviewed about a project I worked on and spoke about the historic sexism in the industry and my company’s goals to be more feminist and inclusive.
Well. You’d think I said I liked to kick babies for fun. Certain sections of the internet have exploded with hate against me. My company has been flooded with threats and harassment. I’ve had to completely shut down my internet presence.
Fortunately my company has been amazing and totally standing behind me. I’ve been thinking, though, of what I’ll do when I eventually move on. I doubt there’s a company in the industry that hasn’t heard of me at this point. If I want to look for new opportunities in a year, two years, five years, how do I handle it? Not mention the incident unless they ask? Address it in the cover letter? Or wait and bring it up in the interview?
Do I warn the company that any public presence on my part might bring them unwanted attention? It’s true, but I don’t think many people want to hire a stick of dynamite.
The push to turn churches into condos (I am a SUCKER for houses that used to be churches, personally, bc they look cool and weird):
The fight over 361 CPW is symptomatic of New York City’s residential real estate boom—Manhattan property hit an all-time peak of $1,497 per square foot in the third quarter of 2015. The boom has meant that most any kind of building, from factories to firehouses, carriage barns, schools, and corporate offices, is liable to turn into condos, like a creeping architectural plague. Churches are the latest targets. A 2012 Wall Street Journal articlenoted the mounting popularity of such “religious conversions.” A record $1.3 billion worth of religious properties were sold in 1,502 sales in 2014, according to the Christian Post; 2010 saw just 889 sales worth $578.9 million. Though the exact numbers of church-to-condo conversions aren’t tracked, “we tend to see it occur during development booms where the availability of building sites is limited but demand for anything with a roof over it is high,” says Jonathan Miller, the New York real estate appraiser.
Call the church conversion a “chondo,” to coin an inelegant portmanteau. The same qualities that once made churches cultural and artistic centers—their central locations in neighborhoods, their size, their vast windows and cavernous chambers—also make them perfect for a real estate market that commodifies light and space in the crowded city.
Speaking as a Harvard Man, The Porc is a club for rich losers and this is stupid and offensive and also I think they should stay single-sex if they want bc why let the infection spread and also I know at LEAST one guy who was raped at an all-male final club so let’s not pretend that they’re a bastion of safety:
Storey told the Crimson that forcing the Porcellian to accept women, as some other final clubs already have, would make sexual assaults more likely. After all, women can’t be sexually assaulted if they aren’t there.
“Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus,” Storey wrote. “Forcing single gender organizations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct….
This scene from Freaks and Geeks is my whole heart:
The very best scenes in film and television function perfectly well without any context, and this one is no different. You don’t need to know who this character is in relation to the rest of the series because the scene tells you who he is. He’s alone, and as the voice of Pete Townshend confirms over the soundtrack, he’s a loser with no chance to win. He makes a small meal for himself—a grilled cheese sandwich with a brownie and a glass of milk—and walks over to the couch to watch TV. He laughs himself silly watching Garry Shandling perform stand-up. It’s implied that this is a frequent occurrence in his household, but it’s also implied that he’s fine with it. For a brief moment in time, he’s one with himself, happy and free, and he’s sharing something with a friend, even if there’s a screen between them.
When regression happens (in a minority of kids on the spectrum), it can SEEM like it happens overnight, I get it. I was once talking to a guy whose daughter regressed significantly the day after her 18 month vaccination appointment. Twist: they had cancelled the appointment bc one of them was sick, so she didn’t get the shots that day. He said that if she HAD gotten her shots, he 100% would have been convinced it was the vaccines and no one could have convinced him otherwise. But it doesn’t change the science:
De Niro said his wife believes their son, who has autism, “changed overnight” after being vaccinated. “I don’t remember. But my child is autistic, and every kid is different. But there’s something there, there’s something there that people aren’t addressing. And for me to get so upset here, on the Today show, with you guys, means there’s something there. That’s all I wanted, for the movie to be seen. You can make your own judgment. There are other films that document and show —it’s not such a simple thing.”
The hosts gently asked De Niro if he knew there’s a broad scientific consensus that vaccines don’t cause autism.
“I believe it’s much more complicated,” he answered.
not really, that would be different, bc your eggs coming from further away than you thought is different from bigamy:
“They say if you spend your money locally, it gets multiplied three times,” said Michael Novilla, who owns Nova 535 event space in St. Petersburg and tries to buy local, from soup to soap.
He was speaking of the local multiplier effect, a term coined in the 1930s by economist John Maynard Keynes. And part of Novilla’s motivation is health, finding clean sources for the food he eats. So if he found out markets and restaurants he loved were playing fast and loose with the truth?
“It would be like finding out your husband was married to someone else the whole time.”
OKAY BUT BACK OFF MY HOUSE WINE:
I have been a restaurant critic since 1991 and have always known there are fraudulent menu claims. This “housemade dessert” is Sysco’s Fudgy Wudgy chocolate layer cake I’ve eaten a dozen times. That “fresh snapper” has done serious freezer time. I know about the St. Petersburg restaurant that refilled Evian bottles with tap, the fancy Tampa restaurant where the “house wine” is a dump of open bottles on their last legs.
Miles: Also, another really bad time is, you look at Anthony and Tracee and they’re just chillin’ in their trailers and we have to be at school.
Marsai: They have an hour lunch and we just have 30 minutes. It’s just crazy.
Hudson: [Randall Park] and [Constance Wu], same thing!
Miles: You just see [Laurence Fishburne] chillin’ in his trailer, watching ESPN.
Marsai: And the worst thing is, he says “School is for suckers” all the time.
sorry:
I’m going to go ahead and quote a third part because I loved that article, too:
Sometimes, in those audiences, eyes would light up, tiny smiles creeping at the edges of a 13-year-old’s mouth. A nearly invisible nod.
This is lovely. While the author is completely right in saying he’s under no obligation to come out to his young readers it’s great to think of LGBT kids hearing his answer to that question and being quietly heartened by the confident no-big-deal-ness of it.
I had the pleasure of attending an elementary school talent show a few years ago (OMG, you guys, so many dance troupes – for real, like 20) and a talented boy sang Let It Go. Here’s the thing, though, he dressed up as Elsa. Wig and dress that he designed and sewed and I knew it was going to happen from fb (friends with his mom) and my heart was in my throat the whole time. I was waiting for awfulness. We live in a pretty conservative pocket of NJ. My adrenaline was pumping and I was ready to effin brawl it out.
But here’s the thing! The crowd was supportive and the talent show MC was supportive and got us waving our hands in the air. I tell you what, once the boy saw us doing that, he smiled and it was the single best smile I’ve ever seen. It was one of the best things I’ve ever witnessed, actually. A smile from a child who sees he will be supported and who knows that the whole entire world isn’t against him is truly beautiful. I mean, he might still face a ton of crap in his adolescence and future and on the flip side, this might’ve just been a little performance in a costume and I might be reading into it, but it went well and he did smile and it was great.
OT from the link and specific subject, but the smiling made me think of it.
this might’ve just been a little performance in a costume and I might be reading into it
You know what, though? Whether this “means” anything about his identity that he wanted to perform as Elsa…. it doesn’t matter. Here’s a kid who wanted to sing a song he apparently loves, and wanted to dress up as a particular character… and the adults in his life did not say to him “no, Frozen is for girls. Wigs and dresses are for girls. Sewing is for girls. A big show-stopper like ‘Let It Go’ is for girls. Showing people what you passionately love is for girls.”
That’s so awesome! Thank you so much for sharing this!
[note I’m assuming the “Let It Go” kid does identify as a boy – but even if the kid doesn’t identify as a boy, it’s still awesome that the message this kid is receiving is one of love and support and affirmation.]
And all of the children watching the show also got that message, and statistically, at least one of them will wind up identifying as queer/trans, so that’s a big win.
This is one of my giant parenting not-secrets.
I love “Let It Go.” I especially love when children sing it. I cry every time.
My daughter’s preschool class sang it at their “graduation”, and it was a little weird (“That perfect girl is gone” is an odd lyric for the context), but they all loved it, each, individual kid sold it, and it was clearly a song that the room full of four year-olds had all considered in a very deep way. A few year’s later, a first grade class sang it at an elementary school holiday recital, and they were the only class that seemed really comfortable with their number.
It is not great poetry, but “Let It Go” is clearly, for a lot of kids, their first experience with a song or poem that resonates with them in a personal way.
When I took kiddo to see Frozen, I sobbed through “Let It Go”. I mean, as women, how much are we encouraged to be nice, be polite, don’t show off, don’t make waves? It must resonate even more with little kids who don’t even get a say in what to have for dinner.
I still get a tiny bit emotional at that scene, and I have seen it approximately a billion times (I have a 5-year-old). Yes, I get tired of hearing my daughter sing the same snippets over and over, but I still really love belting that song along with her when we play the soundtrack.
Yes! By the time I saw it, I didn’t think Frozen was even half as good a movie as it was hyped up to be, but I don’t have the same visceral hatred of “Let It Go” that most people I know do–and I credit that in large part to the fact that it is my niece’s favorite song, and it means a lot to her on a personal level, and she has performed it for me with such passion that I had to excuse myself afterward to cry in the garage.
I remember being that age and feeling that kind of incredibly intense connection to music that was, in retrospect, not great, but the point wasn’t the quality of the music, it was that I was feeling the connection. It’s the same for her now. My own aunt gave me a lot of great advice about how to lovingly support young people, and that was something she told me: you might think/know that whatever book/movie/song is currently beloved by the kid isn’t the best, but you need to also remember that it is important to them, so it matters–and besides, whatever gets them into the act of reading/singing/acting/critically engaging with art does have value because of that. They’ll probably grow out of a stupid song, but hopefully they never grow out of loving music, or the feeling that it’s okay for them to feel strongly about the arts.
I love love LOVED that article, and I love that it seemed like the kids AND the author were boosted by the experiences of him talking about his relationship so openly. Yays all around!
“Like I could have a good future too.”
My heart.
This is a phenomenal link roundup and I am here for every single thing on it. Excellent, excellent, excellent.
Truly an A+ link roundup
I know, right? I don’t even know where to start.
Is the “Great Author” whose work was undermined C.S. Lewis or Ayn Rand? I have no way to know.
I was wondering about that too! The reference to reason and the phrase “meta-modern” has me leaning Rand, but it could go either way.
Me three! Both So Great and So Misunderstood by ppl with critical thought skills 😀
I suspect that it is CS Lewis and the commenter has no idea who Ayn Rand is.
Really? I kind of assumed vice versa. I feel like the kind of person who would take the time to rant about CS Lewis on the internet would actually know something about literature and at least have heard of Ayn Rand. I don’t have the same confidence the other way around.
I’m betting on Lewis. I’ve spent a lot of time around protective Lewisians.
That’s the greatest thing about the comment. Best deleted comment yet!
I assumed “deeper meaning” and “true morality” indicated that they didn’t like Mallory tampering with the Jesusy bits.
My thoughts exactly!
I have been desperately waiting to share this here all morning – the (Australian) ABC made an Aboriginal superhero show and it looks AMAZING.
80% Indigenous cast! Dystopian Sydney! I AM SO EXCITED.
Fingers crossed it gets picked up by the BBC – apparently it’s going to be shown in the US too. Alternatively, how do I use a VPN by june?
https://pedestrian.tv/news/entertainment/watch-fi…
That looks cool! if you’re into sci-fi with diverse casting and amazing women watch The Aliens on Ch4! (Plus Micheal Socha who is bae.)
I’m majorly embracing my love of superhero/scifi stuff at the moment, I’ll definitely check it out!
Warning though, there is only 6 episode and that is not nearly enough.
Ah! Thank you! Passing this along to the SF crowd in my neighborhood.
I AM SENDING IT TO EVERYONE I KNOW
Oh yay!
There’s an indigenous zombie movie being filmed up near my homeland in Northern Ontario (Canada). Rezilience.
Ok I DEFINITELY need to watch that when it comes out.
This is probably the most plausible premise for a zombie movie I’ve ever seen.
Yessss, thank you for sharing this! I can’t wait.
In many cases, I was the first “out” adult these kids had ever met. In Norman, Oklahoma, a little boy waited until after the presentation to talk to me. With nervous glances at the other kids still standing around us, he told me that he was gay and that he was happy to see how confident I was, how it made him feel like he could be confident. “Like I could have a good future too,” he said.
Anecdotes like this make me so sad, and also make me reflect that although my immediate area (a blue pocket in a red state) is a pretty OK place to be who you feel you were meant to be, there are clearly parts of our country (still!!) where kids don’t have role models that demonstrate that freedom.
My immediate response to this was “I’m not crying, you’re crying!”
My folks are from a town in a fairly blue area, yet there have still been pushbacks in the local school district about anything that might normalize The Gay. (The GSA can’t advertise their meetings in the school itself, teachers who displayed signs on their doors indicating that the room was a safe space for children of all genders and orientations were asked to take them down after a Christian parent said that they made her uncomfortable, and the middle school had to provide alternative texts when the kids read about Anne Frank in case parents didn’t want their kids exposed to *gasp* a mention of non-heterosexual attraction.) Even in a place that professes to be open and accepting, there are still likely kids who have no idea that happy and successful adults like them even exist.
and the middle school had to provide alternative texts when the kids read about Anne Frank in case parents didn’t want their kids exposed to *gasp* a mention of non-heterosexual attraction.
But the mention of genocide was probably fine, right?
I read Anne Frank’s diary many times when I was growing up, and the openness regarding bodies and same-sex attraction meant a lot to me.
But the mention of genocide was probably fine, right?
Seriously.
I was angry when I got to the part of your comment about opposing the inclusivity signs, but being against teaching the factual realities of the holocaust is next level closed-mindedness.
So, the saddest thing about this is that Norman, Oklahoma is in fact the blue pocket of that red state. It is the university town. That is likely why these conversations can take place at all. (Sidenote, there are a lot of sad stories that come out of Norman, but I still think that it is better than the places where the sad doesn’t even make it out because no one is willing to face it). (That said, I definitely moved back to Canada SUPER HARD)
According to my Oklahoma bros, Norman is the den of liberal iniquity. Apparently OU is the liberal state university (read: has a GSA and minority student activist groups) and anyone who goes or lives there is suspect to “real” Oklahomans.
Gotta give props to my friends for showing up at Trump’s appearance in Pittsburgh last night with their Penguins rally. We don’t take him seriously enough to protest, might as well bring a fake stanley cup and make everyone cheer on the hockey team.
They did it for the G20 a few years ago, too.
“I can’t take him seriously,” Mr. Reese said, explaining his reason for being there. “I’m aggravated that he chose to do this to Pittsburgh on a night when there’s a Pirates game and a Penguins playoff game. Not only is he a racist and an extremist, he’s making our parking worse, which is just rude.”
WE HAVE REACHED PEAK YINZER
You can take my parking chair from my cold, dead fingers!
haha, the vase and lamp really make this.
I read elsewhere that Trump asked how Paterno’s doing, which is wrong on… multiple levels.
(1. He’s dead; 2. He’s a rapist.)
The CBS morning news this morning had an AMAZING deadpan explanation that Trump’s “bringing that back” comment was, according to the campaign, a reference to moving the Paterno statue back on campus, “not to resurrecting the coach himself.”
Oh, I think Paterno was part of the coverup, but not a rapist, just to be clear! That has never been suggested.
My bad! Should fact-check next time.
Still a bit nuts to bring back his statue, though.
Not a rapist. Complicit in a prolonged coverup of a serial child rapist, definitely, but he himself didn’t rape anybody.
Ugh that Captain Awkward! In so so many advice columns about in-laws the heart of the issue is a husband that is too cowardly and hands-off to deal with or talk to his own parents and so forces his wife to do it instead so she’s on the receiving end of all the hate. It’s ridiculously unfair!
Ugh, yes! This poor lady is saying that she doesn’t want to ruin her husband’s relationship with his mother, but… dude, his mother is the one ruining the relationship by being an actual monster!
It’s just one more thing that women are expected to do in different-sex relationships: manage the emotions and experiences of members of BOTH families.
THIS! I mean, I love the boy, but when his parents come by he’s often still in his bathrobe and only barely interested, and I’m the one who ends up in charge of tea and small talk. His parents are lovely, but it does annoy me that I feel this obligation to step up (and would be judged on not doing it, way more harshly than he’s ever been)
yesssss. We are renovating our kitchen & my mil very kindly brought 2 nights of dinner to us, but she cannot accept simple “thank you so much!” gratitude, there must be a display of appropriate scope, and I know I must make the display, remind my husband to make the display, or suffer through constant reminders of how ungrateful we are. It’s just shitty for everyone, because my husband actually does try very hard to set the boundaries & make sure I’m not doing the emotional lifting, but his family didn’t exactly prepare him to do that & they certainly don’t make it easy on him, so it’s constant, exhausting, therapy-requiring work for him, too.
And I’ll go out on a limb here and conjecture that if your husband were to point out to his parents (*cough cough* his MOM) that it’s unfair to put that burden on YOU when it belongs on HIM, his parents (MOM) would say “wow, permanentmarker has really done a number on our son. She has him believing all kinds of shit that goes against the natural order of things!”
100%. Just in case you wanted a horrifying story for confirmation: My husband quit drinking last year for a bunch of different reasons. Drinking is a huge part of his family culture, and the only way my MIL could make sense of his decision was to blame it on me. She cornered me in the kitchen one time and told me I was ruining his relationship with his family and probably also his job by forcing him to quit drinking, and if I thought he was an alcoholic she would show me some real alcoholics. (Not that it’s even relevant, but I didn’t ask him to quit drinking, never said/thought he was an alcoholic, I still drink, we still have alcohol in our house, he just doesn’t drink it.) I feel so bad for him, because it’s almost like he was orphaned when he realized how his mom’s love/approval depends on that toxic dynamic and that he is never going to get unconditional love from her.
oh wow. Did she listen to herself at all? What kind of family is ruined by lack of alcohol? Hugs to you and him.
O.o
Your husband must be quite a guy, to quit on his own after growing up in a family like that.
My partner’s mother brought him up with the constant reminder “Don’t ever let a woman push you around or tell you what to do; also, you can’t trust women because they are sneaky and will trick you into getting them pregnant.” Remarkably (not remarkably), she is a woman and an absolute pro at pushing everyone around and telling them what to do.
I wonder are those mothers just telling their sons who THEY are when they talk that kind of bullshit.
YUP. See also yesterday’s “conniving” coworker. Tuesday’s? This week? What even is time.
Why do so many men think that this is ok? Why do they insist on letting (lets be honest, making.) their wife be the bad guy to their parents (usually mother)?
I mean I know why, they want to get away scot free and not have to man up and have any difficult conversations when they have a wife to take on that emotional labour for them, but it drives me crazy!
