Double. Rainbow.
One of the best and most troubling and enraging things I’ve read in recent memory is Slate’s new investigation and meditation on young women who received “treatment” for their mental illness at an in-patient Christian center:
In her mid-20s, Hayley was diagnosed with a heart condition, which doctors told her was a side effect of her medications. But when she stopped taking the drugs, she lost control, punching walls and cutting herself out of frustration. Once, her mother became so frightened for her own safety that she called the police. Hayley spent the night in the psychiatric ward. Meanwhile, the family could barely cover its expenses, let alone Hayley’s therapy. “It was a dark time,” she says.
Then, in 2009, something cut through the darkness like a signal fire. Mercy Ministries, a network of in-patient facilities that treat young women with mental illness, addiction, and life trauma, and which has the backing of some of the most prominent names in evangelical Christianity, was opening a new residence in Lincoln, California, close to Hayley’s home. Hayley knew about Mercy because a Christian band she liked, Point of Grace, supported the program. And she learned online that Mercy’s unusual fusion of biblically inspired healing and what it described on its website as “best-practice clinical interventions” could help hurting women like herself “break free from the destructive cycles controlling their lives.” Mercy’s literature boasted that its four U.S. residences were state-licensed and that 80 percent of its counselors had master’s degrees in psychology, social work, or a related field. Hayley’s family believed that the Lincoln home would provide her with a truly integrated approach to mental health—the secular and the spiritual. Best of all, Mercy was free.
Hayley, who is a devout Christian, believed God had answered her prayers. “I thought the new home was a sign,” she says. “I wanted to believe that God would make a change in me. I wanted it desperately.”
I woke up very very early to the news of the verdict in the Hillsborough stadium disaster case, which is great and also very welcome to anyone who remembers the absolute victim-blaming garbage spouted at the time. If you’re not familiar with Hillsborough, and have claustrophobia, I would actually really recommend not Googling it, because even the images that were in the regular news footage are incredibly upsetting (I do not attend any large public events and I do not go to clubs and am very meh on concerts because I have spent too much time reading about crowd disasters, which is on me and not on venues, but there you are.) More on the verdict:
On Tuesday, a jury found that the fans who died at the match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, were “unlawfully killed” and the victims of police mistakes.
The jury answered yes to the crucial question of whether “there was any error or omission in police planning and preparation for the semifinal match on 15 April 1989 that caused or contributed to the dangerous situation,” in which victims suffocated to death as they entered an F.A. Cup semifinal between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.
The jury also rejected the notion that the fans were responsible for the deaths. Taken together, the findings amounted to vindication for the families of the victims and the survivors of the tragedy, who had been fighting for years to prove that the fans were victims of police conduct rather than agents of their own demise.
When the criminal charges against her were dropped, her public defender had technically done his job. The government is required to provide a lawyer to help people through criminal court, nothing more. But Morales’s lawyer was from the Bronx Defenders, which extends representation from criminal court to family court, housing court, and court. Morales was one of 30,000 Bronx Defenders clients in 2014—the only criminal defendants in the city or the country to receive these across-the-board services.
Even after her charges were dropped, Morales had a family attorney and a parent advocate to challenge the family court judge’s ruling. When the police locked her out of her apartment, a civil lawyer from her team got them to let her back in after a few hours. Her advocate, who is not a lawyer, helped her set up parenting classes, and a social worker checked in with her to see how she was dealing with life alone and to offer moral support. Kierra finally came home in June 2014, six months after the arrest.
TEGAN AND SARA ARE TOURING AND THEY ARE COMING TO SALT FUCKIN LAKE
Audubon, you SCAMP:
During their visit, though, Audubon fed Rafinesque descriptions of American creatures, including 11 species of fish that never really existed. Rafinesque duly jotted them down in his notebook and later proffered those descriptions as evidence of new species. For 50 or so years, those 11 fish remained in the scientific record as real species, despite their very unusual features, including bulletproof (!) scales.
By the 1870s, the truth about the fish had been discovered. But the fish were only part of Audubon’s prank. In a new paper in the Archives of Natural History, Neal Woodman, a curator at Smithsonian’s natural history museum, details its fuller extent: Audubon also fabricated at least two birds, a “trivalved” brachiopod, three snails, two plants, and nine wild rats, all of which Rafinesque accepted as real.
Where have all the ear infections gone? (This is really interesting! Neither of my kids have ever had an ear infection, while my brother and I had tons, despite the fact my mom breastfed us and MY kids were almost exclusively on formula, so the vaccine connection makes a lot of sense to me):
What they were trying to do in this study, she said, was look carefully at the actual incidence of ear infections now, in this new environment, in which children are routinely vaccinated against Streptococcus pneumoniae, or pneumococcus, one of the types of bacteria that can cause ear infections (it can also cause more serious infections, including pneumonia and meningitis), and also against influenza, since viral infections like flu may precede bacterial ear infections. Neither vaccine is directed specifically at ear infections, but both have probably affected the incidence since my children were young.
A study published in 2014 in JAMA Pediatrics looked at the number of medical visits for otitis media made by children up to the age of 6 and found a downward trend from 2004 to 2011, with a significant drop in 2010-11. The first routine childhood pneumococcal vaccine was introduced in 2000; we changed to a vaccine effective against a wider set of bacterial serotypes in 2010.
Friend of The Toast Bim Adewunmi spent 48 hours in Minneapolis talking to Prince fans:
Ebony likes to talk, I think, but she especially likes to talk about Prince. She tells me about her first Prince song, the poster of him (the Controversy one, where he’s in the shower looking like filth) she had to hide under her jacket so her mum wouldn’t see. She tells me how important Prince was, and is. We’re standing outside First Avenue, the venue that is synonymous with Prince and Purple Rain, and there are 30-odd people hanging around. Some people are clearly on their way to work, trouser legs clipped for bike safety, backpacks snug on their backs. Some are on walkie duty with dogs, and a good number are not immediately classifiable, beyond having an interest in Prince, or the spectacle of public mourning. Ebony’s spent more of her last few hours here than at home. “I left about 5 and it was packed,” she says, her tied-back locs bobbing. “Somebody got in a little scuffle but they got him out real quick. I was snapping. I was like, ‘Uh uh! You finna disrespect my man?’ Let him rest in peace. We’re not gonna do none of that drama here. That’s my man!”
Another beloved Friend of The Toast, Pilot Viruet, spoke to W. Kamau Bell about his new show:
Did you search Craigslist for “KKK members to hang out with me”?
Luckily they figured that if they sent a black guy to do it, it probably wouldn’t go that well, so we had our white producers reach out to people. It was funny because apparently they had to pretend like they agreed with the guys they were talking to. Like, “Yeah, you’re right, these black people dohave too many jobs.”
What was your prep for the episode like? Did you take any precautions? Because watching it, it’s just you and a small camera crew.
I had to call my wife right before and right after.
Throughout my career and my life I talk a lot about racism in this country, and if you’re going to talk about it then you’re going to eventually come to the chapter about the Klan. I’ve always been curious about that—I’ve read about and seen documentaries about it—so to me [preparation] was making sure that I was armed with that knowledge and could ask them questions in such a way that they knew what I was talking about. As a black man in this country, it’s good to know what’s going on with the Klan.
this is…unbearably bad:
Texas’ notoriously pale school lessons never taught much about the Maryland abolitionist and heroic Union Army spy-nurse.
We have an entire state holiday devoted to Civil War heroes, but only for the losing side.
You never hear about Tubman or Texas’ first Medal of Honor recipient, Milton Holland. We celebrate only Confederates.
Tubman (c. 1822-1913) is now taught in third grade. Lately, a 2010 State Board of Education rewrite has included her for “heroic deeds” along with the likes of Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell and 9-11 Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer.
She is the only African-American studied in the “heroes” section, which originally included mythical figures Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan. (A different section on “good citizens” includes Louisiana desegregation figure Ruby Bridges.)
More than two-thirds of Texas’ students are children of color, yet their lessons are mostly about whites.
Also, happy Chernobyl day everybody!
That seems like a strange thing to celebrate. Is there some added context that I’m not aware of?
“happy” wasn’t the word I used, but it’s been thirty years since the disaster. I posted some links in a comment a little further down if it’s something of interest. 🙂
Nope, I just super love rereading every article I can find on it every year today. It’s just so interesting!
Not terribly good form to use “happy” I guess, I apologize.
That makes me really uncomfortable. I lived through the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and seeing that just tossed up there makes me feel pretty queasy.
Yeah, taking into account things like the liquidators in cotton overalls, the divers who swam knowingly to their deaths to prevent further explosions, and the massive infrastructure dedicated just to containing the disaster, it’s not fantastic phrasing. The topic may be compelling, but I too hate seeing it treated flippantly.
I’m sorry, you’re totally right.
Having been close to families from both Japan and Romania, and speaking with them about dealing with the fallout of each disaster, and also working in the nuclear industry (safety equipment) for at time, I’m realizing now I’ve become way too casual and flippant about it.
I’m really really sorry, I should’ve thought this through better.
Understood; it’s times like this that most of us wish ID had an edit feature. (The extremely dark Slavic humor, like the scientist in the NYT article who says, “Soviet radiation is best radiation,” is less jarring to me, because it more clearly alludes to the deeply fucked-upedness of the situation, but YMMV and caveat lector, too.)
So that may be my go-to example of dark Slavic humor from now on.
Well, and you’re allowed to make jokes about your own situation. I think maybe it’s like comfort in, dump out — I make jokes about my situation, but my friends can’t — and I sure don’t make them to the people I know in Fukushima, because their long term consequences are more immediate than mine.
I am having a hard time with this apology because it is kind of reading like “I have a [minority] friend!”. However, I’m aware I have PTSD and this has kind of got me in the teeth, so I’m not sure if I’m overreacting or not. Any Toasts available who who could help me with a reality check, that would be good; I know that sometimes the protective anger demon of my PTSD makes things bigger than they are, but I also know that sometimes I press down things that are quite legitimate reactions because I don’t want to feel an uncomfortable feel.
That being said though, I do appreciate the apology. I have had people react very poorly to much smaller calling-outs, so thank you for listening respectfully to my words.
Ah no, I understand that it came off that way to you, and I agree it’s a bullshit way to apologize. I was trying to more say that I’ve about meltdowns with people affected by it, and they were very casual/chill about it, but it was wrong of me to assume it would be the same for others affected by it too. If that makes sense?
I mean, I’m still in the wrong, I was basically just justifying my reasoning, which doesn’t really matter if I’ve made someone uncomfortable.
There’s also affected and affected as far as Japan is concerned. It’s a small country, but it’s bigger than people realise. If you talked to people outside of the directly affected regions, you will get a different kind of response to if you talk to those inside Fukushima (or Miyagi or other nearby regions I suspect, but I can’t speak for them). Further out, their reactions are understandably going to be different.
I wrote a reply earlier, but then I decided I didn’t like it and deleted it instantly, so if you saw a strange, ghostly reply appear and disappear, that was me.
This is just my thinking on the subject, but I don’t think it’s quite like saying, “I have a [minority] friend.” If you’re white but you have minority friends, that doesn’t make you a minority. But if you spend a lot of time around people who suffered from something horrific, then you’re affected by it too, just not as much or as directly.
Take me, for example. I grew up in a household that was obsessed with nuclear issues. My father worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for years, and he fought them for years on safety issues (mainly he was trying to get the US to stockpile potassium iodide for distribution in the event of a release of radiation). He also had thyroid cancer very young, as a result of early childhood radiation exposure. We also lived for a time in the Republic of the Marshall Isiands, where there is a lot of radiation-related illness as a result of our bomb testing. None of that, of course, means that my experience compares to yours. But it does mean that I’ve had to spend a lot of time thinking about the effects of events like Chernobyl and Fukushima. I’m also well aware of how possible it is that a disastrous nuclear event of some kind could happen here. And I gather, from GoatlessSon’s post, that they’re in a similar position – not directly affected in the way you are, but close enough to the subject to need some coping mechanisms, one of which is dark humor.
I think this is a good reminder, though, that dark humor is something best kept for smaller audiences. I’m glad you said what you did; it’s important to know how these things affect people, and it will make me more careful with how I talk about nuclear issues.
Now, everybody go check whether your state is one that stockpiles potassium iodide. Even if it is, you should probably have some in your medicine cabinet, just in case.
Sarcastic or ironic can be misunderstood. You meant in a particular way. It is why I don’t use satire or sarcasm in internet comments. So easily misread.
what can it mean
T&S are delightful in concert…saw them a few years ago with Paramore.
I just had this vision of Beyonce leading an army of extremely fashionable yet grim-faced soldiers into battle. It reminded me of this: https://xkcd.com/712/ Beyonce as the Witch-Queen of Angmar? Holy shit.
Today’s xkcd is also quite relevant: http://xkcd.com/1672/
If we’re comparing Beyonce to LotR characters, My first thought on seeing Beyonce’s entrance a the superbowl was “In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! … All shall love me and despair!”
It’s bloody snowing here. I live on the south coast of England where it doesn’t even snow in winter! The cat has stolen my yeti lapwarmer again and I am wrapped in a blanket with a hot water bottle.
Hail here in Leeds!
Eeek! Will check in with the inlaws…
They’ll be cold!!
I don’t doubt it! Can only hope the boys aren’t dragging my SIL outside to play in it.
Wet snow (i.e. the kind that melts halfway to the ground) here in the Netherlands, and we had hail on Sunday. Don’t the weather gods know it’s almost May?
I am so envious that I could burst into flames and/or tears. I loathe hot weather with every fiber of my being but unfortunately, some dickhead slave owning US founding fathers were all “We have to have the capital somewhere in the South because we SUCK SO MUCH.” and today’s it’s going to be muggy and disgusting and I’m impotent with rage.
Hail and snow in London – so many layers on and hurrah for fingerless gloves!
It’s been raining ice in the Netherlands all day! (I mean, I gather that it’s hail, but where I come from hail is associated with summer thunderstorms and also I like saying raining ice.) Which sucks because it’s King’s Day tomorrow and that’s the country’s best outdoor-drinking holiday, it’s going to be ruined.
Yeah– I also thought that hail was a thing that you got for a brief five-minute period in a weird summer thunderstorm maybe once or twice a summer, not all day for three days in late April.
