Behold: the North American Cuddlewolf in her natural habitat.
Our beloved Ella and her Tall Man have sold a Cancer Memoir to Picador, and everything you need to know about their respective delightful personalities is in this screenshot (it’s subscriber-only.)
I’ve told John he should try to die after the hardcover but before the paperback, so Ella can tack on a heartwrenching epilogue and will get to do all the morning shows a second time looking wan and beautiful in her grief and it will be GREAT for sales (John firmly encourages me in making incredibly dark jokes about his imminent death, I CHECK IN ABOUT THAT REGULARLY.)
No amount of praise is sufficient for Jenna Wortham’s look at Cher’s Twitter feed:
Eventually, you realize that Cher uses Twitter in its purest and most organic form: a catchall for any and every thought that might drift into her brain. Her methodology is messy and strange in a way that feels borderline extinct at a time when celebrities and aspiring celebrities treat their social-media presence as endless personal infomercials, vehicles for inciting envy and lust as a means of increasing visibility, and in turn, popularity. Most celebrities’ social-media feeds feel painfully self-aware and thirsty — revealing their desperate desire to seem relevant, in on the joke, caught up on the latest Internet memes and trends. (A classic example: When Katy Perry invoked Pepe, a creepy cartoon frog favored by 4chan users, to describe her jet lag last year, some Internet users complained that the meme had become too mainstream.) In her own way, Cher is an outlier, perhaps the last unreconstructed high-profile Twitter user to stand at her digital pulpit and yell (somewhat) incomprehensibly, and be rewarded for it.
The awards-targeted films today that get a minority protagonist tend to be about the most amazing person of that race who’s ever lived. But award movies with white protagonists are just about a white person who did a thing: It’s a white dude who fought a bear, it’s a white lady who lives in Brooklyn, it’s a white lady who invented a mop …
Here is a GREAT roundtable by autistic women (many of them mothers of autistic daughters) about how we can do better for women on the spectrum:
And a lot of forms of attention that a parent or teacher might presume are positive, can be torment. (I have avoided doing things conspicuously in order to avoid being praised for them.)
Emotional sensitivity: we can feel a lot more than we might be able to tell you about, identify, or explain. And more than it might look like we do.
We can also look very emotionally vulnerable or volatile. Little things can mean a lot to us. Sensory issues can have emotional effects. This can be very confusing and hard when paired with Alexithymia, which is the inability to identify or verbalize emotions, or to distinguish between emotions and physical sensations. A girl could be going through a lot and not know any way to tell or show it to you. Just because she behaves well and gets good grades doesn’t mean she’s not having trouble. Quiet girls may be sublimating a lot.
Here is a fun Storify of this WILD conversation we had on my timeline about what we would do first in heaven (whether or not they think heaven is a thing, people seem to have pretty clear ideas about what they would WANT to do in heaven: see loved ones, hug dead pets, eat a LOT of cheese, cloud naps, ask Queen Katherine of Aragon if she and Arthur consummated their marriage…) It all started here:
Oh, and if that’s not your thing, this became one of the most bizarrely life-affirming and fascinating conversations of my life, and you can make a bunch of new friends through it:
People who are tripping balls are often super annoying, but I kind of had a total crush on Cheyenne during his trip.
Bosnia, twenty years on:
Satire has been a part of Bosnia since the start of the warring years. When the bombs started falling in Tuzla, Sarajevo and surrounding cities in 1991, the Surrealists created a satirical sketch, about ethnic divides and the lack of food and water, which eventually became the grim reality.
The attitude perfected by the Surrealists survived the death and carnage of the nineties. Decades later, I can still hear its echoes in not only my family’s vernacular, but also the country’s. You can hear it in the streets: in the way that people greet each other, in casual conversations. Even now, Bosnians like to joke about how great it will be when they finally get a pay cheque someday. The young people here do what they learned from their parents: make the best of any situation, laugh it off and be thankful that the bombs are not dropping.
THIS CHICK FOR PRESIDENT, PLEASE:
“I made a plan that Dan would show up with Yeva at the 2nd checkpoint for breastfeeding,” said Sveta. The checkpoint is located at a cabin resort about 80 miles along the trail.
In addition to the mandatory winter-survival gear all racers are required to bring on their bikes, Sveta had packed a portable breast pump so that she could continue pumping along the wilderness route.
The new UN peacekeeping sexual assault scandal is horrible, and it also reminds me of Canada’s conduct in Somalia:
The United Nations human rights chief said on Friday that new allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers had surfaced in the Central African Republic. The reported crimes involved the troops from the European Union contingent deployed in the country during a period of instability in 2014.
A statement from Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said both boys and girls had been interviewed by UN staff, and told stories of rape and of being paid for performing sexual acts.
“Four of the girls said their abusers were attached to contingents operating as part of the European Union operation,” Zeid said.
An online documentary on how the New York Times failed to report the Holocaust:
While many Americans assume that the Holocaust was a well-kept secret until the concentration camps were liberated, anyone with a New York Times subscription could have read about the atrocities during the Second World War. Regrettably, though, the persecution and murder of Jews was frequently buried by the ‘paper of record’. Of more than 23,000 front-page articles between 1939 and 1945, just 26 were about the Holocaust. This powerful documentary from the US director Emily Harrold recounts how and why the genocide of Jews was neglected and euphemised by the Times.
This LA Times investigation of America’s elderly poor ripped my heart open:
She endures what is for many aging Americans an unforgiving economy. Nearly one-third of U.S. heads of households ages 55 and older have no pension or retirement savings and a median annual income of about $19,000.
A growing proportion of the nation’s elderly are like Westfall: too poor to retire and too young to die.
Nicole, I’m waiting with abated breath to find out the title of that new book you mentioned about the Donner Party.
(also wouldn’t’ “Donner Party” be a great name for a heavy metal band?”
Too late!
A name that awesome called out to be metal band
Sometimes Cher’s twitter feed is the only thing that gets me through my day. (I also truly believe that she has invented technology that allows her thoughts to be directly transmitted to twitter without the need for things like a phone or computer. Those are for mortals).
Charlie got all his vaccinations! I celebrated with the most glamorous cellphone shot possible. Oh, look at those eyes.
Apparently the vet was super-excited to meet him and he’s famous at the vet’s office because of his name. There were also like A HUNDRED DOGS at the vet because we went on saturday afternoon instead of a weekday evening like usual and Charlie nearly went out of his freaking mind with excitement. I was very mean and only let him say hi to, like, two of them because I figure most dogs at the vet don’t need a puppy jumping on their faces and Charlie isn’t very good at being chill.
Look into your eyes, and the sky’s the limit
I’m helpless!
Down for the count, and I’m drownin’ in ‘em
Helpless…
You’ve probably provided this info before, but what breed or mix is he? I loves me some adorable, fluffy small dogs.
Would share a picture of mine, but never quite seem to get the html right.
He is a shihtzu surprise pack! We are not really sure how big he is going to get (the frontrunners for his daddy’s breed are great pyrenees, border collie, or australian shepherd or maybe one of those mixed or ALL MIXED TOGETHER who knows) but he’s already thirteen pounds and likely to keep growing for a while.
But he is so so so fluffyyyy.
Lin-Manuel Miranda got Dwayne Johnson to give a shoutout to a podcast host, and I am officially dead of delight.
The MBMBAM appreciation group is giving me all of my life lately. **greatjob**
WHAT. He got another celebrity to do this? (I can’t look at that because I am at work, but I assume you mean Griffin of MBMBAM?)
Yup! The list of **greatjob**s is now Carly Rae Jepsen, Tyra Banks, and The Rock. If LMM can get Scott Bakula to round out that gang, I think the internet is over.
The first time I saw Lin-Manuel post something in the MBMBAM appreciation group (I think it was just *greatjob*) I seriously spent 15 minutes trying to sleuth out whether it was really him or not.
I quoted his tweet about *greatjob* when it happened and he tweeted *greatjob* back at me and he’s responded to me about MBMBAM again since then and the dude is MAKING MY LIFE A HAPPIER THING.
I love LMM’s love of MBMBAM SO much.
I’m delighted to know there are so many other MBMBAM-toasts. and Lin’s engagement in the appreciation group is enhancing my appreciation of both MBMBAM and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is so clearly living his best life.
Oh you guys, I had not heard of MBMBAM and so went and looked it up and
holy shit
Tim McGraw Krav Maga
once again, Hamilton and you Toasties
fringing me UNIMAGINABLE pleasure
my thanks
y’all are truly my people
Lin honey trolling Griffin is my favorite thing (I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but I just watched the New Girl episode about Winston’s honey roast so this phrase seemed the most appropriate for what Lin is doing)
If any toasties want to continue posting their areas of obscure knowledge below I would be v pleased.
I have a lot of knowledge about grammar and the the DC dining scene; the former is good for my job and the latter is only good for finding delicious ways to overspend.
The only thing I miss about DC is the dining scene. There is no list for Boston the way Tyler Cowen’s list sort of sums up the DC Metro. : (
I have a relatively strong knowledge of the Boston dining scene, too. I used to review restaurants occasionally when I lived there. But yeah it’s got a long way to go to be sure.
I am relatively new to DC, and need to not spend money, but I want to spend all of it on food. Delicious, delicious food. What’s your fav DC restaurant?
KEREN It is right by my house and I go way way too much but it is always good. Also if you like thai and vietnamese food Wheaton is AMAZING.
That’s right by my house, too! Haven’t been yet but I’ve gotta go!
Dc toast meetup?
For sure! There’s also a DC Toast Brunch happening on February 27, location TBD. There’s a email group for DC where we’ve been exchanging ideas.
Is there anyway I can get CCd for any future DC toast meet-ups? I would LOVE to brunch with you all!
Yeah there’s a Toast Google group you can get in on! I’m not the admin so I don’t think I can subscribe you, but it’s [email protected] so maybe you could request somehow? Shoot me your email and I’ll CC you on the next brunch email for sure!
Thank you! My email is kaholloway13 [at] gmail [dot] com!
diablotien at the gmails.!
Same!
Yep! See my comment above!
Literally my stomach is growling while I sit at my desk. This was a dangerous question to ask.
Oof I don’t know if I can name just one! I’ll give you a couple of my very top ones: Rasika (either location is bomb, the best Indian you’ve ever had), 2 Amys (neighborhood vibe, best pizza in DC hands down, great small plates too), Kapnos (Mediterranean and Greek meze), Zaytinya (ditto), Estadio (Spanish, creative, delicious), Joe’s (if you’ve got money to burn, this is the ultimate seafood/steakhouse), Chaplin’s (20s speakeasy style, great cocktails, pork buns and ramen to die for), Le Diplomate (French and expensive but worth it for the mushroom tart alone), and last but not least, Et Voila (Belgian, warm and friendly).
Bye money! Thanks!
Also, Baan Thai on 14th is super good. It’s above Thai-tanic and although the service leaves a little something to be desired, the food itself is incredible. They have really good sushi, too.
Thanks for the rec! I’ve walked past that place a bunch and never eaten there, so I’ll have to try it!
It’s all Northern Thai and they have a pork curry (I would think it’s a green curry) that is so spicy and so delicious. I nearly wept with joy/pain as I ate it.
Also Daikaya. Their ramen is akin to a religious experience.
Oh yeah, forgot to include Daikaya. I’ve only been upstairs for Izakaya and the small plates are the bomb! Gotta get the ramen downstairs sometime too!
I’ve grown to be a big fan of Sakuramen, as long as I get there right when they open, because otherwise I cannot stand in that tiny little space with a million other waiting people.
I like the Ghana Cafe near Logan Circle.
Yes! please give recs!
-Online conspiracy theories about Marc Bolan predicting his own death
-Scientology
-Joanna Newsom’s clothes
-The character of the Host in the Canterbury Tales in general, and the state of his genitals in particular
omg more on the genitalia plz.
That last one is amazingly specific and as I was rereading the prologue recently, I would like to hear more
I wrote a 20 page term paper about the Host for a Chaucer class in college and a big part of it was about how he was secretly a eunuch. The hardest thing about writing that paper was thinking up enough euphemisms for medieval junk.
Ha! A friend of mine wrote her undergrad thesis on some gay aspects of renaissance drama and had a hard time thinking of euphemisms when she wanted to say “this guy is verbally fucking this other guy.”
I need to know more about this. I thought it was the Pardoner who was a secret eunuch? And the Host was really into the Nun’s Priest?
Well the Pardoner was pretty clearly coded as a eunuch but, as I recall, the main thrust of my argument was that the Host giving the Pardoner shit for being a eunuch was a sort of “takes one to know one” thing.
Heheh thrust
I am 12
Mine would be the Physician. I had a long argument about women’s bodies as cultural signalling. (Or something like that.)
Hi where is database of Joanna’s clothes please and thank u
There is a semi-popular Tumblr dedicated to it that I am fairly certain ripped off a lot of my research so I will instead point you to the ancient forum version I started 5 years ago: http://milkymoon.fromamouth.com/viewtopic.php?f=2…
Thank you! Excellent work on your part
Do you run the joannanewsomfashion tumblr???
I am sad she no longer wears so many Gunne Sax dresses. I myself am a GS enthusiast.
I know I definitely have some and now the pressure’s on and I can’t think!
Current European Royals, and a lot of small details from movies/books and people’s lives that they told me once in passing.
Current European royals are so cool!
CURRENT EUROPEAN ROYALS!! I went on a cruise a few years back and recognized a portrait of Queen Sonja of Norway by sight and excitedly named her tiara for my completely confused husband.
A few years ago, I was visiting a friend who was studying in Sweden at that time, and we saw Queen Silvia and King Carl XVI Gustaf. In the flesh.
Apparently, they travel through the whole country every spring, and happened to be in my friend’s town this day. They got out of the bus directly in front of us! Best day of the trip. (My friend didn’t quite understand my excitement.)
I also have a friend who is (very, very) distantly related to the Windsors. When she told me, I immediately went on to find out who, exactly, their common ancestor was.
I feel like I have a small amount of knowledge about a bunch of obscure subjects, the only thing that I know a bunch of stuff about is swordplay.
oh wait, I guess I also know a lot about European magic practice and belief
NO BIG DEAL, that.
all of this is going to come in real handy when I finally open up a school for black magic and swordsmanship
I can’t imagine anyone who would be interested in that
(I bet you’d get lots of spoiled rich kids; you should make up a contract with fine print that actually says they’re giving you publication rights to their life stories and whatever goes down in your school.)
Yeah, I live next to an extremely rich neighborhood, so.
But I am afraid that kids would WANT to sign over their publication rights, so they can be in the CW TV show version of these events.
Dang I got to figure this out, this is literally my retirement plan.
The Pony Express. And I know A LOT about TV, which isn’t obscure, but my level of knowledge has been frightening to some people.
The TV thing! I can do a solid five minutes of small talk about any show that has been on TV in the last ten years. Thanks Wikipedia!
The sheer amount of stuff I know about my favorite TV shows is insane. The costume designer’s name on Mad Men, every line of dialogue on Broad City, hidden jokes on 30 Rock…
I was so sorry to miss that whole conversation on Saturday!
My things would be:
— Ontario folk songs. Specifically, songs about how hot log drivers are.
— Church politics leading up to the 1927 Church Union in Canada
— and I’m not an expert, but I’ve read Sir Charles Grandison multiple times, which I’m still going to claim points for
Please share with us some hot log driver songs.