I’ve witnessed it within my own family as well as the myriad of advice letters on the subject of MIL is terrible, husband won’t do anything.
I think many men don’t even realize it, and even if they do, it happens so often and in so many different forms that it’s hard for them to see the pattern. Once early in our marriage, my mother-in-law called us in a blind rage because we had forgotten my husband’s sister’s birthday. After he got of the phone with her he said something to me like, “can you please make more of an effort to remember my family’s birthdays?” To which I responded by asking him to tell me the birthdate of either of my siblings or my parents — not only did he not know the dates, he didn’t even know the months of 3 of 4 of them. To his credit, he was completely apologetic and has taken responsibility for his family’s birthdays, etc., ever since. (And, more importantly, no longer gets emotionally invested in his mom’s weird tirades.) But I feel like that’s a simple, clear-cut example and many of the other things aren’t.
After he got of the phone with her he said something to me like, “can you please make more of an effort to remember my family’s birthdays?”
🙁 I have made it very clear to my partner that remembering birthdays and keeping in touch is completely his job when it comes to his family, while I will take responsibility for mine. If we haven’t got a card for a birthday that’s rapidly approaching I might mention it, but it is not my job and he knows I am only doing it out of the kindness of my heart, rather than because I am happy to act as his social secretary.
One of the things I have never done is the birthday or Christmas stuff for his family. We each do our own. It was like this for at least 15 years, and then his sister-in-law’s father died. We’d only met him a couple times, and the funeral was in a different city, so we didn’t go. But my husband did not acknowledge his death in any way. No phone call, no card, nada. A little while later, someone (his brother or mother) mentioned this to him, and he tells me after that “we” forgot to send a card. I asked him why he didn’t send a card, and he says, “I thought you were going to do it.”
I didn’t ask, but I’m pretty sure he deflected responsibility on to me in his conversations with his family rather than own up to it. I’ll guarantee you one thing though. Regardless of whether he accepted responsibility or not, his family would still see it as my faux pas.
I 100% don’t understand this–I mean talking to people you love about how you treat your spouse can be awkward, but overall it’s for the best. My mom is super sarcastic and my husband interpreted it as her not like him, so I had to have a talk with her about toning it down. I didn’t try to tell him he was being irrational or to ignore it, and while my mom was sad she made my husband feel unwelcome, she adjusted–you know, like a grown-up–and things are great.
Similarly, I my husband had to have a Come To Jesus talk with his parents about them constantly trying to convince me to have a baby when we were flat broke while he was getting his PhD. It was too much for me to handle–I still have a physical reaction when anyone says, “If you wait to have kids until you can afford to have them, you never will! Har har har!” He talked to them and they stopped leaving onesies on our bed when we came to visit or trying to convince us that babies are super easy.
leaving onesies on our bed
Jesus Mary and Joseph are you SHITTING ME I would lose my shit entirely oh my god
Yup. It was Not Great, even though from their perspective it was coming from a place of love. My husband had A Talk with them and it’s much better now. My sister-in-law struggled with infertility and I think watching her go through that pain and the treatments also made them more understanding of why it’s not a good idea to pester folks about why they haven’t had babies yet.
By yeah, that onesie turned me into a rage monster.
I’m so glad you know it came from a place of love and that they have so much faith in your ability to be a good parent.
But I literally felt a wave of nausea reading about the onesies. That’s too much pressure.
leaving onesies on our bed
O.o
Please tell me you took that onesie out into the living room, in full view of everyone, dropped it in a bucket and SET IT ON FUCKING FIRE
“onesies on the bed”
What is the logic here?
“Oh, I bet they’ve never thought of having a baby, even though we’ve mentioned it to them! This will open their eyes to new possibilities!”
“Oh, I bet having a baby just slipped their minds, so here’s a reminder. They’ll make great forgetful parents!”
“Probably the only thing stopping them from having a baby is that it would have nothing to wear! Fixed that!”
????
One of my besties experiences this in one of the worst ways – her in-laws kindly buy her expensive airline tickets to visit them when she in no way wants to go. And her partner LITERALLY refused to talk to his mum about it, even when said tix were purchased for dates when they had pre-arranged to be with her family.
I’m not much for the “dump his ass” line of advice, and i love both of these friends dearly (I was his friend first), but i was _livid_ when I heard this story. Like, I told her that he was choosing his mother’s desires over her sanity (she has depression and anxiety issues), and that it was time to grow the fuck up and if he didn’t she needed to nope the fuck out because he is in his 30s and it would LITERALLY NEVER HAPPEN.
This year he went and she did not. She said it was GLORIOUS.
This is why I don’t accept plane tickets from my parents. I love them dearly and visit when I can, but I won’t be summoned at their whim. I’m an adult, I make my own plans.
Dang it, I need to institute this policy. I’m about to get trapped into visiting my parents for my mom’s birthday, which is all well and good but they were just here! I don’t want to go!
OMG I wish the husband would use this proffered script, but it ain’t likely: “Well, Ma, she overheard you discussing her like she was defective breeding stock and maybe she’ll come back when you apologize to her.”
My mother is the toxic MIL in our relationship. Fortunately, to my knowledge she’s not turned on my husband (which I speculate is based on gender), but she’s said some pretty nasty things to me about my brothers’ partners and girlfriends. The thing is she’s always been that sort of person and I only realised it myself in my mid-thirties when I ended up in therapy struggling with my own inability to connect with other people. As a child you normalise your mother’s behaviour as a defence mechanism, which is necessary as a child but damaging in adulthood. It can be very difficult to untangle that as an adult, and see it from the outside.
Nowadays I understand I can’t trust my mother’s opinion of other people, and I can’t trust her with personal information about my life, but it’s been a struggle to get to that point and involved reframing my whole childhood and relationship with her. It is a little like losing your mother, or at least losing the mother you thought you had. This is how I understand these men’s behaviour in this situation, they haven’t come to that realisation yet. I don’t wish to defend their behaviour as an adult, which hurts other people, but I can see where it comes from.
An additional point I thought of that is at some point I recognised there was a lot of emotional work I had to do to fix my relationships. A guy might not come to that understanding because they’re not expected to.
Yeah, I’m here with the same issues. (Except my mom did badmouth my now-husband for years, to the extent of telling my now-MIL days before the wedding, “oh, they’ll get divorced within a year.” She now thinks he’s awesone because he…picked her up from a hotel: how he treats me doesn’t matter, only how he treats her.) It’s really hard to disentangle, even when I know how she raised me was wrong: I keep finding phrases of hers falling out of my mouth, and it hurts. Especially now that I have a daughter of my own I don’t want to fuck up.
My husband just flat-out doesn’t think of my family as his in-laws, to the extent that I made a comment about how he has awesome brothers-in-law “except one” and his response was, “wait, which of my sisters’ husbands do you think is not awesome, they’re all great,” not realizing I was referring to…my own brother. *weak cheer*
Oh yes, the most important relationship is the one between the toxic MIL and her own self-image 🙁
CUT OFF THE TOXIC MIL
DO IT TODAAAAY
Seconded-divorce the MIL and ever speak to her again. Also weak husband needs to stand up for himself and defend his wife for a change.
uughghghghgh
I don’t think my paternal grandfather ever warmed to the idea of having a Korean granddaughter, one who also spoke in the presence of adults. We didn’t see him much. Which was a bit sad for my father, but being rejected by him on a yearly basis would have been harmful for me. Too, chances are if there is something off about a family relationship post-marriage/kids, there was also at least a little something off BEFORE. Other, later challenges and issues just expose those cracks.
I have such a complicated emotional response to these.
The letter writers are almost always looking for advice on how to talk to their in-law(s) in a way that won’t hurt the in-laws’ feelings, and I think, “Good for you! You understand that people have feelings!” But then that turns to, “You are also a people, letter-writer, and ::you:: have feelings, too, and I am worried that you are willing to discount your own well-being for someone(s) who clearly cannot even get it together for a modicum of decency.”
So I think, Nikki, yes: CUT OFF ::ALL:: THE TOXIC PEOPLE. Because there are literally frillions of others out there willing to cater to toxic people, emotionally, so you don’t have to be that person any longer.
Also, then you get to invest all your emotional energy into really loving, reciprocal relationships! That’s the best part, to me – toxic people just take up so much time and head and heart space no matter how you “manage” them. That all gets freed up when you cut them off! IT IS THE BEST.
Absolutely. You don’t want the adopted child having that for a grandmother. No, no, no.
As an adopted person, I am so offended on the LW’s (and future child’s) part. Those in-laws don’t deserve to know the gift that child will be.
+10000000
RUN DO NOT WALK. If MIL ever changes, like really, truly blossoms into a new and highly compassionate person, you CAN choose to reopen the door and have a relationship again. but even then, it’s fair to say sorry, you lost your chance, and it’s too much of a risk to your child.
I’m pretty sure in this case that it is a case of cut off the toxic MIL. On the other hand, a friend and his wife adopted a Chinese girl, and his mother was adamant that this girl would NOT be her granddaughter and didn’t belong in the family and was just toxic as hell (much to everyone’s astonishment, to be honest–it really seemed to come out of nowhere), but literally the instant she saw her, she was in love and has done a total 180 on the whole idea of adoption. So these reactions are not set in stone and can change when confronted with real life, rather than vague conceptions about the idea of adoption.
I tend to have a response more along the lines of DIVORCE YOUR SPINELESS CHICKENSHIT HUSBAND, TELL HIM IT’S BECAUSE HE’S A SPINELESS CHICKENSHIT, THEN KICKFLIP DOUBLE MIDDLE FINGER OFF THE CURB TO YOUR GLORIOUS SINGLE FREEDOM but I’m kind of an angry person
I know this is OT thread material, but y’all, I just dropped my partner (who lives an ocean away, literally) off at the bus station after a 6-week visit (longest and best ever) and I am feeling numb and confused and Fine and kinda afraid it’s gonna hit me like a ton of bricks later. Blerg.
The drunkest night of my life was at a house that used to be a church! There’s something very satisfying about doing tequila shots and getting lap dances from two dudes in a former house of worship. Although I went home that night and barfed in my sleep which may have been some kind of punishment from the lord?
See, I spent my first wedding anniversary in an inn that was a converted church and as someone raised Catholic, there is no bigger mood-killer than a stained-glass portrait of St. Michael the Archangel staring right at your bed.
The first two years of my marriage we did a lot of traveling around doing programs at various churches, many of which would have us sleep in the church building. I, um, did not find it to be mood-killing at all.
It wasn’t so much being in a church as it was the ANGRY SAINT WITH A FLAMING SWORD staring at us.
I’ve had many drunk nights at bars that used to be churches! I don’t look for them but I seem to find them everywhere I go!
I spent most of March traveling to various unfamiliar-to-me localities, and everywhere I went the first prerogative was to find a Former Church Bar at which to hang out and waste my time. It never steered me wrong.
I must find a Former Church Bar ASAP that sounds awesome
May I recommend “Sister Louisa’s Church of the Living Room & Ping Pong Emporium” in Atlanta?
https://www.sisterlouisaschurch.com
Hey, Atlanta Toasties, that’s a superb Meetup idea!
I’d definitely come up!
HOLY HECK you need to GOOOO
I just posted in Atlanta Toasties FB group and I’ll repost Open Thread tomorrow:
Saturday the 23rd?
pavo sum; coquor
Where we live there is a Lake Erie wine growing region, and one of the wineries (incidentally, one of the ones that also distills? I think?) is in an wooden church. There’s a big picnic/wedding area out back. When you go to the wine tastings there, the counter is built on the altar, and you sit and drink in the pews.
here’s something very satisfying about doing tequila shots and getting lap dances from two dudes in a former house of worship.
When I was at university, a company made an application to open a strip club in a building next to a church. It came up in conversation with a person on my course, and it turned out that we had very different views on the matter.
Her: I don’t care that it’s a strip club, I just don’t like that it’s near a church!
Me: I don’t care that it’s near a church, I just don’t like that it’s a strip club!
Mutual bafflement.
I went to a very cool brewery in Pittsburgh that used to be a church, where all the waitstaff were dressed as monks.
Wait, have I just not been paying attention to the waitstaff at Church Brew Works, or does Pittsburgh have another ex-church brewery? =o
This was a few years ago… I think that’s the same place, but they may have changed waiter outfits since then. 🙂
A couple of years ago we rented an amazing holiday cottage that had been a priory before the reformation. There’s nothing quite like hanging out in your own private museum with wine, a remote controlled helicopter and a harmonica…
If I had a recording of Laurence Fishburne saying “school is for suckers,” I would use it as my ringtone.
What I love about the deleted comment is that I can’t tell if he’s wrong about Ayn Rand or wrong about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
SO MANY EXCITING POSSIBILITIES!
Can we talk about this r/relationships thread because man, I would be sooooooo pissed
https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/4…
Omg I have become HOOKED on that sub this week. SO MUCH DRAMA. I fucking love it. I am completely addicted to other people’s relationship drama and I am not ashamed.
I blame Nicole.
I THANK NICOLE
Same! I can’t handle looking through this subreddit myself but do I want to read the best stuff that other people found? YES I DO
SAME like I’ve spent the last TWO NIGHTS reading on there for like 1-2 hours, to the point where I look up and blink at the clock like what????
I coincidentally got hooked on it a few weeks ago and now I am feeling so much synergy with the Toastmind. Every question is either “My partner cheated on me/me and my partner are probably gonna break up” (not actually a question, but okay) or “My partner has this irritating habit, also they are horrible and emotionally abusive.” But I still can’t get enough.
I’m particularly into the Updates section. It’s episodic!
I alwaaaaaaaays check the updates first. It’s just feels so good to know what’s happened with complete strangers’ dramas.
I just remembered my old reddit account and now I’m getting sucked into that sub and want to give advice to everybody. I am supposed to be working. Help.
Given the location of the post I was all ready to agree with “partially think it’s my fault,” but no, this is actually one where it is not! I’m with the commenters that the cat sitter must have just taken this stuff home rather than eaten it on site.
I bet he lived there while she was away (I bet he has roommates) and also had people over. I have no basis for this, but still, that’s where my money is.
Hoo-leee shit.
I like how much of the thread is people arguing whether in two weeks, he would have had time to EAT all that food, or if he just STOLE it.
Also, $20/visit is extremely generous for cat-sitting in the first place! Find a reliable 8th grader to do it at half the cost.
I was thinking the same thing! We pay $10/day to watch both of our pets (a cat and a small dog). I bump it up to $15-$20 for overnights, plus I provide a homemade meal with generous leftovers.
I’m looking forward to next September when my oldest nephew gets his license and we can pay him to be our petsitter in exchange for, like, pizza.
I just always ask friends and bring them beer from the place I visited. I guess I should maybe start giving them money…
Ugh I wish I could find a cat-sitter for $20. It’s usually $30/visit in my area, and the one group of sitters I found that would do it for $25 just raised their rates.
Do you have any neighbors with whom you could trade cat-sitting services back and forth? We have a whole bunch of cat owners in my building and so usually we will watch each others’ cats for free because we all know we’re going to need somebody to watch our own cats at some point. Plus it’s much less of a burden to take care of someone’s pet when they are right nearby and there’s no travel-time involved.
I know of one other person in the building with a cat. We’ve only spoken once, but she is right next door, so maybe it’s worth attempting to speak again. I didn’t even know she had a cat until it got out through her window screen onto the fire escape and turned up on my windowsill!
My parents recently hired a reliable 8th grader to watch their cat, and it worked out perfectly EXCEPT that the neighbors report that the kid had been trying desperately to get the cat to go for a walk on a leash every time he came over. Like he heard “cat sitting” and thought “ok, I pretty simple, I just need to refill the food dish, scoop the litter box, and take this cat for a walk around the neighborhood.” Dude, have you ever seen a cat before?
nah, kid just saw those YouTubes and Vines of cats on leashes and was like MY WAY TO INTERNET FAME
i mean, probably not, maybe he just thought it looked like a good idea and helpful for your parents.
Ok, but that’s adorable.
Oh holy hell we pay $45/day for the Cat Nanny to come. #yuppies
hahahaha. one of my good friends walks dogs! i mean, he’s also a male model, but that’s pretty seasonal unless he does a commercial or something, so with the dog walking he makes enough to live in a very expensive part of brooklyn and also feed himself. it’s crazy.
I’m lucky enough that my ex and I are on good terms and he lives a ten minute walk away, so I just drop “our” cat off at his place when I go out of town for longer than a day or two. He loves it, the cat loves it, his roommates are mad jealous. I would think twenty a day is totally reasonable! I do live in NYC, though.
This sounds like a lovely arrangement!
HE STOLE HER FANCY CHEESE!?!
This is my real-time reaction, because I haven’t finished the letter, but just got to this line:
“and I have a taste for luxury”
And I dislocated both eyeballs rolling them into the very far back of my own head.
Loool, who goes to someone’s house and thinks its appropriate to roast a fucking lamb leg ffs???
I had to stop reading the responses after I found the one about “well, in MOST cultures when you say ‘make yourself at home’ you MEAN IT” and then that redditor was unable to provide any specific examples when asked.
NOBODY EVER MEANS IT WHEN THEY SAY MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME.
They mean you can help yourself to reasonable amounts of food from the fridge and don’t stand on attention the whole time. They never mean strip off to your underwear and drink all of their alcohol, just don’t do that.
They never mean “pee with the door open and hope no one walks by”
They never mean “change the WiFi password”
They never mean “subscribe to all the magazines you want to at this address”
They never mean “leave your dirty clothes on the floor for a day and a half before putting them in the hamper”
JESUS what is WRONG with PEOPLE
Oh god, I have a dudefriend who pees with the door open. And to get to the guest-accessible bathroom you have to walk through my office, so going in to the office you have no idea, but then once inside, the bathroom is so tiny and the toilet so unfortunately positioned that there is no time to NOPE fast enough to not see.
cue the NOPE-ing octopus gif.
That same redditor is also clearly planning to die on the hill that is “6 steaks, 2 bags of crab legs, a duck, an entire leg of lamb, and a filet of salmon TOTALLY is less than 7 meals! It’s only maybe like 5!” Which is INSANE.
omg the guy who is like “I regularly eat a whole duck to myself” and I think WHAT IS YOUR LIFE?
I call absolute bullshit on that, unless he is a duck farmer. He seems like he’s just doubling down to be contrary.
He drank her wine?! NOT COOL, DUDE
TBF, she could have mentioned the wines were expensive. If we had a house sitter, I’d probably tell him/her that drinking a bottle or two from the top shelves would be fine, but that the lower shelves are off limits.
See, I would never drink someone else’s booze even if I was live-in house-sitting. Maybe the food (though obviously not to this jerk’s extent), but even then I’d replace what I’d eaten!
I am reminded of the Black Books episode where that very approach goes horribly wrong.