Snow in central Vermont. Wet, heavy, sticky, fast-falling snow.
Snow in southeastern Ontario as well. I am wearing flats and a sweater because I Did Not Read The Forecast.
I had to pull out the Bean boots I prematurely put away last week. Not a great start to my day.
It was ninety degrees yesterday in Chicagoland and today there are flurries. What even.
I was spending my lunchtimes out on the balcony in a bra and shorts last week!
Ninety with marble sized hail briefly in the western suburbs!
I KNOW. This week and enxt were already bound to suck for job-related reasons and now my poor fibro body is freaking the fuck out.
It’s hailing in Bristol too, wtf? It’s been gloriously sunny the past week. It doesn’t even feel particularly cold!
How did it manage to be sunny and snowing at the same time? WHAT ARE YOU DOING, ENGLAND
“It’s all the fault of the junior doctors!” – qualified weatherman Jeremy Hunt
We had a very brief flurry of sleet here in central London this afternoon! Hail at the weekend, too. (I haven’t seen any snow this winter, though.)
Thank you so, so much for the Tegan and Sara heads-up. I’m going to buy tickets for their Richmond show on Friday!!
Unrelated to anything but maybe there are Toasties who will share my insane desire for this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kurt/noria-c…
This is the most amazing window ac unit I have ever seen and I want it in my life right now. Not to mention, I would no longer need help (usually from a MAN) to install and uninstall my window units every season! Gah, it looks wonderful. Might be saving my $$ for one.
OH GOD, WANT. My husband is already itching to get the AC units up but urgh, I hate them so much, and maneuvering a heavy-ass box into an open window is so stressful.
word to the wise, make sure nothing is in the windowsill when you put in the AC unit
like
nothing
no birds or anything
not that that’s happened to me
or
anything
/ever traumatized by that discovery
Noooooo D:
We had a huge infestation of beetle-like stink bugs in my hometown last summer (which I had never, ever seen before in my life– I blame global warming).
I discovered to my horror (when I was taking the air conditioners out in the fall) that they really love living in my bedroom window behind the AC unit. It’s like their Club Med, apparently.
That’s gorgeous. And I live in a very temperate area, so I have JUST NOW realized that you have to move window units??? What a pain in the ass.
Or, you know, wrap it in several layers of insulation film and duct tape in the winter and curse your lazy landlord.
Or that. Yeah.
I do not take my AC units out in the winter and I live in the northeast. On the other hand, my building has radiator heating and I actually have the windows cracked open most of the winter, soooooo….
Whoa!! I’ll take five. Anything that doesn’t weigh 10,000 pounds would be a vast improvement.
My least favorite part of homeownership is putting those suckers in the windows and pulling them out again. (And carting them up and down from the attic).
I’m seriously tempted to spend vast sums on this, even if I have to wait until April 2017. Hmmmm….
I studied Hillsborough for a Business Ethics module and it was brutal. I wasn’t super familiar with the disaster, too young I suppose, but we watched the BBC doc about in a lecture and I was properly crying by the end.
There was so much institutional bullshit and ass covering and male egos; and things I saw that I didn’t have the language for at the time, like classicism and victim blaming. In the end its the story* of how a blow hard man took on something he wasn’t capable of and fucked up, killed a whole lot of people and used the might of his institution to cover his ass and I am so done with male egos killing innocent people.
*Very. Very simplified.
I remember it but didn’t really understand it all at the time. I grew up in Nottingham, so it was actually pretty close to home, but it was so closely associated with Liverpool that I was really astonished when I was older and realised it had actually taken place in Sheffield and that the other team playing were Notts Forest (who were very local! Their chairman lived in my village and we all knew who Cloughie was!)
I found the verdict today surprisingly emotional. Just the thought of fighting for nearly thirty years and finallyfinally getting that response.
I vaguely remember watching documentaries that mentioned it, but not really understanding the context.
I’m actually a bit emotional; the interviews with the family members that I’ve seen are heartbreaking, its been going on for so long and many of them lost children in their teens/20s, and many have died already. Can you imagine that pain? Not only do you look your child/family member, but then to have the police spew out classist hate speech and blame them for their own deaths, when you know its not true. Those people are so strong and I am so happy for them that they are finally, finally getting some justice. Unfortunately I doubt that anyone will face charges or any real punishment, I’d say most of them have taken a cushy retirement and managed to keep their heads down and stay on the good side of the right people in the last 20 years.
It’s embarrassing, but I truly knew nothing about Hillsborough until I saw the 30 for 30 documentary about it (which is excellent). I have never been more infuriated and saddened by what I saw, and my god, the fact that’s its taken this long to hold the proper people accountable is appalling. At least now, some of it has been made right.
I didn’t know anything about it until today! Someone in a deadspin article mentioned that 30 for 30 and I just added it to my Netflix queue.
I always have such a hard time wrapping my head around Hillsborough because it’s so baffling to me that people could just . . . die like that. Like, the individual parts make sense to me (too little space, too many people, poor crowd control) but I have a hard time conceptualizing it all coming together in such an awful way.
I’ve been in crowd crushes before at concerts because that’s a thing used to enjoy, nothing on the scale of Hillsborough, but one second of it was enough to panic the shit out of me.
In a crowd that size you’re no longer able to move as an individual, it’s like a tide and you’re at its mercy. And the pen at Hillsborough had no outlet at the front, at concerts they leave a walkway so bouncers can pull people out! It only takes one person falling to then the whole crowd down or people start getting sucked under.
I once got crushed so hard I literally thought my heart was going to stop, luckily I was near the front so when I started screaming the guy behind me kicked me up the butt to get me up and a bouncer pulled me out! I was totally fine after and jumped right back into the crowd of course!
Same here, but I realized when looking at video of it that part of the difficulty I have with wrapping my head around it is that the US doesn’t have stadiums like that. I watch baseball at Fenway Park, the oldest extant baseball stadium in the country, where you can literally reach over the visitors’ bullpen wall and slap the hat off a reliever if you want to [get arrested]. Except for netting to stop foul balls braining people, there’s NO fencing between fans and players. Low walls people can vault over in either direction, and that’s it. Even if crowd-control were terrible in Fenway (it’s actually very good), there’s an available outlet for excess people, so nobody would get killed.
So from design on down, it’s just a situation Americans don’t run across. Crushes do occur in the US, but they’re usually in doorways and entry gates, on a much smaller scale.
The fencing in Hillsborough was part of a new design policy in the 70s and 80s to prevent pitch invasions. There had been some high profile incidents of rival fans getting into fights on the pitch and the intent of the fences was literally to pen them in so they couldn’t get out and cause trouble. NOW, it’s not clear that the previous incidents were large-scale or serious enough to warrant that stadium design change – it has been argued that the issue of football ‘hooliganism’, while a real problem, was blown waaay out of proportion by the media and police into a moral panic, and Thatcher and the police wanted to be seen to be ‘cracking down’ on it, hence the new fencing and other policies such as segregating rival fans (that also somewhat contributed to Hillsborough because all the Liverpool fans were restricted to one set of stands/pens which actually had lower capacity than the Nott Forest stands). Certainly, from a safety point of view, the fencing was not a great idea. I believe fencing pre-dated the 1985 Heysel disaster, when some Liverpool fans at a Euro Cup final in Brussels attacked opposition fans and stormed the pitch, but that event probably only solidified police determination to prioritise policies that restricted fans’ movement, rather than, y’know, the physical safety of a huge crowd of innocent people.
That Mercy article. I haven’t had anything resonate with me so much in such a long time, especially that section titled “Jesus Did Not Say to Medicate a Demon.” This is so similar to experiences I had in college.
“Sarah Grech, a co-manager of the Mercy Survivor network, who lived in Mercy’s Sydney home in 2006, knew of girls ‘who were kind of pounced on without notice, being held down to the floor, with staff screaming at the girl saying “shut up!” when she tried to speak or protest because that was seen as a demon speaking.'”
Literally happened to me, except with “friends” instead of “staff.” It took me several years to realize why my mind kept going back to this moment and why I kept having panic attacks about it. I thought for a long time that they were right and were doing what’s best for me, but it was a horrifying, traumatic experience even if I didn’t realize it until much later.
Oh, my dear. I’m so sorry you went through this. Sending gentle thoughts and hugs, if desired.
Whoa, I’m so sorry that happened to you
Oh no! So sorry that happened to you!! 🙁 *hugs*
I am so sorry this happened to you. I knew people growing up who “treated” their children with exorcism instead of medication and every day I regret not doing more to help them.
HOOOOLLLLYYY flying crap, the excerpt from the discharge report.
Lily’s discharge summary—a one-page document signed by her counselor—is a snapshot of that problem. Upon graduation, her counselor wrote that Lily had overcome the following alphabetized list of issues: “Abandonment, all abuse, ADHD, anger, anxiety (social), apathy, attention seeking behavior, authority issues, Bipolar, Borderline, chemical dependency, compliance, depression, desire to be here, detox, eating disorder, family issues, general suitability, impulsive, lesbianism, lying, marital issues, medical suitability, occult, OCD, PTSD, relationship difficulties, rejection, self-harm, self-esteem issues, sexual promiscuity, stealing, and suicidal thoughts.” The counselor concluded that “[w]hen Lily chose to fully surrender to God, she experienced significant behavior and emotional changes.”
What a nightmare of a place. What a wrenching read. Having been mistreated in a medical facility for undiagnosed bipolar disorder myself, I hate to imagine what these girls have been through. Also I am so sorry for your experience, Rachel. We still have so much to learn about how to help vulnerable people.
She overcame the “desire to be here.” That might be the only true thing in this report. Also, how did she overcome both compliance and authority issues?
She overcame “general suitability”!
And anger!
I had the same part copied. Just WTF. (And the part of me that is admittedly neurotic about syntax is all “Jesus loves parallel structure, you twerp. At least more than He does punishing people for drinking an extra cup of coffee.”)
And Rachel, I’m so sorry that happened to you, too.
IKR? There are many nouns in this list, and in fact all of these could be nouns with just a little bit of work? OH, RIGHT, it’s the CONTENT that’s got me enraged, well then. You could still… impulsive is not…
*offers hugs* It sucks that your “friends” assaulted you and tried to perform an exorcism on you.
Christianity is incredibly ableist in regards to mental illness, especially the sort of Christianity in which I was raised (and am still exposed to) where mental illness is tantamount to demonic activity (that you, somehow, allowed into your life *eyeroll*). And yes, I’ve heard that “medicating demons” phrase, too. FTN.
It definitely led to a spiritual reconsideration for me! I was inpatient for a while and kept laughing off advice like “you can’t help others until you’ve helped yourself” because my Christian circle kept telling me that was wrong and I needed to do MORE to help other people if I wanted to get better. But then gradually I realized the bullshit and started reevaluating literally everything I had learned growing up super fundamentalist. Now I realize how incredibly poorly educated we all must have been — I was displaying pretty classic symptoms of anxiety attacks and depression, but somehow no one recognized it and therefore jumped to “demons” as a conclusion.
Thanks (to everyone) for all the encouraging words!
:(((((
My upbringing was more Charismatic evangelical (which is often not much different from “fundamentalist”), but I’ve heard some of that stuff all the same.
I’ve never heard that “medicating demons” thing before, but that is such BS. A of all, psychiatric meds were not available in the first century, and B, YOU ARE NOT JESUS. Would they tell a starving person to make like the loaves and fishes? Ugh, they probably would.
They wouldn’t tell a starving person to make like the loaves and fishes, but they would feed them maybe once or twice, or hook them up with food from a food pantry. Third time they’d be like, “You need to earn it.” Which… sigh.
I’m so sorry that happened to you. It never happened to me, though that was pure luck as I was very much in the target group and my “friends” straight up told me they wished they could free me from Satan’s grip. NOT through secular psychiatry, of course, medication is for the weak and faithless. As for therapy, only Secular Humanists (feh!) have things like “thoughts” and “emotions” that differ from God’s Perfect Will.
So yeah, I read the first section title (“He Grants Sleep to Those He Loves”) and noped out immediately. It was a beautifully Ortbergian title, but I was perfectly happy to stop right there.
Ugh, sounds very familiar! I realized very quickly that medication was helping me and put my foot down about that, but most people around me still thought that I was treating the wrong thing. The same group of friends that eventually decided to try to cast my demons out actually took me to a pastor first, and the pastor told them definitively “NO EXORCISMS” because he understood that, like, psychiatry is a real thing, but I guess my friends figured prayer could only help. Except prayer doesn’t help when it’s actually a form of manipulation and a silencing tool. Anything I tried to say or do in protest against what was happening was seen as confirmation that the devil was speaking through me. After all, I had initially consented to have some people pray over me, so any protests clearly weren’t actually coming from me.
I’m sorry you had to deal with that sort of reasoning too! It’s demeaning and dangerous and no one should have to go through that.
“Except prayer doesn’t help when it’s actually a form of manipulation and a silencing tool.”
SO MUCH YES
THUMBS UP x100000000
Today, April 26, marks thirty years since the failure of Reactor Four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant and the forced evacuation of the nearby town of Pripyat. This is something that I have always had a noted interest in, and thought that some links may be of interest:
Here is a fantastic article from The Guardian about the families displaced and how their lives changed as a result.
This is a good article from the Washington Post about the return of wildlife to the area.
And, as always, I highly recommend this Big Picture post of modern Chernobyl/Pripyat – it’s a few years old now, but still beautiful and haunting. There are some potentially sensitive pictures here.
There’s another link but it’s from the Daily Fail and I refuse to link to them, so.
Anastasia Fedosenko (the radiation officer) is a badass!
If you haven’t read Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl yet, I’d highly recommend it. It takes some fortitude to get through, though.
Reading it, I was AMAZED at how many people moved back into the contaminated area. I know it was their homes and stuff, but I just can’t imagine wanting to go back to a place where the very air you breathe and ground you walk on is poisoned. Many of the interviews with the soldiers that were attempting to maintain the barricades were super interesting, I never imagined that job would be so difficult, I had figured most of their work was getting people out, not trying to KEEP them out.
I have not read it, but literally just bought it on Amazon at your recommendation. I should have it on Thursday. Thank you!