There’s not a lot that are available online, but this is one of the better known ones: https://youtu.be/upsZZ2s3xv8
“Log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely”
(Also, god bless the NFB for their utterly AMAZING ANIMATIONS)
(Also, god bless the NFB for their utterly AMAZING ANIMATIONS)
I don’t even need to click! Thanks for this!
cannot youtube at work; will try to remember to look tonight!
“If you ask any girl, from the parish around,
what pleases her most from her head to her toes,
She’ll say ‘I’m not sure that’s it’s business of yours,
But I do love to waltz with the log driving men'”
well sure, they’d have to have fancy footwork down!
I love this song so much.
Thanks to my novel, I’m currently pretty solid on the 15th century Caribbean, which actually comes in handy for winning arguments on Facebook slightly more often than you’d think. (Relatedly, if I went to heaven, I would just be like “GIVE ME ALL THE PRIMARY SOURCES OF PRE-COLUMBIAN AMERICAN HISTORY, OKAY THANKS GOD I’LL BE OVER HERE READING IN THE CORNER WITH MY LATE CAT CRONKITE AND ALL MY CHILDHOOD DOGS FOR THE NEXT FEW MILLENNIA, OH SNAP IS THAT WHAT ANAKAONA ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE, DANG GIRL WERK”)
– Anything to do with Queen Elizabeth I
– Polydactyl cats (I have one and I like to google)
– As a kid I had an encyclopedic knowledge of horse breeds and markings and coat colors despite never having owned/ridden a horse, but I have forgotten most of it.
– (IDK if this counts but I still remember the tenor parts to most Christmas carols even though it’s been 13 years since I sang in my high school madrigals. I CANNOT FORGET.)
Your high school had madrigals??
Yes!! 😀 We were Madrigals in the fall/spring (complete with a Madrigal Feaste in December, and caroling through all the local schools on the day before winter break), and then in Spring/Summer we were (mostly, minus certain performances) a “Show Choir”. We had the full costumes and everything. Mine was this gorgeous orange and silver one, with a pretty hat that had a veil in the back, I loved that dress.
When I get to heaven, I want to hang out at your high school
Hah! It was the best part of high school for me, tbh.
(Here is a picture of my dress, complete with HORRIBLE AWFUL stage makeup that we had to wear at the Feaste due to the bright stage lights. Oh god, so bad.)
That dress is so cool!
Thanks!! To this day I regret not “stealing” it when I graduating lol.
Another high school madrigal singer here! Same thing with the madrigal dinner around holiday time and the full costumes, etc. My school’s madrigal choir was actually really excellent. The top concert choir at our school won the state championships 10 years in a row, and it became a huge deal my senior year when the madrigal choir also placed in the top 10 in the state, since they only had 20 members. I was in the madrigal choir for two years before succumbing to a desire to be one of the cool kids in the top choir my senior year.
Nice! In my school the madrigals were the top choir. We had an all-girls choir underneath us (I fail to remember their technical title, but they were the “serving wenches” at the Madrigal Feaste, haha), and a general “concert choir” under them that was open to everyone. I think the middle choir was all-girls because boys who could sing and wanted to be in a choir were so rare that they were instantly put into Madrigals so we could have enough balance. (I was a female tenor, which they were so excited about that they bumped me in early right after Spring auditions instead of making me wait till Fall like everyone else, because we didn’t have a lot of tenors/basses.)
A female tenor, cool! I can see how that would be helpful to a choir with a shortage of guys.
My school was…weird, in that the choir kids were the popular kids. We actually had nine choirs, ranging from the general freshman one up through the top co-ed show/concert choir. There was one all-male choir, the madrigal choir, and…I think two all-female show choirs? And some co-ed concert choirs. Anyway it was a weirdly big deal for a random suburban public school.
I know way more than any non-Fabio human should know about Fabio. Also grammar and style, the Tudor dynasty, how the modern white-collar office developed, and Gone With the Wind. If the apocalypse happens I will literally be the first person winnowed out.
Sculpture in Parisian parks and public spaces. Thanks dissertation!
– WWI Stereoscope cards
– Geisha stages of training
– Cultural differences between L’Heure Bleue and Mitsouko
– Fine paper weights, styles, and sizes for different social occasions
I really hope that you get to use all of these in your day to day life but in particular the last one.
There is no greater pleasure in life than gently crinkling a single impossibly thin sheet of onion skin paper. It me:
oh wait what ARE the cultural differences between L’Heure Bleue and Mitsouko?
Oh man, there’s this whole thing about how Guerlain made L’Heure Bleue just before the start of World War I, and Mitsouko just after it ended, and how each scent kinda represents or distills bits of society during those times.
L’Heure Bleue is very romantic and velvety, very late-Edwardian, and is now described on perfume forums with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia for a lost era. Mitsouko was historically described with East Asian connotations, signalling a shift in how the 1920s would begin to pick up on (or appropriate, really) certain aspects of Japanese and Chinese culture for design trends. There’s also an associated story about where Mitsouko got its name that’s Madame Butterfly-esque.
It’s fascinating, because here are these two perfumes, and they acted as cultural bookends to and shorthand for this massive conflict that defined the early 20th century. Fashion is an important part of history.
And where can I smell these? (Guessing they are no longer with us? But your descriptions are very evocative. I want to smell an era.)
Other thought: would the 80’s smell like Obsession?
They’re still made, but they’re expensive and hard to source in brick and mortar or department stores.
You can always get samples: http://theperfumedcourt.com/Products/Guerlain-Pur…
IDK where you live but Neiman Marcus has them in stores and on their website, and they are easy to find at discounters in the EDP or EDT concentration. The samples rec above is also good. I tend to buy them vintage which is its own can of worms and more trouble than it’s worth, really.
Hey fellow Guerlain nerd, let’s be pals?
* Celtic morphosyntax and initial consonant mutation
* Silent film director Harold Shaw (who was the first American director to work in the UK, and also one of the first to shoot on location internationally in Lithuania, South Africa, etc.)
Astrology. I know a lot about astrology. And like, not really about horoscopes and stuff, because I tend to ignore that side of things, but I know a lot about the symbolism in the zodiac and how that symbolism was used in Christianity and stuff, as well as like, the usage of astrological symbols in traditional forms of tarot and stuff.
I know a lot about some obscure forms of arts and crafts.
Um…I know a LOT about etymology and especially the etymology of names. Like I know the language-specific variants for a lot of common names, like how John becomes Jean, Jan, Janne, Sean, Ivan, etc.
Etymology! I can explain everything about how Grammar became Glamor
The Reformation, which celebrity preachers are the most misogynistic, cross-stitching, board games, baking/cooking (related, identifying flavors in food. I have a friend who is the same and every time we cook for reach other we spend 5 minutes trying to guess the ingredients
CROSS-STITCHING
More like “let me tell you ALLLLLL about why evenweave is easier than Lugana, and why Thread Heaven is truly a religious experience of the highest order, also let’s have a discussion salon on why do French knots always happen when I’m just working a row AND NEVER WHEN I WANT THEM”
French knots are the worst! I always loop mine around more than I need to to make sure they stay/are visible.
I’d like to join your cross-stitch salon.
X-Files mythology. Which matters exactly 0% now that it’s all been thrown out with the new season.
Also, I am quickly learning everything I can about Baba Yaga, who is a bamf, but needs to stop serving young men food when they demand it and just needs to cook and eat them.
The Mitfords (not that unusual for the toast I guess), murders committed while sleepwalking, the Czech national hero (he never existed), and animes I have never seen but eavesdropped a lot about.
I just finished reading The House of Mitford and even though I knew he would be, am so cross about how partisan and biased Jonathan Guiness was. DIANA WAS A NAZI.
You mean there are more besides Edgar Huntly???
(Weird Gothic novels may be an obscure knowledge point for me.)
Enough that you feel even less safe at night
“Murders committed while sleepwalking” TELL ME MORE
I am fascinated by this also but then sometimes do not want to know more as husband is a bit of a sleepwalker / talker / kicker.
My favorite is Robert Ledru, a French detective who realized that he had committed the murder he was investigating
HOW IS THIS REAL
BRB, securing funding for a feature film.
😮
I wish it was something more romantic, but it’s Microsoft Word. When I was a bored temp after college, and I wasn’t quite sure what this internet thing was, I would occupy my days by going through every single menu in Word and figuring out what everything did. It came in super-handy when I started doing desktop-publishing, and it’s still extremely useful (even though ribbons – faugh!)
Oh, and knitting.
You are possibly the ONLY PERSON who’s ever wisely used their downtime as a temp.
One of my housemates is so adept at Word she successfully has used it as a Photoshop substitute for YEARS. Also, she used Word instead of Illustrator in a typography class she took in college.
I marvel at y’all.
Word regularly changes fonts on my mid-document and it drives me crazy. Any chance you know how to fix this?
You might be inadvertently applying a template or some styles. Without seeing the doc, I can’t say what’s up.
I am very good at remembering weird/gross facts about places I have visited. For example, the Alhambra is a beautiful, historic piece of architecture, but I will always think of it first as ‘Oh, the Alhambra? A bunch of people got murdered there and their severed heads were put in a fountain.’
I toured the Alhambra sans guide and inadvertently avoided this type of information, so this is news to me! (I do love history and tidbits like that I just get bored with reading plagues when I’m being a tourist, ya know?)
Mary Wollstonecraft and the women who emulated her political writing (Hays! Robinson!)
How to bake things in an un-calibrated oven without a thermometer
Gelato places in Rome
YES to Wollstonecraft and all of the radical intellectual women writers of the time. 1790s — what a decade
Mine is maybe more in the “skill” than in the “knowledge” category, but: if I’m watching tv/a movie with someone, and they go “what do I know him/her from?” about a certain actor, I’m really good at immediately providing something that a) has that person in it and b) they’ve seen.
Um, that sounds almost like it could be a marketable skill. People could pay you to watch movies with them!
…if imdb wasn’t a thing.
It would solve the problem of having to pause the movie to Google.
Ah, you sound like the perfect movie watching partner! I waste so much time while watching movies trying to identify someone I recognize.
I once saw a guy in a Starbucks in Hilton Head (while on vacation there) and I was sure he was on tv. It took me hours, but I figured out that I had seen him as a firefighter on Reno 911. It was not Ken Marino, but the other one – the one who said, “If you don’t believe in your screenplay, how do you expect anyone else to believe in your screenplay?” to Junior, I think. Or to Dangle. I think he’s mostly a writer, but that line stood out to me. Anyway, I feel you! Also, anytime I go into NYC, I always succeed in seeing an actor that has played a bit part somewhere in a small series and it makes me happy.
That sounds much more useful than my skill, which is pointing at the TV and yelling, “Hey, it’s that guy! From that thing!”
I’ve gotten really into reading IMDB movie trivia while I’m watching something or immediately after I’ve finished. It’s strangely satisfying.
That’s mine too! My flatmate called me “movie Rainman” the other day. I was oddly pleased. 🙂
I know things about various obscure things that I research for my academic job, but I feel like that doesn’t count.
But I also know a lot about Late 19th/early 20th century girls’ literature (esp. boarding school and college stories), the rules for writing renaissance counterpoint, and who everyone was in the Wars of the Roses.
ETA: And I’m pretty good at the etymology/history of English words and also at debunking stupid fake etymologies of them.
I wish I could remember who everyone was in the Wars of the Roses. I went to see Richard III once, and the programme had a handy family tree and summary of events leading up to it. I still struggled. (I do like girls’ literature, etymology and debunking folk etymologies, though!)
The Plantagenets.
Plantagenet fangirl for life!
Not obscure, but I can list all 144 Buffy episodes in order. If you give me a number I can tell you the episode title, and vice versa. I also have a reasonably good memory for what outfits appear in which episodes.
This is the most impressive claim I’ve heard for a long time, ngl.
This is AMAZING. You are an inspiration.
Something Blue?
65. (At least give me a difficult one!)
Erm DoubleMeat Palace?
112.
It Me! I used to list Buffy episodes as a mantra for falling asleep (instead of counting sheep, or whatever other people do.
I do it while giving blood! (I don’t have a smartphone and it’s tricky to read one-handed, so it’s focus on something in my brain or just lie there bored out of my mind.)
WHAT this is an amazing skill.
I am deeply impressed!
A few others: the Mitford family; fires, plane crashes and other disasters; the treatment of LGBTQ terms in the Universal Decimal Classification Scheme; lexicographical history; books about or by nuns.
Building codes, I guess? Not very fun, for me nor anyone else. But It takes up at least 8% of my brain! And allows me to complain about things like a 30″ tall railing with pickets 6″ apart, that’s all that was separating my fearless toddler from a 30′ drop into the leopard pit on Saturday. (Should be min. 42″ tall and not allow for the passage of a 4″ sphere / baby head.)
On the boring, work-related front, I know pretty much everything there is to know about Medicare rules for ambulance payments.
Bet that’s fun at parties!
You bet!!
Actually, my mom (who’s a nurse) and I play what we call “ICD-9 Bingo”, where one of us says a medical condition & the other one has to come up with the code for it. Like “Diabetes!” “250.00!” So at least you can have a little fun with medical billing stuff…
My heart is warmed by the fact that I am 100% sure we all share that experience of someone bringing up your Obscure Thing casually and you’re like “OMG YES did you know here are ten more facts isn’t that fascinating????” and then you realize they’re not interested and feel a bit less stable in the universe.
That is on the list of Worst Feelings. Because you are so FULL OF GLEE that the Obscure Thing has come up, and you are so ready to talk all about it, and then you see that they just don’t care, and you have to tamper your excitement and try not to go outside the “normal” amount of interest and enthusiasm.
This happened to me at work the other day. Someone said she liked the Mitfords and I was thrilled. Her: “They were all nutters” (or something along those lines). Me: “Decca wasn’t!” She did not know who I meant, kept hearing it as “Deborah” (I do not care for Debo, Decca 4 lyfe) and eventually said, “Oh! Jessica!”. EVERYONE CALLS HER DECCA, HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT?
The internet.
Not, like, how it works, just what goes on on the internet.
It’s really pathetic.
Yesterday in church the priest wanted a show of hands how many people knew the term “mic drop” and I was the only one. Because demographically he and I are the only people in the congregation in the right age bracket to spend enough time on the internet to have that be a common linguistic reference.
Chicago history.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
The rules for Dungeons and Dragons.
Knitting.
Batman.
1. Skincare ingredients (and specifically those favored by a *fresh* skincare company I worked at for many years).
2. Sleep/circadian rhythms/sleep hygiene.
Thank you, strange job history!
Skincare ingredients and sleep hygiene? Tell me more.
My fridge probably has more oils in it than food. <3 oil. I am definitely not one to jump on health-trend bandwagons, but I will say that oil cleansing (I use almond or grapeseed since they are light and cheap!) has been a huge help to my dry, acne-prone skin. I also really love moisturizing with jojoba – it’s the closest to our skin’s natural oils, so it absorbs very well and would be unlikely to clog pores.
Top sleep recommendations are two-fold – one fun, and one not:
1. Get outside as early as you can, and before noon. Light exposure is important for syncing our circadian rhythms, and artificial lights are not always sufficient. (Note: this is especially important for night owls who need to adjust to 9-5 jobs. It me. If you are a ‘lark’ and want to stay up later, get some late-day sun!)
2. Limit hanging out in your bed, or your bedroom if possible, except for sleep.
Of course, everyone is different! And sleeps differently! Also, these things are only worth trying out if you’re having trouble sleeping. Obviously stressing about sleep is no good for helping you sleep.