That was the first thing I thought of immediately as well
I saw that whole episode once. I’ve only ever seen half of it since, because it gives me huge second-hand anxiety.
In general I don’t care if our petsitters help themselves to food or soft drinks. I used to petsit a lot and I get it. But all of our wines, while inexpensive, are bottles my SO and I picked out together on trips and most of them are set aside for specific occasions. I would be PISSED if I found out someone else drank one. Some of them literally can’t be replaced.
My mom inexplicably gifted us with wine sweaters one Christmas, so now whenever we have parties, we use them to designate which bottles are available for consumption. “Feel free to drink anything wearing a sweater.”
Wine sweaters! I would ask “why on earth”, but clearly they have at least one useful purpose.
I had to read this about five times before I realized the sweaters go on the wine bottles, not the wine drinkers.
“only those of you wearing the wine sweaters may drink the wine”
Worst theme party ever.
Whoops! Yeah, I meant like these:
Hahaha those are absolutely adorable and I cannot think of any function for them besides the one you mentioned.
What if they get chilly…?
oh my god they look like festive little tom servos
Last time I had a house sitter I specifically left a bottle of wine on the counter for her to drink, so that part is maybe understandable? But you shouldn’t have to explain “don’t defrost and cook that entire duck that I’m keeping in my freezer.”
If I had ‘a taste for luxury’ and $$$ in my freezer and I invited someone to eat my food I would for sure be adding a bunch of “but not”s to that invitation. Luckily I do not, so my house sitter can help herself to all ice packs and half bags of frozen veggies she wants.
I mean, I think that the person expected the sitter to use some common sense.
Like, if I said help yourself and someone ate my expensive cheese, I would take that. It’s hard to tell when cheese is expensive or not when it is sitting in a fridge with all the lesser cheese. But this wasn’t a case of someone mistakenly eating expensive food in a way that no regional person can be mad about. This is someone taking a bunch of steaks/salmon/crab/duck/lamb. Things that cannot be mistaken for being expensive. Especially if they were still in the packaging, which says how much it costs usually.
It’s like when you take a friend to dinner and say “get whatever you want, I’m buying”. You do that under the good faith assumption that they are not going to order an appetizer, surf and turf, two desserts, and an entire bottle of wine. The writer was acting in good faith and it backfired.
It’s like when you take a friend to dinner and say “get whatever you want, I’m buying”.
But you know that they’re not going to do that because they’re your friend, not some acquaintance from your grad program. I made a similar offer to a friend of a friend who helped me move, and believe me, they took advantage of that.
I liked the analogy used in the thread’s comments: “Feel free to use my car for anything!” means you can use it for an errand, not for a cross-country road trip.
That’s my attitude. I had a roommate once who told a guest that they could help themselves to anything in the fridge, and the guy went straight for my Snickers bars, which were a luxury for me at the time.
I’m so pumped that the toast and my reddit/r/relationships addiction have finally crossed over. The level of batshit insane drama on that sub make my workday so much more bearable. Did any of you toasties see this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/4…?
Huge asshole tries to prank his girlfriend into thinking he proposed! Weirdly, she’s not into it! The comments are my life.
“No shit? And you didn’t realize that before hand? My cat could have seen that coming, and the only words she understands are “chicken” and “down”!”
The comments. Thank you.
This thread is AMAZING. Holy shit I am into other people’s lives and drama.
I love the way that comment prompts a long segue into the personalities and habits of various commentators’ cats 🙂
aaaaaaaand now i’m reading
Dear GOD. What an idiot.
I’m so pumped too, I’ve been addicted forever. The prank threads on r/relationships are an amazing levels of crazy. They pop up every now and again and leave everyone speechless. Remember the boyfriend who dumped spiders on his girlfriend? It was just a joke, bro!
God bless r/relationships. And all the people posting their favorite threads.
I hope it ended for him like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyhs8dKMTN4
I am very sad because I feel like the mindset of this guy is scarily close to the mindset of my own boyfriend. 🙁 I sent him the link and asked him to read that thread and he said “don’t judge.”
Oh, honey. Here, take this internet hug (that is, if you are a hug person; if not, take this internet thought of kindness).
Thank you. Could use it right now!
OOOOOOOOOOOOOH can we talk about “pregnancy entitlement” guy? https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/4…
And its mirror scenario, which may as well have been written by “Darla.”
Terrible! How did this guy convince that woman to marry him? She is obviously so much better than him.
im just grateful every commenter was also down to rip him to shreds
Oh my god ‘the pregnancy hormones are finally kicking in’.
Yes. This situation is pregnancy’s fault. Pregnancy is sending your wife crazy. There is no other explanation.
HOOOOLY SHIT. Run away Darla. Run away.
The tone deaf entitlement of Reddit men is amazing.
I can’t stop. This woman wants to know if she should be concerned after her boyfriend casually pooped in her car right in front of her https://rr.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/3e…
jesus christ on a pogo stick
Hoooollllly shit. I don’t even know what to say about that, aside from that dude probably needs some help? And the poster should probably still break up with him (and maybe get a new car because I can’t imagine letting anyone sit in that passenger seat again).
I love the person in comments who’s like “oh yeah, this is classic depression” followed by dozens of responses from people who have been depressed and still managed not to poop in inappropriate places
I am screaming inside.
I love how much time she wastes on talking about him getting too comfortable and other regular problems before getting to the poop thing! And then is worried she’s being unreasonable!
Every single time I babysat for somebody (unless they were jerks) they would tell me I was welcome to whatever was in the fridge, and every time I would eat like, 2 olives and a slice of ham and feel EXTREME GUILT. What planet is this dude from?? He has to have stolen it, who just DEFROSTS A ENTIRE DUCK and eats it while getting paid to make sure somebody’s cat doesn’t die??? WHO???
It’s a dick move but man! The confidence to feel like, naturally while I stop by to feed the cat I’ll also cook a duck, that’s what I’m owed for my time.
good god I hope he defrosted everything improperly and got food poisoning from his spoils*
* yes, I did that.
it’s pretty easy to believe that a dude who would steal or eat a ton of expensive food because he purposefully misinterpreted a friendly invitation would also not know how to cook it “properly” (for tastiness or food safety standards).
….I kind of hope he at least fed some to the cat?
I’m cat sitting for another Toastie right now but it has not occurred to me to check their freezer for salmon………brb
I looked in the freezer and there IS a piece of salmon in there, but since I’m not a dumpster fire of a person I’m OBVIOUSLY not going to eat it. I shall restrict myself to the gallon of milk I was specifically instructed to finish and the cereal I brought over myself to eat with it.
I think this is my favorite comment:
“I dont know by what alchemy of decision making one must determine the polite amount of food to eat as a guest, but I know that literally all of it is not the correct answer.”
I wouldn’t be so quick to conclude that the leg of lamb was used as food. As we know, there are other uses.
“Lamb to the Slaughter”?
Yes! I messed up the link: http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lamb.html
That’s what I was thinking!
So much mileage to be had out of /r/books’s rage over anything Ayn Randian.
Sorry for OT but I need to rant. I had ten hours of steady, painful contractions yesterday, and then they just…. stopped. Apparently this is a thing called prodromal labor that none of the books seem to mention – contractions that feel real but start and stop after hours. This can last days or weeks. I was prepared to be late, but not for the constant pointless fake labor. Just frustrating and demoralizing with no discernible end. I don’t know what to do about going to work – I want to, but I could end up having intense contractions and having to head right back home. And it’s unclear if my short-term disability will even kick in without a birth, so I’m losing money for every day I’m home beforehand (no maternity leave at my 90%-women organization, natch). Uuuuugh. Thanks for listening.
*hugs* if you want them. Prodromal labor is the pits. If it helps: the contractions are real! There is no such thing as fake contractions! You’re just not in labor yet, which feels arbitrary and pointless. I have a little pep talk speech that I give people in which I say the bad news is that we don’t know how long the prodrome lasts but the good news is that your body is doing exactly what it needs to be doing.
This is totally true! You can comfort yourself with the knowledge that every one one of these contractions is one less that you’ll have to deal with once labor really kicks into gear.
That may or may not be comforting…
Yes!! I’m totally convinced the uncomfortable week I spent before ‘real’ labour started was key to it being so quick. All the best to you, and I hope baby decides to finally make their entrance soon. Also totally second whoever said to just take sick leave – false labour has got to count as sick enough not to be working! I’d sign of on that and I bet your doctor would too.
According to my mum she spent a week like this before I was born; and she was planning a water birth (in a cottage, in Ireland, in February) so every day she was sure it was the day and made everyone rush around heating up the water, filling the tub and lighting fires and then she’d sit in the tub for a bit and realise nope, no baby today.
Eventually it got to Sunday and she decided fuck it I’m going a party and her labour started in the car on the way there and everyone had to turn around very quickly and there was no time for tubs or anything.
Obviously I needed to make a suitably large entrance and made sure there was ample anticipation.
TL;DR, go out and continue your life, baby will decide that is the perfect time to arrive.
idk where you are, but in my state short-term disability will kick in when you have to stop working for medical reasons. Ask your provider to fill out your short-term disability papers (do not call them “STD papers” even if you love to abbreviate things) and if it’s possible where you live, they can put “latent labor at term” as the indication.
STD papers! LOL.
Oh man oh man, biggest internet hugs to you!! I had this for 2 weeks with my second daughter. The worst part is I couldn’t sleep and it left me so so drained. Can you arrange to work from home? I skyped in to a PhD defense in the midst of week 2 of fake pre labor… and worked on bits and bobs on the computer in between trying to sleep and basically feeling like my undergirdle was gonna split.
On the plus side, happy healthy baby DID eventually come out. They ended up having to break my water – then 45 min later baby in arms!
I have nothing to say except I AM SO SORRY, and hugs, and if you are in the DC Metro Area I’ll come make you mac and cheese if you want it.
Boooo. I’m sorry, that is frustrating as all hell. I hate that the work situation makes it all that much more stressful.
Here’s some cheerleading you can take or leave: Your body is awesome, it is getting ready to push out that baby, and you are going to crush it. (And this is your third, right? So afterwards, you’re going to tell me alllll about having 3 kids and whether I would be an idiot to do so as well. :P)
“a thing called prodromal labor ”
This is the first I’ve heard of this. I had it for a couple days with my first and nobody EVER told me it was a thing or explained why, after several days of intermittent labour, I wasn’t even starting to dilate. When the contractions got steady and were 5 minutes apart, I went to the hospital as instructed, had the last one in the parking lot, and when they examined me, they just said, nope, you’re not in labour. Like I’d been making it up.
So frustrating! Best wishes to you, hope labor gets its butt in gear soon and you’re welcoming your baby before you know it. *hugs*
I am SO SORRY! And so frustrated on your behalf that you have to even be THINKING about working and short-term disability right now!
I really like how casually this aside was dropped into the food deception article: “INSIDE EDITION CORRESPONDENT Lisa Guerrero wore a fitted black blazer and stilettos when she busted with her camera crew into Get Hooked, a casual seafood restaurant in Hudson that on occasion hosts micro-championship little people wrestling.”
Where’s Stefon when you need him?
The way it’s worded makes me picture her wearing a blazer and stilettos but no pants. Which…I hope was not the case.
I HOPE IT WAS
I’m imagining Lisa Guerrero in future years, maybe with some cool gray streaks in her hair, saying in total Troy McClure voice, “YOU MAY REMEMBER ME from that time I busted with my camera crew into Get Hooked, a casual seafood restaurant in Hudson that on occasion hosts micro-championship little people wrestling.”
“I was, of course, wearing my fitted black blazer and sky-high stilletos.”
Aww, I will never not be mourning Phil Hartman : . .(
The other night NBC showed a “classic” episode of “SNL” from 1992 and seeing Phil Hartman made me so freshly sad. (To make matters worse, Nirvana were the musical guests. At the end of the episode Charles Barkley (!) was standing there thanking the audience, thanking Lorne I guess, and Kurt Cobain was just right there, stage left, obliviously eating some kind of dark-colored non-fruit food item out of hand. Seeing video of Kurt Cobain casually being human and occupying his living body will never NOT slay me.)
“Kurt Cobain casually being human and occupying his living body,” yes, always
If anyone would like to scream about the new Captain America: Civil War clip with me, this is the place to do it.
Wait, is there a new clip this morning?? I’m so out of the loop.
Yup, it was on Jimmy Kimmel last night.
I’m afraid I’m too eager to see this movie.
did you see the (now-deleted) Ed Brubaker tweet saying Civil War was Steve/Bucky slash friendly? There was a lot of squealing on my end.
I did, but I’m very multi-ship friendly, so it wasn’t exactly life-altering for me. (He said the same thing about Winter Soldier. He was not wrong!)
I think reviewers are saying there’s a painfully awkward het scene shoved in to forestall any actual slash, but Steve and Bucky’s relationship is super important anyway.
Well, now I am squealing too, and all is right in the world.
I died a death. Look at them all, being competent and badass! TONY STARK’S TECHNOLOGY AND HIS LITTLE SMIRK OMG.
(We have had to ban talking about Civil War in my household as I am too #TeamIronMan for everyone else.)
“forcing the Porcellian to accept women, as some other final clubs already have, would make sexual assaults more likely.”
So your whole club is a bunch of sexual predators? Got it. Best to keep them all in one place so we can avoid them.
Yeah, maybe this letter is enough to begin an investigation.
yeah at the very least there should be a public registry of their names
If only someone at Harvard could invent a digital “book” of sorts, so we’d know all of their faces.
I love you so much right now.
And then burn the house to the ground?
I just bought a whole pile of matches, I mean, I do have to find some use for them.
That reads as “All that is preventing our members from assaulting women is proximity”, which is a horrifying thing to say.
Imagine how un-self-aware you have to be to put out a statement like that. There’s literally no other way to interpret it than “girls will be raped if they’re near us”
The US military has been claiming that for at least since the 60s/70s second wave feminism.
The Greatest Soldiers/Seamen/Airmen In The World are apparently incapable of not raping women.
Right. And it’s even worse when you take it out of the passive voice. “If girls are near us, we will rape them.”
It’s basically a threat
I think what they are actually saying is worse: “here is a club where form social networks that will give a huge amount of economic privilege, and we’re literally using the threat of rape to ensure women don’t have access to this”.
Yup yup yup. Ragey!
I’m pissed this guy is the Harpoon president. I love Harpoon. I do not love this.
That was my thought in reading this, and the “but I love Harpoon!” only got worse the more he was quoted.
right?? just a sad cycle of “nooooo, stoppppp, noooooo, whyyy” [looks sadly at the variety 12-pack I was planning on buying for my bday party, gets magic hat instead]
I’d go for Smuttynose, now that Harpoon is …. no good
wait hold up did Mallory destroy Ayn Rand or C. S. Lewis?
dang you got to have like a Deleted Commenter AMA sometime or something I have a lot of questions I need answers to
On first read I assumed it was Rand but upon re-reading I’m leaning Lewis based on the mention of morality. But you could make a strong case for each! Best deleted comment of all time?
You guys. My whole week is being consumed by the search for one certain certificate. I feel like I live in a soap, where each and everytime I believe I’m close to the end, something happens that only prolonges the journey. Ugghhhh
I have recurring dreams like this. Frequently I’m lost in some kind of cavernous subway station or massive department store/mall. This sounds worse, as it’s (a) real and (b) not a question of getting your butt from point A to point B, physically, which is a thing that is do-able even when filled with obstacles.
On the one hand, I believe that the Porc should be co-ed because it preserves and perpetuates male power by providing connections and networking opportunities to wealthy male mediocres (and, bro, (a) treating the womins as subhuman invaders of your male friendships does indeed contribute to the problem of sexual assault and (b) I know from friends’ horrifying experiences that at least some of the dudes are rapists)
On the other hand, the Porc is the worst, those dudes ARE rich losers, and they shouldn’t be inflicted on any women anywhere. I hope they climb into their dumb clubhouse and never leave.
Well put– these are my thoughts exactly on all-male groups. I don’t think all-male groups should be forced to include women; I think all-male groups should be dismantled and replaced with more inclusive social structures. Tear down the Porc, fraternities, secret societies, whatever, and put up LGBT safe-spaces, women’s mentorship groups, clubs dedicated to the arts or sciences or juggling or whatever regardless of gender expression.
Oh how the distinguished line of long-dead Secret Society Dudes would convulse in their graves. Spinning is for more minor disturbances, such as Not-Raping or the Letting-in of Plebes.
Something that really annoys me is the condescension and vitriol aimed at anti-vaccination people in the media; calling someone an idiot has never changed anyone’s mind.
IME the majority of people who are cautious about vaccination do not think that it causes autism, but have a lot of other very real concerns that are not addressed by the media or medical professionals. These are real people who are scared and trying to do the best for their children, spewing hate at them doesn’t help.
Blame lack of education and sensationalist media, not the people.
(The Jezebel piece isn’t too bad, but I read another article about the situation earlier that was nothing but condescension and name calling. I’m not trying to start a pro/anti vaccination discussion, just vent some of my feelings about it because every headline I see makes me feel sick)
This is a real problem! Every now and then I get a patient who is strongly anti-vax (in the community where I practice, it’s rare; in the community where I live, it’s a bit more common) and I hate myself because I want to say JUST TRUST ME I AM A LOT SMARTER THAN YOU, and then I realize the actual issue is I KNOW MORE THAN YOU which is slightly different but still a message impossible to receive without one’s hackles rising. I feel so passionately as a health care provider and as a parent and as a citizen and as someone well-educated in life sciences, that vaccination is so much more safe than disease that it is irresponsible not to vaccinate. But I don’t know how to impress this upon relatively-uneducated (meaning these people have not received my specific level of education in a science/health related field) without sounding like an ass.
I don’t have an answer, but yet again I’m impressed by you as a healthcare provider who is aware of your own personal feelings and biases.
I think a lot of people, especially new parents, just want their concerns to be heard and listened to, the idea of injecting a new baby is scary, they’re so tiny and delicate! anecdotally I’ve heard that a lot people who question vaccination to their doctor (As with a lot of questioning doctor situations) are just dismissed or their doctor actively scares them (if you don’t your child will die!), neither of which is an ideal solution.
“their doctor actively scares them (if you don’t your child will die!)”
I don’t think it’s inappropriate for doctors to impress on parents just how serious this issue is. It’s entirely possible that their child will suffer considerably if they do contract one of these infectious diseases.
A big part of the problem is that most people these days have never seen a case of measles, pertussis, etc., and many of those non-vaccinating parents genuinely don’t think it’s a big deal. They often don’t realize just how dangerous those illnesses can be, or that there ARE potentially serious (and potentially lifelong) complications that can arise.
Soft-pedaling these kinds of issues is not necessarily effective or good medicine.
Agreed. These are terrible diseases that can cause death or permanent injury to children but people have forgotten because vaccination reduced their occurrence.