Yes, everyone brace yourself. It’s fantastic, but utterly gutting.
I put this in my queue not that long ago – I’m suspecting it was based on hearing about it at The Toast.
YESS, thank you for these links.
Not as serious, but if you get a chance to see the Nova episode on the recovery of the wildlife around Chernobyl, it’s fascinating and a little silly. (The idea of lethally radioactive 6-foot catfish still sticks with me.)
And by “Nova” I obviously mean “Nature.” ‘S what I get for commenting pre-coffee.
If you’re interested in Chernobyl and that interest extends to other nuclear meltdown zones/areas impacted by the early days of nuclear power, Kate Brown’s Plutopia is a fascinating read. It compares two towns, one in the USSR (Ozersk) and one in the US (Richland, Washington), the first two towns to produce plutonium. People would beg to get back into an area they knew was incredibly contaminated because it was just that much better than the alternative, and both sites released hundreds of millions of radioactive isotopes into their surrounding areas. It’s absolutely staggering.
Ooo! Ooo! I have been meaning to read Plutopia for a while now. I bought it for a class I was teaching at the time and a quick skim showed that I couldn’t assign as much of the book as I would want, so I skipped it and went with Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive instead. (Which I realize is completely different in form and purpose, but which covers more territory.)
Either way I’m glad to know it’s as good as I thought it would be. Gotta get it off the shelf again!
!!! What class were you teaching that involved possibly Plutopia and definitely Radioactive? (And yes, Plutopia’s kind of difficult to assign unless it’s for a very particular sort of class – I first read it in a special colloquium on nuclear controversies/issues, tied to the environmental impact of nuclear power.) Regardless, definitely pick it up again, it’s worth the read!
Have added this to my wishlist – thank you for the recommendation!
If you’re interested in the chernobyl disaster , but you’ve never seen the BBC horizon documentary “inside Chernobyl’s sarcophagus”, you ought to track it down.
Fair warning, it remains the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen on film.
Frightening, fascinating, and devastating. That picture of tiny, sweet-faced little Igor from the Big Picture post…. I’m speechless.
thank you so much for this. I was born in 1989 and haven’t ever really found a way to understand what happened.
If anyone is near Chicago, a great documentary called THE BABUSHKAS OF CHERNOBYL is playing at the Siskel Film Center until the 28th!
http://www.siskelfilmcenter.org/babushkas
Would anyone care to discuss how bad the new season of Deadbeat is!? And it was such a good show for two seasons. But… no no no no NO.
Yes! I agree with you. I miss Roofie and chamomile. I only watched two episodes from season three before I quit
Oh, that sucks to hear. We were looking forward to starting the new season once we finish Kimmy Schmidt.
They must have gotten a new set of writers. All the sweetness is gone, replaced with puke, poop, and casual killing of prostitutes.
…imagine the NOPE squid here, because I cannot figure out how to add a gif…
Oh HELL no. Definitely nopeing out on the new season, then.
Any librarians out there dealing with Baker and Taylor’s failure to update their security certificate? I feel like if I can find other people angry about this on the internet, it’s here.
I am not a librarian, just a librarifriend who is headed into info security. Not updating security certificates is being cruel to their users! They need to get it together.
yeah, it seems to be okay now. not like people buy books at the end of the month or anything…
It’s back up for me! But yesterday was infuriating, for sure.
We had a double rainbow at the house last night and then an eagle flew by. It was very scenic.
Are you… in Heaven?
Some say, some say.
(this is from March but damn, we do get some good sunrise at our house, picture a rainy gray sky with double rainbow and eagle)
I’d like your post, but it’s currently at 69 and I don’t want to ruin the magic.
Today in (Feminist) History!!!
On this day (April 26th) in 1777, 16 year old Sybil Ludington rode 40 miles through the darkness to warn her father’s militiamen that the British troops were attacking and burning a supply depot in Danbury, CT. A messenger had come to warn her father at his farm, but the messenger refused to ride any further, and her father’s militiamen were spread out across their farms, having been given permission to return home and plant crops. Since her father could not leave his farm, Sybil volunteered to go. She rode alone through the rain and dark from 9pm until dawn, knocking on the door of every farmhouse she past, shouting out that the British were burning Danbury and to muster at her father’s farm. She rode until dawn, through the settlements of Carmel, Mahopac, Mahopac Mills, Kent Cliffs and Farmers Mills, even allegedly fighting off a highwayman with a long stick (according to some historians) and hiding from British soldiers. Because of her warning, the people of the area (and Danbury) managed to escape mostly unharmed, and by the time she returned home at dawn, almost 400 soldiers were ready to march on the British; they couldn’t save Danbury from burning but managed to drive the British troops back in the Battle of Ridgefield. General George Washington came to thank Sybil in person for her bravery.
Despite the fact that she rode twice as far as Paul Revere did in his very well-known ride (which took place when he was 40, was less than half the distance, and took place on well-lit roads with stops for supper and relaxing), Sybil’s ride was barely spoken of. (Gee, I wonder why?) If it wasn’t for her grandson eventually re-telling her story, and the Daughters of the American Revolution eventually immortalizing her in a statue in 1961, her story might have become forgotten.
She’s the American Laura Secord!
The Drunk History episode of this is the goddamn best.
“I’ll do it,” peeped a voice. “Bluh blah, I got it.”
Yessss, haha.
YESS. I think I experienced a religious ecstasy the first time I heard that line delivery.
Sybil!!
I never knew this! Wow, thank you for this.
Aaaaaand sending this to my friend/grade school history teacher, in case she doesn’t know! A classroom of future Toasties thank you.
I mentioned it down thread, but since your friend is a teacher she might be interested in the great children’s book about her: “Sybil Rides for Independence”
I had that book!
The statue is in front of the Danbury Public Library. I recently moved here and was impressed by the history. The statue is very expressive!
Yessss, Sybil my girl! My mom gave me a children’s book about her as a “congrats on finishing 1st grade!” gift and I was immediately ALL ABOUT Sybil. She was the first girl hero I ever had to look up to. We even took a detour to see her statue once on a road trip.
(The book is called “Sybil Rides for Independence” by Drollene P Brown and Margot Apple and the illustrations are fantastic)
I’m from that area and we talk about Sybil Ludington! Yay Sybil Ludington! I always thought she was much cooler than Paul Revere.
Here is a statue of her from right near where I used to take music lessons:
That is a BADASS statue, tbh. I wish I’d heard her story when I was younger! In comparison Paul Revere’s is like… so? You rode your horse on some nice well-lit roads, stopped for food, relaxed a bit, and were all oh yeah hey the British are coming y’all. MEANWHILE, Sybil here is riding through the dark and rain, banging on doors, fighting off people with her stick at SIXTEEN like damn.
I had literally just clicked reply to say, “That is a badass statue” and saw yours.
[high five]
It *is* a badass statue.
Goddamn. If I ever get a statue made of me it needs to be at least this awesome.
I grew up in Danbury! There was a statue of her in front of the public library.
We sang a song about Sybil Ludington in my second-grade women’s history month musical revue! (I was Sally Ride, and so I had the BEST song, but “Ride, Sybil Ride” was a solid number, too.
Teenage girls: way more hardcore than Paul Revere.
Can we officially make this “Today in Feminist History” A Thing? 😀
Oooh I am honestly tempted! I may lose steam but I’m lining up at least some for the next few (week)days, so we’ll see!
She was in my giant coloring book of revolutionary girls, when I was a kid. (Purchased probably at Sturbridge village or Plimoth Plantation?). I loved her story.
Yayyyyy Sybil Luddington!
I’ve just moved to Liverpool for work and it is a big emotional day here, unconscionable that it’s taken so long (nearly as long as I’ve been alive!) for the families of the 96 to get some sort of justice. Waiting with a kind of nervous weariness for those who were most cruel at the time to react, or not.
And if you want to have a little cry http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-new… You’ll Never Walk Alone is a tearjerker at the best of times…
OT: some people were asking about a piece I wrote on Tina Fey and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt a while ago, and it finally went up. It IS in Dutch, and running it though Google Translate didn’t yield great results, but if you want to give it a try, here’s the link.
I could write several book on the way history is taught to young people and why it’s fucked up, but I will say only that “only teaching about white men” and “including mythical figures in a unit on heroic people” are both FUCKED UP concepts. (For starters that teaching that history is orchestrated by single people acting individually to change great tides of society is dumb, and also that while mythological figures can be fascinating and a great way of understanding what a society deems important they really really really don’t belong in a unit on heroism.) Blah blah blah race class gender temporal periods, we are done here.
yeah especially when it’s like, “great heroes of history, here are the white guys who founded America, here is another white guy who lassoed a tornado with a rattlesnake” — not only does it confuse the issue about what’s real and what isn’t, it contributes to the mythologizing of actual historical figures, which makes it difficult to deal frankly with their shortcomings.
“only teaching about white men” and “including mythical figures in a unit on heroic people” are both FUCKED UP concepts
Fucked up, but not surprising considering we’ve got Intelligent Design clamoring to be included in science classrooms, too. Ugh. #nohopeforamerica
“Lies My Teacher Told Me” by Loewen was my first introduction to just how revisionist the version of history we get in schools really is. I always knew it was, I just didn’t appreciate how bad it was. It is a good primer for anyone looking to feel rage at the inadequacies of our educational system. It’s also just interesting history.
Also the sequel, “Lies Across America”, about the failures of our national monuments and historic sites!
Oh man, that was crazy popular with my fellow ninth-graders who lived in the school library. Of course, we read so much Howard Zinn in my actual 10th grade US History class that any claims to actual rebellion via reading that were pretty far-fetched, but I think he did include our 8th grade textbook in the review, so it was still handy to begin to understand how nonsensical the ‘great man’ method was. It’s taken me a few more decades to finish grokking it, though.
Oof. It actually has taken me by surprise to learn how history is taught in even contemporary public education. I was homeschooled K-12, very conservative Christian curriculum, and I know, or at least understand more all the time, how messed up what I learned is. But because of course in that context public schools are demonized, I had no idea the extent to which conservative, white-centered views permeate a public school version of history too. In some ways, maybe it was easier for me to unlearn what I was taught, because I was under zero illusions about its particular point of view. There’s no assumption of neutrality.
I recently tried to tell my family that Christopher Columbus was, in fact, a genocidal maniac, contrary to what we were taught. My mom was in literal disbelief until I showed her an article online that went over how history does back this up.
We have a stupid statue of Columbus & Isabella (because why have only one genocider memorialized when you could have two?) in the California State Capitol and everyone hates it. The problem is it’s so damn heavy they aren’t sure they can move it safely. (this is at least the story the tour guides give people sometimes about why it’s still there, it may not actually be true.)
After seeing only statues of men all week, I was shocked to see a statue of Queen Isabella in Washington, D.C.
It’s true what they say: no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.
(I wouldn’t mind keeping that statue until more less-genocidal women are featured, and by women I mean actual women who lived, not a Half-Naked Beautiful Woman Who Represents Freedom Somehow.)
My favorite is the Lewis and Clark statue in Charlottesville, which features a scantily-clad Sacagawea literally crawling at their feet. / anger face
I mean, yes, of all the women who deserve public lauds in America they pick the ones that are either a) imaginary or b) that one truly horrible person who is only tangentially related. I mean, in all honesty Queen Elizabeth had way more to do with the whole colonizing this part thing.
Are you trying to imply that some women are a) not imaginary, b) not horrible, and c) possibly laudable? No one’s ever going to believe that!
I always found it odd how history in the IS seems to be taught centered around individuals and not concepts or in a general context. It makes history look a lot less complex than it actually is (same with Sciences, Edison and Einstein are not the only people one should learn about). Maybe I am biased because I am German, our history classes mostly focus on how concentrating and hero worship of a single charismatic is not that great a thing. (Not that EU education is better, it has its on problems, it is just a different approach and less based on modules when I went to school). I’d be curious to learn more about why history in the US is taught the way it is.
Americans have a whole mythos built around “heroic individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”, unconnected to any other people or broader societal influences.
The idea is that anyone who’s willing to work hard enough can do [X] entirely by themselves, without any help. And that, by extension, any individual who doesn’t succeed in doing [X] just wasn’t trying hard enough.
If we admit that life is actually more complex than that (and that people are inter-connected in many ways), then we’d have to re-think our entire society– our economic system, our health care and social services, etc. And many people aren’t willing to do that.
I don’t entirely understand the psychology of it, or why Americans in general are so resistant to thinking in a more communal way. I’d guess it stems from fears that people who are “undeserving” will receive some benefit, or from magical thinking that “everything will be okay as long as I work hard enough”.
Ugh. I could go on about history in schools for days. Especially having witnessed/experienced two extremes of it. The latter half of my high schooling was done in Texas, where they didn’t even have teachers, just coaches pulling double duty. I got one semester of American History. One. That’s it. The only history class I got there. The first half of hs was in Rhode Island where one semester of American History only brought us up to the 1830s. It was pretty damn thorough. (Also hell bent on exposing the products of a very tiny, very white coastal town to just where all the nice 18th century houses came from. Months were spent discussing slavery. Another fun fact: in World History the Protestant Reformation came as a massive shock to my 99% Catholic class.)
Then my younger brother went to high school in Vermont where they took iconoclasm to such an extreme that my mother had to ‘stage an intervention.’ Teaching kids that George Washington didn’t chop down the cherry tree is something I am in support of. Teaching that he was a monstrous dictator is another.
There’s a happy medium somewhere, people.
My eleventh grade history teacher was the baseball coach and his method of teaching was to have us memorize all the Civil War battles in chronological order. Followed by “answer the questions at the end of the chapter.” And this was a good school! It horrified me daily even then.
The only good thing that Coach What’s His Face did was very purposefully stomp all of the long held glorious illusions about the Alamo into the ground. In elementary school there it was handled with the utmost reverence. I think he just enjoyed seeing their faces fall. (He also enjoyed showing videos about how the moon landing was faked and how the JFK assassination was an inside job…)
One time my boss asked me to go with a client to go file some stuff in court, and it was an hour drive and on the way back the guy, who was this otherwise very mellow, seemingly innocuous person, started talking about conspiracies. He said the moon landing was faked, mentioned conspiracy stuff about JFK I don’t recall, said terrorists have technology that allows them to blow up our cars, etc., and that he doesn’t watch movies or read books because “they’re not important.” Meaning the only important thing, apparently, is sitting around researching conspiracies.