I just started using a nighttime oil on my face and chest (I have very oily skin on my face and very dry skin on my chest/neck area but the oil has been doing great to counteract both issues).
Those are good tips. I am a 9-5 person, so I REALLY NEED to get outside more. I sleep alright, but I have a problem of clenching my jaw at night and I think it’s stress and not getting enough exercise.
Thanks for the knowledge!
Ah, clenching/grinding of teeth is one thing I did not learn about working in a sleep lab, but I wish I had! It’s a huge problem for me, and it feels impossible to deal with! How do you stop being stressed while you sleep?! Exercise and magnesium before bed helps me a little, but I think it’s time to shell out for an expensive mouth guard. If you have any other tricks, I am all ears!
Exactly!! I can’t help it at all.
My dentist is a very holistic one and he told me a trick that helps: Stretching before bed. When you clench your jaw, it affects the muscles that extend all the way down to your chest and lower back. So he says that stretching the lower back muscles and your neck/chest will help a lot, and so far, I’ve woken up having less pain in my temples, which means I’m not clenching AS much.
I have seen inexpensive mouth guards at drugstores/amazon. It’s worth trying those first. I bought a $400 mouth guard only to find that I couldn’t sleep with it in; I always ended up having vivid dreams about stuff stuck in my teeth and waking up to find I’d pulled it out while dreaming.
If you are a big sleep hygiene fan, I highly recommend Phillips hue or another color temp shifting bulb system. Cool in the morning, warm at night- it’s awesome.
Would this fresh company happen to be Lush? I helped open one of their North American stores and it was, top to bottom, the most bananas company I’ve ever worked for.
Ooh, could you be persuaded to share any anecdotes?
TELLS US MOOOORE
Theories of dog body language, social behaviour, and learning, and how to help a dog not be afraid of pretty much everything in the city.
can you help me make my dog less afraid of flags, both vertical and horizontal? as well as sandwich signs?
Dogs disapprove of the most amazing things!
I only know what worked with my dog and also different dog theories I have read that were based on something other than how wolves deal with conflict when locked together in a cage (hint – it’s a lot different to how they deal with conflict in the wild).
Flags and sandwich signs don’t move around too much and are easy to see coming so the following might work:
If your dog is uneasy about a particular flag or sandwich sign, maybe feed treats (or bounce balls) at an ever-diminishing distance from the offending flag. Possibly building up over a number of days to turning a sandwich sign into a plate for dog treats, with a flag for a tablecloth.
If there are LOT of flags and sandwich signs that meet with your dog’s disapproval, you could train “Flag!” and “Sandwich sign!” as super happy commands, which mean “If you see a flag/sandwich sign, look at me and get a treat or a ball bounced for you!”. The command eventually works as a headsup to the dog to expect a flag/sandwich sign in the next few seconds (and isn’t that great because now the dog gets a treat!)
If your dog is flatout terrified of flags and sandwich signs, then the best thing I learned to do was to physically get between my dog and whatever scared her. Just a very slight pressure on the leash to be like “no worries – your person has got this” and then body block the offending object as you pass it without even looking at the dog.
If your dog is having a super bad day, it’s also really OK to make a big curve around the flag or cross to the other side of the road. Essentially, respect dog logic and aim less for “silly dog – that thing is not scary” and more for “even if that thing is scary, I’m your person, I got this, and I’m gonna protect you no matter what.” The latter will hopefully lead your dog to realise the former.
But… I am just a dog nerd, not a trainer or a behavioural vet. Although some of my obscure knowledge does come from having paid a trainer and a behavioural vet a LOT of money to help me make my dog less afraid of things.
Mine is very predictable, it’s the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
Oh my god yes. My old roommate is obsessed, present-tense, with Star Wars (well ok I am too now but I was not before the movie came out) but had only read a few of the books… she brought a gentleman caller by the apartment one night and he thought he could take me in a Star Wars EU debate… he was dead wrong. Roommate had been in the other room, and came out to watch us yelling at the top of our lungs about Timothy Zahn, etc. Luckily I liked the dude so it was good-natured yelling, but I’m sure our neighbors thought we were insane.
I LOVE good-natured yelling about the EU! There are a couple dudes in my social circle who I can always count on for a long yelling argument about Corran Horn, which is nice, but sometimes they do foolishly start to think they can take me on Star Wars trivia and I have to set them straight.
Mine is super-specifically Knights of the Old Republic. Just the two games, that’s it. I’ve never even seen the star wars films! (That or mass effect. Hoo boy.)
My most specific area of obscure knowledge is probably facts and anecdotes about Alex the Parrot. I know a LOT of random obscure things about animals in general, but “animals” isn’t really an obscure area. Also, at the end of my first summer as a camp counselor, I was awarded, “Most likely to know the most random things” (or something similar), and I’m still very proud of this.
Corknut!
(I learned about Alex from Margaret Atwood.)
(anecdote I learned yesterday) Margaret Atwood got to visit Alex, thanks to the book, and Dr. Pepperburg, the researcher, kept trying to get Alex to say “cork nut” for her. Alex would only say “walnut.” Atwood was very polite and gracious about this.
As soon as she was gone, Alex said, “cork nut.”
That is awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Of course! As a counterpoint to my “One of the Worst Feelings” post above, one of the BEST feelings is getting to ramble on about your Very Specific Interest to someone who is ALSO interested.
The children’s crusade/s
fin-de-siècle novels of Europe
The Eucharistic controversies
British comedy panel shows.
I can repeatedly be suprised by the fact that I’ve seen Band X six times (and have no memory of any of those times), but ask me who was on the other team in the ‘Tub of Lard’ episode of Have I Got News For You, and I’m so there.
Obscure or somewhat obscure knowledge:
Though a non-clinician, I know a relatively large amount about various mental illnesses and their symptoms, due a short lifetime of Googling
The history of 20th century St. Louis, especially social scenes, prominent families, local politics, economic history, etc
Also I know a LOT of fandom dirt, for multiple fandoms, though there is one fandom in particular where I believe I know or have heard of every major person involved in it, as well as what their opinions are and who they’ve had beef with. lmao I wish I could forget it because I’m sure it’s taking up valuable real estate in my brain.
omg which fandom is it
I also want to know, I am here for fandom dirt
Just bc you mentioned it in your comment… shh but it was ASoIaF. I left [an undisclosed number of] years ago for [imo quite valid reasons]
“though there is one fandom in particular where I believe I know or have heard of every major person involved in it, as well as what their opinions are and who they’ve had beef with. lmao I wish I could forget it because I’m sure it’s taking up valuable real estate in my brain.”
Different fandom than you, but yeah: me. I did finally manage to stop hate-reading a few different tumblrs. I’ve got a streak going of nearly a week, which is really great.
-epidemics/pandemics and horrifying diseases
-Greek mythology
-obscure details about A Song of Ice and Fire
-obscure details about Harry Potter
-weird murders in general, serial murders in particular
-vampires and their attendant metaphorical value/psychological significance, starting with folklore and moving right up through teen paranormal romance (I wrote my undergrad thesis on this back when the topic was more relevant, so if anyone who has time-traveled to this thread from 2011 is interested in talking about the ways in which although Twilight is terribly written, it taps very into some deep-seated desires/fears that teenage girls have, I am here for you)
Please continue discussing the ways in which Twilight taps into common deep-seated desires/fears of teenage girls. I am all ears, although probably not a time traveler.
I posted a looooong-ass comment in response to someone above.
It was everything I had hoped for. Thank you!
Interested in the deep-seated fears! And yes to the terribly written, but culturally fascinating. Why people love the things they love always interests me.
My central argument boiled down to the idea that Twilight allows adolescent girls to fully explore and engage with feelings of sexual desire without having to deal with the anxiety and risk that accompanies becoming sexually active in real life. The typical narrative presented about teenage sexuality is that boys are the aggressors and girls are the ones who bear the burden of accepting or resisting that aggression. They’re traditionally the ones who have to negotiate physical boundaries, handle the social repercussions of sexual activity (slut-shaming, etc.), and deal with the (often very real) threat of being pressured or forced into going farther than they’re comfortable with.
By contrast, for the majority of the Twilight series, there’s a narrative barrier to ever consummating their relationship (he’s a vampire, she’s a human, they can’t actually do the sex or she might die). The story acknowledges the existence of threatening male sexuality–we know that as a supernatural monster, he is physically strong and potentially very dangerous–but he’s also so good at controlling himself that there’s little real risk of going too far. Therefore, in that kind of suspended, consequence-free space, she gets to be the sexually aggressive one in the relationship, without fear of ever being pressured or harmed by him. It ends up being super female-gaze-y–every other paragraph is about how gorgeous he is and how much she wants him–and very much about acknowledging and embracing female desire.
Also there was some stuff about male vampire love interests being paradoxical figures of desirable masculinity (dangerous yet protective, physically strong yet emotionally receptive, etc.) and about Bella’s blandness as a character actually offering a blank slate for readers to project themselves onto (ordinary girls are still deserving of extraordinary romance!).
Again, the execution? Bad. The implications? Problematic? The fact that lots of teenage girls absolutely lost their shit over these books? Fascinating.
tl;dr I have a lot of feelings about teenagers’ feelings sorry
There’s your pitch. Send it in! The female-gaze aspect fascinates me. And I KNOW you have more to say about it.
I have thought about it, but worry that I may have missed that window of interest re: Twilight? Like it’s gone from being “MULTIMEDIA PHENOMENA OF THE MOMENT” to “Oh yeah…that thing.”
Hey, I wrote an essay about how Twilight is just Dracula updated with the morals switched (Victorian prudishness for modern “licentiousness”) so maybe we can jam?
*steeples fingers* Tell me more.
Haha, okay, well.
Dracula is this figure of rampant desire, similar to Carmilla and other vampire novels of the same time. He has multiple sexual partners and it is possible to read his interest in Jonathan as sexual (shock, horror, homosexual desire!) due to the parallels between bloodlust and actual lust. The vampire, as a monster, is a symbol of what Victorians were afraid of; a reptilian and base character, who is less than human but also incredibly charismatic and seductive.
Edward, in contrast, still adheres to the social mores of his birth period, which means he is a contrast to the rest of modern society, including Bella, who treat premarital sex and casual relationships as the norm and as morally acceptable.
Meyer’s choice to cast Edward as the hero speaks to how her beliefs are out-of-step with modern western culture whereas Stoker’s were aligned with the social consensus at the time.
Beyond that, both books describe vampires incredibly similarly and for the bulk of the text, both Dracula and Edward are outcasts. (Dracula as an Eastern European foreigner in England and Edward as a person out of time unsuited to the role of a modern teen.) They also use pathetic fallacy, using the environment to reinforce the character’s feelings; (both settings are heavily wooded, constantly cloudy and rural;) they even both begin with a traveller making their way to somewhere unfamiliar.
Dreams are used in both books to suggest deeper truths (both Bella and Mina/Lucy dream of their vampires because they are in the room watching them at night.) Bella’s withdrawal from Edward in the second book mirrors they way Lucy and the Harkers are increasingly destabilised by their interactions with Dracula (and a case could be made that Bella is in fact seduced in the same way that Lucy is over the course of the series.)
Bella’s unwanted suitors, Mike, Tyler, Eric and Jacob perform the same function that Quincy, Arthur and Dr Seward do in Dracula for Lucy, showing how desirable the character is. They even fill roughly the same templates, being from various society backgrounds; New Money from the New World/Landed Gentry/Middle Class and Jock/Sensitive Jock/Nerd/Childhood Friend respectively.
Van Helsing and Billy Black (later the other werewolves and their family) fill the same “Native/Folklore Wise Man” and are Othered as foreigners in the same way. The Forks community is just as scared of the Cullens and rejects them in the same way that the villagers do in Dracula…
That got long, oops. I hope you can find it interesting. And I guess if the Toast ever wants to do a series on Twilight we’ve got it covered?
Ooooh, I really like this. I don’t think I ever made the explicit connection that Edward is still acting under the constraints of antiquated etiquette norms (I had a section about him as a literary Byronic hero, but that’s not exactly a stretch given how much Meyer bashes the reader over the head with the Wuthering Heights thing). But now I’m going to be mulling that over for the rest of the afternoon.
This was great, and makes a lot of sense. I actually read the whole series in about a week and change in 2008, and genuinely enjoyed the first two, because they reminded me so much of my favorite fanfic tropes, and your explanation helps me understand that.
Perfume (the cosmetic not the band), Hello! Project up to the eighth generation of Morning Musume, chaos magic, resale prices of Andrew Chumbley’s books, fountain pens.
I also have an uncanny memory for song lyrics that frequently results in me showing off at karaoke by turning around and ignoring the screen completely because there’s a room full of people here, I’m playing to them, not this damn TV.
I guess my areas are: first-wave punk trivia, women’s political participation in a handful of post-civil war countries in sub-Saharan Africa (thanks, grad school), and MST3K.
I wouldn’t say I’m an expert by any means, but I’m pretty knowledgeable about digestion and problems related to digestion, summary judgment practice in Texas, and snacks that are food-allergy-friendly.
Also mysteries from before the 1950s (I know mysteries from after then, but usually only if their author started writing before then). I have read a lot of mysteries published after that time, but I’m much less likely to have read all of an author’s work if they started publishing after that.
ooh, I missed this.
–retellings of Bluebeard/Fitcher’s Bird
–Green-sky (from Below the Root)
–JEM
–Joseph Cornell
–Alice in Wonderland and people’s opinions on Charles Dodgson
Curious about that last part. I gave tours on an exhibit about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and a big portion of it was about Dodgson himself.
– Tolkien
– traditional archery
– design theory (I am not an expert or anything, but I know way more than a person without a career in design needs to know)
– fandom culture (did my undergrad thesis on SG:A fandom; it was a trip)
– neopagan movements & philosophies
SG:A fandom was the wackiest fandom I’ve ever been in, no lie, it was completely BANANAS. I’m curious to hear more detail about your thesis!
Poop transplants, history of birth control, and many versions of fairytales (the Little Mermaid dies, Sleeping Beauty rape, etc…)
When I was little my two things were:
– an encyclopedic knowledge of almost every single figure in Greek and Roman mythology (like, not just gods, but ALL the characters)
– conspiracy theories about the death of King Tut
These days I know random blobs of info about a lot of things, less specifically obsessive. But, I suppose if you got me drunk at a party, obscure stuff I could go on about:
– the history of ballet
– this one woman who I did a huge archival project about at my last job
– probably still mythology to a certain extent
I dunno, there might be something else but I’ve long since lost the ability to determine what is “obscure” in my knowledge-base.
I replied to Nicole’s tweet with the semiotics of men’s suit lapels in fiction, particularly as moral alignment signifiers, but I also know a great deal about the Ace Attorney series. I am therefore a double expert on the intersection of the two, an overlap that is surprisingly large.
I would like to know more about semiotics of men’s suit lapels. (No, really.)
So, there are three kinds of lapels: notched, peaked, and shawl. Shawl lapels are the least common and virtually exclusive to very formal suits like tuxedos, so there’s not a lot of data from which to draw conclusions about them, and what IS there is hard to disentangle from conclusions about fancy suits in general. Notched lapels are the most common, and you see them on everything, at all levels of formality. Peaked lapels, however, are where it gets interesting. Peaked lapels are much less common in real life and in fiction. However, when they do show up in fiction, they tend to be found on villains.