Okay I really don’t want to start a vaccination discussion–The Toast is my safe space–but, as someone who is emphatically pro-vaccination and does seriously question the judgment and rationality of people who do not want to use proven, safe methods to guard not only their children but also other people’s against preventable illness … what “very real concerns” do these people have that are not addressed by medical professionals? I mean, I can agree that medical professionals do not always do a great job of communicating (ARRRRGH is not super convincing, I’ll admit), but the research is there if you’re looking for it.
I’m editing to add that this is a genuine question, not a sarcastic one.
the research is there if you’re looking for it.
The sticking point being that IME a lot of anti-vax folks distrust research, medicine as a profession, pharmacology as an industry, and science as just… as SCIENCE. These same folks tend to trust… nature. (You know, that thing that is red in tooth and claw. You know, nature, where arsenic and anthrax hang out. And sharks and Clostridium spp. Nature! We’re totally friends with nature!) Trust of nature (as a construct) does not always translate to trust of science as a way to understand the natural world.
Look, world, medicine as a discipline has done a lot of shitty things over the years. You are right to cast a cynical eye over the whole operation*. But you are wrong to forget that as a discipline, the health sciences have literally saved your ass over and over again. From nature.
* pun, shamefully, intended.
Okay, this is such a good point! I tend to see the world through a very evidence-based lens, so it’s hard for me to remember–or to understand why–huge swaths of people just don’t believe in empiricism. I can definitely also acknowledge that are real problems with the way some research is conducted, and what gets published, and so forth. For me, what matters is that science does, eventually, change its mind based on evidence. Sometimes it takes a while and there are detours along the way, but the whole point is to continually increase knowledge, not to return to some imaginary one-with-nature state.
Also, every time someone uses the word “nature” or “natural” as reason to do or not do anything, I temporarily lose my ability to hear.
Also there is great susceptibility to confirmation bias without believing that confirmation bias is a thing that exists. Because science-types will tell you about confirmation bias, and science-types are distrustful.
Confirmation bias, yes!
The interesting thing is I was part of the Facebook mom’s group for people who gave birth at the same birth center I did (so a big crunchy streak of people, as you can imagine). And I noticed that people in that group didn’t necessarily distrust “science” — they would post articles claiming that science says attachment parenting is best, science says CIO is murder, etc etc. But the science of vaccination (obviously a hell of a lot more established than anything about parenting styles or sleep training) got shouted down. So I think it has a lot to do with the confirmation bias towards “natural is good” as well as just a lack of education on how to understand scientific studies.
To me there’s a world of difference between:
A) I’m skeptical of this study because it has this particular design flaw that I can specifically articulate/I’m struggling to square these results with Major Accepted Principle X (but would be open to hearing others’ explanations).
B) I’m skeptical of this study because of feelings and This Thing Happened to Someone Someone I Know Knows (and nothing will convince me otherwise).
I like to respond, “Arsenic and earthquakes are natural, too.”
And snake venom!
this is a good opportunity to add one of MY favorite things from Freaks and Geeks:
Lindsay: I don’t smoke pot.
Nick: Come on, what’s the big deal? It’s from the earth, it’s natural. Why would it be there if we weren’t supposed to smoke it?
Lindsay: Dog crap is here and we don’t smoke that.
Quick, somebody invent all-natural organic farm-raised measles vaccine! Possibly with essential oils!
My personal pet peeve is the use of the words “chemical” and “inorganic” to automatically mean something is bad and not “from nature.” You guys, EVERYTHING IS CHEMICALS! Water is a chemical! Salt is a chemical! Your body is made of chemicals! And “inorganic” mostly just means that something is not made up of any living matter. So, again, water and salt are also inorganic compounds!
In 7th grade we had to watch a video about “what if we didn’t have chemicals!?!” which was depicted as. . .wearing white robes walking around on a beach all day.
:headdesk:
(Of course, the flip side of this was my high school honors chemistry teacher who would answer EVERY question with, “Well, see, the world is made up of atoms. Everything is atoms! This desk!” :punch desk: which is not really an answer to “I swear to God I can see no way to balance this equation.”
I hope he didn’t break his hand, like my grandfather did while teaching a Latin class.
(A student had waited until the very end of the school year to ask him where to find vocabulary words that weren’t on his lists. He yelled, “LOOK. IN. THE. BACK. OF. THE. BOOK!”, pounded on the desk, and then said “Ummm… I think I broke my hand”).
Research aside, the one thing for me that proves it can’t be related to vaccination is that autism is much more prevalent in boys.
If it was purely related to vaccinations, wouldn’t it be a 50/50 distribution between boys and girls?
It’s plain old truth that it’s more common in boys–and that’s not research, that’s just counting.
But idk, people who don’t want to listen to reason are stubborn and this probably wouldn’t convince them either.
This is also true even correcting for the fact that autism-spectrum disorders are very under-diagnosed in women because the symptoms are often different/girls receive less tolerance for neuroatypical behavior and learn to “fake it” at an early age, I’m presuming? (This is an honest question- I don’t have the statistics at my fingertips; it’s just that girls not getting treatment that would help them because they don’t present in a “typical”, i.e. male way is a bugbear of mine.)
Potentially something y chromosome related? I seem to remember that colorblindness works this way? I’m not a scientist, but a friend of science.
*pushes up nerd glasses*
Colorblindness is due to recessive mutations (not my field, so not sure of the gene or genes involved) on the X chromosome, actually – it’s much more common in XY individuals because they only have one copy of the X chromosome, and therefore no “backup” copy. XX individuals need to inherit the mutation from both parents.
Also totally not sure if autism has links to sex chromosomes! That is even further outside my field, but I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has insight.
– a friendly Toast biologist
Thanks! Anyway, I knew that at least for certain traits, having a single X and a single Y makes males more likely to have it than females. I wasn’t trying to suggest that autism works that way at all, just that some traits, inherited or environmental, could disproportionately affect a single group.
pavo sum; coquor
The gene that codes for photopigments in the eye is on the X chromosome, yep. (I taught four semesters of psych of perception in grad school and LOVED it.)
I don’t know how we should be communicating it, all I know is that saying people are stupid and calling them names doesn’t help. And I feel that the autism debate is a smoke screen, at least the people I know, their concerns are more about the safety of injecting a newborn with a forgien substance, and the effects it will have on a developing immune system and brain, as well as potential side effects like allergic reactions and infection. I’m sure the literature on these things is available, but since these people aren’t doctors who can read and interpret medical papers, its obviously not getting to them in the right way.
Where I’m from there’s also a long history of doctors doing damage to patients and then lying about it, especially around pregnancy and children; thalidomide, symphysiotomies, forced hysterectomies, mother and baby homes, it goes on and on. Lets just say that trust in the medical establishment is not high.
I also read (but cannot find, of course) an article that theorized that one of the reasons mothers can be reluctant to trust doctors and vaccinate is that many of them have had a very traumatic experience, very recently, at the hands of doctors. So a doctor saying ‘trust me I know better’ doesn’t really resonate with them.
I get this. I think for some people anti-vax is part of a shift in thinking about doctors and western medicine. Like, there’s an enforced binary that’s like “well either you’re a tree-hugging hippie who does acupuncture and believes in MAGIC or you believe in LOGIC, Science, sound reasoning, and the absolute power and knowledge of doctors” and while I think anti-vax is on the wrong side of the “doctors think they know everything but science can be wrong!!!” there are legitimate examples of places where doctors HAVE been wrong, pushed their ego before the wellness of patients, and places where western medicine relies on Long-Established Knowledge for just a liiiitle longer than strictly necessary when newly-established knowledge would actually work better.
I think you’re right that for many people doctors are not automatically seen as a source of good knowledge, and that this belief is not dumb or baseless.
Yes, so many debates come down to us and them, when in reality its so complicated and nuanced that its nearly impossible get a full picture.
There’s also the same problem that liberal vs conservative parties struggle with; the majority of people gravitate to emotive appeals and personal stories. The lunatic fringes always understand this better than the rational parties/sides in a debate.
So on one side you have parents and celebrities in the media and online telling emotional personal stories about how vaccinations damaged their children, or they believe vaccinations damaged their children, for life. And on the other side you have people telling you you’re stupid and throwing science and numbers at you, a lot of which you don’t understand for various reasons.
I can very easily see how new, scared, parents land on the emotive side; because the doctors are saying that only 1 in 10,000 children (or whatever the actual numbers are) might have a bad reaction, but here’s a personal story from someone who’s child was that 1 and what if your child is also that 1?
I get that you are coming from a place of empathy and compassion, which I agree is sorely lacking in many public discourses, but I have to nope out at that last paragraph. What if your child is that 1? That would be unfortunate, tragic even, as it would be if your child were injured in any of the myriad ways children can be injured. Regardless of your emotions and fears, however, your child is not more important than mine. Your child is not more important than the foster child down the street. Your child is not more important than the immuno-compromised cancer patient. There are many valid reasons for people to distrust doctors and/or medical science, but when it comes down to it, a significant number of “vaccine skeptics” are simply saying “my child should receive special treatment because it’s MY CHILD”. And that is not ok. Scared new parents can and should feel all the feelings they want to, and we should not judge them for those feelings, but they don’t get to act on those feelings in a way that damages others. ETA: I’m using “you” in the same sense you did, not directed at you personally.
I can understand this from the perspective of a community that has not had much reason to trust doctors, sure. That’s a helpful check to my own anecdotal experience, which is mostly in communities where people are wealthier and well-educated–some of them have science degrees, for chrissakes. And I can see how even the vaccine information sheets they hand out at well baby visits can be hard to access for people who haven’t had much experience with that type of literature. So, I really shouldn’t comment on vaccine refusal that stems from very legitimate mistrust of doctors and a mishandling of women’s pregnancies and births. I appreciate the corrective. Although I still think Robert de Niro has the resources and reasons to know better.
many of them have had a very traumatic experience, very recently, at the hands of doctors. So a doctor saying ‘trust me I know better’ doesn’t really resonate with them.
This is a very, very good point. I will have to ruminate on this.
Yeah that one got me hard. I read the piece awhile ago, I need to start savings things! I think it was addressing the common thing that happens (at least where I’m from), that babies get their first round of vaccinations but then the parents don’t bring them back for further rounds, and it gave this as a possible reason for mistrust of doctors/medical professionals.
I helped lead the movement in California to update the vaccination law to get rid of the personal belief exemption. (Yay!) When my kid, who was too young for MMR at the time, was in daycare with at least one non-immunized kid and measles was happening in our county, I was not having it. All the parents involved tried to enforce a practice of being kind and respectful towards vaccine-hesitant parents (many are offended by the term “anti-vax” because they are not anti-vaccine, just anti FORCED vaccination).
But that was a strategic choice about effective messaging. I frankly cannot summon actual respect for the perspective or experience of these parents who, at least in southern CA, are often highly educated and believe in, e.g., climate change, but feel comfortable indulging their doubts about vaccines because the rest of us immunizing our kids lowers the risk for theirs.
So in my experience, “I just feel icky about injecting strange substances into my pristine newborn, and it doesn’t seem necessary” is less connected to distrust of the medical establishment and more to an attitude of privilege that your kid is more important than the other kids in your community, that has a range of negative implications – “I’ll send my kids to an elite private/charter school and let the public school system fail black and brown kids.” Obviously that’s not be applicable to all parents who resist vaccination, but it’s a definite thread in parts of that community.
so basically, it’s nice to try to educate anti-vax parents in a non-condescending way, but I prefer to limit their ability to endanger the rest of us.
Exactly. The parents who choose not to vaccinate where I live typically have college degrees, higher-than-average incomes, and a fair amount of time on their hands.
They’ve had many advantages in life and choose to remain ignorant on this topic (while endangering other people), so I have zero qualms about calling them morons.
In my town (Portland, OR) the public schools released a school by school vax percentage and just about every single school that vaxed to the rate above herd immunity was a low-income school. The more alterna- or charter-y, and also the higher the income, the lower the vax rate.
Yep, that doesn’t surprise me at all– a lot of outbreaks have started at Waldorf/ Steiner schools around there.
This!!!! I worked in a developing country and a significant part of my work was convincing parents to vaccinate their children.
The privilege of some (not all) anti-vaxers really astounds me. The families I worked with didn’t vaccinate often because of structural barriers (cost, distance, literacy etc.) and they didn’t have the privilege of herd immunity in their communities. I will never forget the day I was working at the weekly vaccination clinic and one woman who I had spoken to about vaccinating showed up towards the end of the day having walked through a desert in 100 degree heat with her baby because she didn’t have the money for both public transportation and the vaccination but she knew it was important to vaccinate. It’s just so mind boggling to me that we as a society really have it made for vaccines and people are throwing it away so easily.
I know that anti-vaxers are not responsible for global medical inequities. And I know that this complaint is the equivalent of telling a child that is a picky eater that “there are starving children in Africa” but the privilege of some of the anti-vax community just pushes all of my anger buttons which is why I don’t usually comment on vaccination threads because I know my anger is not likely to convince someone to vaccinate.
Thanks for this comment. I think about this privilege when I hear anti-vax arguments as well. I also think of people born before the vaccine era, who would be so thrilled that something so simple would keep them and their children from dying from measles, mumps, flu, typhoid, pneumonia, etc, etc.
I mean, there’s a good reason that everyone asks after everyone’s health and gets concerned when people get colds in Jane Austen books, because that cold could turn into something deadly very quickly.
Thank you for saying this. Caring only about your own child and not the safety of the community is not ok. Yes, that may be your emotional impulse, but you cannot act on that impulse for the same reason we cannot permit vigilante “justice”.
That’s the thing that gets me. I would feel TERRIBLE FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE if (say) my kid infected a baby or cancer patient down the street with measles and they ended up in the hospital.
Short of locking your unvaccinated kids in the house forever, there’s no way to magically sequester them from the rest of the world. A lot of recent infectious disease outbreaks (e.g., in the Pacific Northwest) have started at private schools where 70-80% of the kids were unvaccinated, and spread to other people in the community.
I have to assume that people who don’t vaccinate either don’t believe that this is possible, or they really just don’t care about other people’s welfare.
I think they don’t care, and I think they don’t care in a very particular and pernicious American way (speaking as an American). It’s privileging individual choice over common good and acting like that is in some way morally superior–insisting that other children pull themselves up by their immuno-bootstraps.
I think you hit the nail on the head there.
All your comments on this thread are very perceptive and insightful. Thank you.
No, people really do hate autism that much. Autism $peaks used to be one of the most strident supporters of anti-vax autism claims.
Not everyone trusts medical professionals. Some people have very good reasons not to trust medical professionals.
Some people may have very good reasons not to trust *a* medical professional, or even *some* medical professionals. But taking one bad experience with a doctor and translating it into “all doctors are horrible and know nothing” is not only terrible logic, it sometimes has serious consequences.
Thing is, anti-vaxxers aren’t exactly above condescension. I mean, I tend to stay out of discussions about vaccination, but I saw one recently on my fb wall where the anti-vaccination said little more than repetitions of “Open your eyes, sheeple!”, except with more caps and many more exclamation marks. Her pro-vaccination friend kept asking her for more concrete objections to vaccination, and she just kept telling him to stop listening him to the evil media and “do his research”, without ever mentioning ANY arguments.
This is not an original point, but what drives me up the wall is the equation of “research” with Google. Plenty of people have done research into vaccines. They’re called scientists.
There’s always assholes on every side of any debate
The assholes on the pro-vax side aren’t emotionally invested in denying my humanity as an autist and putting my immunocompromised ass at risk in one fell swoop. They are brusque and rude, but not invested in supporting a whole system designed to convince people that autism creates soulless, inhuman wrecks with no chance of a good life.
Let us not do the false equivalency thing here.
Yeah, I get really upset by the assumption that autism is definitely a worse consequence than something like measles, which can a) kill you and b) resets your immune system and makes you more susceptible to OTHER potentially deadly diseases.
It makes me angry enough that I start shaking, sometimes. I am not a big enough person to expend tons of energy on managing the feelings of people who think that my neurodiverse mind is worse than diseases that maim, kill, and cause miscarriages.
If people want good information so they can learn better, I am super happy to help! But if they want their inchoate fearmongering and disablist beliefs to be taken as seriously as my fear that their kid will get me hospitalized… I cannot and will not do it.
In this case, though, only one set of assholes is actually endangering other people (including newborns, people with compromised immune systems, et al.)
The media’s on the other side here, though. The anti-vax opinion is coming from Robert De Niro – he’s not a cautious parent, he’s the producer of an anti-vax movie. Even after his movie was pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival, he’s still making the rounds on talk shows to promote that viewpoint.
It’s not “get a load of the rube” so much as “scientists or celebrities, you decide, after our interview with the celebrity!”
Thank you for saying this and I agree. I’m strongly pro-vaccination, but I wish that people would show a bit more empathy for people who are–reasonable or not–scared and just trying to do the best they can for their kids. I’ve had a lot of health issues in my life, and while I’m immensely grateful for all of the amazing health professionals who’ve helped me, I have also found the bedside manner to be severely lacking in many cases.
I had one particular specialist, who is known as one of the best in his field, and my experience with him was just awful. He’d recommended that I take a medication as a precautionary measure, and when I pushed back, he was incensed (to say the least). I’m not uneducated and I don’t hate science, I really just wanted him to talk me through what felt like a big decision. He was extremely dismissive of my concerns about the expense, time away from work, general quality of life, etc., though he did say that most people quit taking the medication after a few months (no wonder!). In the end, he printed off a bunch of medical journal entries and sent me off with those. I came away feeling alone, terrified, and completely overwhelmed. I never went back.
I get that he’s not a social worker, but he’s not a research scientist either. Some of my doctors were awesome. They’d talk me through x-rays, tell me about studies, and really break things down for me in layman’s terms. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them, it’s that I wanted to understand (as much as I could) what was happening with my body. When you are scared and sick and it’s a new thing for you, there’s this gulf between you and the folks who deal do this for a living and deal with this stuff day in and day out (and have spent years getting an education to do so).
Exactly! Thank you!
New parents in particular are bombarded with information about what to do and what not to do from all sorts of sources and every decision seems like the most important decision in the world! (formula or BF, cotton clothes or synthetic, do we only feed organic? it never ends and the train of people telling you conflicting advice never ends either.). So having a doctor blow off your concerns or questions, or not explaining things clearly could have a real impact on the decision to vaccinate.
I do feel like there is a lot out there making clear how serious the ramifications of not vaccinating can be, though. I saw this news story the other day which got the message across well: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-3597501… – and there seem to be news stories like this, with people dying from potentially-prevenatble diseases, so often. The infectious diseases that we vaccinate against can kill (and even if they don’t, can have serious effects – the coughing during whooping cough can break ribs), and I find it scary to think that so many adults have somehow got to a point in their lives when they’re having children without realising this. (Plus, HERD IMMUNITY. It’s not just about you/your child, it’s about the population at large, especially the immunocompromised.)