I have never been so happy to get out of a car in my life.
Ha, my public school in Vermont used Ishmael by Daniel Quinn as a core text and offered a 3-week long lesson on the Kennedy assassination with the thesis, “probably LBJ did it” and also I didn’t learn any European history, only all the other continents. Vermont: it’s definitely happening over there.
The Vermont public school system’s lasting memory in my family will always be ‘that time reading my brother’s assigned history book made my mother cry.’
Howard Zinn, everyone. I get what he was trying to do, but eesh. That doesn’t mean he does it well. Extremes. We’ve got to find a way between the extremes. Which, thanks to my burgeoning history degree/career, is something that I’m becoming increasingly more aware of. Bad history makes my teeth ache. From any side. (Also, your sources suck, dude. If I wrote that sloppily in a senior level history class I’d get booted.)
Related note: ask me about my collection of 19th and early twentieth century history textbooks. They’re a riot. (In a sometimes they make you want to cry kind of way.)
Can you suggest a good Zinn-but-not-awful history resource or two or five???? PLEASE!??!?!
Also, asking about your 19th century history textbooks, please please please tell us more!
Give me a bit and I will try to come back with some good general books. Since I eat sleep and breathe history I tend to read books specialized to specific eras/topics from a broad range of periods and perspectives then form a nice picture from that. So I don’t read many monolithic ‘this is everything that ever happened in US history’ books. (Although since he starts his book in 1492, I would suggest reading 1491.)
And I might post something about ye olde history books in Open Thread. But for now, there was this one time when my mother and I went into hysterics reading all of the George Washington as superhero bits in the most ponderous, self-important tones possible.
I haven’t read the Audubon article yet, but I have to say I wish my name ended in -esque. What kind of descriptions of birds? Rafinesque. How are you feeling today? Rubenesque. How would you describe your neighbor’s family? Dahmeresque. &c.
Don’t forget ‘Is something mildly confusing? Clearly it’s “Kafkaesque”‘
Yeah, I’m not so sure I’d want Kafkaesque as a last name. I fear my life would be… unpredictable at best, bizarrely horrific at worst. Tempting fate for sure. Overall, maybe embodying an adjective isn’t the safest plan.
Can we change the phrase “Middle Eastern” to “Arabesque”? (if for no other reason than to confuse some ballerinas)
Rafinesque was a DELIGHTFUL WEIRDO, the whole reason Audubon acted like that toward him is that Rafinesque showed up at his house unintroduced and unannounced (tbf Audubon lived in the backwoods and Rafinesque couldn’t exactly phone ahead) and stayed for some time going “we’re such good friends, look at all these new species I’ve discovered.” Audubon woke up one night and discovered that his favorite violin had been smashed to bits by his guest, who was trying to use it to knock down and capture the bats in his room. He was sure the bats were a new species. I wouldn’t have been able to resist feeding him false info either, though it backfired; between the two of them they kind of discredited American naturalists as a whole in the eyes of Europeans for some time.
(Check out Lynn Barber’s book The Heyday of Natural History for more of this stuff, it’s solid gold.)
I had to read the first sentence of the excerpt 3 times before I realized Raffinesque was a name and not an adjective. I already have difficulty going through life with a surname that might as well be “[InsertSurnameHere]” so I shudder to think what it must be like to have one that doesn’t even read as a noun.
Junior doctors are on full walk-out today, the very first full strike in the history of the NHS. All emergency cover is being provided by senior doctors, so if anyone in England fancies it, today is a very very good day to get ill.
But Jeremy Hunt said that everyone’s going to die because of the doctors’ strike, who should I believe huh?
Someone tweeted that it was VERY CONFUSING that people are dying at weekends because there aren’t enough senior doctors, and today they are dying because there are too many senior doctors. What is the perfect amount of senior doctors, do you think?
England is too doctors to survive. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)
Actual LOL!
There was a thing in today’s Guardian with various people – patients, junior doctors, etc. – talking briefly about their feelings on the strike and how it was likely to affect them, and I was so sad to see a few people talking about how angry and scared they were because they feared they would get substandard medical care, and that doctors needed to care about their patients (one said that the Hippocratic oath is the most important thing, so doctors mustn’t go on strike). There seems to be a lot of scaremongering, which is really shit for patients.
I don’t think the Hippocratic Oath is said at all in the UK now – I guess doctors may say it informally, but it’s certainly not any kind of formal thing. It’s kind of amazing how much anecdotal hold it has over people, though.
Not according to this anonymous person here: “Withdrawing medical aid to those in need breaks the Hippocratic oath that all doctors vow to do at the start of their career.” Someone should let them know.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr…
UGH. Get it together, England. Who are we supposed to look up to across the pond?
Scotland? Scotland’s looking pretty good.
From experience, Scotland was a lovely place to get ill. Also, to get birth control. Also, having accompanied a friend to get an abortion, for that, too. All in all, 10/10, would rely on their medical system again.
I also got a free eye exam and free contact lenses when I was living there. I’ll throw in a 10/10 as well.
Every now and then I talk wistfully about fleeing to Scotland, in search of lower housing costs and generally better politics and social services. (I realise that Scotland is not perfect (homosexual acts were decriminalised so much later than in England and Wales) and they are probably sick of English interlopers, but still.)
More/less sick of American interlopers, do you think?
Those of Scottish extraction?
I am of Scottish extraction too! (One grandfather, I think more forbears further back.) I suspect that might irritate them more, though.
If they feel at all similarly to the way the Irish seem to feel about Irish-Americans, then, yeah they’d probably find Americans more irritating.
Everyone was extremely nice to me (American studying abroad) when I was living there. Most of the people I met had some sort of family connection to the States and generally pleasant feelings about it. I think they’re fine with Americans, as long as you’re not too loud and obnoxious.
Also, I think there’s a big difference in how they view Americans (who are typically just visiting for short durations) and wealthy English people who tend to be working in the financial sector and driving up housing prices.
From my limited experience (a year spent in Edinburgh), the locals tend to group people into: (a) annoying posho Home Counties English who wear pashmina shawls and (b) everyone else. If you fall into the latter group, you’re probably fine.
I worked with a mix of Scottish folks and Geordies, and they got on extremely well.
I am so completely behind the doctors in this whole situation. And it makes me so frothing mad that I can’t be any more coherent than that.
The NHS is amazing and no one should believe anything the Tories say about it. They just want to justify selling to their friends. DO NOT BELIEVE THEM.
I kind of spin between being utterly astonished and disgusted that people vote for the Tories, and utter amazement that winning an election isn’t piss easy for Labour. Like, surely “hey, we’re not going to do anything super radical or impressive, but we will keep the health service in public hands, we’ll build private housing and social housing, we’ll give tenants a little more security, and we won’t starve libraries and children’s centres of public funds and we’ll just slightly increase the top two tax rates to do that”… you’d think that would be the easiest sell.
Labour seem to have forgotten who they are and have settled into their position as Tory-lite media whipping boy.
The Tories blame everything that has happened in the last 10 years on Labour and Labour just accept that and say ‘yeah sorry about that’, instead of saying ‘Hold the fuck up you pig fucking nonces, we didn’t cause a global financial crisis, you and your banking buddies did that.’
Unfortunately the media is almost completely Tory owned or Tory supporting, and there is no one out there willing to challenge the narrative that they set out. Which means they get to control the entire conversation. And, Labour, instead of retreating back to the Left and sorting out their own house, just keep following the Tories Right, which is fucking stupid for the supposed Left wing opposition party.
The Tories are ruthless and smart and have a media industry willing to sell their lies. Labour is a wet blanket and the Greens are a punchline who never actually achieve anything because they won’t compromise.
If Labour realized that people are relatively selfish and respond to emotional appeals they’d win in a heartbeat, but instead they think copying the Tories will win them elections. (Or if you put on your tin hat for a moment, they’re in cahoots and are deliberately taking the fall so that the Tories can push their neoliberal agenda and everyone makes buckets of money selling off the country and its citizens.)
That’s the part I can’t understand. If Labour spends all it’s time trying to be Tory because ‘that’s what it takes to get elected’, then what’s the point of being Labour? They’re so upset about Corbyn being a lefty… um, guys? YOU ARE THE LEFT. Or at least they’re supposed to be.
Personally I think its a conspiracy. If there’s no viable opposition party then there’s no opposition.
Or Blair turned New Labour in Thatcher-lite and the majority of Labour MPs are now New Labour/Blarites, so the re-adjustment is difficult for them because they’ve gotten used to the cushy right wing lifestyle.
“If Labour spends all it’s time trying to be Tory because ‘that’s what it takes to get elected’, then what’s the point of being Labour?”
See also: the NDP trying to out Liberal the Liberals, uuugh.
Can Toasties start their own political party? because this seems like common sense to me
This honestly might finally break the Tories, everyone loves the NHS, and people have a lot of respect for doctors across the political spectrum.
Not just across the political spectrum, but across the country. It’s not like the miners’ strike, where people in Wiltshire or Surrey never had to look at a miner.
I don’t really get the government’s strategy on this one. Do they think it’ll go away? Do they think public support will swing to the government eventually? We’re getting closer and closer to August, when the first lot of juniors will move onto the new contract, and I don’t really get the sense that anyone has any idea what’s actually going to happen.
There is a lot of support, but people have a short memory and generally aren’t media savvy. They’re constantly told that we need to balance the budget (we don’t.), and the only way to do that is to make cuts (it isn’t.) and that the NHS is the biggest waste of money there is (Its fucking not.) so privatizing the NHS is the best way to fix the country (NO ITS FUCKING NOT.).
Attacking doctors to make them the bad guys is just one of the many current ploys being enacted to make the NHS seem like a shambling mess so that when they sell it off, they look like the heroes.
I really hope this is what breaks the Tories, but we have at least 4 more years with this government, who knows how much more damage they will do before then. (Can a general election be called for by the people in the UK? It happens in Ireland a lot, but I’ve never heard of it happening here)
A recent e-petition to call an early election got well over the 100,000 signatures supposedly needed to trigger a parliamentary debate, but the government’s response was basically ‘Nah, you can’t do that.’ So no, apparently we can’t call an early election, or if we can then the government is unsurprisingly doing as much as they can to prevent us from doing so.
That was one of the coalition’s first acts. It used to be possible to dissolve parliament and call a general election at any time, but I don’t think it is now.
*cough* changing the laws so that the government can’t be thrown out/re-elected…. *cough* sounds a bit familiar.
Hear, hear! I was extremely grateful to have NHS coverage for the year that I was living in the UK, and I received excellent and very affordable care. (I had some weird medical problems while I was there, and had to get all kinds of blood tests and X-rays done).
I’m one of the “lucky” ones here in the US, who has a decent income and private insurance through work. But I still put off getting medical care I need because I can’t afford it.
I would take NHS coverage again in a heartbeat! And I definitely find it enraging when I hear Americans who know nothing about it spreading horror stories. We have plenty of those ourselves (like people dying from lack of care, cancer patients losing their homes and filing for bankruptcy, etc., etc.)
Ha, I spent my time in the UK playing ‘horrify the locals with tales of living with no health insurance’. All the Americans I knew did, because a good portion of them hadn’t had insurance in years before they moved overseas. It was a huge relief to have access to healthcare again, and it’s a bit hilarious and a bit sad how some of the universities use that as a selling point to attract American students.
I make sure to share things about my experiences with the NHS because Americans need to hear about them and maybe realize that we shouldn’t have to settle for our broken system.
As an American with British relatives, I can confirm playing many rounds of “Horrify The Locals.” We should start a league.
Great tweet from the Tall Man earlier: https://twitter.com/JM_Underwood/status/724854141…
(The whole thread is great)
Ahhh, Tall Man! I need to follow him. Great, great tweet.
Some of my in-laws are Tories and they’re obviously against the strike. Every time I mention that I’m for it on Facebook, they’re all ‘oh, what’s wrong with a 7 day NHS?’ As if that’s the question, or the actual reason for the junior doctors walking out and leaving? I’m not sure if they’re parroting talking points or trying to genuinely misinform.
‘oh, what’s wrong with a 7 day NHS?’
For the same price as the current one? Well, basic maths, for a start.
The worst part? That branch of the family is all accountants. (eyeroll)
ouch.
WE DON’T NEED A 7 DAY NHS. That’s whats wrong with it.
Also, we already *have* a 7 day NHS. If you need acute treatment on a Sunday you will get it. If you want to see your GP on a Sunday because its more convenient for you, and because you can’t get that you go to A&E because its ‘quicker’, you can just piss off and rot in a hole.
There actually is a fairly wide consensus amongst Royal Colleges and other influential bodies that there are problems with weekend care and there was a lot of work being done to improve it. (link) The thing is, very little of it had to do with doctors’ contracts: it’s much more to do with access to diagnostic services (eg. histopathology and radiography) at the weekend.
I don’t doubt that, everyone is willing to admit there are issues within the NHS that need to looked at and solved, weekend care is one of them and there are very smart people who are willing to tackle these problems.
I just get sick of the narratives around it; we need a ‘customer focused’ ‘7 day service’. No, no we don’t. And Jeremy Hunt and his ilk like to pretend that because the NHS has *some* problems, its a failed experiment and privatization is the only way forward.
Yeah, that’s what’s mega-frustrating – there are problems, and the health service was making genuine progress towards alleviating them until austerity came in and everything was fucked.
For various reason Austerity is the stupidest policy every concocted. Even economists agree its idiotic, only one economist ever thought it was a good idea and his study was based on flawed data.
If you want an economy, or anything really, to grow you need to feed it, not strangle it and tell it to be better with less.