There are a few different reasons for this. Peaked lapels tend to be present on certain kinds of suits. Something about the way they’re cut makes them difficult to mass produce on single-breasted suits, so you see them more commonly on double-breasted and higher-end single-breasted suits. Men wearing peaked lapels in fiction are therefore more likely to be rich businessmen or politicians, and in settings where people wear suits, those are two common villainous archetypes.
The other major reason has to do with how we view menswear as a whole. Men’s suits have hardly changed at all in over a hundred years, and in that time, as film and video and photographic technology have exploded, the idea of a “default human” have become standardized. The default human is something most of us here on The Toast will know about: a young or middle-aged white man with a particular body type, haircut, and outfit. That outfit is a suit. Specifically, a dark solid-color single-breasted suit with a collared shirt and tie. The jacket has notched lapels.
As many of us on The Toast are also aware, the idea of a default human is pretty powerful, and any deviation from it gets our attention. The zoot suits of the 1940s were a deliberate invocation of that phenomenon – it’s no coincidence that the communities that incorporated them into their identities were the non-white ones, those where nobody was a “default human” to begin with. And it was around then that the romanticization of organized crime began to emerge, which was both a way of exotifying outsiders to the dominant culture and keeping them on the outside (making white people view them as criminals), so you have this whole vortex of mistrust and mythology and xenophobia swirling around those groups of people whose greatest crime, for better or for worse, was rejecting the culture that was already rejecting them.
Of course, any deviation from the default human status can and has always been enough to provoke distrust in people who ARE closer to being the default human (see: literally all female archetypes that don’t involve subservience to men), but I mention zoot suits to make the point that even just a variation on the default outfit can be enough of a visual signifier that a character is an “other,” someone to watch out for. Even a subtle one. Even one you might not consciously notice, like a suit jacket with peaked lapels.
SO MUCH LOVE
Fictional lawyers in nice suits! I love Ace Attorney so much.
Settler narratives by Canadian women. I stumbled on one this weekend that I’d never read before. Wheat and Woman about an English journalist who decided to be wheat farmer in Saskatchewan.
Adding this to my TBR pile immediately!
After years of drawing/painting and taking papermaking/book art classes, I know a lot about paper – what the texture and thickness of paper means, what paper is best to use for what, and how to make it out of various things. PAPER YA’LL.
Not exactly obscure, but I’ve been able to name all of the U.S. Presidents in chronological order since I was 10 years old. I also have a tendency to know bizarrely specific details and bits of trivia about movies that I haven’t even necessarily seen yet.
Oh! Also, it’s not quite expert level, but due to a summer spent working at my uncle’s traffic safety supply business I know a remarkable amount about the production of road signs.
The US Westward Movement. In high school I researched and participated in 2 multi-day re-enactments of US pioneer treks on historic trails in Arizona, trails still marked by faint wagon wheel ruts. Horses, wagons, period clothing, butchering chickens and cooking them for supper over a fire pit, etc. Pretty sure I can still harness and drive a team of draft horses. Not that I’ve ever been called on to do so in the past 30 years.
As a child, I knew everything then known about elephants. I’ve forgotten a lot and much has been discovered since then.
I know too much about surviving a childhood dominated by an abusive narcissist.
I know way too much about being a trailing spouse. Moving every few years, job hunting without any local contacts, navigating new towns by the seat of the pants (expert at the last-minute u-turn).
And I understand weird little dogs of one specific, willful breed.
World capitals and flags are my trivia wheelhouse.
Also the business of Broadway, though that’s my career so it’s not all that random, but people don’t often expect a whole bunch of trivia about musicals to occur in their everyday conversation (APPARENTLY). I’m pretty solid on history and types of circus arts also.
Oh, when it comes to geography trivia I can do the counties of England in under 5 minutes. I can also name all the US states in alphabetical order.
Despite never actually OWNING a pet bird, I was a weird little middle schooler who took my subscription to BirdTalk very seriously. Which means I can tell you pretty much anything you want to know about pet parrots.
Also can school pretty much anyone on Little House On The Prairie information. (I was such a cool tween you guys)
Chicago-style pizza, dog breeds, and old-timely queers.
-Outhouse maintenance
-Romance novels, particularly plots and characters, particularly historicals, particularly which book you should read right now if you haven’t yet, based on your interests, also keeping the Wallflowers series in order and naming the Bridgertons
-The religious and spiritual history of the Baikal region
-Rigging sailboats, stepping and tuning masts, operating boom trucks
Was that an offer to rec romance novels? I have just begun to dip my toe into that genre but still need guidance. So far, I have enjoyed a bunch of Sarah MacLean’s stuff. In general, strong preference for historical over modern, witty dialogue is A+, kink welcomed but by no means necessary. I will admit to being a sucker for “convoluted plot device means that Character A and Character B must spend lots of time with each other” and also “initial knee-jerk dislike that develops into mutually satisfying banter/rivalry that develops into sexytimes.”
Absolutely! If you haven’t checked out the Toast goodreads group yet, there’s a romance rec thread there too! If you’ve liked Sarah MacLean, I’d recommend:
– A Talent for Trickery by Alissa Johnson
– Tessa Dare, particularly A Week to be Wicked
– Loretta Chase, particularly the Carsignton family (which relays nicely into the Dressmakers)
– Courtney Milan, particularly Once Upon a Marquess
Thanks! I’ve definitely heard Courtney Milan’s and Tessa Dare’s name tossed around before, and have been meaning to check them out, but it’s hard to know where to start, so thank you for mentioning specific titles!
Don’t forget our own Dakimel, Toast Romance Novelist: melaniegreene.com
The properties and uses of British native hard woods.
E.g: alder makes the best charcoal for gunpowder…
After a lifetime of random reading, I feel like ALL my knowledge is obscure trivia or stuff that “everybody” knows. I can’t tell the difference between what’s general knowledge or not anymore. But anyways:
– Hallucinations and weird sleep stuff
– Holocaust memoirs/personal narratives
– History of physics, time and astronomy (I suck at the actual science though)
I’m sure I know something that doesn’t begin with H…
Concrete
Calendar reform in England
Neil Diamond’s chord progressions (which is more identifying things he wrote but didn’t sing from the chords than it is knowing the progressions themselves)
Golf rules
Wegmans
WEGMANS.
wegmans
-Werewolves in medieval literature, specifically in Northern and Western Europe up until the 16th century.
-I, in fact, am a certified wood-burning expert. Ask me about pressure planes in the home and how they affect the performance of your woodstove!
-I have become the person in the office who can figure out how to pronounce unusual names, and often give the derivation of that name (i use the term “fun fact” a lot). At Starbucks, I was the barista who tries very hard to spell your name right, and annoyed her coworkers by spelling East and South Asian names correctly, which forced them to guess at pronunciation when calling drinks.
Religion, specifically Catholicism, weird Protestant sects, Mormons and Judaism. Also the Bible generally.
Standardized test scoring and don’t ask me to tell you about it, I signed a confidentiality agreement.
I have a thing where I like to read longform, deep-dive type articles. Lately I’ve been focusing on the surgical realm, which is weird but fascinating. I’ve been reading every longform article about brain surgery that I can find and it’s taken me into lots of research jargon. Cut to me, at lunch with friends, and when they mention something like conjoined twins I spurt out all the fascinating things I’ve just learned about how brains are operated on and this one dude who’s regaining use of his legs after being paralyzed because doctors cracked open his brain and used his olfactory nerves to inject into his spine..
See, I’m doing it again. Right now, going on about it while people’s faces reflect amusement and then bafflement.
Oh and also, animal facts. I used to read animal encyclopedias as a child (and teen), so I’ve got a hoard of knowledge about different mating and predation habits of all sorts of species. This is especially useful to bring out while on dates.
No, no, no bafflement here, just giddy excitement! Please tell me EVERYTHING about the olfactory nerve guy!
You already know about the conjoined twins who might have a connection between their brains, I’m sure, but boy do I have some surgery links for you. (Oliver Sacks is my favourite weird brain doctor, but he wasn’t a surgeon). I fell into a hole of doctor blogs a few years ago, and these were my favourites:
This guy is a slightly strange South African general surgeon who writes really well in a casual style. He’s often hilarious, but tells his war stories with a whole lot of pathos. And there are so many stories. There are almost no “routine” posts about daily life – only tales from the operating theatre when everything went wrong or when everything went right, creative (or desperate) solutions to terrifying problems, crazy anecdotes from his training and entertaining observations of extremely eccentric doctors. http://other-things-amanzi.blogspot.com
Contrast and compare to this older American surgeon, who waxes poetic on the beauty of your inner organs and the sheer aesthetic joy of removing ugly cancers just to watch the tissue fill with healthy colour again. He seems to like the puzzle-solving aspect. There are several posts discussing how he enjoys doing slow, tricky procedures and takes pride in leaving very tiny scars (the SA guy is more into the human side, he actually has a great post on the honour of getting to operate someone’s anal fissure). http://surgeonsblog.blogspot.com
Man I like good doctors. Especially those who can write.
Omg, you just gave me a goldmine! I never even CONSIDERED doctors who run their own blogs! Here I’ve been reading beautiful writing from journalists observing it — this is like, a level up!
Okay so the olfactory nerves guy is the first one to have this surgery be a marked success. The whole reason they think it’s working better than any other surgeries they’ve tried is that they actually opened up his brain to get the nerve out of the olfactory bulb — everyone else they tried getting the nerves out of the sinuses, without cracking open skulls. So basically, because the nerves came from inside the brain, rather than external, they were more potent.
His story is SO compelling too – the way he got his injury was his long-time friend stabbing him 18 times after he began dating the friend’s ex! Like, it’s so crazy. Also they think his ability to walk again (assisted by braces, but after being COMPLETELY paralyzed from the waist down) may have something to do with how clean the cut was in his spine — most paralyzed patients come from car wrecks, to the cuts aren’t as neat.
Oh man, what am I doing, read the article cause it’s so good! http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/25/one-…
OH MY GOD THEY WRITE SO MANY BLOGS. There are LOADS of doctors/writers out there! Doctors automatically have interesting things to say because life and death are kind of inherently interesting, so if they can string a sentence together, they WILL write. And they write books too! Some of them even write fiction!
If you like strange brain stuff (the best), I guess you’ve read Oliver Sacks (the BEST), but do you even KNOW how many books he managed to squeeze out?? Most people just read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and then stop, but there are just so many. There’s a migraine book where he got artists to paint their hallucinations. There’s a book on sign language, including what happens to a brain that grows up without language. He has a book about musical superpowers, one about vision and a great book about hallucinations. For heavens sake, there’s a book where he went to a tiny Pacific island with a completely colourblind Norwegian guy from a narrow fjord to meet the only completely colourblind population in the world, AND to try his hand at solving a medical mystery that was suspected to be caused by either the world’s oldest plants or cannibalism.
Speaking of cannibalism, how about prion diseases? Here’s the cultural and medical history of kuru, the laughing disease: https://web.archive.org/web/20121116100702/http:/… (through the Wayback Machine)
Also also! The NYT has a monthly column where they present a mystery case, and then they publish the answer a week or so later. It’s impossible unless you’re actually a doctor, but it’s fun to follow! http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/category/live/docto…
Tatiana and Krista, right? I read this in 2011, when they were only 4: http://nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conj…
Since then, it’s been confirmed that they do share minds – at least the senses. The sensory nerves are routed through the thalamus, where they happen to be joined. There’s a documentary I haven’t seen yet. No recent articles though (it seemed like there were a few, but they’re all just quotes mined from the documentary).
WAIT. I was thinking earlier that it would be amazing to check if they only share senses or if they can read each other’s thoughts, but I couldn’t think of a way to test it (because if they do share minds, there’s no difference between reading a message through the other’s eyes, which we know they can do, and reading the other’s mind). But smell doesn’t go through the thalamus. The olfactory nerve is a cranial nerve, it goes right into the cortex. So they shouldn’t be able to tell what the other smells! Sooooo what if one twin smells something, and the other one guesses? That would test the hypothesis, right? The family doesn’t want anyone to do experiments on them, which I really understand, but the curiosity, it burns…
I know I am very late, but! The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is a book about prion diseases and is GREAT.
Okay, that New Yorker article was amazing. Leading neurons through sheaths of glia cells? Life, uh, finds a way.
Also, I don’t get why this wouldn’t be worthy of a Nobel prize even if someone succeeds with the enzymes? I feel like this is objectively cooler (though probably less practical) and they should at least get to share.
I’m not sure it’s very obscure, but horror movies. Particularly (but not exclusively) the main big slasher series and the random celebs that have been in horror movies at some point. For example, if you, like all sane people, think Fitz is the absolute worst, you can go watch him die in the first 15 minutes of Friday the 13th part VII.
I know there are others with more comprehensive horror knowledge than myself, but I definitely know more than most in this area 🙂
In increasing specificity: world mythology/Indo-European mythology/Celtic mythology/Welsh mythology; the social/cultural history of the peoples who participated in said mythologies (primarily Bronze Age-early medieval); how purple use those mythologies in the modern world; why everything is all mythology anyway; associated topics of magic, belief, ritual, Weird Stuff and Forteana. And cats.
Basically, I don’t have much use for the so-called real world.
Way late to this party, but I know a lot more about women and gender in the mid-twentieth century U.S. than you can shake a Betty Crocker Cookbook at.
Comedy Bang! Bang! inside jokes that appeared on super old episodes (“Baking a plane cake!” “The upcoming Dogpocalypse” “The Batting Gentleman” “Can you SING Jeremy Piven?”).
Don’t ask me if it’ll ever come in handy in a substantial way in the real world, but it’s great when I run into another fan on the Internet.
The fandom culture of BBC Sherlock, if only because I’ve been immersed in it for several years now.
Dang. There are so many things where I know more than the average person but less than other people, like the different kinds of harps, or Gunne Sax dresses, or the history of women and bicycles….
Script development and other behind the scenes details of the tv show Leverage.
They have commentaries for every single episode! And creator blog posts or podcasts for most of them! I love knowing how these shows come together.
Small scale slaughterhouses and local meat supply (technically this is due to my thesis, but since I studied architecture it still tends to surprise people).
What I would like to know a great deal about is how new world food affected traditional cuisines, particularly in Asia, but I’ve not found a promising starting point that is reasonably recreational in nature.
Monkeys.
Ernie Pyle.
Mine are not all things that are too obscure, but they are:
-Any and all things related to Jane Austen + the industry her works have spawned
-Tea (this is actually a thing I nerd out about–tea history, tea science, tea cocktails, tea-infused cooking—all out obsession but also related to my profession so does it count?)
-One Direction
-Little House on the Prairie (the TV show–I read the books but I was obsessssssed with the TV show as a kid/preteen/teen)
-The history of birth control through the ages
-Fashion history, particularly French + English dress in the late 18th and early 19th centuries
-The history of the bra
OK, I’m late but here are mine:
-US state license plates (I can identify most from a distance without actually being able to read them)
-The Albigensian Crusade
-early and medieval Christian Church history and doctrine (also, heresies of those time periods)
-English monarchs of the past (from about the Plantagenets to the modern era)
-many fantasy/scifi series’/authors’ works (inc but not limited to Tolkien, Jacqueline Carey, Connie Willis, Lois McMaster Bujold, Lloyd Alexander, Mercedes Lackey, J.K.Rowling) (bit of a mix there of stuff I loved as a kid and stuff I love now)
-the American World’s Fairs, 1892-1940 ( including The American Negro Exposition of 1940)
-Pre-Columbian trade between Northern Mexico and the United States Southwest
Can we talk about Grease Live?! It had it’s ups and downs, but I thought the production elements were insanely great. Also, a Boyz II Men variety show please, that is hands down the most delightful version of Beauty School Dropout I’ve encountered.