I also think turning down vaccines because one is a”healthy, fit, organic woman” is bollocks, because a) herd immunity and b) viruses are “organic” as well.
I do feel like this sort of outrage is disproportionately targeted against women (because they’re most likely to be primary caregivers and have the main responsibility for ensuring their children access medical care), which is shit. But I also think that the information about this sort of thing is not hidden away, and I hate that these people’s poorly thought out decisions are causing harm to others.
So the thing about the herd immunity argument that annoys me is that quite often its people being aggressive about it online; and I wonder how many of those people have had adult booster shots for their own vaccinations? Everyone focuses on childhood vaccination, but its rarely talked about that vaccines wear off and you’re supposed to get regular boosters at varying intervals. I’m pretty sure no one I know gets vaccinations as an adult, not even flu shots, unless you’re going travelling.
(This is not aimed at you in the slightest, just a thought I always have when I see someone touting herd immunity as a global panacea to disease. Also there was an article awhile ago from some man whining about getting whooping cough that spent the entire piece bitching about Jenny McArthy and how she cause him to get sick, but never once mentioned if he’d bothered to get his adult booster shot before he got sick.)
My mum works for the NHS, so I may be an outlier; when I was 15 and there was a mumps outbreak, she dragged me and my siblings off to the GP for booster injections, and a few years ago when I worked as a GP receptionist I eagerly took up the offer of a Hep B vaccine and carefully put a reminder in my diary to have a booster after one year (which I had, even though I had moved to London in the intervening period and no longer worked in a medical environment). But you’re right that vaccines don’t necessarily last for life, and I think the NHS should do more to make people aware of that.
Well, the CDC only recommends boosters for the Tdap, but I’m sure you’re right that most people don’t think to get it unless it specifically comes up. Ex. I had boosters during both of my pregnancies, and my husband did during the first.
Do you have a link, or something, about this? I have been looking since I read this comment, and can’t find anything that suggests that you’re right- only anti-vaccination sites.
The NHS tends to be quite a good guide on this, because they are spending public money- so the cost of the vaccines they give has to weigh out against the cost of treating people. and they recommend a series of vaccinations and boosters in childhood (as a baby and again at 14), with tetanus boosters every ten years. The NHS also gives flu shots every winter to vulnerable people, i.e. those people who are susceptible and might become vectors of the disease in the community.
(That’s another thing the boosters argument doesn’t really deal with: some people, mostly children, are more likely to pick up and spread illnesses, because they interact in ways that adults mostly don’t.)
The NHS also gives flu shots every winter to vulnerable people, i.e. those people who are susceptible and might become vectors of the disease in the community.
I have done that job! Not actually giving the vaccinations, but working my way through a list of patients (carers, people who are pregnant, people who have long-term conditions like asthma or CODP, over-65s) and phoning them to invite them for a vaccination. So many said no (“Last time I had the flu jab it gave me flu!”) and it drove me mad. Take all the free medical care going! It’s great!
My flatmate, who has asthma, was offered the flu vaccine. He didn’t take them up on it, I think because he couldn’t be bothered :/
http://www.vaccines.gov/who_and_when/adults/
This is the one I checked quickly before I posted the comment; obviously childhood vaccines are more important and frequent. This is just a personal gripe I have when I see people being self congratulatory or belligerent about vaccines online, it’s quite possible they’ve had all their boosters, but I have a suspicion a lot of adults have not.
Just a quick note: An NHS nurse told me a few months ago that they don’t recommend tetanus boosters anymore, unless there’s a clear reason for it (and that the “every 10 years” practice was when refrigeration was less consistent (tetanus vaccine is apparently very temperature sensitive)).
The acellular pertussis vaccine is the one that really seems to wear off, and my impression is that scientists were really caught off-guard by that (it might only last a year or two?).
The NHS also seems to recommend fewer vaccines for adults than the CDC does.
I have had the flu exactly once in my entire life, but I get a flu shot every year now because so many of my coworkers have young children and I don’t want to be a vector for them.
I was also very glad to have recently received my TDAP when my BFF announced she was pregnant with my godson, because it was one less thing to worry about.
But you’re right, a lot of people don’t get their adult boosters, especially when you consider how many people don’t get regular check-ups.
Most people rely on their doctors to tell them when they need vaccines and boosters, though and if they don’t hear about it from them they’re not likely to look up vaccine information on their own. I understand what you mean but it seems unfair to say that no adult can complain about herd immunity online because they might not be 100% up to date on their vaccines. An adult who was vaccinated as a child is still contributing more to overall herd immunity than a completely unvaccinated child, and that child is more likely to both get sick and spread it to others. The people who talk about herd immunity online might have any number of people in their life who rely on it- people allergic to eggs can’t get some vaccines, for example. It just strikes me as somewhat petty to dismiss their concerns because of that.
I’m not saying people can’t talk about herd immunity or dismissing anyone’s concerns because they’re not up to date on boosters; my gripe was with one writer in particular, and it’s just a thought I’ve had a couple of times when seeing people be real assholes about it online with personal attacks. I just wonder if some of these people are maybe, possibly, being a bit hypocritical attacking someone for jeopardising herd immunity when they themselves are not immunised. And I could be completely wrong, but judging by my mid20s never-go-to-the-doctor social circle, I’m guessing there might be one or two.
I don’t believe I’ve every been told I should get a booster shot in my adult years. Would they likely be covered as “preventative” even under my shitty, shitty high-deductible plan?
So that BBC piece is good, but it still has a relatively sensationalist headline that is likely to turn away the people it’s trying to communicate to (I personally balk at any use of nicknames/monikers for a group of people in the media, in particular ‘anti-vaxxer’.).
I saw a version of that article awhile ago, and didn’t read it because of the use of ‘anti-vax’ in the headline, I assumed it would be condescending finger pointing and blaming the mother (this one wasn’t the BBC).
So the only people who will probably read that article are people who are already pro-vaccination. And a lot of the commentary around it will be ‘haha look at the stupid anti-vaxxer’. That’s hardly going to bring anyone around.
The problem is, we do not have a good handle on what WILL bring people around, and in the meantime, it really is a pressing public health issue. It is terrifying for the immuno-compromised, and I was sweating bullets until my babies were big enough to get vaccinated for whooping cough. There are pamphlets and lectures and peer-reviewed studies out the wazoo, vaccines are one of the oldest and safest forms of medicine we have, and I know that especially in the US, when you can only budget, say, half an hour for a well-child visit, pediatricians often have to spend the full half hour having very, very fruitless arguments about vaccines and then they do not get to probe on some important developmental stuff. It is exhausting for providers, and the science is SO clear that when people reject it as being tainted by Big Pharma (vaccines are basically free, and ARE free from the state, they are not moneymakers) it is very, very hard not to point fingers when there are outbreaks.
Being a parent is terrifying, but vaccines have made being a parent SO MUCH LESS terrifying that I do very, very much get wanting to shake people.
This is where I stand, too, although for me, I’d go further and say that sometimes, passively accepting, or being gentle, is also harmful. We call racists racist, and explain the harm their actions cause. We call sexists sexist, and explain the harm their actions cause. When someone deliberately does something actively harmful to other people, I think it’s disingenuous (not to mention hugely privileged) to say that we should direct our feelings to worrying about them, rather than the people who suffer because of their actions.
My partner is severely immunocompromised, in that all of his vaccines have been wiped out by a stem cell transplant; by next month, he will not only have no vaccines but also absolutely no resistance (no immune system, no gut bacteria, all systems down). It is, perhaps, very easy to be gentle and thoughtful to people when they are not actively hurting you- and make no mistake, if you don’t vaccinate, you’re hurting immunocompromised people.
Yes. And adults getting their boosters is great, but to act as though that is on the same level as childhood vaccination is to ignore the reality of how children work as disease vectors. Not only is it easier for kids to contract these diseases full-stop, kids are the ones running around licking surfaces and each other and spending days in close contact with many, many other kids. It just has. to. be. done. and the moving goalposts of what might convince people definitely drive me bananas.
This is where I stand, too, although for me, I’d go further and say that sometimes, passively accepting, or being gentle, is also harmful. We call racists racist, and explain the harm their actions cause. We call sexists sexist, and explain the harm their actions cause. When someone deliberately does something actively harmful to other people, I think it’s disingenuous (not to mention hugely privileged) to say that we should direct our feelings to worrying about them, rather than the people who suffer because of their actions.
This. I think it’s important to be considerate and kind, but sometimes that means not just accepting all behaviours and viewpoints, because letting them continue may be kind to the people who hold them, but not to all of the others that they might be harming.
(This is part of why I am really struggling at the moment with trying to be more open-minded about religion – I find it really hard not to see it as harmful more often than not, which makes accepting it feel like I’m causing harm too. But that is mainly down to my issues, and not a conversation for here and now.)
I really hope your partner doesn’t come into contact with anything bad – it must be a really stressful experience for you both, and I’m sorry you’re having to deal with it.
YES to everything you say here, but particularly: “When someone deliberately does something actively harmful to other people, I think it’s disingenuous (not to mention hugely privileged) to say that we should direct our feelings to worrying about them, rather than the people who suffer because of their actions.”
I mean, taking a stand against how they’re described in the media is SO beside the point.
I’m also so sorry for what you and your partner are going through. Best wishes to you both.
I completely agree!
My mother can’t receive some vaccines due to severe allergies to the inactive ingredients (eggs). She developed pertussis a few years ago (during an outbreak here), and had to be hospitalized. It was a very long and difficult recovery for her. It’s scary and infuriating when people you love are endangered by other people’s refusal to educate themselves or listen to reason.
I tend to think that, if anything, the media is TOO deferential in allowing anti-vaccination groups “equal time” to present their views. In an effort to be fair handed, they’re giving many people the mistaken impression that both sides have a legitimate scientific basis for their views, which is just not the case.
I guess the difference here is that I’m not talking about the folks who are out there actively advocating against vaccines, and more about parents who are hesitant to get their kids vaccinated. Communication/empathy/bedside manner is an integral part of medical treatment, particularly in family medicine. It’s not about being nice or gentle, it’s about establishing a doctor-patient relationship built on mutual trust and credibility–which has been shown to improve health outcomes.
Also, to your point about privilege, even though the vaccine discussion often centers around affluent, white parents, generally, “cultural competency” (or the ability to understand how a patient’s background might influence their perception and health choices) is a really important part of doctor patient relations that has implications for bridging health disparities. There are plenty of reasons why a non-white, non-english speaking person might feel some apprehension or distrust (not w/ vaccines, but w/ the health system in general).
I’m sure that’s exhausting (and I understand that the rate of emotional burnout is high), but I resent the implication that it’s a waste of time to reassure a patient who might be anxious or even to just take a few moments to hear some of their concerns. I absolutely agree that the issue of people not vaccinating their kids is a health crisis, I just don’t know that treating worried parents with hostility will address the issue.
I don’t think missellabell or anyone else here is against doctors treating their parents with respect and taking the time to establish a doctor-patient relationship built on mutual trust! That’s very much needed for every sort of medical issue. I’m pretty sure that in her first sentence, she’s referring to ordinary citizen interactions, not doctors’.
“Also, to your point about privilege, even though the vaccine discussion often centers around affluent, white parents, generally, “cultural competency”… is a really important part of doctor patient relations that has implications for bridging health disparities. There are plenty of reasons why a non-white, non-english speaking person might feel some apprehension or distrust (not w/ vaccines, but w/ the health system in general). ”
But from everything I have read, the majority of anti-vaxxers are, in fact, white, educated people. Who, whether or not they conceive of it in precisely this way, are perfectly happy to take advantage of the herd immunity conferred by a wall of immunized black and brown bodies to protect their precious babies.
Not okay. Not to be respected. Not to be babied along.
I completely agree, which is why I said “not w/ vaccines, but w/ the health system in general.”
Also, as I said, good doctor patient relations are not about babying people, but rather creating a safe space where people feel comfortable asking questions and sharing information w/ their provider that could be critical to their getting the best care.
There are plenty of reasons why a non-white, non-english speaking person might feel some apprehension or distrust (not w/ vaccines, but w/ the health system in general).
Yeah, that’s fair. I have zero time, patience, or sympathy for the Marin County GranolaMoms, and am not at all sorry about calling them stupid, because: well, yes. And willfully, too. And I wish I believed in Hell so that I could genuinely wish Jenny McCarthy there.
But I can also understand how a POC might have bad memories of, say, various pretty horrible government experiments conducted under the heading of vaccinations. So I’m inclined to be more sympathetic toward people who aren’t the crystals-and-organic-food version of That Girl, but really don’t have as much access to reliable medication, and do have more grounds to distrust doctors.
DiNiro, OTOH, needs a punch in the kidneys.
Completely agree with you there. I was so disappointed to hear about De Niro. I really thought we’d reached a turning point on this, but ugh, nope.
Yeah, I feel like it’s a good thing fewer people get say, polio, and that the generations who didn’t have to see it with their own eyes don’t really get how terrible terrible TERRIBLE things used to be and could be again, except that we made enormous strides. And people actively spreading misinformation ensure that “research” connecting ASD with Vaxx is everywhere and complaining that modern medicine is a conspiracy… just, my head explodes. Too true that vitriol won’t change any minds, but I’m not sure any approach will overcome the confirmation bias.
I do feel for pediatricians who have to explain these things patiently. I don’t think I could personally do it, without banging my head against a wall.
I really don’t think this is a situation where being gentle or “agreeing to disagree” is helpful. I’m 100% in favor of stronger peer pressure being brought to bear on non-vaccinating parents. (“No, my kid can’t come over to play with yours, because we have a newborn who’s not fully vaccinated yet and that puts her at risk”. “No, you can’t enroll in this public school unless you have a medical exemption form from a real doctor”. Etc.)
It might not sink in for everyone, but I would bet a fair number would change their minds and vaccinate.
Yes. There are diseases I learned about in medical school (not that many years ago) as, “Well, we’ve mostly eradicated these because of vaccines but you should know about them since they haven’t been gone all that long.” And in my pretty short career as a pediatrician, I’ve seen mumps, measles, and pertussis (aka whooping cough), all of which fell into that “rarely seen” category in medical school.
Of all the things I do with my day, vaccination is one of the top 3 most important. There is almost nothing that makes me angrier and I’m really thankful that none of my close friends or family fall into the anti-vax category because I really don’t think I’d handle it well. This is a nice explanation of why people who refuse to vaccinate their kids is so infuriating for doctors: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wont-hurt-bi…
I really appreciate the Toast community for being one that can have such a reasonable discussion about this topic.
And a lot of the commentary around it will be ‘haha look at the stupid anti-vaxxer’. That’s hardly going to bring anyone around.
That sort of commentary is horrible, yes. I saw something on Facebook the other day which was an atheist thing about “proving” that prayer did nothing, by posting a graph showing that a few examples of really religious countries also had high levels of child mortality, and not-very religious ones had low ones. Leaving aside the fact that there were plenty of other factors in play (most of the “religious” countries were significantly poorer than the less religious ones), so it was hardly scientific, it was really awful to see people cheerfully sharing it and clearly finding it hilarious – child/infant mortality is horrible, not a thing to laugh at “stupid religious people” about. (And I am an atheist who really doesn’t like religion and got really angry about a recent news story about women ad babies in Nigeria dying because women are choosing to give birth in church rather than hospital; I am, I suppose, the target audience. But it was just such a shitty thing to do and, as you say, isn’t going to change anyone’s minds. It’s just one-upmanship and being a dick for no reason.)
(I personally balk at any use of nicknames/monikers for a group of people in the media, in particular ‘anti-vaxxer’.).
Really? I don’t see how that term is derogatory. I’m genuinely curious what name/phrase you would prefer that fits in a headline, because that’s the real need driving the term — this is a serious public health issue, it’s newsworthy, so journalists need a shorthand term to refer to those against vaccines.
I am a huge, huge fan of respect and compassion and not demonizing any group of people, and the discussion in this thread illuminated that there’s more complex groups of parents who have concerns and don’t deserve to be shunned, derided, or thrown into the same trash heap as Jenny McCarthy.
But I don’t think it’s helping to minimize the stakes (so aptly described by Nicole and missellabell in this same thread) or to pretend that “if only we treated them nicer, they wouldn’t be campaigning for a major threat to public health.” Not when people are now dying of diseases that should have been wiped out thanks to decades of tireless and proven medical research.
I think missellabell had a good point in comparing it to misogynists or racists (which I am not equating to ALL who’ve ever worried about vaccines, but rather those who campaign to convince others not to take vaccines). We don’t worry then about not making fun of them or using nice language, because how will that bring them around?
Late to the party, but this article (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/01/growing_up_unvaccinated_a_healthy_lifestyle_couldn_t_prevent_many_childhood.html) led to some great discussions on my FB wall, including with some friends flirting with the idea of being anti-vaxx.
Oh lordy, I was just re-reading that article and realized I’m all over the comments section arguing with people. (That was a very non-productive work day two years ago!)
I think that it is the way a lot of anti-vax people talk about their disabled kids that fuels some of this reaction. I can have sympathy for people who are struggling, but when I read stuff like “the light went out of her eyes” and “it’s worse than having a dead kid, bc you can’t grieve and move on,” I get really viscerally upset.
That’s never nice and I do agree with you. This is something I’d ever really thought about until I started reading The Toast (All the stuff around parents searching for a ‘cure’ for autism and how they publicly share the details of caring for their disabled children and how they are looking for something to ‘blame’ for this happening to them and how these narratives effect autistic people), not because I didn’t care, it just never crossed my awareness beyond ‘some people think their kids are autistic because of vaccinations’.
I think that is really common! Unfortunately, it also helps shape the attitude other parents have about their kids on the spectrum, I think, in a really toxic way. If your kid gets a diagnosis and you google it and find so many people mourning their living child and trying to figure out what happened to them, you’ll be more upset than if you google it and find neat adults with that diagnosis living their lives and talking about their joys and challenges. I personally avoid the parent blogs like the PLAGUE, even the good ones, and I think it has meant everything to me in terms of my emotional reaction to diagnosis.
I think in general avoiding parenting blogs is a safe bet for any reason.
THIS. “Mourning their living child” is just it. So sad for everyone concerned.
^This. The idea that you would rather that your child be dead than disabled is just so deeply disturbing to me. And that cannot at all be good for the child in question.
Yes, that’s what really bothers me. I always think, look, even if vaccines raised a child’s chances of developing autism, which they don’t, not getting vaccinated raises the child’s chances of developing a whole host of illnesses, some of them potentially fatal. So where does this assumption come from that autism is worse than any of those illnesses? Who are these parents who assume without thinking twice that it’s better for their child to risk developing measles encephalitis than to risk developing autism?