(Also, the “convenience” thing is interesting – I have a lot of sympathy for people who struggle to access medical services during the week, and I don’t think it’s so much to do with “convenience” and much more to do with, firstly, the shift to greater job insecurity, zero-hours contracts, presenteeism and the monitoring of sickness absence with things like Bradford, and secondly, the fact that underfunded and understaffed outpatient clinics and GP surgeries often keep you waiting for hours. A relatively minor chronic condition that requires frequently monitoring or prescriptions can become incompatible with working if you need a whole morning off at least once a month because your appointment is supposedly at 9.25 but you don’t get seen until gone eleven. I think the idea of accessing primary and outpatient services at the weekend would be less important if employers were better about people taking time off to visit the doctors’ and surgeries and clinics were less overloaded so people didn’t end up waiting for hours.)
Convenience/ 7 day GP access is a misdirection in the debate; I completely agree with you that there is a cultural shift affecting everything and as you say underfunded and understaffed GP clinics are causing issues for everyone, underfunded GPs and community care are causing over flows in A&E and people being unable to get the care they need, but extending ‘normal’ GP hours into the evening and weekends is a band-aid that won’t really fix anything but looks good in the headlines; Pouring money into it wouldn’t solve all the problems, but having enough staff and auxiliary resources (Like disability benefits, carers income, community health visitors, properly funded and accessible mental health care) would ease the burden a lot more than opening the GPs office on a Saturday.
But that wouldn’t gel with the ‘we need to make cuts and privatize’ mantra, so it won’t be done.
That pissed me off so much during the leaders’ debates before the election last year – various people going on and on about how GP surgeries needed to be open in the evenings and weekends, and that it was ridiculous that they weren’t and their goverment would fix it. Which, yes, that would be great for patients, but there is currently a shortage of people wanting to become GPs, and the current ones are generally run off their feet as it is, and you can’t just blithely say, “All GP surgeries open late from this date forward!” withough putting a lot of work and money into staffing and administration.
We also have a huge GP shortage here in the States, with the added problem that many new doctors start their careers with US $200-300K in student loan debt. (So you can hardly blame them all for wanting to be dermatologists instead…)
Making their hours and working conditions worse without increasing compensation seems rather… counterproductive to attracting people to the field. To put it mildly.
Huh – is dermatology a highly-paid specialty in the US? Man, I’d love to see a comparison of the demographic profiles of dermatologists in the UK and the US, then. In the UK, dermatology is a competitive medical specialty, but it’s also one with fairly regular hours and not much acute work, so you get a lot of women doing it. There’s some private work, but the vast majority will be done in the NHS and it’ll be managing eczema, psoriasis, severe acne and skin cancer. You’re definitely not going to make significantly more money as a dermatologist than you would in another specialty.
Jeremy Hunt gives the impression that if he was Minister For Bread, the yeast would revolt.
One thing to take from the Hillsborough verdict is that grass roots activism can get important results, even if it does take a long time. Let’s hope someone actually goes down for it now.
http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/news/a792027/great-b…
ALL HAIL QUEEN NADIYA.
I LOVE HER FACE SO MUCH.
The Chronicles of Nadiya.
I love her so much.
Nadiya? Getting a cooking show? Oh, PLEASE, someone put this on a legit U.S. streaming channel so I don’t have to pirate it!
Yaaassss Qweeeeennnnnn!
also, re: Queen’s birthday cake: I think it looks crooked in the photos because of the lens. She used a level on that sucker!
Wait, what is she reacting to there?? Is she pleased or displeased? I love her expression so much, but have no idea of the context and I am dying of curiosity!
She’d made a bubblegum flavouring for something, tasted it, and went “Does it taste of bubblegum? *Oh yeah*.” So I guess the expression is “Whoa, that’s strong! But it is what it’s supposed to be!”, maybe?
Hee! That makes it even better, thanks!
This article, about a guy discovering most people can visualize, has kinda made my morning. That’s the exactly feeling I had when I learned most people actually remember faces instead of Cubist blurs! The surprise, the “so you literally do that and not just figuratively?” – it’s really fascinating.
yeah that was how I felt about the thing about experiential-memory the other week.
Wow, that was indeed fascinating. The tidbit that surprised me most, and convinced me he is indeed different? He’s never had a song stuck in his head. Never! Wow.
And that he can kind of get the voice in his head to sing the Star Wars theme tune but can’t actually conjure up the real version. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the thought that he can do one and not the other.
I wasn’t entirely sure what he (or his friends and family) meant by this in the music bit though “not as vivid as the real thing, to be sure, and not as many instruments.” When I have music in my head, it plays out exactly like the recorded version – is that unusual or has he just phrased this oddly?
I’m not very musical, so I think I only get all the instruments if I know the song quite well.
with me it’s mostly that if I don’t know the song very well, one or two lines will loop in my head instead of the song playing out. But if I know music very well (say: the Hamilton soundtrack) I can take off my headphones for a bit and predict exactly what I’ll hear when I put them back on.
For me, my memory of a piece of music usually isn’t as complete and textured as the real thing, just because I don’t remember how all the individual parts go, so I’m not remembering what the rhythm guitar is doing or what the percussion sounds like or whatever. Unless I know the song extremely well, usually what I remember is a sort of simplified version along with a memory of how it feels to listen to that song.
I tend to get a background impression of the whole piece, but the foreground is my head-voice singing/humming/doot-dooting the line I’m focusing on. I’m actually more likely to get all of the instruments if it’s a piece I don’t know very well, since I don’t have a clear enough memory of it yet to pick out individual lines. If I’ve played or sung it (I played cello in school, and choir’s just always been a thing I did), or listened to it a lot, I tend to pick out whatever line I feel is the most important, and focus on that.
This is all so interesting, I had no idea other people don’t get, like, complete playback (or some people have some seriously advanced shit going on like Nashirakins). I’ve always suspected that I have an unusually good memory for sound: I’ve always been able to learn lines/poetry/songs off by heart straight away because I just hear it in my head. I also apparently inadvertently do impressions of people because if I’m reporting something they’ve said, I’ll say it in the same way without realising. This seems to at least be linked to that. I don’t have a very good visual imagination/memory though.
I know! That really jumped out at me because as far as I can recall, I *always* have music rolling around in my head.
Whenever a coworker’s phone rings, I start humming their ringtone.
I play a game with myself when I watch 30 Rock and Parks & Rec – the game is “can you whistle along to the theme song, how perfectly can you do it, betcha can’t do it” … I rarely win (they are both v quick songs with a lot of differentiated notes, some of them quite high or low) but it’s very gratifying when I do.
That struck me as so odd! I may be bad at faces, but when I get bored I sometimes create new orchestrations for songs I like. Usually with more instruments and descants and harmonies. Sometimes the music in my head is so vivid that I’m afraid my iPod at work is obtrusively loud when no, that’s just my mind music. Barely summoning “dunh dunh dunh” is something I have a hard time imagining.
I love learning about other people’s minds.
Okay I have to ask- can you do a round in your head? If I am relaxed and concentrate I can do a three-part “Row, row, row your boat” round.
I am shit at recognizing people and remembering their names.
If I’m having a good brain day, sometimes if I focus really hard. Of course to be honest, I have to be having a good brain day to do complex orchestration stuff in general? It isn’t an every day thing, due to migraines and stuff.
I am also glad to hear I’m not the only person who’s tried this. Absolutely agree that it’s only on a Good Brain Day.
I’m pretty sure you’ve mentioned you’re on the spectrum before. So am I, and I have a very similar auditory memory/way of thinking/ability to hear the whole score, etc. Bonus: auditory processing problems that make understanding speech sometimes difficult.
Yes! I’m definitely somewhere on the spectrum, and I definitely have problems processing speech too… If I’m very focused on something, words don’t make sense as language. It drives me a little bonkers that music is easily handled by my brain but words as meaningful sound can be hit or miss. It is why I enjoy the Internet and typing at people v.v. much.
I can almost do it, but I suspect that’s only because I’m hearing the Grover, Cookie Monster, and Herry Monster version from Sesame Street in my head.
Haha, I was just talking with Elyse about this on Twitter last night – I think I discovered this around Christmas and promptly began bugging all my friends and family about whether or not they could actually see things in their heads. I can hear distinct voices (like reading things in Morgan Freeman’s voice) or music or whatever, but MAN it’s mind-blowing to think that other people can see faces.
I dated a guy long-distance and the first 5 months we were together (in between meeting and the first visit) I had to ask my BFF what he looked like. I had a few pictures, but mostly it was “Was he tall? Was he cute? What colour are his eyes?” I literally had no idea. I knew I’d been attracted to him and that he was funny – that’s all.
What’s funny for me is that I have a decent memory for faces in that I can recognize them well, but I’m not good at visualizing someone’s face unless I have a photograph to picture and if you ask me to describe someone I am almost always at a loss (I might be able to do hair color or what they were wearing, but I am much better at “the guy at the party who talked about X”)
I’m terrible at visualizing faces. Which made me a terrible witness when I was robbed, incidentally.
That’s totally crappy *hug*
I hope the police didn’t give you a hard time about it.
They were very kind, luckily. And it’s been over two years since it happened now, so it’s just a vague bad memory – which did get replayed in my mind a lot the first two-three weeks after it happened. I wonder how people with aphantasia react in such situations, come to think of it.
I remember emotions much better than I remember visual anything, so if I were in such a situation I’d probably be (a) remembering how awful I felt and (b) trying out various mental scenarios about what I could have done differently.
Yeah, I have PTSD, and when I read his description I was like huh, I think this guy is immune to PTSD, that’s an advantage at least…
Oh man, I always tell my friends that I’d be the world’s worst eyewitness. I don’t know what colour their jacket was! I don’t remember their face! I mean, they had eyes. And a nose. I’d remember if they didn’t have a nose. That’s about all I’d notice, though.
I’ve always thought this wasn’t the worst thing. I’d be able to say “If you leave now I won’t be able to id you later- I’m horrible at faces.” and then they wouldn’t need to hurt me!
Most people are highly unreliable at eyewitness identification, if it makes you feel any better.
My friend is just like this! She remembers much better when she has seen pictures of something. So she always takes pictures. Pre-cell phones, she kept cameras everywhere. If she missed a night or event, she almost can’t remember it.
I was like that for a really long time! Photos of everything, of everyone, all the time. Otherwise I really can’t remember what things looked like. It’s also why I really value GOOD photos – I’ll sink a lot of money into a good camera or a photo session with a good photographer, because I want to feel like I’ll actually remember things.
Yeah, generally I can look at someone and think “ah, I know that face” but trying to conjure it up in my memory is totally not happening. It’s bizarre because we’ve always lived far from extended family, so on the rare occasions when I see an aunt or cousin or whatever in real life, I’m always terrified I won’t recognize them because I don’t have their face “saved” in my mind.
Ooh yeah, I was long distance for ages with my spouse and he eventually began wearing a specific jacket to pick me up at the airport because I could remember his jacket when I couldn’t remember his face at all. (Beyond “supposedly looks like a blond young version of my dad but has hair and a goatee.”) And recently he shaved the goatee and I kept losing him at the grocery store… Thankfully he’s a) growing it back and b) knows to call me by his private nickname to twig my voice recognition.
I’m pretty good at recognising people, but the first time I went to visit my ex I got out of customs/immigration and he wasn’t there. I got kind of nervous, had no idea where he was, but I saw this very attractive man walking towards me, so I at least had some eye candy. Then I realised the attractive man was my boyfriend and I was a very happy lady indeed!
I was just coming to comment here! It was a huge relief to find out I’m not the only one and talking it out with you yesterday was super helpful, honestly.
Key differences for me: I remember and dream, and am very good with music, but as no picture forms in my head, I (we) read LIGHTNING-FAST. But then I have little recall for what happened because I didn’t SEE it.
Whoa – didn’t realise it affected your recall! I am so obsessive about phrasing that I’ll remember things for years afterwards. My friends and I are watching Outlander (I’ve been reading the books since I was 14) and every now and then I’ll mention that something isn’t like the book and quote the exact line that differs from the show.
My friend, on the other hand, gets these detailed mental pictures that are often only tangentially related to actual descriptions, and so she’ll get annoyed when it doesn’t match her head. She’s learned not to argue with me about character descriptions, though, because I’ll remember the words and she’ll just remember what she thought the person would be.
ETA: Also, glad I could help! I love being able to talk to people who experience this – helps me feel less weird/alone.
I remember a lot of plot elements (like right now I am stuck because I am remembering parts of a story about a woman who forces her way into marrying a genius sportscaster and doesn’t realize he is mentally disabled, forces him to get a job with like ESPN and he gets so upset the first day he’s on air he shits himself) but sometimes fine details slip past! I always had a hard time with close analysis on exams unless the text was still in front of me.
My sister is a ridiculously visual person, and has tons of visual images going on in her head constantly, and sharing that article with her yesterday helped her “see” (pun only slightly intended) my point of view a bit better.
She’s learned not to argue with me about character descriptions, though, because I’ll remember the words and she’ll just remember what she thought the person would be.
I have this problem a LOT with books. To the point that I know my experience of the book, the way I visualized things, and the things that stuck out to me might not be a faithful representation of what actually occurred. I’ll have to reread my own goodreads review (which I wrote using the book as a reference, to make sure I got everything right) to get an accurate description.
This is basically me too! I definitely don’t see images, but I can imagine sounds for the most part and have a good short term memory. Do you dream in images? I honestly don’t know if I do or not, I wake up with only the ideas of my dreams as just words (like all my other thoughts).
This is interesting as I consider myself a highly visual person, and I’m a pretty fast reader, but my recall for books / quotes is also pretty terrible.
However visualization is how I do math… I manipulate numbers by “physically” moving them around in my mind’s eye. My mom is the same way, and it let us do basic operations pretty quickly.
So The Man in the Tan Jacket wasn’t that unsettling a figure for a lot of people, is what I’m hearing.
Hahahahaha, no! Oh man, I hadn’t even thought of that. It was just like “Oh, okay, so that’s a thing to know about this character.” Not unsettling at all – just what people do! They leave and you can’t remember their face.
Yeah, it’s supposed to be all ominous and stuff, this power he has over people’s minds.
I learn so much at the Toast.
Wait, in Night Vale? It never occurred to me that that was ominous. I just went “well if he’s always in the same coat, that’s how I would remember him yes.”
Huh.
This is like when a friend tried to explain her synaesthesia to me.