I did not enjoy it so much! To be fair I’m not the hugest fan of the movie by any means. There were a few good moments, but I felt like they got carried away with the big production elements of it all and there was…a kind of chemistry missing from the cast? It felt like quuuite a slog at points.
I wouldn’t disagree with that. The chemistry was off, I felt especially with the leads. Though guitar kid (Jordan Fisher, according to imdb, who played Doody) totally stole the show. He’s adorable.
Oh man that was SO great- one of the few times the group I was watching with was totally enthralled. What a cutie!
Jordan Fisher was preeeeeeeeeeecious.
I was very impressed with some of the choreography/camera work.
I never think of myself as loving Grease that much, but I watched it many many many times in my youth and those songs are catchy as hell. So I enjoyed it a fair amount. “Those Magic Changes” is one of my favorite songs from the show and they did a great job with it, I thought.
I loved the choreography too. It was classic. But yeah, overall, I would not watch it again!
I enjoyed it thoroughly, imperfect though it was. Then again, I think part of the weird charm of Grease for me has always been the fact that the plot has slightly weird pacing (and might actually be more like a series of chronological set pieces than an actual linear storyline with rising action/build/etc) and there are times I’m not sure entirely what the point is. (Hey, great, a long section focusing on Marty’s correspondence with a whole lot of men overseas with a musical number about it to really drive the point home and a friend asking her how she keeps them all straight and–and we’re never coming back to that? Okay, then. What about her totally unrelated desire to pull a Rex Manning Day on Vince Fontaine? No, we’re just moving on like nothing ever happened? Okay, cool, moving on then.)
But the Boyz II Men “Beauty School Dropout.” MAN. That was perfect.
Also watching my fiance get all delighted-verklempt every time Original Frenchie was onscreen, especially when she was talking to Frenchie just the two of them in the diner right before “Beauty School Dropout” time.
Our main complaint was that adding girls to the ensemble dancing during “Greased Lightning” really diminishes the dizzying level of intensity of the gayness that the number should ideally have.
(Then again, I also agree with the chemistry lacking between the leads, but I generally feel that way about Grease, so I dunno if that was all that much worse here than usual. My fiance’s main quandary was whether Danny should end up with Kenicke or Doody, because we were pretty sure Danny was falling for him by the end of “Those Magic Changes.” At any rate, he had more chemistry singing to him than he did with Sandy.)
Boyz II Men “Beauty School Dropout” is literally the only time I haven’t hated that number. Also, Carly Rae Jepsen as Frenchy was adorable. I didn’t care for the song they added for her though–I like her voice, but I felt like the key was too low for her. It didn’t really show off what she can actually do.
Also, Carly Rae Jepsen as Frenchy was adorable.
I had honestly never knew much about or had many feelings about Carly Rae Jepsen before, but I may have sent an email to a friend this morning describing her as a perfect human cloud of cotton candy.
I didn’t care for the song either, but when I looked it up this morning, I learned that the duo who wrote it are writing the music/lyrics for a stage adaptation of Magic Mike which I hadn’t even known was a thing that was happening. So I consider the song to be worth it for bringing me that theatre news to ponder.
That is EXACTLY what she is. I actually do have feelings about Carly Rae Jepsen. She’s just adorable.
I mostly didn’t have any feelings about her because by pure chance I somehow had never seen her before or known anything beyond having heard “Call Me Maybe” only a handful of times. (Not by actively avoiding her and not because I dislike pop music at all. Just all by some weird twist of fate I had missed out on knowing anything about her.)
But now I know for an actual fact that she is super adorable.
(Opinion: Every Frenchy in every Grease should always just keep the pink hair.)
Carly Rae Jepsen’s latest album is genuinely perfect and I suspect she was hired for Frenchy after a Fox exec sang Boy Problems into a hairbrush every morning for a month.
YES even though a bunch of lyrics throughout were somewhat sanitized, the dance movies were sexier than the original, but like, in a super reinforcing heteronormativity type way. Like, the whole performance, not just the Greased Lightning number, somehow managed to feel like a paean to heterosexuality even though there is SO MUCH built in homoerotic tension just inherent in the show?
When I was watching it and they were singing “Greased Lightning” and said “the chicks’ll scream for Greased Lightning,” I thought, Oh God, I have mishearing it all these years and thought they weren’t saying they would scream. What’s wrong with me? And then I looked them up and realized, no, I was right, they had just tidied up that whole song a bit for television.
But, yeah, the whole show seemed so insistently heterosexual that it almost hits levels of “methinks they’re trying a little too hard to convince us this is straight. It’s cool, guys, I understand; I remember high school.”
So I guess I forgive Danny trying so hard to date Sandy, who I just realized is pretty much the perfect girlfriend for him with her purity and strict parents to use as good excuses to keep things pretty edited-for-TV, so he can turn in a performance of Straight Boy with Pretty Girlfriend while he figures out what to do with the fact that he’s clearly more into any single one of the T-Birds you could pick.
Oh my god yes. Yesssss. I really enjoyed it! I know the other live musicals were trainwrecks, but this one seemed to work somehow, maybe because Grease has NEVER taken itself very seriously. I thought Vanessa Hudgens was adorable and sultry all at the same time. I thought Julianne Hough was just cute as a button and the goofy grins she and Aaron Tveit gave each other were sooooooo cute. Like they really showed the real story with Danny and Sandy, which is that when they were together, they were just STUPID in love with each other.
Yes! Here to talk about it! I was very impressed with the direction and staging, but it was Tommy Kail so there you go. Also I realized that Rizzo’s whole arc was very progressive for 1971.
The whole thing made me nostalgic for the adaptation I wrote and directed for my Orthodox Jewish girls’ summer camp. Wherein Donny becomes more religious for Simi.
Not a huge Grease fan but I am huge Kether Donohue fan and she was perfect as Jan!
i love her SO FREAKING MUCH.
I really liked it! I thought Aaron Tveit was terribly miscast (I love him so much, still) – my roommate described him as too WASPY to be Danny, which I think is right.
The big numbers were great, Vanessa Hudgens did a great job. I think my standard is really “wow, this could be so much worse!”… but yeah, not bad all things considered!
These Pink Ladies >>>>>>>>>> the T-Birds (<3 Kether Donohue)
I seem to have different opinions from most people here! I actually quite enjoyed it, as did the other Broadway snobs with whom I was watching it.
Vanessa Hudgens was the standout for me. I was truly impressed with her performance, and wow was that a great look for her. And of course it’s even more amazing that she pulled off that performance just hours after her father died.
Aaron Tveit is beautiful and has a beautiful voice, but I was sad that he didn’t get to use it much. I know that’s just the role, but it’s still too bad. (I have held a conversation with Aaron while he was wearing just his boxers. It was distracting.)
I really did not like Carly Rae Jepsen. Actually I didn’t realize who was playing Frenchie until that solo song, when I was finally like “WHO is this and WHY can’t she sing.” Bleh. Also did not like Mario Lopez.
Loved the shop teacher (Jan Brady!), most of the staging, the unabashed breaking of the fourth wall, the lighting tricks during the car race (even though it was cheesy), and the multi-ethnic ensemble casting. Was sad not to love the new song, because it is written by geniuses.
Man, I feel like such a dork because all I could think about if Heaven was real and I somehow ended up there (unlikely) is that honestly just knowing that everyone was okay, I feel like I wouldn’t really be worried about any of the rest of the stuff? I guess it’d be nice to know who did all the murders, but it seems like once you know that a person is up in Heaven, it isn’t really very important who murdered them.
I don’t know what I would do in Heaven, I guess I would just read books forever. Maybe I would finally learn to play the guitar.
So I was reading the women with autism article and they mentioned alexithymia and oh my god that is me that is me that is me. I’ve been having a hard time in therapy/life because I really cannot describe how I feel beyond it hurts/it doesn’t, fine/not fine. And that is a thing!!!
Any other people out there who feel this?
Yes, I identified with that a lot, especially the part about difficulty distinguishing between emotions and physical sensations. I frequently have to work out what emotion I’m feeling by starting with the physical symptom and working backwards. Like, “oh, I don’t have a stomachache, I’m worried about this decision I have to make” and “my chest feels tight because I’m anxious about a conflict with a friend”. And then sometimes I do just have free-floating anxiety that isn’t really about anything, but I have the physical symptoms and kind of have to do an emotional audit to figure out if there’s something emotionally wrong or just some Hashimoto’s-related anxiety.
I’m not autistic, but I also often have trouble to disentangle physical and mental things. Nowadays, I know that if I feel cranky/anxious, it’s a good idea to start by having one or two glasses of water, just to check if it wasn’t due to thirst.
I saw a post on tumblr where someone talked about how they can only identify their emotions by what physical sensation they’re feeling or actions they feel like taking. It confused me a lot because I’d never thought of identifying emotions in that way, but then I realized that I do have physical sensations that go along with my emotions. And then I freaked myself out a bit because what even are emotions?
(Sorry if this is garbled, it’s still something I’m trying to figure out. I don’t think I have trouble identifying my own emotions, but ever since that post I’ve been questioning how I actually do it.)
“What even are emotions” is a totally legit scientific question. I mean, what even! They’re so strange! Here’s what I’ve learned, in case you want to know.
You’re completely right that bodily sensations are a part of what an emotion is. I was taught that emotions are made up of AT LEAST three or four parts (depending on how you group them): cognitive, physical, behavioural and the subjective “feeling”. So an emotion is a combination of thinking, sensing, doing and experiencing (like, your experience of “having an emotion”). I guess it can be identified by any of these things. But how? I’m not sure. Emotions are inborn, so we usually just know, but trying to think clearly and label the emotion consciously does help with identification and coping.
The changes in your body are actually really important, because an emotion’s “job” is to make you take action. An emotion is a motivational state. It suggests to you what you “should” do by readying your body to do it. That goes for more than just fight or flight – “happy” motivates you to do more of a thing, “scared” motivates you to discover threats and problems, “dislike/disgust/contempt” is related to spitting out gross food (for real!) and so it motivates you to recoil as if you could be contaminated. And they all have social functions too, they motivate you to deal with people in certain ways (avoid, attack, share with, seek protection, etc) and they have distinct postures and facial expressions for ease of communication.
I think this is really useful to know, because when people aren’t sure what they feel, they can check their thoughts and body to see what suggestion their emotion is making. Of course, that’s not always easy (scientists debate whether all emotions have specific physiological characteristics, or whether it’s more like a spectrum), but it’s interesting to try, at least. And I feel that it’s good to know that emotions are motivational, like what does it want me to DO? Because then you can ask yourself whether you actually agree with the plan.
Thank you so much! This is really interesting, and there’s so much more to emotions than I thought (silly me, I should have known better)! I knew that we need them in order to make decisions, but that was about it.
It’s a huge field, actually! I can’t remember what it’s called in English right now (affective neuropsychology??) but it’s really exciting. I accidentally wrote a wall of text right now, maybe you’ll find it interesting…
If you think about the components of emotion, you can see how emotions are a kind of labeling system. We perceive the world, and our emotions quickly label our surroundings and experiences. They tag certain things as important, sort them into a few categories, redirect our attention towards those perceptions and dig up similar memories. The system is fast but crude, so emotions aren’t always “right”, but “fast and crude” isn’t bad! We need a quick way to prioritise information, and emotions tag information that is relevant to our needs and get our bodies and minds ready to handle the need. We need to keep our bodies functional, good social bonds, integrity/non-contamination, safety, learning, etc, etc, and emotions pull us towards things that satisfy needs and away from things that threaten needs. Emotional interpretations are way faster than cognition, so even though they’re not always right, they save time and are easy to use.
I think emotions teach us how to deal with the world, basically. There’s an inborn basic system, and we’ve added loads of expansion packs through our experiences every day. We save our experiences in memories that call up similar emotions and sets of behaviours the next time similar situations arise. We condition ourselves. Emotions say “this is basically what’s important here and now, and this is how you and/or mammals in general usually deal with this type of situation”. At least, that’s how I interpret the science.
The important thing to remember is that emotions aren’t always right BUT also aren’t useless. Their quick-and-dirty interpretations are frequently wrong. You might be tempted to just dismiss your emotions. But that’s when it helps to remember that emotions actually do something, and you can’t just dismiss the effects by ignoring them. Emotions really do influence our actions and priorities, because that’s their JOB. If you know what you’re feeling, you know what your body and mind is biasing you towards, what it’s trying to pay attention to, what it’s trying to do. When you don’t realise that you’re having an emotional reaction, you won’t notice your biases, but they’ll still influence you. If you try to “not have” the emotion because you think it’s bad or useless, you don’t gain anything, because you just waste mental energy trying to suppress yourself (which prolongs the emotion) and you still have the same biases anyway. The best solution is to use your mind to identify the emotion and figure out 1) what it wants you to think about and 2) what it’s getting you ready to do. With that in mind, it’s way easier to decide for yourself what YOU think is important and what YOU want to do. Sometimes you agree with the emotion! But sometimes you don’t. In either case, you’re free to go ahead and think about whatever YOU decided was the most important things to think about, and perform the actions YOU decided to perform.
This usually works far better than dismissing or not paying attention to emotions, according to what I’ve learned. And I don’t mean just when you disagree with the emotion. Even if you DO agree, or at least don’t mind feeling it, you still don’t want it to make decisions for you all by itself! And if you don’t agree, you still need to be aware of it and not try to push it down. Psychologically, it’s easier and better to try do to a certain thing than to try to NOT do a thing. Our minds are always active, so what should you actively DO while you try to “not do” something? If you can’t come up with anything, your only action will be “trying to not have emotions”. Why not just pick something to do instead? You can do what you want even if your emotion is suggesting something else, you don’t have to shut off the emotion first. This is my personal interpretation of many different facts, so there may be misunderstandings, but I’m pretty sure I’m not majorly wrong…
Btw, I don’t always take my own advice. It’s SUPER HARD to remember these things in real life, because your own thoughts feel “true” even when they aren’t. But it really helps to try. So useful! Writing this down has been really great too. I learned the sciencey facts in a class two years ago, so it’s been great practice to try to recall everything properly and fit the facts together. I feel like I’ve been educated by this discussion even though I subconsciously already knew this stuff, haha.
Oh my, thank you so much! I’m going to save these email notifications and read over them some more. I’m not used to thinking about emotions in this way, so it’ll take some time to examine how I deal with them now and integrate this information into my life. Thank you for taking the time to write all of this down. I love learning new stuff like this!
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Thank YOU for allowing me to geek out! Psychology is my favourite, favourite thing.
This is what evolutionary psychology is for, incidentally. As soon as you get away from the douchebags who are like “women are destined to do boring stuff because of the stone age” and into the actual science, it’s great. (Much like how biologists aren’t philosophers and should never try, psychologists are not anthropologists and should never try. The humanities: you actually need to learn them to be good at them! Who knew??)
It’s fun to think about how it all came together. Where does the mind come from? What does it DO? What can animals with advanced brains do that less complex animals can’t? How are those things useful?
I like to pretend that I’m going equip an animal (or a robot) to survive. Instead of programming everything outright, giving it long lists of food and dangers, you could just put in a few really basic rules and then program it to learn from its behaviour and the ensuing consequences. Make it search for things to do, make it feel good when it tries random behaviours. If you want it to do things that make it live and avoid things that make it die, you could put in a rule that it should always look for bad stuff and good stuff around it. It needs to be able to tell the difference, and it needs to be able to filter out some of the info its senses are picking up. So it needs to have a focus of attention, and it needs to be able to shift the focus around. But dying happens faster from one bad thing than from lack of a good thing, right, so you could balance its brain to prioritise bad things over good things. Also, the animal needs to pay attention to its own status, like if its body is damaged or if it needs something, so make sure it does that.