Have you ever read Eula Biss’ On Immunity? I love it. So well written, and I think she does a great job of exploring where many parent’s anxieties come from while still acknowledging the science. It’s so understanding and good.
It’s on my list! Admittedly my list is expansive at this point, but I’ll get there one day!
Thanks for the recommendation- looks interesting. Hope Jahrens wrote a blog post I really liked on this topic as well- https://hopejahrensurecanwrite.com/2015/02/19/how…
I was just coming down to rec this too! I LOVED On Immunity. I’m a scientist and often have a visceral reaction to anti-vaxx people, and I thought Biss did a really wonderful job of relatively non-judgmentally actually looking at why people might believe that. She’s also a really lovely writer. Strongly, strongly seconded
The child Actors Interview is giving me life:
“Marsai: I had an audition where I was supposed to be a really bad girl that was adopted. That’s the only thing I’m gonna tell you about that part. But I had to say the S-word, the H-word, the F-word, the N-word.
Miles: Dang!
Hudson: So you learned all the words!”
I forget how little they all are!
me: “the H-word??? Is that….. ho?????”
So I’d totally forgotten the sweet sweet innocence of a youth so young that “hell” is an expletive.
I swear I can’t tell if child actors are getting more awesome/funnier/cuter or it’s because I’m getting older. Marsai is FANTASTIC, and I loved Albert Tsai on the lamentably-titled Trophy Wife.
Man, now I’m wondering if they were adapting “The Great Gilly Hopkins” and it fell through, which makes me sad.
That cat looks the way subway riders do when a particularly obnoxious intoxicated person gets on their car. All she lacks is a iphone to study intently while she hopes that the newcomer moves to the other side.
Now I’m picturing public transportation with cats and realizing that it would NEVER WORK.
Sure it would!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/pets/8958012…
“given that it is elderly we suspect it would be eligible for free travel”
so great
a bus puss
*dies*
He sits on people’s laps! What a great kitty!
haha I KNEW it was that article. Love it.
As always, Japan leads the way.
I got off the bus this morning just as a guy got on with a kitten in a carrier. I nearly got back on…
In Prague I trailed a guy through two stations because he was carrying a cat. It’s probably for the best that cats don’t take public transport because I’d spend all my time travelling but never actually getting anywhere.
Re: your comments about all-male clubs like that and sexual assault, there is a similar club at my alma mater, Cambridge University, called the Pitt Club. All male, women can be invited to social events and it is generally expected that if you are a woman who deigns to attend a Pitt Club event, you will be having sex with someone. In addition to this, my male cousin was invited once, went out of curiosity, and once the members established that he didn’t have any interest in actually joining, they switched to treating him like one of the women and he had to fend off several creepy dudes! So yeah, they’re not fussy.
I have honestly never felt closer to hell than standing in their rooms above Pizza Express. It’s a horrible place. The mentality it perpetuates and the rhetoric surrounding it are frightening. In fact that mentality surrounding sex and privilege in Cambridge as a whole is frightening, especially when it concerns male students with any kind of sporting status. The level of entitlement there is staggering. I have never felt as unsafe as I did while at university there.
I went to King’s, so I never had to encounter male students with any kind of sporting status. Entitlement though, that’s everywhere there of course…
Urgh, that sounds so scary. My friend who went to Oxford said that one of the men’s sports clubs had really sexist and racist parties.
They call the girls who decide to sleep with those guys ‘Blue Tack’ because you get a ‘blue’ (wtf?!) if you do some sport. It’s vile.
Really cannot state enough how much I loathe that place.
I did encounter someone who proudly put about the fact that she’d ‘had a boat’ i.e. slept with all of one of the boat teams. But everyone was faintly baffled as to why she thought that was an achievement.
Living in an old church would be cool, but so would living in a SpOoOkY HAUNTED OLD HOSPITAL THAT LOOKS LIKE A CASTLE: (1) http://www.curbed.com/2012/12/5/10298912/haunted-… , (2) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/nyregion/thecit…. This is a few blocks from me, and I was VERY excited to learn that you can see pictures of most of the apartments on StreetEasy: http://streeteasy.com/building/455-central-park-w….
Aw, we could have been neighbors! Except now that I’m thinking about it, I moved out of that neighborhood 10 years ago. Time flies… Anyway, I was also obsessed with that building/those apartments.
On that De Niro article – ugh dude you are not a scientist just shut up
Seriously. “Nobody seems to want to look into it” – THAT’S BECAUSE IT IS NOTHING.
Sorry, I have a lot of feelings about nonscientists thinking they’re more expert than the experts and I see it so much in some of my circles (climate change denialists and Young Earth Creationists too).
> “Nobody seems to want to look into it”
Except of course we’ve been ‘looking into it’ for decades now.
I understand it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to do tireless research on a topic before they open their mouth about it but I swear to god every time some one calls for ‘a conversation’/’more thought’ /’more studies’ on a topic what they mean is ‘I refuse to treat anything done before I was aware of this as valid’
See also: Blackface, “is it really racist? We should have a conversation”
Asking for more research is also often a deliberate stall tactic. No amount of data will ever be enough to convince tobacco companies to stop demanding more research on the hazards of their product and framing their contempt for science as a form of caution.
And in my experience, they often have a really set idea of HOW it should be “looked into” (like a widescale experimental vaxed vs. unvaxed study) and consider it further proof of the Big Pharma conspiracy when people who actually design and run studies point out that their ideas are impractical, redundant, or in violation of medical ethics.
I’ve never watched a single minute of Freaks and Geeks beyond the clip in question– I remember finding it in the early days of youtube sans context, watching it, and just crying myself hoarse. It really is a brilliant bit of characterization, since it didn’t need context to achieve that kind of emotional impact, but it also meant I could never watch the show because I couldn’t stand to see anything bad happen to the character.
The “local food” piece is also great. I love hearing which mass distributors fancy restaurants get their food from, it’s such a thrill. I was at a restaurant in the suburbs recently, and they sat us at the “pizza bar” in the back, which was a bar around their large pizza oven. There was a cook working the oven, not only for pizza but for all other dishes that got broiled, and I could not tear my eyes away– nearly everything came prepackaged and pre-cooked. Which is totally fine! I’m sure the stuff tasted good! It’s just a bold choice for a restaurant to prepare that stuff in a completely open kitchen directly overlooked by bar seating.
Please watch the rest of Freaks and Geeks! That scene is a highlight but there are certainly many others; the show as a whole is absolutely worth your time.
Freaks and Geeks it way too real for me. The burning humiliation that Sam experiences in the sex ed class because of an asshole bully teacher just breaks me. Every time.
DON’T PUNISH CHILDREN FOR NOT KNOWING THINGS WHEN TEACHING THEM THE THINGS IS YOUR JOB.
The F&G article also dovetails nicely with the NYT Bookends piece on advocating for more exploration of joy and class in contemporary fiction.
I found that article horrifying so I just skimmed it. That thing about the house wine? Oofta.
There was an article I think in NYT a few years back about just how many big name restaurants in Paris were using pre-packed and frozen food from a warehouse or whatever.
Yeah I commented before finishing the article– it started like “people lie about their local sources! Scandalous!” and then devolved real fast into passing pork off as veal and animal cruelty and wow there is really no such thing as ethical consumption.
Yeah, it’s a big thing for Parisian restaurants now to advertise that they don’t use frozen food, because a distressing number of bistros and brasseries (and probably fancier restaurants too) were buying the classic meals that all of them serve completely frozen and reheating them. Those meals do take a lot of work to make on command, but come on, you’re French!! Put in some effort to your food!
I love how France has essentially a micro industry of documentaries on the use of prepackaged food in restaurants.
Yes, lol it’s like they realized that they had managed to get good at mass producing the dishes Maman used to make and are horrified by it, but not enough to stop buying it.
It’s the act of caring about terroir for 1 to 2 hours without paying for it.
Though I love the dumpster diving for packaging behind fancy restaurants the investigative reporters do on these programs.
Someone linked to the article in yesterday’s link roundup, and I watched it and blubbered. I have watched F&G (we own it on DVD) and I know I have seen it before and sort of even remember it, but I do NOT remember crying over it when I saw it the first time. It was surprising, especially since I was at my desk at work.
Though I recognize the genius of the scene in question, I cannot enjoy it because of open-mouth chewing.
But I don’t think I have ever sobbed harder or more suddenly at a TV scene than I did at the final scene of the series. I just didn’t see it coming… and the sheer joy and freedom.
I can definitely get that reasoning for not watching the show. I will say, if I remember correctly, Bill (the character in the clip) is the character on the show who’s the most comfortable in his own skin throughout. While other characters deal with a lot of (often painful to watch) self-esteem issues, he somehow seems above it most of the time. It’s part of what makes him such a great character.
A throwback to a few weeks ago, but I think that this video of how Viennetta cakes are made is Relevant to our Interests and I don’t think it was posted before: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uA_SjARUeqM
Can you still buy these? Because after watching this I need one. Now.
Mezmerizing! How do they make the middle fold like that though?
The container of rejects at the end: Still yummy.
That is so cool. I want to dive into the bin of trimmings. Is that too weird? Nah, probably normal.
You are a good and kind person, and I hope you experience as much joy today as you have brought me.
Ever since that post I have been dying to have a Viennetta but I cannot find one. I am not sure they are still sold anywhere in the US, though they seem to still be sold in Europe. They definitely are not sold at big chains like Safeway. If anyone knows a specialty store where you can still obtain them please let me know!
I was interested to learn about the farm to table deception described in the linked article, but have some additional more complicated feelings about it. While obviously no one should be lying about the contents of their menu, and supporting small businesses while reducing your carbon footprint is a good thing, I feel that people get hung up on farm to table being some sort of moral good and I wouldn’t go as far as that. It’s a way of eating that requires compromises when it comes to the type/variety of food you expect and also the price you’re willing to pay for it. It’s not something that everyone can do (both in the sense of restaurant owners making their products and consumers buying them), and the realisticness of farm to table dining is going to vary wildly based on where you live in addition to your amount of disposable income.
Not the most eloquent commentary on my part, but mostly what I’m saying is that in addition to the investigative reporting on the authenticity of farm to table claims (which was both thorough and valuable!) I’d appreciate some further discussion of the class factors and privilege associated with the farm to table movement. The author touches on this when discussing the dining realities of most farmers, but I’d gladly take a whole follow-up piece on the subject.
“And it’s local?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAlWrT5P2VI
(I love this sketch so much…)
I for instance live in New Mexico. Farm-To-Table would mean nothing but cattle-grade alfalfa, green chiles and pecans.
I would love to read an article about all of the class issues endemic here. It’s becoming a huge thing where I live, the eat local thing (five years after everyone else), but ONLY for tourists. Really. Locals eat the same as they always have, but for tourism it’s becoming a huge thing because….rich people from Toronto coming to visit want to eat “local.” You know what local is? Honey. Apples. Beef. Corn. Mushrooms. Your elegant three-course meal in the fancy hotel just can’t be 100% locally grown!
For a while McDonald’s had a billboard up near Des Moines thanking the farmers of Iowa for growing the fresh ingredients in their food. Ah yes, corn syrup from our charming local Cargill plant.
I’m much more interested in the farmers’ side of the story, too — the folks finding that their names are being used as selling points by restaurants that don’t buy anything from them or pay them a cent??? Listen, I don’t really give a shit if you serve me tilapia and tell me it’s a fancier fish, but you can’t tell me it’s a fish you bought from Tim’s Kind And Gentle Fish Farm if Tim is a real dude who hasn’t seen a penny from your lying ass.
I took a food ethics class in college & we actually discussed the environmental ethics of organic/fair trade vs. local that doesnt jump through the USDA organic hoops but emits way less co2 by not traveling vs. genetically modified crops in the face of global hunger. I just want to chime in & say it is nuanced issue! It’s one big gray area with no perfect answer. Added to it, food is an industry in which people generally refuse to pay for the labor it takes to make it (from growing to picking to cooking), in order to keep the costs as low as possible down. Even for the fanciest local certified organic food, what we think of as fancy and expensive, is pretty close to real costs compared to other industries. How do you weigh out CO2 emissions and fair wages for farm workers and local economies and starvation?
I have a degree in agriculture (that maybe someday I’ll have a job that it is relevant to), so I definitely spend a lot of time thinking about the ethics and grey areas of all of this. Pesticide use is a big thing too. If you’re not a big corporation, but a smaller farmer, you’re generally going to use as little pesticide as possible because that shit is expensive! Not that organic agriculture is bad, but at least in my area, the main weed control method for organic production is tilling. What does tilling cause? Hella bad erosion! So really, nothing is perfect and we can only make the best choices available to us in the area and economic state that we’re in.
The prices mentioned in that article were incomprehensibly low to me (though I think meant to indicate they are high for that market? Tasting menu with wine pairings for under $100?). Where I live, farm to table is a justification for charging a LOT more for a hand -harvested duck-fat-coddled weed on a plate (not a slam, I’d order that). So yeah, it’s an elite indulgence but it is one you are agreeing to pay a huge premium for. Clearly a “fuck Monsanto salad” is going to cost a lot more than a diner salad, so it’s not just that your feelings are hurt, they’re also picking your pocket.
“…the dining reality of most farmers.” Truer words were never spoken! The farm where I board is blessed with approx. 150+ acres, all of which is used for hay production and/or pasture turnout. Costs for growing, harvesting and storing said hay vs.the end price of a 50lb square bale is unrealistic in terms of the haybale’s actual value. This guy isn’t eating at any high end restaurants on the reg, either.
I spent way too much of yesterday working my way through some of the Audubon’s archives. They have suprisingly great stuff!! Of toast interest I’d recommend this piece about crow research
and also Can 2 frozen testicles bring back the Spix’s Macaw
I adore all articles about researching the intelligence of crows, so my morning has been made. 😀
I adore all articles about researching the intelligence of crows, so my morning has been made. 😀
Part of me just wants to glory in the phrase “Can 2 frozen testicles bring back the Spix’s Macaw?” and go no further.
Oh, you should go further, if only to read about how they can make a bird ejaculate sperm from an individual of an entirely different species!
“house wine” is a dump of open bottles on their last legs.
My thoughts precisely. I’ve been known, in fact, to make my own “house wine” !!
ETA and it’s delicious, guys, I could serve it at a starred restaurant.
I made a lot of house vodka during college.
Ooooo, i made skittle vodka once. That was totally a great idea.
Out of all the skittles? Or just like the red ones? What if you made different bottles of each color ahhhhhh I’m doing that this weekend
I separated the skittles and made one jar of each colour. But then we wound up mixing them all into shots anyway, because who eats just one flavour of skittle at a time?
oh… pfff…. nobody does THAT…
I believe you that it is delicious but I would also like to try it in person JUST TO MAKE SURE.
Yes, I think that is a really capital idea.
Where are our Star Trek transporters????
aaaaaaaaaah, no, i am sorry, but this is terrible, you pay more than a 50% markup on booze and it is in part to deal with spoilage and if your house wine is vinegar/corked/off i will send it back again and again and again.
If it’s just plonk, tho, that’s fine. I can drink plonk.
Edited to add: your .gifs are still the bestest.
If it’s obviously off or has stuff floating in it? Yeah, no go. Otherwise? Eh. I am not a picky drinker.
(also, awww. thank you, bb!)
yeah seems like a pretty good solution to almost-empty wine bottles, imho
Yeah, when I read that my reaction was, “Well that’s pretty clever, actually.”
I”m not sure exactly why, but I cannot stop laughing at this. But I think we are the same page on the subject of wine.
This is what I always thought “house wine” meant. Why else do they not tell you what the brand/label is on the menu?? It’s so they can make it be anything! I’ve ordered two glasses of house wine (sequentially) at a restaurant before and had them be two clearly different kinds of wine.
I always thought it meant whatever was on sale in the gallon jugs that week.
The most delicious sangria I’ve ever tasted was at a restaurant where I worked where they just had a big bucket of it and you dumped the last inch of whatever wines were open in there all evening. Customers raved about it.
A local bar does the same! SO GOOD.
I used to work in the wine industry and this was my reaction too. I mean it’s just a blend, I buy blends all the time. So long as it’s tasty, appropriately priced and made from grapes I would not turn my nose up at it.
I bought a “red blend” that was on sale at CVS last Wednesday (last Wednesday was a long and stupid day). It was…very sweet. Like, sangria sweet. I was pleasantly surprised.
Who is this man in this gif? Wrom what series? Why is Gordon Ramsay suddenly a young actor?
I think it’s this guy in Supernatural (but he’s in other things too) http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003067/?ref_=ttfc_fc_…
Same.
But is the “great author” that deleted commenter is referring to C. S. Lewis or Ayn Rand?
I got “are you married” from a sixteen year old student yesterday, yes; followed by “do you have kids?” no; followed by “but you’re 35?!?”
I did not respond. I’m hetero, but life is complicated in ways that I do not have the time or social obligation to explain.
This is from a kid I have a good classroom relationship with, and I can see that it comes from a place of curiosity about an adult he admires.
Please please, parents, friends of children, world in general, teach–and model for kids–that there is more to an adult’s life and identity than marital and parental status.
Ugh, I’m sorry. I’ve taken to jokingly responding about how I’m on my way to crazy dog-lady who’s a doting aunt with the extra money to travel every year. But I get you can’t do that with a genuinely curious teenager.
I get this all the time. I also get called “Mrs.” as a default and I correct students to “Ms.,” and I can see them realizing what a bitter old hag whose life is devoid of meaning I am as I do so.
Hell, I am married and I correct people when they call me Mrs. (Mostly because I kept my own damn name, and I am well and truly not “Mrs. Oh.”)
Alas, I also deeply, viscerally dislike Ms. Back when I was teaching and single, I went by Miss. Now I want to go by Mme., but it is *really* hard because that isn’t even a bit standard in the US and I’m not even a little bit French.
Yes, I am married and I took my husband’s last name, and I still correct people (politely) — I am Ms. [lastname], thank you.
These kids live in a relatively sheltered and homogeneous middle-income suburban community, so they probably don’t have a lot of other childless adults my age in their lives. I’m sure they’re largely innocent of the less pleasant adult realities of graduate school taking forever, underpaying jobs, crushing student loans, career/worklife juggling, concerns about overpopulation, questioning one’s fitness to parent, working through tough relationship times, not wanting to pass down hereditary conditions, infertility struggles, dealing with physical and mental illness, time and money involved in the adoption process, sandwich generation caring for aging parents, other priorities, content with role as dog/cat people or uncling/aunting, exercising other preferred avenue for having effect on future generations, or any of the other reasons an adult either might not have kids or might not want to have kids.
I try to speak to them as humans too, asking them about their non-school interests and activities. It can easy for us grownups too do default to “how”s school going? how are your classes ?”