I saw it via a friend of mine who has this – it’s so interesting watching different types of people try to understand each other in the comments. For example my friend can imagine sounds but not images – so he can play songs in his head or imagine voices but images – nope. Also his sister has it as well which by the standards of facebook means that there is almost certainly some kind of genetic component.
I wonder if this affects people’s preferences between books and movies. I could understand having a harder time getting into books if you can’t realize visualize what the books are describing.
So I had this conversation with a few people, and both sides looked at the other saying, “But, how can you even enjoy reading?” It seems EXHAUSTING to me to have to build a mental picture – I bop happily along to the rhythm of the words, letting the sounds work through me and particular bits of phrasing really stand out to me. My mom can’t imagine not *seeing* the worlds in books and feels badly that I can’t. It does really explain why I find descriptive passages super tedious and why it took me years to figure out how to include descriptions in my own writing. I never understood why people wanted that before, but now it’s like, oh! They can see things, so they WANT to see things! It’s important to them! Mind. Blown.
So for me when I’m ‘picturing’ something from a book, or audio, or anything without an explicit visual element it isn’t really the same as recalling someone I know or scenes from a film or something. It’s more like when you remember a conversation and the topics you talked about and the gist of peoples opinions and emotions but not the exact words. As opposed to projecting a photo on a screen inside my head which is the best way I can think to describe thinking of a face I know.
When I read, I have a mental image of what’s going on, but it’s almost incidental to the actual word descriptions. I find it tiring as hell to wade through a lush paragraph of description and try to integrate it all into what I’m imagining–it’s much easier to skim through and let my mind integrate whatever bits I happen to pick up into the scene it already conjured.
(I mostly conjure a sort of bare-bones, spatial representation of what’s happening, anyway. Where people are standing, the room layout of the house they’re in, etc. Sometimes I reread a book and realize I still remember the layout I imagined for the character’s apartment.)
I often miss descriptions of what characters look like.
I am a visual person. For me, when I’m reading a book I’m really into, I pretty much feel like I’m inhabiting the world, to the point of tuning out entirely everything around me. I actually can get lost in it a bit (if it is an enjoyable book). Books that don’t grip me in that way are the ones I struggle with.
*really, not realize
I don’t have a particularly strong visual imagination, but I still prefer books to movies. For me, the primary joy of reading is the language, so I get more into the nitty-gritty of the construction of the book, or really great individual sentences and stuff than most people. My own attempts at prose writing are very dialogue heavy because I just don’t imagine visual stuff that much – it’s hard for me to write it in a way that doesn’t seem really forced because that’s fairly incidental to how I imagine a scene.
…
…
OH OF COURSE that’s why when I write anything my first draft is literally just the conversation/the character’s thoughts. It all makes sense now!
I couldn’t help thinking of my great-grandma, who lost most of her short-term memory for the last 10-15 years of her life due to strokes.
She couldn’t follow most TV shows (because she couldn’t remember what happened), but she really enjoyed watching football because she could follow what was happening in the present moment.
My mum and I both have difficulty recognising people we’ve met before. It’s not extreme – this only really applies to people we’ve met a few times, like, enough that they recognise us and know our names – but it’s notable that we both have it and my gran possibly has it too.
I kind of suck at visualization- like, I can see a beach or a face, but it’s bare-bones outlines. Same with spelling, where I can sorta get a complicated word out but I’d feel a lot better if I could piece “sesquipedalian” out on paper first. Which is weird because as a person on the autism spectrum, I’m supposed to be great at visualization.
They’re beginning to rethink that visualization & autism thing. Of course this all goes into the cold vs. flu autism theory that there may be multiple medical conditions with similar symptoms. Back before we could tell the difference between bacteria and viruses all upper respiratory illnesses were thought to be the same. So there’s a chance the visualization-strong autism has a different cause than the other kinds.
Edit: “Cause” is the wrong word here but I’m not with it enough today to think of a better one. “Mechanism”?
I consider myself pretty visual, but spelling is way easier in writing than say speaking it out loud. I think for me the process of speaking it kind of “erases” it from my mind, or I don’t get a chance to visualize it?
Thank you for that article! That is fascinating. As someone trying to learn art (drawing and painting) in order to get the complex visual ideas in my head out into some kind of reality (and it’s super frustrating when you are just starting and can’t do that) it blows my mind to think of not having an inner “picture”.
I see a lot of discussion below about recognizing faces. I am very good at recognizing faces (possibly too good) but I am terrible at remembering the names that go with them or contexts (if I come across a person without context).
I’ll see someone on the train and cannot recall if they work with me or if I’ve just seen them on the train before. Drives me crazy.
Oh man, that public defender article is so good! I hope she’s right about it being scalable – I’d really love to see this kind of holistic approach take off.
I am so excited that her next project is in my hometown – it is badly needed.
That’s the sort of thing I went to law school for! (Unfortunately, I can’t afford to do it for another 20+ years…)
Last weekend my coworker was peer pressured by cyclists into shaving his legs.
(I’m laughing because this guy is susceptible as hell to peer pressure. Of course this is a thing that happened to him. He’s also convinced that he needs a women’s razor to get a better shave, but that one’s all on him.)
I haven’t shaved my legs in maybe 10 years (I am a cis lady) but road rash is the one thing that makes me consider it. Especially the very special kind with gravel and mud in.
Does having shaved legs make that much of a difference? It sounds like it would be really nasty either way.
Well it’s definitely not as good as NO road rash, but in my experience, it’s easier to get the mud and gravel out if the legs are shaved, and if it’s gross enough to need to be covered, obviously that’s a lot nicer.
Wait? Is that why? I thought it was so leg hair doesn’t get caught in stuff.
Stuff as in like…..the chain or derailleur? Your leg hair would have to be extremely and unusually long to get snagged in that, I think. Mine is really long and it’s never gotten snagged in anything, and I’ve been cycling nearly 20 years now.
I don’t bike and I’m prone to imagining worst-case-scenarios. I’m glad to hear this is deeply unlikely.
That’s funny,because I buy men’s razors because they are cheaper, yet are the same. Silly man!
Ditto! I was like “well, if he is right I have been hosing myself for ages over here” 😉
Wait, so is HE a cyclist? Or did gang of cyclists just pull up aside him and start taunting him?
Lolol, now I’m picturing a Kate Beaton-style illustration of some cyclists yelling “NICE GAMS” and laughing at coworker guy.
He is, sort of! I think he’s been cycling for a while, but hasn’t had much interaction with cycling culture? The peer pressure happened at a race he participated in last weekend.
Hi! I’ve been lurking for a while and usually read everything too late to comment. However, I couldn’t pass this up. Racing cyclists shave their legs for aerodynamics. At least that’s what they did in the late eighties… I have a friend who still does this.
As a married, cis-woman, I have not shaved my legs in at least a year. Only when it gets hot…
That ear infections piece is interesting! (Of course I clicked that first, I’m a mom cliche.) I too had near-constant ear infections as a kid, which the doctor blamed on my “tiny Asian ear tubes.” Of my two kids, the oldest has had ONE ear infection, the youngest none. When the older one was going through it, someone told me to squirt breastmilk in her ear (we were still nursing at the time). I did not. Amazingly, the antibiotics worked just fine without my natural cure-all.
“tiny Asian ear tubes.” *eyes-bug-out emoji*
Oh yes, I remember reading an article in the Journal of Pediatrics about how 60% of the world’s population suffers greatly, deeply, horrifically from otitis media. It brings educational efforts and the world’s economy to a screeching halt, yearly, as all the Asian Kids stay home from school and the Asian Parents stay home to care for them.
“squirt breast milk in her ear” good gravy
someone else told me to squirt it on skinned knees? I just lol thinking about how this person must have assumed I’d go through life whipping out my boob and indiscriminately shooting breastmilk everywhere.
(I mean, that is what happened at the beginning, but it was accidental, I had oversupply issues)
like if some kid fell off their bike in front of you
“Stand back everyone, I’ve got this — I’m…LACTATING.”
I have also seen it recommended for pink eye. However, having had pink eye as an adult, all I’m gonna say is pass the antibiotic eye drops.
Things I’ve been told to put breast milk on: cradle cap, baby acne, stuffy baby noses, bug bites, skinned knees, diaper rash.
Things I’ve put breast milk on: the counter and floor when I accidentally spilled a bottle.
almost all of those things go away on their own
except for floors and counters, I don’t know how well breast milk would work on those
I couldn’t see through all my tears. Shoulda put the milk on them!
There was a Sawbones podcast last week on ear infections, and they mentioned the breastmilk as a folk remedy thing!
Sawbones! Glad to know other toasties enjoy that show.
It was the toast that recommended it to me!
My whole childhood is a muffled blur of actifed and amoxicillin for the rotating ear infections I had. I retroactively blame my ginormous Caucasian eustachian tubes for producing so much wax.
I had an outer ear infection a few years back that resulted in Bell’s Palsy. Good times.
Ugh.
I had constant ear issues as a kid and artificial banana is a flavour I LOVE whereas fake-cherry is super gross to me and both are a result of kid meds for my ears.
I had so many ear infections. I was excited about them because the antibiotics I’d get were delicious. We called it the pink stuff, and it was this opaque light pink liquid that we’d have to shake up before taking it. But sometimes instead the doctor would prescribe another kind, and my parents would try to trick me by saying it was the pink stuff, but it was actually a translucent darker pink that was disgusting. Maybe that was the fake-cherry you experienced.
I had soooooo many ear infections (and I was breastfed). I remember the first antibioticyou are talking about, kind of tasty. At one point I got an antibiotic that was, I think, banana flavored? It was a milky yellow and absolutely disgusting, they were trying to cover up some vile bitter flavor and it just didn’t work. I still have a really strong aversion to banana flavoring.
Oh my god I’m the same. That banana gunk was absolutely disgusting. To this day I can only eat bananas as fruit, never in anything else (muffins, bread, candy, etc.) because of it.
(well, fruit and those banana marshmallows. only those two things)
That banana stuff! I totally had to take it as well as a child when my friend’s sister got whooping cough. It was so nasty.
I LOVED that pink stuff during my many, many childhood ear infections.
That opaque light pink stuff that tastes like bubblegum is probably amoxicillin. I had it during all of my MANY bouts of strep throat as a kid and it is delicious.
The exact same drugs had the completely opposite effect on me! I will eat fake cherry flavoured stuff until I get a reaction headache from the chemicals but the banana smell makes me gag.
I’ve got to say, breastmilk is at least better than the “natural remedy” my cousin suggested when I had swimmer’s ear, which was to squirt fresh urine into my ear canal.
Eeeww.
I have a friend who tried to convince me to put fresh urine on my eczema. No thank you.
I got them a few times, and my sister got them a lot. I do remember them being extremely painful, so I’m glad kids don’t have to go through that as much these days.
I am 29 years old and had not one single ear infection my entire life until I was 26 and got one as a result of surfing in polluted water in Brazil. I am AMAZED at how many of my peers on this thread seem to have had constant ear infections! How! How could you deal with that pain??? I was formula-fed after six weeks so it’s not my mother’s magic breastmilk.
I was so excited to read that article! I had tons of ear infections as a kid, and had tubes multiple times, as did my husband, so I’ve been worrying that our son would also be prone to ear infections. This gives me hope! One of my few childhood memories is how painful ear infections were. :/ Also how weird it was when they took the tubes out and gave them to me scotch-taped to a tongue depressor.
Nicoleeeeeee that picture is straight out of a fairy tale.
Can we talk about the letter writer who moved across the country to escape her mother?
There are consequences for treating your kids badly! They don’t let you see their own kids so you can do the same thing again!
And the aunt is like, yeah, she was treated badly, but she should get over it because it makes other people sad. I’m glad Mallory gave her what for.
Mallory is SO good at seeing through people’s bullshit. Same with the letter about Memorial Day.
OMG. The Memorial Day letter. WTF?!?!?!?!?!?
It was going along, so straightforward and miss manners-y and tame, about a mild foot-in-mouth and what effort should be done to recover! And then, “also we hate our marriages and I’m trying to use this as a cover to start an emotional affair”.
I was totally bewildered by what the real question was/where the letter was going, and then all of a sudden BAM “we’re both in awful marriages.” *headdesk*
That memorial day letter answer was a work of beauty. And also leaves me reflecting on how people put things in their letters like they are BEGGING to be called on their shit.
The thing is, if the mom really doesn’t realize she did anything wrong, the aunt should tell her.
The two examples she brings up are the mom being a lot stricter with the older kid than the younger one, and favoring the boy over the girl, neither of which is OK, but both of which are common enough that the mother may just not get it. She’ll never be able to change or ask for forgiveness if she doesn’t know she needs to.
I agree with Mallory that it’s between mother and daughter. If she moved across the country to get away from the family but didn’t acknowledge why, she has the right to have those boundaries respected. It seems to me that the LW chiming in would inflect things with her own desire to smooth it over. She is minimizing it (nearly) as much as the mother is.
Yessss, absolutely agree. If I was the daughter and found out my aunt who I confided in both minimized my mom’s behavior and also told my mother I would be furious and that aunt would no longer be a part of my life.
You both make very good points. It’s possible I sympathize unduly with the aunt because it sounds like she is the person her sister unloads on emotionally and she’s running out of cope. Maybe she should just tell her sister to get counseling and go on a trip with her phone turned off. If the therapist her sister sees is any good maybe zie can nudge her in the right direction.
I maybe cried while reading that? Yes, of course, the niece is deliberately choosing to still be upset and mad about a thing just to annoy you, if you tell her to “get over it” it will magically disappear and the damage will be done. It is so great and validating to see a response like Mallory’s instead of “get over it.”
Also I came across some people on reddit discussing how great Mallory’s response was to this particular letter and then, “hey she writes for some website called the Toast, I wonder what that is?” so HI AND WELCOME, reddit people, I assume you’re all Toast commenters now!
Re: Reddit knowing about Mallory. This could go well, or very very poorly.
I just see this letter, and the letter referenced in the title/URL – “I’m marrying a man who doesn’t love me so I can have kids,” and I can’t help but put them together in my mind. Please, somebody, think of the children, etc.
Yeesh – see also “My husband does know that I would divorce him if I could afford to and am only staying to give my stepdaughter a communal home until she graduates high school next year.”
This tendency we have to say that abused children need to forgive their mothers- especially their mothers. Because “she’s your mother.”