Actually if you want to make it really great at being alive, you could give it a way to GUESS what’s going to be good or bad without trying everything. The guesses need to be good, so the animal has to be able to sort relevant things together. Also, wouldn’t it be great if it could compensate for those times when it really needs to rest or when it didn’t find any food? It could split the burden with others, because then someone else can keep watch when your animal sleeps, and they can give it food when needed. But it needs to be a win-win situation, otherwise it won’t work out, so we need to put in some rules about that and make it a “bad” thing to break the rules or be cheated. Just make the old systems deal with this too, no need to put in any new parts. Wait, what if it could use its learning ability to learn from those other animals? What if it watched them and learned from THEIR experiences too? Maybe they could even swap information somehow, if you give them a signaling system.
It’s good if all this sorting of information and rule-following happens automatically, but what about the exceptions to the rules? Few things are always good or always bad, right? Completely new situations are bound to happen sometimes. A REALLY great animal should be able to deal with those too. If we shove a whole bunch of extra brain cells in there, the animal might be able to process information about information. It could try to predict the future! So, make it think really hard when necessary. You can even make it feel good to think about random new things or unreal situations, so that it can make up totally new solutions out of thin air instead of having to trial-and-error everything. But it can’t think this hard all the time, because it wouldn’t be practical, so let’s not throw out the basic rules…
…and so on. That’s decision making, emotions, morals, empathy, language, curiosity, imagination, conditioning, drives, executive functioning and identity, and more. Some of these things are incredibly basic, such as drives and conditioning (“everything with a nervous system can be conditioned, you could condition a cut-off leg from a cockroach” – quote from a TA:s biology professor), and some are so insanely advanced that only one species on the planet has them. But those advanced mental functions still have humble beginnings. It’s like every tool in our minds is made up of learning and instinct, learning and instinct, no matter how crazy things we can do with them. I mean, think about how crazy it is that this hot mess got so complicated it became self-aware! How freaky is THAT?
This is so fun I love my subject yay
Oh my god, it is so freaky. You kept adding more and more items on to the list of things the animal needs to do and every time I was like YES THIS IS AN IMPORTANT THING but at time same time NOOO HOW WILL THIS EVER WORK OUT. I’d never thought of it like that before but man, it’s amazing we don’t have MORE problems than we do. Like, on one hand we obviously design our society to be human-centric, because we are humans and we don’t know any other way to do things. On the other hand, where we’ve ended up is so different from its amazing we fit into this set-up as well as we do (though granted, it’s not all that well for some people).
And the self-awareness thing! What’s up with that? What benefits does it give us, evolutionarily speaking? I read a SF novel a while ago which basically had the premise what if human consciousness is an aberration, and there are aliens out there that are intelligent but unconscious. The aliens got pissed at us, because they came across all the information we sent into space and decoded it, and found that it was (from their point of view) gibberish. Whoever was spewing out all this gibberish was obviously an assholes, because why else would someone send out messages with no useful data? What else is art, or Hamlet, or a TV show, to a creature that has no self to examine? I probably missed a lot of stuff in that book. It was a lot to wrap my mind around.
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My daughter’s therapist works with autistic kids by helping them draw comics about emotions and sequences of events so they can connect up physical sensations with feelings, and causes with emotional effects (on self and others). He thinks the visuals really help kids learn to get outside the emotions to see the patterns better. It seems to help her.
Ooh, I kind of want to do that. I think it sounds like a good technique for neurotypical adults too! Maybe we should all break out pen and paper when we talk about emotional situations.
That’s not strange at all 🙂 The point of emotions is that they direct us towards filling our needs, and obviously thirst is a huge need. That’s not just wordplay. In daily life, we think that emotions are supposed to be about psychological needs, but our minds grew out of our bodies, and bodily survival was their first task. NOTHING makes us more miserable than a lack of food, sleep or water.
P sure I’m about to lose my morning to reading about this amazing word I’ve never heard before. So, yeah. I’m with you.
Oh so much. I am cursed/blessed by living in the Midwest, where “fine” is an acceptable answer to “how are you,” no matter the circumstances.
And you have to parse tone of voice to figure out whether “fine” actually means “yeah, things are pretty ok today,” “this is the best day ever,” or “I may or may not have cancer, waiting on the test results.”
When I think about life after death, I wonder whether I will go to heaven as bipolar. I want to be able to choose the mood I’m in for heaven, and I would prefer a mania, please and thank you. I want to be able to talk to Isaac Newton (may have had bipolar), Georgia O’Keeffe (may have had BP), Ernest Hemingway (also, may have had BP) and I want to see who else had BP. I want my heaven to be a BP nirvana, where I don’t have to worry about people disparagingly pointing out my moods and saying I’m not “normal.” I will be normal with my BP and all my BP friends. We will celebrate our many moods together.
We can hang out!
* squees happily* Yes!!
Mental health question in the thread.
I had my second anxiety attack in two weeks last night, and decided to stay home because I feel shattered. I have only started having these recently, and until I graduate in May, they may be a part of my life. How do I deal? I am not used to them, and they frighten me…
Huge huge hugs, those suck. A) well done you for staying home and taking care of yourself! B) what helped me were finding meditative things that weren’t actually meditation like knitting and cooking.
I had a couple of panic attacks in grad school. It helped me a lot to be able to recognize them, and then just think about them – not in an obsessive way, but just, hey, my heart is racing because I’m having a panic attack. I will just lay down for a while, and then it will be over. If they are coming too frequently (for you) or are too strong (for you), then certainly see about getting some drugs!
Seconding the self-talk. Being able to tell myself, “yup, I am having an anxiety attack because I have an anxiety disorder, that’s a normal symptom of the disease I have, here are some of the things right now that are triggering it, and even though I can’t do anything about them at this moment, at least I know what they are,” has been massively helpful to me in learning to ride out my (occasional) attacks. I used to try and tell myself that everything was fine, but since my brain and body knew damn well that everything wasn’t fine, that inevitably backfired. But recognizing that, while things aren’t fine, they’re un-fine for reasons that make sense, that has helped.
Medication can be a great option. Sometimes just knowing that you have a pill you can take if you need to makes it easier to get through them.
My doctor also recommended “The Anxiety Workbook”, which I never actually checked out, but which might be helpful.
There are a lot of things you can do to learn what you anxiety triggers are and what helps you calm down. For me, yoga and breathing exercises are really helpful, as are certain types of distractions. I also have certain specific triggers that mean that sometimes the answer is leaving the room/changing the channel/putting down the article and taking deep breaths.
The Anxiety workbook is GREAT. It really is good if you need help managing it, because tbh, that’s what you can do. Management is HUGE.
A lot of my anxiety is triggered by specific thoughts, so I have hairbands on my wrist and I snap it when I get those thoughts. I also have one for snapping if I get depressed about how many times I’m anxiety snapping… and one to put my hair up.
Here are the things that have helped me with anxiety and panic, honestly just knowing what is happening with your body and having some tools to deal with it helps immensely. Once you know you are not dying or anything, just having an attack (which are so very common, especially in your mid to late twenties) they are less scary.
1) Breathing exercises. I do deep breaths in for five seconds, hold for two seconds, and then a deep breath out for five seconds. Doing a few cycles of these helps calm everything down. There are lots of suggestions for variations on the internet.
2) Probiotics. It may sounds crazy but a friend turned me on to taking lactobacillus rhamnosus for anxiety and I’m not sure if it is a placebo but man, does it help me!
3) Learning triggers and avoiding them. Mine are too much caffeine or too much alcohol, meaning a hangover with a side of terrible anxiety.
Good Luck! You’ve got this.
I’ve had them my entire life, here’s what I’ve learned:
1-since you’ve had more than one by now, you might be able to sense when one’s starting to happen. Biochemically, part of a panic attack is what’s called a “positive-feedback loop”, which basically means that the chemicals you start producing at the beginning of one tell your brain ‘ok ramp it up, we’re DOING THIS’, thereby producing more of said chemicals, when then go back and tell you brain ‘quadruple that, make it more intense’. This is why it is SO FREAKING HARD to force yourself to stop having a panic attack. (Though that can be done. It feels like summoning up every ounce of jedi power you have and will probably leave you feeling slightly high and with a migraine. It’s not pleasant, but sometimes you’re somewhere where you just Can Not have a panic attack, for whatever reason. But you should know it can be done if you spot the symptoms early enough in the process).
Anyway, all that to say that 1: if you know you’re about to have one, if you can, just let it happen and try to focus on some object that isn’t going to remind you of any panic attack-inducing triggers. For example, sometimes I read the ingredients lists on bottles of shampoo or hand soap. Idk, all the chemical names is soothing.
2-Look for patterns in when the panic attacks happen. Like do you infallibly have a panic attack if you are, idk, in a poorly-lit public washroom? Knowing what the patterns are gives you options–you can weigh “do I want to walk 15 minutes to go to the washroom that’s less likely to give me a panic attack today or do I feel like it’s probably worth it to just grit my teeth and use the bad washroom”. Sometimes (often) the options suck, but at least you have them.
3-Panic attacks don’t come from any moral paucity you may or may not have. If you’re religious, you are not having them because you didn’t pray enough. (Took me YEARS to figure that one out, LOL). God is not making you have them to a) test you b) punish you or c) for any reason at all. Biochemistry is making you have them, and biochemistry is morally neutral.
4-Drugs may help. They also might not. I really agree with what blushingflower said about pills: sometimes knowing you have them on you is actually enough of a deterrent.
5-You can do this. You can get through it.
PS-I promise you aren’t having a heart attack/stroke/aneurism, it’s just really unfortunate that the symptoms are almost identical.
Biochemistry is making you have them, and biochemistry is morally neutral.
I think I’m going to embroider this on a sampler and hang it on the wall.
I’m flattered! <3
This is all grade A excellent advice.
This was a very good and heartening response. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
Lot of good advice in the thread already, but 7-11 breathing literally forces your parasympathetic nervous system into action, which for many induces relaxation:
http://www.panic-attacks.co.uk/course/4-panic-att…
I am trying this now, and it is helping. THANK YOU.
I’ll preface this advice by stating that I’ve only ever had one anxiety attack where I actually felt like I was dying. Normally, it’s just a state of extreme anxiety and jitteriness, but it isn’t to the level where I feel seriously ill.
Ok, that out of the way: when I’m doing well, I like to set up small, simple tasks for myself to do (here is a pile of folded laundry which I can put away at some point, here is a tin of eyeshadows which could be arranged alphabetically or by color, depending on how I feel) when I’m feeling out of control. Nothing of any particular significance, nothing which would cause problems for me if I messed it up, just something incredibly simple, but which has results I can physically see. Along with self-talk, exerting a small measure of control over my physical environment makes me feel much more in control of the world inside my head.
Oh, I love the breastfeeding biker story! A lot of similar stories have this vibe of “if this mom did X there are NO EXCUSES for the rest of you lazy sods” and this one is much more like “hey, are you afraid you can’t do the stuff you love to do after you have a baby? Don’t listen to that patriarchical nonsense, you can do whatever the fuck you want.”
That WAS a great story.
My sister-in-law ran a marathon three months after giving birth and breastfed along the way; my brother toted the baby and their three-year-old to designated mileage markers, and had a stuffed animal tied to the top of a broom handle to let my SIL know where they were in the crowd. She found them and stopped along the route (three times I think), fed the baby while chatting with onlookers, then got back to her race. It was awesome.
Thank you for pointing out that dynamic in many stories of amazing moms. Sometimes, even if it’s not explicit, I extract and apply it to myself. (Because the patriarchy is calling from INSIDE THE HOUSE.) Your comment is a helpful reminder not to do that.
This right here! ^^^
Why oh why do I volunteer to take this crap on when the author isn’t even offering it?
Aw, I’m glad that was helpful! I am not a mom but I do walk tensely into a lot of these stories anticipating a guilt trip over my own life choices, so I am always happy when it actually feels, for want of a non-loaded term, ’empowering’.
There’s such a difference between ‘You can do anything you want!’ and ‘This lady is doing a thing and you suck because you aren’t doing that thing.’ I think enough articles come down heavily on the latter end that it’s unsurprising you learned to anticipate it. Me too.
I hope this is an ok place to ask this. I feel like if anyone might be able to help me find what I’m looking for it will be fellow Toasties. I’m afraid it might get long so I’m gonna put most of the info in the replies, but short version I’m looking for info on Autistic ESL kids.
I work for a literacy non-profit that provides one-on-one tutoring for children who are behind grade level in reading. Most of our tutoring is done by volunteers and because they have varying degrees of background in working with kids/teaching/etc. most of the students we work with don’t have cognitive IEPs, meaning for the most part they are NT. However, I’ve had a couple students express to me that they believe a few of their students do fall on the Autism spectrum, they just haven’t been diagnosed. A lot of the kids I work with are also ESL, and at my particular school mostly speak Spanish or Chinese as a first language.
This got me wondering: are ESL students less likely to be diagnosed with Autism? I found a few things saying that a lot of times Autistic behaviors and the behaviors of ESL students, especially in a classroom, can be very similar. But I didn’t find anything about the diagnosis rates or really a whole lot of info on how to work with these students. I know that obviously it’ll be different for every student but it’s just really frustrating to search and find so little about the intersection of the two. I feel like there’s more I could be doing to work with these kids, to provide a better environment for them, but I just don’t have the background to know what all to do or where to look. Also I’m just extremely curious if anyone else has experienced this themselves or heard anything about ESL and Autism.
I don’t have any resources for you, but just chiming in – I volunteer for a similar literacy nonprofit and there is a kid we work with who fits this description perfectly! When I first encountered him, a year or so ago, it seemed obvious to me that ESL (he’s Hispanic) wasn’t the only barrier to him being able to communicate properly. I believe he was in kindergarten or first grade at the time, which is later than I think most kids are evaluated for things like autism. Since then, he’s gotten a spectrum diagnosis (and presumably the associated resources at school) and is doing SO much better.
I’m glad to hear he’s doing better! It’s good to know there are others out there who have had the same experiences and have gotten the right support.
Also, is it possible to message people on intensedebate? I’m curious now where you volunteer if you don’t mind my asking!
I have a close friend who is an autism support therapist. She goes into people’s homes to help with their kids. She has told me that the ESL families (especially from East Asia and South Asia) were her biggest challenge, because it’s harder to get the parents on-board with the therapies, and even if you do manage to communicate through that language/culture barrier, there is usually also a grandparent in the home who is not on board at all. My friend has tons of experience with this, so maybe I could put you in touch? You can contact me: (lyricalikons–>gmail)
I’m afraid I don’t have any specific resources, but I could easily imagine that kids might fall through the cracks in those circumstances.
It often takes a lot of pushing and advocacy for parents to get evaluations and assistance for their kids. If English isn’t your primary language and you don’t know how to navigate the system, I’d imagine it would be extremely daunting. (Also, autism isn’t particularly well-known or understood in many other countries).
I don’t know if there are other non-profits in your area that assist parents with special education issues (e.g., Legal Aid), but perhaps your organization could provide the parents with some contact information.