Yeah, the town where I grew up was overwhelmingly middle to upper middle class, white, heterosexual, and just like…. really square. The kind of town where adults appear to have no lives outside of driving their kids around to a bajillion different activities and working furiously hard so they can afford the mortgage on their McMansion. And the view from a place like that is just so limited, especially for a kid… I’m honestly wracking my brain to think of an adult who I knew as a kid who wasn’t married or divorced, besides a friend of my parents who’s a Catholic priest. I would not have *said* that to someone’s face as a kid (and definitely not by the time I was 16) but I kinda sympathize with the student.
Best part of the child actor roundtable is this:
“Had you ever seen a VCR tape?
Hudson [Yang]: Yeah, because of my grandparents. I have seen most of the stuff on set because of my grandparents. They’re not hoarders, per se, but they have so much stuff. I’ve seen it.”
I really identify with the descriptor “not a hoarder, per se.”
TOO REAL
A precocious kid saying “per se” is *100 emoji*
I’m not sure how an article about gay children’s authors can not mention Maurice Sendak (but probably just because of my enduring love for Maurice Sendak.)
I don’t think it was something he discussed with kids, though. Honestly I don’t know how much time he spent with kids in his later years. Or ever?
There was so much controversy over stuff like In The Night Kitchen; can you imagine if people had known that Sendak was gay back then? I shudder to think. Things do change, sometimes even for the better. It’s nice to see.
That last line of Joseph Boyden’s piece: our nation is only as good as how we treat our most vulnerable, as how we respond to those most in pain.
Blurry Potato, highlighting a) his amazing size-changing powers (how does he look so small here???) and b) his newest nemesis, the broom I was using to sweep instead of playing with him.
(The job loss thing is going as well as can be expected, I decided not to go back for the next two weeks due to health reasons but I managed to adult my way through it and left on good terms!)
He DOES look tiny! I just moved into a place with wood floors, and I feel like walking around barefoot on them I feel the need to sweep CONSTANTLY. The broom is also MY nemesis right now.
Magic Potato or Potato with Size-Changing Superpowers?
If the dear potato reacts to a broom this way, what does he do to the deadly and obviously alien vacuum cleaner?
Also, glad you are looking toward a new job position. Hang in there.
There are a lot of disused churches here that are or aren’t turned into condo buildings, and there’s a lot of Destroying Our Cultural Heritage stuff, and I think: look, they’re all Roman Catholic churches, the Vatican doesn’t financially support them, citizens who are not always Roman Catholic do (via no property tax and other tax breaks) and if after THAT you don’t want to pay to keep your church from falling down, screw you, and also you should have to pay property taxes.
Yay more toasted cat photos.
I work in a local office of a mainline protestant denomination, and it’s fascinating to see what happens to the churches we end up closing as well as area Catholic churches — quite a lot stay churches, but for denominations that are becoming a much greater demographic presence: Spanish and Korean speaking evangelical congregations, the Coptic Orthodox church (apparently exploding in population in my area), various congregations that are predominantly African or Caribbean. Mainline churches and the Catholic church are dwindling at an insane rate in this area, I think it’s great to let a congregation that can actually sustain itself past the next generation use and love the building. Lots of European cities preserve churches in the name of cultural heritage but you to go Mass on Sunday and there’s like 12 people there, and it’s like….. who exactly does this benefit? The tiny number of tourists who came in and dutifully read all the plaques? (I’m not talking about like, Notre Dame here….thinking about the gazillion small churches in the Spanish city where I studied abroad. They’re culturally insignificant, socially irrelevant, and mostly being maintained by tiny 80 year old grandmas.)
I would be totally okay with other denominations taking over these churches, but obviously they can’t pay as much as condo developers, so they lose.
The article about coming out as a children’s author is making me raaaage because last week in one of my courses we were discussing book selection in libraries and it got suuuuper elitist and the word “quality” was thrown around a lot and should we really let patrons read 50SoG when there’s “good” books out there? And the connection here is that I argued that the idea of a quality book is actually kind of dangerous because look at this, just including he has a husband in his author bio can discount his work and how effing dangerous that is!
Sorry, I have a lot of feelings about using the idea of “quality” and “classics” as some kind of covert censorship.
(Also, no one cares if you prefer “real books” to e-readers you do not need to preface your every discussion comment with it!)
That’s incredibly offensive all around. Fingers crossed that some right-headed, more-seasoned colleague kicks their asses individually during their first professional job. There’s a vast and dark underbelly in librarianship that mistakes readers’ advisory for acculturation in the worst way. It’s one of the most unfortunate parts of our professional history, in that it is racist, classist, and sexist as all get out.
(I have been known to be that right-headed, more-seasoned colleague, academic library division.)
Hopefully someday I can be that reasonable colleague! (Or maybe we will reach a point where no one has to take that role because everyone is with it? Hm? Maybe??)
Do you have any advice on how to deal with this right now, at the beginning of my career and as a student? I eventually had to pull out of the course discussion (online class) because I was just crying angry rage tears and realized that I didn’t have the stamina to fight this out… and I was super glad it wasn’t an in-person class and so no one but my cats could see me cry! I care so much about this and don’t want to just let this idea slide, but I’m already wearing myself thin trying to keep up with my coursework and having a life.
That’s a really good question and I’m glad you’re asking it! As one of my most loved library mentors likes to say, it’s a “hill you want to die on” problem, right? You’ve got a lot of responsibilities as a student and changing the worldview of these jokers isn’t necessarily one of them. But if you can’t let it go and it makes you angry, this is also potentially good practice for dealing with colleagues who are going to do very similar things in circumstances where you won’t be able to walk away and it will most definitely be your problem.
I see two options, depending on who you are as a person and what level of struggle you’re interested in engaging in. Wait. Maybe three –
1. Readings! There’s a lot out there on the political and social aspects of librarianship – questioning the notion of neutrality as a professional value, the racism and sexism we’ve had to work to undo in practices like collection development, readers’ advisory, and classification. Authors like Toni Samek, Hope Olson, Wayne Wiegand, and basically anything ever from Library Juice Press, Progressive Librarian, or In the Library with the Lead Pipe (an online journal). It strikes me as unlikely that the people who are troubling you will want to read anything to change their views, but you could do some reading to reassure yourself that you are a) correct and b) very much not alone in your views. I found that reading these authors was tremendously helpful to me as a student, as classroom discussion was usually alienating and stressful, in the ways you’ve described.
2. When someone is saying something inappropriate and probably not very well thought-out, I am a tremendous fan of the standard-issue social justice warrior Socratic move – “What makes you say that?” “Why do you think that?” “I don’t understand – why do you think that book is bad?” “What does bad mean” etc. etc. until they either stop or get backed into saying something so awful its awfulness can be seen from space. It requires basically no work on your part. All you have to do is wait for the patently awful thing (because it’s coming), point out its awfulness, make your point, and carry on.
3. Where is the instructor in all of this, letting students get away with such nonsense? Maybe write to him/her and say that you’re troubled by the pattern emerging in that conversation? I’ve taught online LIS courses and it can be hard sometimes to monitor every last bit of discussion. A good instructor wouldn’t want you to feel so miserable and lacking in recourse.
The instructor presents us with readings, a lecture, and a list of questions to answer but stays out of the discussion board 100%. Which, generally, has its pros and cons but I really wish she’d chime in on the quality debate. I get that she doesn’t want us just crafting answers to match her opinions but idk, part of having a teacher is getting perspective from their experiences, right?
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer! I’m going to be checking out those resources and practicing my even-keeled Socratic method. I am going to be prepared and ready to defend the rights of my patrons to read what they want!
That is a really irresponsible way to run a discussion board! Like, I teach online classes and while I don’t post in every discussion you have to check in on them and set people straight when they need it.
Aaaaargh I had a professor that ran a discussion board like that, and it was legit the worst class I have ever taken. You had to post on the board or your grade would suffer. The teacher was a man. There were three men in the class, and the rest of us were women. Two of the men were fine, but one was an angry, irrational troll who would go on the discussion board, deliberately misread all the women’s posts, and write abusive responses. The teacher found these delightful and would read them out loud in class sometimes. Also he refused to let a friend of mine reschedule a presentation to go to her grandmother’s funeral.
Also, the dude who wrote the abusive posts had a quotation from the catechism chapter of Ulysses tattooed along his forearm. I can still remember it, because he would sit with it artfully displayed at all times:
Womb? Weary? He rests. He has traveled. Where?
Excellent advice from mmejoy, and I would only add that it is also practice for dealing with patrons who try to censor your collection. Having your philosophical position clearly developed as well as knowing your library’s collection development policy backwards and forwards will allow you to deal with challenges as they come in without experiencing too much trauma. Also, sooo much side-eye for the notion of “letting” patrons read something. Yeah. Not how it works. I’m imagining a couple of my saltier patrons responding to that idea (ha!). Hang in there, you’re in training for some fights worth fighting!
I can’t really offer professional advice, since I’m basically in the same place as you, but I have decided that at some point, you have to just step back with the discussions because otherwise all you’re doing is frustrating yourself – especially in an online setting where people don’t even have to fake being polite at you.
People in my program tend not to come back much for discussion, and especially not if I push on a point, but if they do and it seems like I’m going in circles, I leave it at that because otherwise I will get way too worked up for nothing.
Yeah some of us don’t get paid to read books and read for the sake of escapism. Sure I would prefer the best written books in the mystery-solving-dogs genre, but that’s really not the point.
Not sure if you meant librarians but – most librarians don’t get paid to read books, that’s sadly a myth. Sorry if I’m a fantasy killer! May more and better mystery-solving dog books come your way.
They can prise my YA dystopia and sci-fi romance from my cold dead hands!
Hilarious the idea of being gatekeepers re: trashy novels, though. Imagine! “NO YOU CANNOT READ 50 SHADES OF GREY YOU MUST GO THROUGH MEEEEE FIRST”
Ok, so I apologize for being appallingly off topic before, but what I wanted to say is this:
1) Many “classics” started out being considered trash in their time
2) Sometimes things that are not considered great literature can nonetheless be very creative, like the way that sci-fi has often played with gender and sexuality in novel ways
3) Sometimes trashy things can lead you to seek out more knowledge. I became interested in history because I read a romance novel in the sixth grade that made me want to seek out more knowledge about Mary, Queen of Scots and by extension, her cousin Elizabeth I.
It’s all so true though! (Hell, there are many classics I still kind of think are “trash” in terms or writing and plot but they’ve managed to say something about the culture they were written in that causes them to endure… hence why I fully expect to see the much-maligned 50 Shades considered a “classic” in the future because of the cultural zeitgeist around it but now I’m getting off-topic in my own damn comment!)
The point about genre fiction so frequently being considered less-than was shrugged aside because “I like geeky things, no one is saying geeky things can’t have merit look at game of thrones!” and well… maybe in your personal group of friends you’re not running into people who think fantasy, sci-fi, and graphic novels are universally crap with a few anomalies but those people still exist!
I made a comment about Goosebumps potentially being a gateway to more classic sci-fi/horror, because yeah, anything can be an inspiration! Classmate countered with the “better” books she chose while her classmates were into Goosebumps. So incredibly frustrating!! Perhaps even moreso because I used to have that kind of elitist “I’m different and therefore better” attitude in high school, but I outgrew it and am filled with so much shame because youth!hannahfish was such a pain in the ass. It’s almost scary to think there aren’t people who will never grow into subjectivity, especially when it comes to media enjoyment.
I feel like 50 Shades might end up more like East Lynne – there was definitely a huge cultural East Lynne moment, but ultimately the book didn’t survive, probably because the writing was just so bad. I mean, a book representing its zeitgeist is important, but once that zeit is over, if all you’re left with is bad writing, there’s no good reason to keep reading the book beyond intellectual curiosity.
Without knowing any of the specifics about your class (and it does sound like your classmates are being elitist and insufferable) I’m inclined to take a kind of middle stance. That is, I think it’s stupid and elitist to try to keep books you think are bad out of libraries. But I also think it’s in the nature of knowing and caring about literature to think that some books are better than others, and to want to make sure that people have access to good books. What’s important, I think, is to realize that there are different ways of judging the value of books, and that a book that has no relevance to you may have tremendous relevance to someone else. It’s also important to realize that people have the right to read bad books. Where it gets tricky, I think, is making sure that there’s a balance, so that a kid who’s outgrown Goosebumps and wants something with more substance has plenty of books to move on to that have things like strong characterization and complex themes and prose that isn’t clunky.
In which John Kasich attempts to explain the Old Testament to yeshiva students
Bless his heart
“But they threw him in that ditch, they saved him and then sold him to slavery. And that’s how the Jews got to Egypt. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” they responded politely.
Seriously, that is 150% more restraint than my seminary classmates would have shown.
They deserve Vienettas for being so polite.
That— that can’t be real. This isn’t a parody article? This genuinely happened and he genuinely said this stuff?
THERE IS VIDEO
HE LOOKS LIKE SUCH A MORON
I really don’t want to click on that because I have issues with second-hand embarrassment, but also I’m dying to know if he called it “the Old Testament” to their faces.
He argued about the relative significance of Moses and Abraham, and essentially told them they were doing Judaism wrong.
I used to hang out (“lurk”) in the Amazon religion forums and the Jewish forum was mainly full of Christians coming in to preach/yell at them.
Honestly Jewish people explaining why Christians have it all wrong is what made me an atheist.
Best part of the article: he was escorted by a Democratic strategist. A+ strategy, that. Good work!
ohnoohno someone check I can’t bear it.
I peeked through my fingers and they did not quote him doing that.
in the video he calls it “the old bible” 😐
I cringed so many times I think I sprained a muscle.
Godsplaining :-/
Oh honey, honey no.
I couldn’t sleep last night and had the following weird thoughts:
1) Dudes are weird. How is putting your D in something establishing dominance over it? I’d feel like, if I was putting part of my anatomy into something, that something would be dominating me.
2) Why don’t the people that protest in front of Planned Parenthood also protest in front of, like, Old Country Buffet and rail against the sin of gluttony?
I … may have been taking too much cold medicine.
Yes, I think about #1 all the time when trying to understand normative dudes. We could just as easily frame penetration as engulfment.
My favorite sexy fantasy books do that! It’s amazing. (black jewels trilogy, fyi)
Oooh! Getting these now.
Well I mean no one has ever said “ha ha I win this fight because I have engulfed your knife in my abdomen”
ETA: except probably Marvel’s The Blob
Yeah but dicks aren’t weapons? PiV sex is a flesh thingy being put into or engulfed by another flesh thingy, not combat.
I dunno I’m pretty comfortable betting that the penis->sword metaphor/association predates the Roman Empire.
Yo, traumatic insemination is a thing. Not in humans thankfully, but still.
Knife : abdomen :: penis : vagina does not hold up. Penises are way more delicate than vaginas.
American Gods, Neil Gaiman at your service.
PierrePoutine, you are on fire today with the comments. And your username is truly awesome.
Thanks randomphone! Man, Toasties are the best, 4 EVA.
This is especially true re: fellatio. I mean, yes, it CAN be a submissive act, but it isn’t inherently one. You are trusting me to wrap my teeth around a delicate part of your anatomy
I love you, those are QUALITY weird thoughts.
One wonders if some dudes do see it that way and claim otherwise out of insecurity.
I mean, vagina dentata.
I feel that way about the whole “conquering the mountain” thing in mountain climbing. No, you have not conquered the mountain. The mountain is still there. Honestly I think of mountain climbing* as getting a chance to be with the mountain, to be part of the mountain. When you climb the mountain the mountain has given you a gift!
*I’m kind of opposed to mountain climbing that involves putting holes in the rocks to link up rope lines and things. I get that it’s for safety and I get that many of the holes are from decades ago and I get that building paths for hiking is way more destructive, but it still makes me uncomfortable. Bad number of users to amount of destruction ratio.
I am very excited that Old Country Buffet has been brought up in this comment thread.
That’s really all I have to say here.
There’s this scene in Smilla’s Sense of Snow where she fucks the mechanic dude by putting her clitoris in his penis. It is totally unexplained, and I don’t understand the logistics at all, but I find the idea of it unsettling. Putting your sensitive parts in someone else… i feel like an alien trying not to be grossed out by the human body, we’re so weird.
OUCH
Re 2) That’s simple: Abstaining from (‘wrong’) sex is about 10000x easier (for those privileged assholes who are PP protesters at least), than abstaining from gluttony.
We had a legit 2 hour debate about this in my law&philosophy seminar on monday so it delights me that this is what you are thinking about.
(1) I love the fact that the Link Roundup frequently features my favorite advice columns, all of which I discovered independently of The Toast and each other, so it’s like, all my best worlds are colliding.
(2) I had a job interview yesterday and it went really really well. They invited me to sit in on a daylong regional meeting tomorrow (totes going, for the afternoon session) and are checking my references today.
(3) One of my besties also applied for the job and she’s interviewing this afternoon. I’m super excited for her but I feel like I’m the stronger candidate and I will feel really bad if I get the job and she doesn’t. But also excited. Because job. Gah.
Best of luck on the job!
That’s tough and you are a compassionate person. But also, if you are the best person for the job, you are the best person for the job. Perhaps she will then go on to find something that’s an even better fit for her.
Read the amazing Joseph Boyden piece (thank you so much!) and then I thought to myself “I wonder what the commenters have to say, no one could possibly have anything revolting to say after such a thoughtful and heartfelt piece and boy was I wrong.
I know this gets said every day, but do not read the comments.
🙁
My grandpa was the member of a Secret Club at his alma mater back in the day, and when my uncle got into the school he applied(? I don’t know how it works) to get in to the club and was rejected. My grandpa was FURIOUS, writing letters, calling people, stomping around annoying everybody, etc. After my grandpa died my dad brought this up because he found the angry letters in a box and my uncle said (very casually) “Oh yeah, I messed that up on purpose, they’re a bunch of assholes”. I love my uncle.
I love your uncle too.
I know that the farm to table article is serious but this line just makes me think of Portlandia
“Your purchases are unverifiable unless you drive to that farm or track back through a restaurant’s distributors and ask for invoices.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErRHJlE4PGI
Captain Awkward for the win!
“…she’s choosing the jerk path. That’s not on you to fix!”
i just want to say, i really like that fudgy wudgy cake. my parents worked in food service and will always roll their eyes when the chocolate cake turns out to be sysco, and I DON’T CARE.
I am a fan of their carrot cake too.
There’s a similar chocolate fudge cake in the UK made by a company called Brakes and I don’t care that it comes straight from the freezer IT’S SO GOOOOOD. The cafe I worked at stocked it and I ate so many stale and icing-too-melty-to-sell pieces and life was great.