Tell my niece how she is killing her mother?
Oh my God, can we please ban people from using this phrase ever again? It’s the actual worst.
(I guess when I was growing up, at least I usually got the slightly more creative “You’re driving nails into my coffin,” but I’m not really sure that’s an upgrade?)
Oh god I feel you. Let’s add ‘Look what you’re doing to your mother!’ to the ban pile.
I’M NOT DOING ANYTHING TO HER. SHE’S DOING IT TO HERSELF.
(Luckily it’s been a looong time since I was faced with anything like that, and family relations are very harmonious these days, but even *hearing* someone use a phrase like that starts the rage stroke)
Yes, exactly! Siiiigh.
If/when I get given “Look what you’re doing to your mother,” I’m totally stealing that as the best possible reply though.
SPEAKING OF this week’s Dear Prudence, did anyone see the one about the person complaining about having to get “kosher” food for their Muslim in-law????
…which immediately tells you so much about the level of respect the writer had for the Muslim in-law’s religion.
I KNOW! Not only complaining about, but considering LYING about it. Madness. Utter selfish madness.
As a prairie born-and-bred vegetarian, I get this a LOT. It is not religious, so a different KIND of contempt, but the venom with which people spit “it’s just a little ground beef, it is not going to KILL you” at me is… surprising. And then they’re all like “why don’t we ever see your awesome face?” and i just don’t understand how they would think i WANT to see them.
That said, DO NOT LIE TO PEOPLE ABOUT THE FOOD YOUR ARE FEEDING THEM. If you don’t want to go halal, fine, tell the person. I bring my own food to family meals _all of the time_, it is not that haaaaaaaaaard.
Chicken broth doesn’t count.
Bacon’s not really meat.
But we’ve always put ham in the beans!
And halal food is so easy to find! I buy the halal roasting chickens at my grocery store because they’re a little bit cheaper and nicer than the regular chickens. And they haven’t been bathed in sodium.
I did not see this, but I have a lot of Muslim friends who ask hosts to buy meat labeled “Kosher” because it’s more readily available than “Halal”, and the practices are similar. Muslims are typically allowed to eat meat prepared by Christians or Jews so long as it is slaughtered in a particular way, and if I recall correctly Kosher rules require the same form of slaughter. So that writer might have gotten the idea there – e.g. the in-law trying to be helpful says they can buy steak marked “kosher” for the dinner party, which is available at most grocery stores (rather than going to a halal butcher/grocery store).
That’s certainly possible, but judging by the tone of the letter (where the LW and their husband were seriously considering lying to the Muslim in-law about the food they’re serving him) I wouldn’t be inclined to be so charitable in this case.
No! I definitely don’t condone lying about food and those hosts sound terrible! I’m just saying the use of “kosher” *might* not be an indicator of their horribleness (and it’s not like we need any additional info beyond “lying about food” to judge them).
Kashrut standards are more stringent than halal standards for slaughtering on several points, so most Muslims who eat halal will eat kosher meat but most Jews who keep kosher will not eat halal meat.
Reminds me of the time my aunt put bacon in the broccoli salad and didn’t tell anyone. We had a vegetarian, a keeper of kashrut, and someone who doesn’t eat red meat at the table. Rude.
Did anyone see the letter last week that I think came from a Toastie? The exact same specific story was told in a LR here, about a long-distance not-boyfriend whom she skyped with and said, “I love you,” then realized another woman was in the room??
Yes! I was trying to remember where I’d seen that story before. That dude needs to at the VERY LEAST brush up on some LDR/non-monogamy etiquette, because dang.
I had to stop speaking to/interacting with my mother about a year ago after years and years of her crossing the line, and I’ve felt terribly guilty about it (and even worse for realizing that I enjoy my life so much more without her in it) ever since, even though I know it’s the best decision for me… reading Mallory’s response to that LW really helped me breathe easier and realize that I’m not obligated to be the one to mend the bridge that she burned. As long as she thinks that my “attitude” and “problems” are the result of “something seriously wrong with [me], spiritually and emotionally,” she can stay in my blocked folder.
So as always… thank you, Mallory.
Go you!
I have two essays and three finals before I am done with my BA! Yeah!!!
You can do it!!!!!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-women-dea…?
I got very excited when I saw this article on how female astronauts deal with periods in space; I don’t know what I was expecting, hi-tech tampons or specific waste disposal systems, but its seems NASA’s solution is ‘don’t have periods’ (Pill or IUD usage to suppress periods), which is fine I guess, but not as cool as I wanted.
IUD to suppress periods sounds kinda risky. Isn’t it pretty much 50/50 whether you get no periods or ALL PERIOD ALL THE TIME?
It certainly doesn’t work for everyone or even consistently for the same person. I had no periods for about 3 years in the middle and then random periods for 2 years, with my Mirena.
It says at the end of the article that the current recommendation is that astronauts get the implant/IUD 1.5-2 years before their mission to ensure its working correctly; So yeah I’d imagine if your one of the period all the time people (my biggest fear of IUDs) then you’d have to figure something else out
Period all the time person here, including 13 weeks straight of at least spotting every day.
Finally got it out after 11 months. I had to change doctors because the first doctor kept saying to be patient. The new doctor was horrified and took it out the next week. (First doctor was a man, new doctor was a woman… surprised?)
Copper IUD (paraguard) often gives people heavy or long periods. Hormonal IUDs (mirena, skyla) tend to reduce or eliminate periods. Of course, all bodies are unique and different and react differently.
There’s been a LOT of coverage of this because a study finally came out about it! (Studies on specifically female astronauts are uncommon, shock of all shocks. Still kind of mad that the Year in Space crew was two guys, because if that was supposed to be forward-looking for long term missions it sends some… questionable implications.) We’ve come a long way from NASA blundering its way through how many pads Sally Ride might need, but it’s still fairly overlooked part of space travel.
So, after all the articles about male managers/family members being grossed out jerkfaces about periods, I ended up reading that tidbit about Sally Ride and found it kind of charming. Like, they still didn’t know squat, but at least they assumed it was a constant thing and not just something women would control.
That cracked me up so much when I read about it. But at least they were making an effort to make her more comfortable. “So, she needs, like……. ten thousand of these? Okay, we’ll pack them!”
It’s still cool! Because you can open the medicine cabinet in the morning and go, “time to take my astronaut pill!” Or point to your belly and go, “Space technology is in there.”
The reality is so disappointing, though, like that “astronaut ice cream”.
I was similarly disappointed.
[Content warning for sexual harassment]
I don’t know if this article on the experiences of female students in STEM made the rounds of the toast when it was published, but I just came across it: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/opinion/sunday/…
Choice quote:
She forwarded an email she had received from a senior colleague that opened, “Can I share something deeply personal with you?” Within the email, he detonates what he described as a “truth bomb”: “All I know is that from the first day I talked to you, there hadn’t been a single day or hour when you weren’t on my mind.” He tells her she is “incredibly attractive” and “adorably dorky.” He reminds her, in detail, of how he has helped her professionally: “I couldn’t believe the things I was compelled to do for you.” He describes being near her as “exhilarating and frustrating at the same time” and himself as “utterly unable to get a grip” as a result. He closes by assuring her, “That’s just the way things are and you’re gonna have to deal with me until one of us leaves.”
BURN IT DOWN.
I remember that piece. Burn it down indeed.
it really kind of makes me appreciate cultural traditions where — even though they were super emotionally-repressed — the honorable thing to do if you were a dude who was attracted to a co-worker or something was to simply pine away in absolute silence until you died.
I found the piece via a comment on Captain Awkward’s latest, and the Captain has great advice for people who find themselves with a crush on a co-worker who is unavailable, uninterested, or subordinate to them: write it down in a journal, sing a song about it in your room, tell a friend. You don’t even have to pine away in absolute silence!
you don’t have to, if you’re WEAK
It’s a more romantic and heroic image to bear this cross in stoic silence, while no-one knows the pain in your heart.
You are my favorite commenter on The Toast. You crack me up every time. I generally just lurk and don’t comment much — but just needed to give you KUDOS.
oh well thanks, I do my best O_o
that’s probably still what this guy thinks he’s doing
WASP-y emotional repression FTW
Or move to South Africa, like Trevor Howard in “Brief Encounter”.
I was thinking of even like old-time Cyrano de Bergerac kind of stuff, where it is okay to confess your love on your deathbed and not a second before.
I don’t know how I’d never heard of Hillsborough before, and I did in fact google, and JESUS.
Also, I don’t know how I’ve made it to eight years of marriage before I realized we share the date with Chernobyl. I can’t wait to dive into articles about that, because it fascinates me and I dig seeing pictures of nature creeping back into disaster areas.
I spent grades 2-9 in Texas and that was a wild, wild time. Mercifully for me half of my teachers pointedly mocked the curriculum and took it on themselves to teach more than just white (sometimes fictional) men, but it was a WILD. TIME. Nothing springs to mind from my history classes (honestly I don’t remember LEARNING history, really, which is itself alarming and probably why I stubbornly majored in it), but I have so many science stories. At the start of biology, for example, my teacher announced, “Technically, I need to teach Intelligent Design with just as much weight as evolution and but this is a SCHOOL. If hearing about evolution offends you, you have the right to request a different teacher, and I’ll give you the people to contact to switch, but I’m not doing that.” Three people changed classes.
The only history I DO remember learning in Texas was, shockingly, Texas history. Go ahead, ask me about the Texas revolution. We spent a FULL YEAR ON IT.
Texas is sort of deeply terrifying in a lot of ways.
“Three people changed classes”
So, future members of some congressional science committee, right?
Well, naturally! After all, we can’t have scientists or anyone with a scientific background on that committee, it’d be a BIAS!
(Too. Real.)
I grew up in Denver and we spent all of 7th grade focused on Colorado history (pioneers! gold mines! silver mines! Unsinkable Molly Brown!). This included watching the entire “Centennial” miniseries, which seemed to be 78 hours long. And yet I ended up knowing very little of the native history that I stumbled upon as an adult.
Ah, state history. We did that in 7th grade, too. Of course in Louisiana we got Pierre of the Iron Hand and pirates like Jean Lafitte to liven things up.
Yes, I also grew up in Texas and despite spending junior high and early high school in unaccredited Baptist schools, I got my full year of Texas history.
I remember a lot from my fifth-grade history textbook, which was part of the A Beka Book curriculum (sent out by Pensacola Christian College). I remember learning about the First and Second Great Awakening in early American history, figures such as Jonathan Edwards. The only point I’ll give them is also teaching us about Phyllis Wheatley, first African-American female poet, but I know very well they chose to highlight her because she was so good and exemplified Christian obedience and her owners were so kind. (I looked up her entry on Wikipedia just now, and I DON’T remember learning about her incredibly hard and short adult life ending at 31.)
But I never, ever learned about the Freedom Riders as part of civil rights history.
Huh, you know, history was always my best and most favorite subject… but I really tuned out those TX classes (I lived in SanAnton for about 5 years). I couldn’t get /anything/ out of them, and didn’t recover my love of the subject until I switched to a private school! My brain must have rejected all of that bullshit in a fit of self-preservation.
Long time reader, first time commenter, btw. HI ALLONSY AND OTHER TOASTIES! I also wasted my entire 8th grade year on the Texas Revolution, and am down to discuss it if that’s your thing.
SAME HERE. And living in SA meant constant, CONSTANT, trips to the Alamo. It’s not that great! Texas History was the worst and crazy and I blocked so much of it out.
THIS THIS THIS. also the abstinence only education meant that there was a daycare nearby premises almost specifically JUST for the students’ children. i had previously gone to school in Washington state and man did i blow kids’ minds.
We had a student daycare in my urban high school in upstate NY, too. (We did actually have decent and pretty explicit sex ed, but they obviously started way too late…)
I went to elementary school in two states, so I got the This One City Got Founded And Then We Killed All The Native Americans History Year and the William Penn Invited Quakers In And Then The American Revolution And Gettysburg Happened History Year.
I’m struggling so hard with something. I want to live in a world where assault survivors aren’t doubted disproportionately more than victims of other crimes. Then I read this thing about patients at Mercy Ministries fabricating abuse stories “in order to fit in” and the thing about Jeannine Risley fabricating a rape story, and I feel so freaking conflicted and confused and I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. I’m so sorry for people suffering with a mental illness that convinces them making up stories like that is a good idea. I can empathize with that Munchausen’s thing, the deep desire for support and kindness. And I’m furious at them, because I feel like by making up those stories they’re betraying me and undermining my own experiences of abuse. I just don’t know how to untangle it. Does anybody have any ideas?
It isn’t just the mental illness that convinces them that it’s a good idea, though, it’s also an appalling, abusive and possibly gaslighting environment. Things that are utterly wrong in a non-abusive environment, like lie, cheat, or steal, can be basic survival in an abusive environment, and I don’t think you can judge people by the same standards. Does that make any sense?
wow, yes, that’s a good point. i never really thought of it in those terms. Yes, regarding the Mercy situation that absolutely does make sense.
Why do you suppose that became part of the culture there? Maybe to give patients something to blame for their discomfort? Something other than a disease, and other than the bad practices at the institution itself.
Oh man, thank you so much for articulating this. It’s something I’ve also struggled with and tried to talk about here (badly), but the way you summed it up is so true and important to keep in mind. (I lied in a coldly calculating way when I was twelve, and I remember the desperation that drove me to it, but it’s still messed with my adult perception of the “trust women implicitly and without question” mantra.) ETA: EVEN THOUGH I’m pissed that those I talked to and who heard later about it didn’t throw up some flags and try to find out what was going on and, even if I were lying, why I would say that.
Popping in here to add that in this kind of abusive “therapy” environment patients are often browbeaten and bullied by the therapists that they are “holding back” or repressing some (nonexistent) trauma. One of my friends was in a Christian wilderness camp for “troubled girls” and had to manufacture stories about being abused to get the counselors to lay off–give them what they’re looking for in order to make the bullying stop, essentially.
It’s okay to be angry at them. The people who are making up stories hurt a range of people: the accused abusers, the people who listen and sympathize, people who’ve experienced abuse and feel their own experience has now been minimized or made instrumental. I would focus more on the fact that if the people doing this have a mental illness, they are not really doing it deliberately/in the kind of conscious way that someone without a mental illness might.