Okay long time lurker first time commenter and kind of late to the party but: I’m an autistic college student and while I don’t know any specific resources I do know some blogs that can point you in the right direction: Ask An Autistic and Autistic Lifehack are tumblr blogs that are autistic people answering questions like this from our perspective (I’d try the lifehack one first for this kinda question), and I know the Autistic Self Advocacy Network has a lot of great resources though I don’t know about this specific situation. Sorry for jumping in late or being too forward.
I have read about the terrible stuff happening with UN peacekeepers at the moment, but I had never heard of the Somalia Affair until today; that is horrifying.
I am drawing a blank about random stuff I know about, to my great annoyance. (This is the best sort of conversation! Why do I know nothing about anything?)
My atheism-influenced feelings about Heaven are unfortunately not too great; I feel like I would be sad being able to see my still-alive loved ones who were grieving for someone they believed was gone forever, and for some reason my personal view of Heaven does not include any of the earthly stuff I enjoy, like food or books or the internet, because I feel like God would consider these sinful fleshly indulgences and in Heaven we’re just supposed to, I don’t know, bask in the joy of God’s presence forever. It doesn’t appeal. Eternal oblivion for me!
Same atheistic tendencies for me; and I’m honestly pretty fine with eternal oblivion.
Yeah, I have a hard time imagining a heaven that would actually be truly free of suffering. There’s the thing you mention about watching your loved ones on earth, and then there’s the fact that as an introvert, I periodically feel that hell is other people, so if there is universal brotherhood and peace in heaven, it would have to be the kind where people didn’t try to talk to you all the time. I’ve heard the idea that in heaven all our earthly desires and fallibilities will be erased (so presumably I’d never be annoyed by anyone again), but I am so far from being able to imagine that state of being that heaven just doesn’t compute for me. Similarly for physical pleasures. Either heaven has an infinite supply of chocolate covered almonds, in which case I imagine I would get sick of them eventually, or in heaven you have no desire for chocolate covered almonds, in which case ???????
I assume that in heaven everyone is free from desire, which sounds pretty shit, really. Like Abed Nadir, I just like liking things.
I see it as being a lot like this: http://www.pbfcomics.com/5/
Oh no, I’m Ruby Gillis.
The Heaven Schedule Storify is totally giving me life* on this Monday.
*By that, I mean making me cry the happiest tears at my desk.
I know, it made me so happy too! I don’t know what I’d do in Heaven other than eat all the food all the time haha
Sign me up for 1) all the dogs all the time, 2) hug all the relatives, 3) just chill with Jesus and do puzzles or something
I’m pretty sure I also saw some Romney/Mr. Burns crossovers in 2012. Of course with this current Republican race I miss Romney tbh
Hell I’d welcome Republicans for Voldemart at this point.
See, Romney never scared me. I didn’t like him, I wasn’t going to vote for him, but had he won instead of crushing dread I would have felt pretty meh (depending on how congress had turned out… those guys scare me way more than the pres). I felt similarly about McCain before he paired himself with Palin.
This go around if I think too long all the Republican frontrunners I start to feel physically ill…
If you’re in the US like borrowing ebooks and e-audiobooks from the library, but find it annoying because half the time the book you want is currently out, you should check out an app called Hoopla. You sign in using your library card info, so your library system has to subscribe to it. I can’t say what sort of selection it has–so far I’ve mostly just borrowed Georgette Heyer ebooks. As far as I can tell, any book can be borrowed by any number of people at the same time, which is awesome.
(It also has some random movies and TV shows available for streaming, but I haven’t tried that yet.)
*checks to see if her library subscribes*
well dammit, I’m never doing anything useful ever again…
Georgette Heyer <3 It was a lovely day when I discovered how many of her books are available on Kindle Unlimited.
What’s your favorite? I genuinely guffawed through “Lady of Quality.”
I haven’t read many yet so my opinions are hardly definitive, but I did laugh a lot at the Talisman Ring. I’ll have to borrow Lady of Quality next–I’ve been picking which one to read next somewhat at random.
Also, I really like the two main characters in the Quiet Gentleman. Poor Drusilla spends the whole book with a really hansome guy who (she’s convinced) will never look twice at her, so she counters by being excessively practical and unromantic. This is definitely something I would do. And usually dandies are infuriating, but I love how Gervase refuses to be embarrassed about it, while also not being a prig. He’s so nice and calm!
I might have to read The Quiet Gentleman next. That sounds lovely.
I’m reading Cotillion at the moment, and I was feeling pretty meh about it until idiot cousin Freddie showed up. He’s basically Bertie Wooster, and I do not have it within myself to dislike Bertie.
Let me know how the Quiet Gentleman goes!
You are in for SO MUCH FUN!
(Cotillian is my favorite! )
Hello, librarian with questions here. It’s a private company that asks for your library card information?
Just like Overdrive, it’s a service the library subscribes to – so yeah, it connects your library card information with the library’s database, to make sure you’re an authorized user. (It’s much nicer on the patron side, because there’s no one-user-at-a-time limit; it’s dicier on the library side, because rather than ordering titles individually everyone has access to the whole library and you get billed per checkout.)
Thank you for the explanation! I did not know any of this.
Happy to help! 🙂 My library is in the process of deciding whether or not to get it. We’re leaning toward yes, but it’s a bitch on older devices, and the cost model is…frankly a little scary. The more popular it gets the more unsustainable it is! How does that make sense?
They also have a pretty good comic collection. For instance, I’ve read a bunch of Sandman and they have Walking Dead and a few others.
How does the selection compare to Overdrive?
I can’t say. I have access to three different overdrive systems (the county my parents live in, the county I live in, and the county I work in) and they all differ wildly in their selections. And Hoopla is different than all of them, in turn.
In my experience: crap for books, mediocre for TV and movies, okay for music, and pretty great for graphic novels.
Yeah, I second that summary of the book selection. I think I found a couple Peter Wimsey and Wooster and Jeeves books, but far from the full collection.
Ooh, I didn’t even think to look for Peter Wimsey. I will have to check there next time I need my fix.
Yeah, I listened to the Strong Poison audiobook on Hoopla! It doesn’t have all of the books, sadly.
I think Hoopla is the library subscribes to the entire collection that Hoopla has, whereas Overdrive is titles that your library has purchased individually. Hence why Overdrive varies widely in its selection.
ugh I cannot believe that it includes the town I grew up in (the one whose library card I let expire a few years ago) but not NYC
holy shit, i’m in winnipeg and your library never has cool shit like this, but apparently we (and the manitoba regional library) subscribe. This is amazing!
That’s so awesome! I had no idea this was international. Enjoy!
——– Original message ——–
“What is a random thing you know a whole bunch about? I’m “Linda Ham and NASA’s cultural failures leading up to to the Columbia disaster.””
Nicole, any suggested reading on this subject? Or can I hear you talk about it?
“Comm Check” is a great book, but just google “William Langewiesche Columbia” and his extraordinary investigation for the Atlantic will come up.
Ugh, that piece about elderly poor makes me squirm. My grandfather is in his 80s and still working because he can’t afford to retire. I should feel worse about this, but he’s made some TERRIBLE financial decisions over his life and his current situation is about 80% his own damn fault for refusing to plan for the inevitable (he STILL doesn’t have a will). So, yes it’s terrible that this elderly man is still working when he shouldn’t have to, but also I know him and I know that he’s smart enough to have avoided this, it’s just his own stubbornness and ego that led to him being where he is. He insists that he would work even if he didn’t have to, but working because you want to and working because you have to at that age are drastically different propositions.
Watching him made me to leap at the chance to contribute enough to my 401(k) to get my max employer matching funds the minute I was eligible and up my contribution 1% each year, so at least there’s a generational correction on those tendencies. I guess.
well, I guess the upside is that working may actually be good for his overall health. It’s great that he’s simply *able* to work in his 80s!
He and his older brother are both in pretty amazing health for their ages. He has hearing aids that he hates and has had to have cataract surgery, but mentally he’s still all there and he’s still pretty physically capable of handling himself on a day to day basis. The biggest risk is him losing his ability to drive. There are, of course, no plans in place for when that happens.
I’ve had my first day in heaven planned since 2010. Me and my mum are going to go out for lunch somewhere, ideally in May or June, nice enough weather to sit outside, and have a bottle of white wine and as many courses as we feel like and I am going to update her on everything she’s missed and she can tell me what she’s been up to.
This sounds remarkably like what my dear friend promised me when my mom died: when Mom got to heaven, Carrie’s mom would take her out to Heaven’s bar, and show her the lay of the land up there.
That sounds lovely.
I think if heaven exists, in addition to finding out who did all the murders, I’d want to visit/get to know both the relatives I knew and loved in life (looking at you, Grandma Bette and Grandpa Lou) as well as my super interesting ancestors from long ago. I have a snake oil salesman, someone who may have inspired a character from The Tempest, and both an accused witch and a witch accuser in my family tree–there have to be some good stories there.
Exploring family history for real sounds like an excellent use of your endless heaven-time. I have an ancient relative who was supposedly involved in an important medieval battle that is not very well documented and I think it would be so interesting to learn about. I’m pretty sure I’m not for-real related to them, but my Aunt likes to talk about it.
Did the witch accuser accuse the accursed witch, or did your ancestors just happen to live in a particularly witchy time/place?
Just as an update, I went on the date with the cute girl and it went very very well. A++ would lesbian again.
Yay! I went on a date with a cute girl recently too and feel the same!
Woohoo! *high five*
The first person I want to talk to in heaven is Joan of Arc (sorry, God). WHAT WAS HER DEAL I NEED TO KNOW.
Toasts, please wish me luck! I have the joy of two important job interviews today and oh god oh god I am so nervous that I want to fall through the floor.
Good luck! You are going to be great 🙂
Friends, this baby that I got has learned to use his voice, and so all he does is sit in his chair and go “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”.
He’s not crying or upset or anything. He’s just loudly saying, “aaaaaaaaaaaaa.”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa.” Chews on the teething ring. “Aaaaaa.” Plays with stuffed animal. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.”
We spent the weekend before last snowed in at my parents’ house, and since my whole family communicates like the congress of New York from 1776 (i.e.: everyone speaks very loudly and all at once and no one listens to what anyone else is saying), I think he’s got an idea that this is just what talking is.
If that’s the case, my new nephew will be doing the exact same thing. My Christmas present to him was those baby noise-cancelling earmuffs, specifically for him to wear during family dinners.
My nephew had about a month of that right around the time he was learning to roll over/crawl. It was so hard to tell if he was happy or mad!
Congratulations, you have a baby!
there’s was some question early on, but I think that you’re right
Also, baby sign language can be a good and useful thing if your particular baby becomes frustrated with “aaaaaaaaa” as his primary communication tool before he acquires superior verbal tools. It was helpful with our first, who was a little slow to pick up language, but used barely at all with our second who was much more language-oriented.
Sometimes when they’re swaddled, they do look like hams.
That is the sweetest thing I ever heard! Babies!
My little guy, who is now 8, used to say “meeeeee” for everything. When he wanted something it was in an upspeak, so it sounded like a question. When he was mad he would say it, but with an angry tone. When he was happy he would wiggle and say it. He basically was born with that male privilege baked in!
I am happy to say he has found other words to express what he needs.
…your kid is Beaker?
I remember that stage, and texting my spouse excitedly, “She learned a new vowel sound!”
Get used to it! Fifteen months, and there’s still a lot of that. We’re only just starting to get actual words. (She can say “Cat!” and “Rhuby!” (the cat’s name). She cannot say Mama.)
Last night:
Me & partner, singing in front seat of car: … one fell off and hurt her monkey head! Along came the Mama Monkey, this is what she said –
Baby, back of car: Ee-i ee-i oh!
NOPE. TOO CUTE.
This is a wonderful stage of development. Don’t miss an opportunity to let Baby explore an echo chamber. If you’re passing a pedestrian tunnel of any kind, stop inside with Baby and enjoy how “aaaaaaaaaa” sounds in there.
You need the Doctor to come speak baby with him!
(This is pretty much my Younger Niece’s vocab at the moment, although she’s refined a variety of different pitches for different occasions.)
When mine was still a Baby, rather than a Terrifyingly Huge Pre-Teen, he spent about four months just saying BA-BOO-BEE over and over. Where’s the kitty? BA-BOO-BEE! What’s on TV? BA-BOO-BEE! How’s that diaper holding up? BA-BOO-BEE!
Isn’t it weird how you go from silent, internal baby to incredibly unpredictably loud outside baby the second it’s born? It’s as if the baby has stored up months and months of sounds and they’re all coming out uncontrollably. Unless it’s been yelling into water in there all along. Either way, it’s very odd. (New babies are odd.)
Being a famous historical person in the afterlife must get really tiring. I’d totally want to chat with Anne Boleyn and learn her real story but she’s probably really tired of everybody asking about Henry and just wants to have mother-daughter board games + wine nights with Elizabeth I in peace.
I always think about that with celebrities. Like, obviously we all want to go hang out with David Bowie, but why would he want to hang out with a bunch of random people constantly? I mean, he’s got to be able to enjoy his heaven too. Whose heaven takes precedence?
Dear Toast, I will be getting a cat. I found a cat yesterday but unfortunately/fortunately she was adopted right after I left. But onward to more cats.
So much fluffy cuddling in your future! Looking forward to seeing pics in the Open Thread 😀
Are you in NYC? I have a foster cat right now through Brooklyn Animal Action that needs a home! http://www.adoptapet.com/pet/14338226-brooklyn-ne…
Sorry I’m not 🙁 I have a friend that just moved there though. I’ll pass it along!
Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S® 5 ACTIVE™, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone
——– Original message ——–
No worries at all–hope you find the best, snuggliest cat!
Toasties, whats a good hangover cure? Besides falling asleep at my desk. In a random chain of events, the vegan restaurant I wanted to go to last night was closed, sending me to a different locale down the street next to a popular gay club. One thing lead to another, and I ended up doing karaoke to “None of Your Business” by Salt-n-Pepa with some new friends. No one could remember my name and just referred to me as Kourney Kardasian, which I didn’t mind. Good times.
Ibuprofen. As much water as you can stand to drink and then drink some more (you may replace this with watered down Gatorade). Eat something carb-y. And, finally, a 5 hour energy drink.
Many thanks! 🙂
Any and all of these in combination, ideally 3:
–Alka-seltzer
–Weed
–Green smoothie
–Potato chips
–Orgasm
–Coconut water
and non-negotiable: WATER and coffee
This is a GREAT list, bless you.
Diet Coke and greasy food. And water.
Water and any fatty food that doesn’t disgust you.
I hope you are better and / or home by now, but my no-fail formula is diet coke, coffee (alternate sips), water, many many fried potatoes, bacon if you’re into that sort of thing, and some painkillers.
I am very late to this, but I have STRONG FEELINGS.
Sugary soda (NOT diet) with caffeine, preferably slightly flat.
Ibuprofen
Water, lots
Carbs (I like bagels – they are like hangover chew toys)
I once had a hangover so epic that I called my mother for advice. The soda thing is Mom Wisdom. The theory is that the sugary syrupy part kind of coats and settles your stomach while the caffeine is prying open your poor dehydrated brain blood vessels. This may be bullshit, but it worked for me back when I used to drink.
Thank you!! Yes, I did the soda thing. Felt so much better. Ginger ale and pho healed my worn and weary bones just in time to watch Vanderpump Rules.
I had a dream once where I went to Heaven. It was sort of a nightmare. I dreamed that I ended up running away, because nothing could be worse than being reunited with my loved ones and having to confront my wasted life.