Toasties, today is my fortieth birthday! My husband and I took the day off work and we are going on a hike to look for wildflowers. We will probably have dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant, the tiny family-owned place with the friendly waiters and the ridiculous bread and the delicious eggplant-fried-in-butter pasta alla norma.
Sounds like a good day. Enjoy!
Happy happy birthday! Your dinner sounds yummy, enjoy!
Happy birthday! Your day sounds excellent!
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday! It sounds like a perfect, perfect day.
Happy Birthday! Not sure where on the planet you are but this year has been off the hook for wildflowers in lots of them so I hope your search bears fruit (and flowers).
Happy birthday! Your play for the day sounds lovely.
That sounds wonderful. Happy birthday and welcome to the club! (I’m 41) 🙂
Happy birthday!
Ridiculous bread at an Italian restaurant is a perfect way to spend your special day. Happy birthday!
Happy birthday! You are exactly one month older than me!
Bf hadn’t discovered Freaks and Geeks until it ended up on netflix, and we got to talking with another friend about how amazing it was when bf was only a couple episodes in. Bf said “hopefully they’ll get the rest of the series up soon, right now they only have season 1!” and lord if that wasn’t one of the hardest conversations we’ve ever had to have. There’s no way to let someone down easy on that.
OH THAT POOR THING
I had a similar moment when my dear nephew discovered Nirvana. In like, 2005.
Off topic, but Mallory is absolutely KILLING IT as Prudie. I’ve been so impressed with Dear Prudence lately. Especially today’s.
She is just amazing
This sentence alone: “free yourself from the responsibility of managing other people’s discomfort in public.”
BUT HOW, MALLORY. How?
Right? It’s really hard to undo a lifetime of conditioning to care/obsess about what other people think!
MALLORY
TEACH US YOUR WAYS
Meditate upon a field of fucks
Lovingly sow salt from edge to edge
Till it into the soil
Allow the feeling to sink in
Then go forth into the world, relieved of their burdens.
This needs to be cross-stitched or calligraphed or something so I can hang it on the wall!
Oh guys, I had a dream where two Toasties came over to visit me and I didn’t know their names or anything and I was a horrible host, I am so sorry
You were a terrible host! You didn’t even offer us any “house” wine!
Oh, it wasn’t that bad, really, you were charming! I don’t care for wine either way!
No it was horrible, there wasn’t anywhere for you to sleep!
Give us enough house wine, and we won’t care where we sleep!
okay okay checklist before going to sleep tonight
1. wine
2. wine
3. did you remember wine
4. vodka and skittles?
That’s okay! BTW I stole the duck in your freezer.
Remember the guy in my grad offices who said, “I just want to be taken care of”?
Well there are two specific computers that the TA’s sit at every class. He parked himself next to my computer, in a 50 seat computer lab. It’s been weeks now–and EVERY DAMN TIME I get to class he’s got his bookbag under MY chair, his notebooks on MY desktop (literally a separate desktop), and gets all pissy if I have the nerve to move his stuff back into his designated area. Fucking manspreader. THEN he doesn’t ask for any help during lab OR the hour after that I stay for ‘office’ hours, and as soon as I get to my cubicle (Which is, after all, supposed to be my private research time/space), he launches into a tirade about how the lab sucked and expects me to support him. Hints do not work.
Also our cubicles have partially frosted translucent “windows” that span one side to let in light. There is NO way you can see through them. So he stands on his tiptoes, leans his face into the glass panels at about 6 ft up, and STARES DOWN AT ME until I acknowlege him being “cute”.
Three more years with this guy. I will move offices as soon as one clears out, I’m SO DONE.
Keep shifting his stuff. Maybe add “This is the designated workspace for TAs. If you need more space for your things, sit elsewhere.”
When he pops by your cubicle, tell him “These are not my office hours. My office hour is immediately after class. If you need help, please ask me during class or in the hour immediately following.” And don’t acknowledge him further.
Although, you may want a higher up to back you up on this stuff in case this guy can make any kind of complaint that can damage your work reputation. But this dude sounds like he needs a firm, explicit hand.
^This
He has to pass my cubicle to get to his. There are some older offices that are actually offices that the senior phd candidates get and you can bet I”ve got my eye on them! Just now I came in (I expected class to end later and I didn’t expect to be here), and he said, “Oh, where were you? in class?” Oh, I got divorced so I didn’t have to tell men where I was or what I was doing anymore, thanks. Then, “Are you going to be around this summer?” Me: Don’t know.
10 minutes later:
“so, trying to get some work done?”
Wtf, he sounds like a child. That must be so irritating!
I don’t have ANY patience for that behavior. I think it’s totally appropriate to tell this grown ass man who is supposed to be learning how adults behave that he is not “being cute.”
It’s also totally appropriate to say, “I have private research to work on. I don’t have time to do your lab work for you. I have time to answer questions in my office hours.”
Oh my god, fuck this guy for real.
What do you anticipate his response would be if you stopped hinting and just said, “I am not available to talk to you right now”? Would there be any repercussions for you?
No, except everybody else pities him so I’ll be the meanie. I’m ok with that.
If any of us were witches we could turn him into a cat. He’d do the same stuff but at least it actually would be cute.
Surely there is an incantation SOMEWHERE.
Right? Although there are too many cats already.
So… turn him into a cat and neuter him with one incantation? Two birds, one stone, ammiright?
Hey! I’ve DONE that (but on goats)
I know that you are not saying a) that you have turned goats into cats and neutered them and also that you are not saying b) that you have turned men into goats and neutered them, but they are both really great images for me to have right now.
Oh my god you’re RIGHT, all cats are men! Tiny, adorable, fluffy men! I always thought all dogs were men, but maybe they’re merely dogs.
My gods, I am a terrible human, my reaction to his spreading would be to address the entire class “Someone seems to be leaving their books in the TA area. Will whoever’s stuff is where I am supposed to be working please come and remove it?” And then just wait until he gets up. If he’s gonna be a dick, EVERYONE can know about it.
110% with everyone else – you are being paid to talk to this dude. When you are not being paid to talk to him, do not so if you do not want to. He can respect your office hours or make an appointment like everyone else. (note – am well aware that this will be awkward and only has, like, a 10% chance of working).
Solidarity. This sounds like a special version of hell.
Boston toasties! Off topic and I’ll probably re-post this to the next open thread, but I’m moving to Cambridge in September for a postdoc and I need an apartment! If you know of any apartments near Harvard, let me know? I was hoping for a tiny but well-maintained cat-friendly studio in a beautiful old building, but I’ll entertain the idea of shared housing if I know the people will be awesome, so I’m asking here 🙂
I don’t have any suggestions, since I just moved here myself, but feel free to ask if you have any questions! I’m right up the street from Harvard 🙂
I don’t have apartment leads, but welcome!
I have zero helpful apartment leads, but welcome to the area. I’m at your geekier rival/friend school nearer to the river.
Technically I’m at the American Academy, which is affiliated with/located almost in Harvard but is not Harvard 🙂 So I am a neutral party.
And I am and admin, not an academic. My school loyalties are all University of Wisconsin. So there’s that. 🙂
“Storey told the Crimson that forcing the Porcellian to accept women, as some other final clubs already have, would make sexual assaults more likely. After all, women can’t be sexually assaulted if they aren’t there.”
So what you are saying here is that your members are rapists. Got it.
My brother lived in a converted church. The confessional was the shower stall. He said he purified himself every morning.
Also Joseph Boyden is the absolute best. Anyone who hasn’t read his novels is missing out.
I think I know exactly who that CA letterwriter is… I read her interview, and saw the subsequent backlash. It was an ugly business. (The backlash was; her interview was great.)
What’s the business/industry?
My guess based on the timing (though, as pointed out elsewhere, this type of thing happens all the damn time to women so I might be wrong) is that it’s related to the recent inclusion of a trans character in a Baldur’s Gate (video game based on the Dungeons and Dragons system) expansion.
The instructor presents us with readings, a lecture, and a list of questions to answer but stays out of the discussion board 100%. Which, generally, has its pros and cons but I really wish she'd chime in on the quality debate. I get that she doesn't want us just crafting answers to match her opinions but idk, part of having a teacher is getting perspective from their experiences, right?
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer! I'm going to be checking out those resources and practicing my even-keeled Socratic method. I am going to be prepared and ready to defend the rights of my patrons to read what they want!
Yeah that one got me hard. I read the piece awhile ago, I need to start savings things! I think it was addressing the common thing that happens (at least where I'm from), that babies get their first round of vaccinations but then the parents don't bring them back for further rounds, and it gave this as a possible reason for mistrust of doctors/medical professionals.
No, that would be the time I got detention in 9th grade history for vehemently insisting that Mary Queen of Scots and Bloody Mary were, in fact, two different people.
Then I really hope you win at least once, so you can have TWO stories to share!
Sorry for not waiting till the open thread, but does anyone want to swap funny/depressing stories of street commentary? I feel sometimes like the only thing to do is laugh about it. There’s a man who hangs out at my local train station and thinks it’s hilarious to tell fat women “take your time, young lady” when they are going up the stairs. I get all sorts of characters when waiting at the bus stop but yesterday, this young guy (I think probably a teenager) tried to have a weirdly dead-eyed conversation with me about how I’m ugly and I should give him my phone number because ugly people don’t get asked for their phone numbers.
O gods, he probably just read The Game and was negging you and is now probably really confused as to why it did not work.
I was actually touched by a stranger who was trying to get my attention (I always have headphones on and was actively avoiding eye contact because making kissy faces at me is not exactly a great way to get me to pay MORE attention to you, asshat). I did not – but really wanted to – whip about and yell “did you not see the button that I am wearing that actively says Don’t Fucking Touch Me? What even is wrong with you”, but… well, you know.
ARGH with the touching. NO NO NO! So much rage! And yeah, I know. 🙁
I had dyed my hair purple and some random colleague from the other side of the floor that i have encountered literally once before touched my hair.
That was a real learning moment for me; i had heard ladies talk about people doing that before, but it had never happened to me, and I STILL don’t know why ANYONE thinks it is ok to TOUCH MY HEAD WITHOUT MY CONSENT.
I jog in the inner city, and I’m very, *very* conscious that not all street commentary is friendly or well-intended, and that even if it is, it can be extremely intrusive.
That said, I have a fairly good relationship with some of it.
I was training for a half-marathon once, running on the boardwalk by the beach. I needed about five laps to get my mileage. The first time I ran past the guy on the bench, he woke up. The second time, he gave me this bleary “are you shitting me?” look. The third time, he said hi. By the fifth time, he was basically my own personal marathon cheering section. It was a rarity in my street commentary experience, in being funny and sweet.
OTOH, it’s Summer Jobs for the Cause season here now, and there’s a dude outside my office building who guilt trips me every time I go through the door. We haven’t even gotten to what his cause is. He just wants me to stop and talk to him. I know he’s just doing it for his job, but he creeps me out.
I did a Summer Job for a Cause once, and it can be really stressful. We had quotas we had to meet (or be automatically fired), so it really was imperative to try evvvvveryone who walked by, just in case.
Unless he’s just being creepy on an interpersonal level, in which case there is really no excuse.
He did an imitation of a duck throwing a tantrum when I walked past him on my way to buy a sandwich.
It went on until I turned the corner at the end of the block.
Oh boy. Yeah, I got nothing then. Hope he gets reassigned elsewhere soon.
We have teams of those kids near my building, and I flat up walk around them. Sorry, but no. I’m definitely sorry this is your job option. In college, I once spent the better part of a year doing telephone fundraising for the university. It was pretty awful, but the pay was decent and the hours good. And still, no.
Oh my gosh, the Summer Jobs for the Cause crews. I once had a young ‘un block my path when I angled around him. He sidestepped RIGHT in front of me, forcing me to come to a halt to keep from bumping him, and then said “HI” very loudly and stuck out his hand. I looked him dead in the eye and with my eyebrows raised, said slowly, “uh. NO.” He moved, quickly. I wish his supervisor had been there, because it was 100% NOT the way to approach someone on the street to discuss your Cause.
If I feel safe enough, my default is to point and laugh. Loudly.
If strangers must talk to me in public, I prefer old ladies who want to tell me about conspiracy theories.
Does…does this happen to you a lot?
Wait, people don’t try to tell you about chemtrails at bus stops? What am I doing wrong here?
Making eye contact. Sad, but true. It happens to me, too.
I had a verrrry long bus ride once next to an older lady, who told me all about: (a) how she used to go to the soda fountain in the department store downtown and get banana splits for a nickel, (b) how her son was a fireman and lived at the fire station with his wife and kids, and (c) how she wasn’t allowed to call him on the phone.
I once made the mistake of talking about conspiracy theories (mocking them actually) with a couple female friends in a public place. In the cafe of a food co-op. This was a mistake. A man (of course) proceeded to come over and talk at us for a good 10 or 15 minutes about how the start of the Vietnam war was all a conspiracy and eisenhower and johnson and I admit I don’t know the rest because I tuned out completely.
I once had a man talk at me while I was waiting for my order at a fast food restaurant about how his cousin worked on the TV show Wilfred. When he asked for my number, he seemed genuinely shocked that I hadn’t been wooed by his impressive industry connections.
Come on, a cousin? Who doesn’t have a cousin that worked for the TV show Wilfred these days? Also clearly you were looking for a sexy date, waiting for your food and all.
Yeah, surprisingly, a McDonald’s at an interstate service station is not the best place to pick up women.
So, I got catcalled the other day. And maybe because I have Resting Murder Face, but I literally do not ever get catcalled. (The only exception was when I was in the Middle East years and years ago.) Even though I’m aro ace, no interest in men whatsoever, patriarchy still got me. For a brief second I was a tiny bit flattered that someone called me beautiful…..And then he followed it up by asking for money.
Last week I made accidental eye contact with a woman leaning against the side of a building, and she started screaming “WHORE! WHORE!” as I walked away. So that was fun.
Oh man, the BYU article is horrifying and utterly unsurprising, coming from an alum. The Honor Code has so many fucked up consequences. Students can lose their place in school, their credits, their on-campus jobs and even their housing for breaking the Honor Code. Hell, they’ll even do that just for leaving the Mormon church while a student, and they have no leniency for drinking or sex. I can’t imagine the bravery it would take to report your rape when it would lead to an Honor Code investigation. And on top of the constant teachings to young women that they’re the gatekeepers, that they’re responsible for not letting boys have sex with them (girls’ sex drive is of course never ever mentioned), it’s all just piling on rape victims. Horrible.
And if you haven’t already, definitely read the Salt Lake Tribune piece linked in the article, it’s more detailed and even more horrifying. Like this quote: “”She was telling me at BYU people falsely report rapes because the Honor Code Office is so strict on premarital sex, and people report rapes so they won’t get investigated,” MacDonald said.”
Extremely enjoying this latest trend of curation of The Worst People on the Internet for our gawking pleasure
I want Robert De Niro to have a private conversation on the whole subject of the anti-vaxxers with one of the people that he played in the movies before he started doing so many crap ones; the guy he played in Heat would do fine.
“I think the movie is something that people should see.”
“The movie is not something that people should see. It’s bullshit, is what it is.”
“There’s a lot of information about things that are happening with the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies, there’s a lot of things that are not said–”
“No. The stuff that needs to be said has been said and the stuff that needs to be written is fucking written. Wakefield is a quack and a fraud and he’s not even a doctor any more. He lied in his paper, boom, he’s not allowed to do anything beyond putting on a band-aid. Do they even call them band-aids over there? How the fuck would I know?”
“There’s more to this than meets the eye, believe me.”
“But then there’s that one thing they did for the famine in Ethiopia, they called that Band Aid, but for some reason I keep thinking of ‘sticking plaster’, so–what the fuck did you just say? What the fuck did you just say? There is nothing more than meets the fucking eye. It’s all out there. All of it.”
“I don’t remember. But my child is autistic, and every kid is different. But there’s something there, there’s something there that people aren’t addressing–”
“No, my friend. It’s all been addressed. Look, I feel for you, OK? I get that it’s tough. Totally get it. But whatever this thing is, it’s not about the fucking vaccines. It’s not about them. Sorry, but no. And, you know, Bob, people look up to you. They do. And with this, this thing, they are either going to do the wrong thing, or they’re going to look down on you. Either way, you lose, my friend. You lose, we all lose.”
“I believe it’s much more complicated.”
“The only thing that’s complicated are the layers of bullshit you’re putting up. OK, I’m getting up now, OK? You see me looking down at you, right now? That’s the rest of your life, if you keep going this way. Now, I got people I gotta see.”
I just want to get sick so I can take off three days and spend my life catching up with LR which has been a deep, rich mine of delights this week.
Same! I feel like I’ve been so behind with the Toast recently. Damn work.
I know this is kind of OT, but in my online dating mailbox today I get a message from a dude who says he “I’d be a good match for a female who needs a stabilizing and dominating influence in her life” and then filled in that he would be interested in meeting “a nurturing female who might enjoy being told, in a kind way, to shut up every once in a while. Someone smart who can also mother me. Let’s face it, men and women are different.”
WHHHHHHYYYYYYY?
My eyes rolled back into my head as soon as I got to “a female” which is great because I wasn’t able to read the rest of that awful, gross dude’s crap. (Is this a JOKE that’s like red flags with every single thing he’s said!!!)
LOLNO. I love how he wants a mommy who he can tell to shut up. Right, ok.
I bet he can’t figure out why he’s still single (eyeroll)
A friend told me about some truly wonderful phrasing her sister had employed once, on the subject of both terrible in-laws and racism: at a party/gathering/dinner/whatever, a man expressed the view that if his daughter married a black man, he’d never talk to her again. Friend’s sister says, “you’re right, that makes a lot of sense, if you hate black men more than you love your daughter.”
I know this isn’t a revolutionary concept in any way, but the complete lack of abstract or euphemistic language really struck me, and now I’m going to use variations of it in every even remotely applicable situation.
Ugh. My sister had a stalker in at her first university, and when she tried to deal with it as best as she could, (a “stay away order,” which has no legal ramifications if you ignore it, was the best she got because he’d never touched her) the school threatened to kick HER out if she kept causing trouble. The guy had a printout of her class schedule and was showing up everywhere she was, and very nearly did attack her, but the school decided it was her fault.
It turns out that attending a professional conference is an excellent way to handle my son’s due date because I spent a week getting drunk every night on someone else’s dime. #winning
And to the very lovely Toastie who introduced herself to me during the conference, I apologize: I’m awkward all the time IRL.
I completely agree, which is why I said "not w/ vaccines, but w/ the health system in general."
Also, as I said, good doctor patient relations are not about babying people, but rather creating a safe space where people feel comfortable asking questions and sharing information w/ their provider that could be critical to their getting the best care.
Completely agree with you there. I was so disappointed to hear about De Niro. I really thought we'd reached a turning point on this, but ugh, nope.
in the video he calls it "the old bible" 😐
I want to like this more than once!