Also, whatever they say or do has nothing to do with you or your experience — I would try to hold onto that, because it is true. These are unrelated people.
That is the best I can do — it is a hard thing to think through and deal with, definitely.
Thank you so much, spring chickens.
In the face of something so serious it feels incredibly glib to say “you do you,” but I actually think that’s the best thing for it–you (universal “you” for survivors, not pointing a finger) know your truth and are best equipped to express it. People do make things up but it’s a ridiculously tiny number relative to the real numbers of people who have been assaulted or abused. I think if you’e trying to treat everyone with kindness it’s still fine to be furious at people whose needs are causing them to do harm on this level–you can wish them well/send them loving-kindness without having to get involved with them directly, and continue to do the difficult work of speaking and living your own truth. I don’t know if that helps, but I relate to your conflicted feelings about it. Sometimes an engaged detachment is the best, and only, medicine.
Thank you. I think that detatchment thing is very astute advice- I’m personalizing something that is only tenuously related to me. I’m so relieved to know I’m not the only person with conflicted feelings.
hey – yeah, thanks so much for bringing up these feelings because I have them too – I want want want so desperately everyone to be believed unquestioningly when they tell people about abuse.
For me, because my experience of abuse was undermined/relegated to fantasy at a young age, I sometimes attack myself with allegations that I’m a malingerer / Munchausen sufferer and that I’ve invented the whole thing (my therapist tells me NO to this in capital letters btw) – it makes stuff like this really difficult to handle – (especially! especially with therapists in the roles of abusive enablers). I really appreciate the stuff about remembering that you are you/detaching from these other unrelated situations.
The fact that the Toast (which is definitely my favorite Web site) posts updates about Tegan & Sara (who have been my favorite band since the released So Jealous when I was in high school) makes me INCREDIBLY HAPPY.
OT, but I received a particularly gross query from a dude author that spent 90% talking about my appearance (in my professional portrait), 8% telling me what a genius he is, 2% actually describing his novel. I know from experience, when I send the politely worded form rejection, I will get a Nice Guy/Genius Author rant that I’m just not a good enough publishing professional for his work & I’m actually ugly. The shit that gets sent to my professional outlook from male writers belongs on #byefelipe. I need a swipeleft button FOR WORK. FOR WORK.
WHAT. That is horrifying. I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised that men violate professional boundaries like that, but…way to burn a bridge, dude! You legitimately hold all the power in that situation…does he not realize that? I guess not.
I’m so sorry. I work in the production side of academic publishing, so I don’t really see that shit.
I…don’t think they think of it as professional, tbh. I get stuff that’s like, “I’m sitting at home at 3 a.m. drinking my whiskey writing to you because [body part] was so captivating…”; since they’re not writing in a professional circumstance, I don’t think they realize I’m reading it in a professional circumstance? As if it should matter? And the rants are always about how they *deserve* to get published & view my job as a mere service to them. So it’s not *my place* to reject them (though, because the patriarchy defies logic, I’ve been disparagingly called “the gatekeeper” implying that it literally is my place?). The parallels between agenting and online dating/MRA/Reddit shit are horrifyingly similar.
Please write a Toast post on this!
I don’t get Toast post! Can I have Toast post? How can I get Toast post?
Hell, PUBLISH it, with his real name!
Man, I am so, so sorry. I’m in a very different field, haha, but I work alone at a very popular local coffee shop and the SHEER GALL of my male customers just amazes me. On a day to day basis I have dudes asking for my name, number, where I live, etc, coming unprompted to sit with me on my breaks, or in more memorable cases just standing by the pastry case staring at me. I have a few guys who only come in on the days I work, during the hours they know I will be there. Often during conversation they try to make it seem as though they know more than me about third wave coffee, my actual job. A guy once followed me all the way ON TO my train at night and I almost called the cops on him. He apparently just wanted to know if I’d go out with him sometime.
I quit the funeral industry/schooling for a few years, though I will be going back to school this fall, because my old white male coworkers and teachers were equally as horrifying. I guess you just can’t win!
Just saw this Lemonade review on my timeline and it is LIGHTING UP MY BRAIN: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/…
So this Lemonade thing, I should listen to it right? I’m probably the only person in the Western hemisphere who’s never heard a Beyonce song.
You’ve probably heard a Beyonce song.
I have never really been into Beyoncé myself – just caught a few songs and music videos here and there – but I have HBO GO so I watched Lemonade this weekend. It was captivating, to put it mildly, and while I’m sure listening to the album alone is fantastic, I would highly recommend watching the film. The visuals are STUNNING – beautiful and heartbreaking and haunting – the music is powerful, and the poetry by Warsan Shire is… fucking incredible. I’m super glad I watched it, it has stayed with me for days.
I’m going to wait a bit to read it. He may even have amazing things to say, but a white man’s take on it…should wait.
http://verysmartbrothas.com/dear-white-people-who…
As a child, I had a lot of ear infections and I had pneumonia several times. I missed two weeks of school in Grade 5 because of pneumonia. The last time I had it was in my early 20s and I’m not sure my lung capacity has ever recovered.
I don’t know if these vaccines would help with strep, but I started getting strep throat in my teens and I still get that least once a year and I’m nearly 40! The worst was when I was 19 and had it almost six times in one year. If I had kids and vaccines were available that would help with any of these, I would get the doctor to stick them in a second.
To be fair, I was a preemie and was around a lot of smokers (aunts and grandparents) as a child, so that probably had a lot to do with these constant infections.
Anyway, I don’t understand how vaccines aren’t a no-brainer for some people. Being sick is miserable and dangerous. Be nice to your kids! Let doctors poke them!
I had so many ear infections as a child (all the way through high school) that I have partial hearing loss in one ear. I had so much amoxicillin as a kid that as an adult, I’m intolerant of all the -cillin antibiotics. All this despite having access to some of the best healthcare in North America.
I also had pneumonia in 2012 that resulted in my gaining 30 pounds from the prednisone I had to take to treat it.
All I’m saying is I’d like to go back in time and give that vaccine to baby me.
me toooooo ( on all points #deafiscool ) maybe we can carpool in the time machine.
I actually just contacted my physician about the possibility of getting the vaccination as a healthy adult, in light of my medical history. Cross your fingers, and you can maybe do the same!!
Pneumococcal vaccination is most certainly available for adults. It’s strongly recommended by the CDC for people over about 65 as well as others with risk factors. I got it last fall.
Robin Steinberg of the Bronx Defenders is such a fucking bad-ass. I was in her seminar for a semester in law school and externed there at the same time, and she is so inspiring and unapologetic and amazing. Everything that happened following the Youtube video was total bullshit, including Harvard Law School uninviting her for a symposium (but shout out to the amazing women at HLS who wrote a letter of support for Robin and called the bullshit out).
Remember the North Pond hermit? He’s the guy who lived in the Maine woods not by hunting and gathering, but by stealing from camps. Then neckbeards decided that he was a philosopher hero. Well, he doesn’t want to pay to clean up his old campsite http://www.pressherald.com/2016/04/26/north-pond-…
(I do agree with his lawyer that it’s taking it too far, but still THIS GUY ugh)
It’s rich to complain about the fairness of paying money for restitution when you unapologetically stole from many people for years.
“Knight was seen by some as a folk hero, admired for his ingenuity and survival skills while living in the Maine woods for decades.” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Hey Toasts, this is kind of late and also OT but you seem like good people to ask. What do/can you do if you’re worried that someone you care about but aren’t that close to might be suicidal? Further context in reply.
For further context: a friend from childhood that now lives in the same area as me. We see each other occasionally, like for birthdays and things, but aren’t really in the same circle of friends otherwise. He’s had pretty serious mental health problems in the past, and lately he’s seemed, like, very manic but also really sad? He’s got a lot of good things going on in his life right now, but they’re big changes. He’s been posting a lot on fb and twitter, which is unusual in and of itself – and he’s also posting at all hours of the night, and some things he posts don’t make sense. This morning he commented on a photo I had posted, “thanks for everything,” which to me sounded like “goodbye.” I’m just – super worried? Should I calm down? Say something?
You should not calm down. You are a good friend for noticing these very serious signs, and that’s what they are. These can be symptomatic of mixed manic/depressive episode with psychotic features. (Obviously I am in no position to diagnose this person, but I recognize the elements.) As for practical advice, I am not sure. But your concern comes from the right place.
You say you aren’t really in the same circle of friends. Do you have a common acquaintance that you could ask somewhat subtly if they’ve spoken to him at all, if everything seems ok, if he is sleeping? It is very likely that he needs medical and psychological care, and urgently, but this is a very delicate situation.
Thanks for your comments. My husband was able to check in with him, and he had some family arrive today to help him manage things/get care, thank goodness.
I am so very glad, for you as well as for him. I hope things continue to improve, and that you can breathe a little easier knowing you did a good and brave thing. I am also heartened that he has a nearer network to help get him through.
I’ve had personal experience with people close to me with mental illness and suicide (some successful and some just fantasizing), and frankly I think that warrants a call to a suicide hotline. One you make, I mean, to talk to them about your friend and ask what you should do. They have the training to talk to you about whether or not it’s serious and what steps you should take, if any.
Yes, the “thanks for everything” message rings so many bad, bad bells. Please don’t take on this worry and stress alone, it can be absolutely crushing, no one should carry it by themselves and agonize about whether that one thing they did or didn’t do could have made a difference.
I have not had to confront this situation before myself, but this is the advice I have seen in similar situations – call a good suicide hotline, talk to professionals, get a clear sense about what is and isn’t possible.
Thanks, this is enormously helpful. My husband (also friends with him) is going to lunch with him and another person and I’ve suggested he do this beforehand.
Good, I’m really glad you aren’t the only one who knows him and is involved right now.
It looks like (from the other responses) this situation is under control for the moment, but for reference, here are some things that I have found helpful from other people when having suicidal thoughts:
1. Generally being a friend. This is harder when you’re not in a close circle of friends with the person, but still, quantity as well as quality does help. It’s hard(er) to convince yourself you have nothing worthwhile in your life if a large quantity of people are obviously interested in you as a human being.
2. Expressly noticing what’s going on in someone’s life. One time when I was going through some stuff, as well as having a few close friends be supportive, I remember really clearly getting a letter (written! It was some time ago now) from a person I knew but wasn’t close to, in which she said she had noticed things were going on with me and hoped I was ok, and was there if I needed her. Not everyone’s the same, of course, but part of my thing is sometimes feeling invisible, so it was really significant for me to feel that I was visible to someone outside my close circle.
3. Don’t feel responsible! if this guy’s anything like me, he would be horrified at the thought that anyone felt like they had to take on his problems. I agree with everyone who has suggested talking to a crisis line or other professional about strategies and boundaries. Take care of yourself first. None of this is your fault; you’re amazing for being sensitive enough to pick up on some signals, but that doesn’t make it your problem.
Bless you for being willing to help and wanting to equip yourself to do so. Praying for you and your husband and friend.
This is off topic/open thread-y, but it’s late enough and far enough down I don’t feel so bad about it — I’ve identified as bi for ages, but that’s been feeling more and more Not Right, and two days ago I had the epiphany that I’m gay! (or: did you know you can think a man’s face is cute and like their style without necessarily wanting to get it on with them?? I’ve known that for ages about everyone else across the gender spectrum, but somehow THIS WAS A SURPRISE.) Despite knowing for ages I was into women, being not into men is weirdly scary! so I’ve been practicing saying it everywhere, so — today is a good day, like every day, to be gay \o/
Good job!
Thank you! It’s taken me ages to get here, but get here I have!
(s/o to every single lgbt person I know and am friends with for sticking around while I flailed mightily in confusion, and also Gerard Way for triggering the particular revelation that “I want that suit and that hairstyle” != “and also I want to make out with men” haha)
Hooray for a good day! And for figuring out the best way to be your particular sort of human.
Seinabo Sey, anyone? Elegant, beautiful, powerful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KovrJ8HXI1Q
I first found out about her when N.K. Jemisin tweeted about her, which certainly helped sell me on her.
HOLY **** YOU GUYS I’M WATCHING THE OSPREY CAM AND I JUST SAW HER LAY AN EGG
OMG SO JEALOUS OF YOU
RE Mercy Ministries, it’s just yet another way to blame and demonize women for their emotional issues and retraumatize them. It should be shut down.
Hey toasties!
I just broke up with my girlfriend. I don’t want sympathy because it was a really fucking good decision on my part because I WANTED TO CRAWL OUT OF MY SKIN. But I’d like some suggestions for podcasts, books, movies (that aren’t depressing), comedians, poets, or all-around badass ladies who have decided that a house, a spouse, 2.5 kids, and a picket fence just isn’t for them.
Because in this great 29th year of my life, my Saturn Return is making me say “I might not be a lady who wants to settle down with a partner. I might want to do a different thing.” I’m a queer lady and I kind of bought into the whole idea of “we’re just like straight people, get a wife and some kids!” And that seems great, except I don’t want that. If I “settle down” it’s going to be with my best friend (who also doesn’t want a spouse) and nobody will fart in my bed (thank you, comedian Jen Kirkman, for putting that in perspective).
Congrats on your sound life choices! I am also someone who would like to settle down with a friend and not have to share my bed with anyone.
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is always a popular TV show rec. If you’re looking for something cozy, low-key, and British, Rosemary and Thyme is about two middle-aged ladies solving mysteries and designing gardens.
Are you looking specifically for characters who have considered that lifestyle and rejected it, or are you fine with characters who never consciously rejected it and are just going their own way?
Seconding Miss Fisher, but the books not the TV show.
oh well thanks, I do my best O_o
Part of me wonders if it's a matter of kids being drawn to other kids whose families are like theirs. Like, all of my close friends from my childhood (and me) were raised is families where the MO was "WOW there is some dysfunctional shit going on but mostly the family is okay" because at least one of our parents were all from abusive households but were not abusive themselves. I had not as close friends who were experiencing active abuse and also not as close friends whose families were really and truly healthy, but my closest people were the ones who understood that weird middle ground of "man I am glad I did not grow up like you dad it fucked you UP."