If I found myself in Heaven, I think the first thing I’d do is enjoy the ability to think clearly, without mental illness. But then that ability would probably throw the reality of my wasted life into acute relief, because I would be able to fully appreciate the magnitude of my mistakes, which I am only intermittently aware of now. Maybe I could make an appointment to speak with God or Mister Rogers, and they could help me get a handle on things.
I am afraid I would probably have to be a different person before I could enjoy Heaven.
Yes. I have had a very cosseted life, but even I would probably try to give the angels an “I would like to speak to your manager”-type speech about why there was so much cruelty and injustice on Earth, and don’t you dare try to say, “Oh, you could have fixed it, Miss Packard, if you’d just been a better Christian and got other people to be better Christians too” because that’s all bootstraps and nonsense. Better people than I spent their whole lives trying to fix things, got murdered for it, and ended up being quoted out of context by people trying to justify complacency.
I’d get kicked out of Heaven and have to be a ghost on Earth. There are worse things. I’d haunt the hell out of rotten people and hide their important papers and favorite hats.
I like you.
Thanks! I like you, too! 🙂
Also I like damanoid and think zie has a perfect right to be in Heaven and should have a big atelier there and complete creative autonomy to do what zie wants to, perfectly.
Heaven-You might have compassion for Earth-You, and recognise all the things you did right and well in spite of fucked up brain-chemistry.
If nothing else, damanoid, I think I’ve seen you elsewhere in the InterTubes, and you have a witty and insightful comment history. <3
The Heaven schedule Storify! 😀
My own agenda would go something like (in no specific order)…
* A lot of questions about the Bible as we know it now. (Was that really via your inspiration or did those dudes who compiled it get it wrong? If they did get it wrong, did you want more woman-centric stories/more righteous women featured in it? What about the books that didn’t make the canon? If they got it right, WHY THE HELL DID YOU NOT HAVE MORE WOMEN IN IT?)
* Ask what God’s pronouns really are. Ditto the Holy Spirit.
* Reunite with old friends/acquaintances.
* Find Lucy Maud Montgomery and ask about the sequel to Jane of Lantern Hill. (She was working on one before her death, according to her journals. Oddly, JofLH is yet another of her books I started but never finished.) Also ask what she thought of every Anne adaptation made since her death.
* Snuggle with a cat or kitty.
* Meet the Desert Mothers, and all the other early Christian women, and ask them to tell me ALL THE THINGS.
There are probably more things. *nods*
YES, the Desert Mothers! I just want to listen to them talk, forever. (Does anyone know a good book of stories about the Desert Mothers, or their parables and sayings or whatever?)
* Find Lucy Maud Montgomery and ask about the sequel to Jane of Lantern Hill. (She was working on one before her death, according to her journals. Oddly, JofLH is yet another of her books I started but never finished.) Also ask what she thought of every Anne adaptation made since her death.
Megan Follows = sits on the right hand of God. Duh.
NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOO MEGAN MUST LIVE FOR MANY MOAR MILLENNIA OKAY.
Is anyone else here in a position of seeing their parents struggle live in ‘retirement’ without private pensions, but ALSO not having a pension plan of their own?
Oh, yes. Also, I am being called upon to bankroll emergency repairs to my Mom’s home with money I should be saving myself.
I am terrified for you; that article was a real heartbreaker (read it last night and posted it to FB for anyone needing “gotta save” inspiration).
In Canada, there is the Canada Pension Plan in which every employee contributes to while working PLUS small business owners also contribute to CPP in order to qualify; full benefits are available at 65 years (or at 60 years with reductions). In addition to the CPP, Canada has Old Age Security which is based on the years living in Canada and your income at the time of age 65; depending on your taxable income at age 65, OAS may be clawed back or eliminated all together.*
*This was brought to you by Mr.PonyAlong, a financial planner and all around Good Egg.
So… another reason to move to Canada? 🙂
I’m sure Mr.PonyAlong will agree: Saving is necessary, but not the focus; investing is. Rather, *careful* investing is. I know a couple in their 70s who saved enough to retire very comfortably almost 20 years ago. Then they lost it all in the 2007 stock market crash. They’re now barely getting by with Social Security and minimum wage from a part-time job with the only employer they could convince to hire a septuagenarian.
Go see a good financial planner, Toastfriends, one like Mr.PonyAlong.
Yeah, Canada’s pretty unusual in that we spend a lot more per person for elderly people than any other age group, and as a result, the poverty rate for seniors is lower than for any other age bracket and is less than a third the poverty rate for children.
Ah yes! I haven’t had that exactly, but have helped them out in other ways that postponed my plans for myself. Plus, I’m single – very happily, but do wonder how much easier it would be with someone else to split the financial risks with?
I don’t think I know a single person my age (30s) in the US who has a traditional pension plan. Those are going the way of the dinosaur, at least in the private sector. (If they have anything at all, they have 401(k)s or Roth IRAs).
I suspect I may be in that boat with my parents. I have some meager 401(k) savings, but I’m probably not going to be set up too well in my own old age.
My current plan is to Take to the Sea.
Taking to the sea sounds IDEAL. Do we have to wait until retirement? Because “Monday” also seems plenty reason.
I’ll pack a bag! (SPOILERS: It’s mostly snacks).
I’ll bring wine.
That is, may I come too? I’ll bring wine!
Absolutely!!
I spent my weekend working on a doll and “watching” Smash Season 2 while working.
1. Smash Season 2 was awful.
2. Smash Season 2 is like a Hamilton bonanza: Leslie Odom, Jr., Phillipa Soo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and King George III the First. I’m sure I’m missing another five people.
3. Oh, Katherine McPhee.
4. Rage that Megan Hilty is not a bigger thing in television.
5. Jesse Martin *heart eyes*.
6. The lovely and charming Jeremy Jordan doing his UTMOST to be NEITHER of those things and making only one face for an entire season.
(ALSO I just saw Megan Hilty – my neighbor! – in Noises Off and she is magnificent, along with Andrea Martin. Highly recommend to all tristate and traveling-to-the-tristate Toasties.)
I’m unclear whether I dislike him more in Smash or Supergirl. Because I don’t care for his character in either show. At least Winn is sort of non-offensive?
The problem with Smash is that they really loved Kat McPhee, and they wanted everyone else to really love her, and maybe she’s charming and wonderful in whatever show she’s in now, but she was not that great in Smash, and her charmed character was annoying.
I am mad at them also because I heard about their season 3 plans and they were bad.
I both want to hear about the season 3 plan, and don’t. I mean, Julia, WHAT are you doing going back to Michael? And Jack Davenport, you’re tall and handsome and the only one I’m really interested in watching because your character is a complete jackass.
Toastie-in-training: 7th grader decided she wanted to change her mind on the book she will read for class this semester. Came to me and asked for Jane Eyre! She was three chapters in by the end of the school day (she even tried to read on the bus at 6:30 am, but “it was dark so I didn’t get very far”.
The bus or the book? 😉
Parenting: you are doing it right.
Heaven: 1. Find the bar 2. Try and get in David Bowie’s pants 3. Avoid relatives
I expect David Bowie already has a waiting list.
We’ve got all eternity.
I do love how many people justify U.S. involvement in WWII because of the Holocaust. There’s the first-level ridiculousness that it wasn’t the justification at the time. But there’s the second-level ridiculousness that the Holocaust actually happened and the plan for genocide was substantially completed in many respects. Evincing that it is possible for nationalist propaganda to distort even the understanding of basic cause-and-effect.
At least we have Cher’s Twitter, though, so this country isn’t all bad.
Yeah, it wasn’t until I visited the Holocaust Museum in DC that I truly realized how little we knew about the Holocaust and what was going on in the concentration camps. My history classes growing up definitely had that nationalistic bias.
I went with my high school class to the Holocaust Museum, and I remember first they showed us a video, kind of “Holocaust 101.” There was a shot of an American flag and an explanation that the Nazis went against “American values”, so the US had to get involved and Make it Stop. It made me want to puke, knowing that FDR knew exactly what was going on, could have bombed the tracks to Auschwitz, and chose not to. Knowing how many times before and since the US has looked the other way when genocide is politically convenient. Ugh.
I’ve been reading my grandfather’s WW2 letters and he was so angry with his fellow draftees for thinking the only reason we were at war was Pearl Harbor.
“What is a random thing you know a whole bunch about?”
I’m writing a dissertation, so…
Yeah, retirement…I’m not holding out much hope. In 12 years I can start receiving social security (unless we have a slew of GOP presidents). I picture myself as the most angry Walmart greeter ever.
I’m guessing Netflix will order a half-hour dramedy about that Walmart greeter.
“Welcome to Wal-Mart, and FUCK YOU, MAN!”
Finally, a Walmart I’d love visiting!
How is everyone feeling about Thinx? I’m considering buying a couple pairs and see there is a referral discount now – would love to support a Thinx-buying Toastie if anyone has a referral code. Also – sizing? I hear going up a size may be necessary?
Pretty sure our own Nicole Cliffe has them and loves them. I think she made a post about it even. Or am I imagining that? (it might have just been on twitter)
Yes! That article helped convince me but I think it was per-referral codes so no one had any to share in the article or in the comments (could be wrong, sorry if this is repetitive!)
She did indeed do a post about them! http://the-toast.net/2015/10/28/thinx-period-unde…
I’m curious about these too because my IUD has made my period too light for tampons and most maxi pads so I’m stuck with pantiliners, which I deeply dislike…jumping on this thread to see what people thinx (lol)
I love them! I do suggest sizing up (depending on how tight you like your underwear). They aren’t uncomfortable but I always get a big of a wedgie because I have a big butt so keep that in mind. I wear them as backup for a diva cup on my heavy days or alone during my very light days (three pairs). They do work and they wash well and they are awesome.
And here is my referral link, though you are under no obligation to use it: http://fbuy.me/duWC0
Awesome, thank you! I will absolutely use the referral link once I decide on which ones to try out (leaning towards the hiphugger and/or sport).
Re: the elderly… sort of…
Can someone tell me what is going to happen to me if I never have children, when I grow old?
I am so scared of this every day of my life. Who will take care of me? I have no nieces or nephews, either, and never will.
I hear you; I’m single with no children so I can only depend on myself. My retirement plan involves saving as much as possible from every paycheque – I’m lucky to have been well-employed to date and to live in Canada where we do have a social safety net, but life is never certain and with aging parents, am I saving for them as well as myself? It is a scary prospect, no joke. Toast retirement community, perhaps?
You will move to Miami and find 3 other older women to live with and take care of each other, Golden Girls style. With the internet at your disposal, this will be a piece of cheesecake.
(I’m only 26 and I think about my old age plan, and this seems to be the best option)
Thank you; I will keep your username in mind for when I am searching for Miami friends.
That’s a pretty excellent old age plan, honestly, count me in.
I’ll head up the snow-loving Golden Toasties compound.
aqueousmedium and her parka, reporting for duty. I mix a mean hot toddy.
You’re in! Here are your mittens with the GT logo on them!
This is my FAVORITE, thank you so much.
This actually sounds ideal. I kind of expect old age to be like a return to college, except with less pressure and more art classes where we make watercolors. And fewer all night parties.
I think there are retirement communities based around this – like they take place on or near a campus and you’re expected to take a certain number of classes to join.
Yep, the golden girls model is my plan. That and save, save, save. I’m terrified of what my healthcare bills will look like in 30 years and beyond and know I will have no children to help out with any part of aging.
Even though I deal with medical billing stuff every single day at work, I have NO IDEA how to estimate my own future medical costs. Who knows how much anything will be??
(See below re: taking to the sea).
I… I don’t know where I’ll end up with kids and extended family but I don’t want to live to the point where I need to be taken care of, so I’ll be making plans for that reality when it becomes a little more pertinent.
And people think this sounds really dark when I discuss it, so I’m sorry if you do! But in my personal life it’s something I’ve thought a lot about and I am happy and at peace with what I’ve decided, even if I change my mind in 20 years.
Assisted suicide, on demand and without apology!
Cosigned! Bodily autonomy should apply to all situations in life.
This is appealing to me. What kind of things can one do to make plans?
I agree! I’m not sure if I’ll stick to the plan when the time comes, but right now my thinking is that Alzheimer’s diagnosis (or something similar = a hangout time in the car with the garage door closed, good music playing, and some bubbly to see me off.
Got friends who have kids? Pick your favourite and start weaving yourself into his/her life (I have no kids, too and although I got 1 niece and 2 nephews, I’m not holding my breath, you know? So I casted my net to include my friend’s kid, just in case…!)
Find a house of worship you don’t totally object to, or some other high-commitment group like a volunteering association or a community theater company and join it and be a member of its community and it will take care of you. Research your town’s Council on Aging and what they offer. I know saving is so hard and most of us have nowhere to cut, but provide. Take out long-term care insurance.
There are a LOT of people who had many, many children, who got preyed on and/or abandoned rather than cared for by those children in old age. ETA I’m sorry to be so cynical and grim, but I’ve watched this play out in my family over multiple generations.
Long-term care insurance is something of a gamble. There are projections suggesting that all of the major companies will be out of business by the time I’m likely to need that care.
Damn! So we’d be better off buying bonds with the money, then?
Honestly, I’m hoping to keep going as long as I can live a dignified and useful life and feed and clean myself, pay bills, follow the plot of a whodunit, etc, and when that stops I will either take a final swim in all my clothes or take to my bed and stop eating like Aunt Jane in “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.”
I am far from expert in this area, but what I have heard from Serious Financial People makes me very leery about it.
Long-term care insurance companies are also just as skilled as regular insurance companies at weaseling out of paying claims. (Even if they don’t go bankrupt first).
Those all sound like excellent options! I’m thinking along similar lines for myself, if/when the time comes.
I am not disputing your projections, but I will say long-term care insurance was a fantastic blessing for my grandmother. Some neighbor or something sold it to her, and my dad found the policy stuffed in a desk when he was helping her move. it kept her in a private room in a nice facility until she died…
Yeah, it was good for my grandmom and my parents wish they’d gotten it before my dad got sick. But I’ve also heard those companies are having a hard time keeping up with the payouts and even if they don’t go bankrupt, people who have had plans for years sometimes get surprise big increases to their premiums.
Paid nursing home attendants, children of friends you’ve grown close with, and / or your robot butler?
See, I feel like even if I have children, why would they take care of me? I seriously doubt they would actually want to, and I wouldn’t want to burden them with my decrepit, decaying self.
Because it isn’t a burden to want to keep someone you love happy and as healthy as possible. If anything it’s worse when they refuse help because they “don’t want to be a burden” and then they are injured or get sick and there’s no plan in place.
But what if you don’t love them? My dad is estranged from his parents; my mum has a very difficult relationship with her mother, and has given up on hoping her mum will ever actually be kind to her. They are not going to be first in line when it comes to “taking care of our elderly and infirm parents”. As someone who doesn’t want children, I find that darkly comforting; I know fuil well that having children is no guarantee that they will be there to look after you in your old age if you need it (children sometimes predecease parents, too). My tentative plan is: try to stay in good health, maintain good relationships with friends and extended family, assisted suicide.
Oh yes! But I was responding to the question of why children ever would. I am not going to assume that the imaginary children of alchemical defect wouldn’t love her.
I have to disagree with the idea that it’s not a burden if you love someone. Whether it’s a burden or not depends on many factors, like the level of care they need and your own ability to provide it.
Full-time caregiving can be absolutely exhausting (physically, emotionally, and financially). Caregivers often end up losing their jobs, depleting their own retirement savings, suffering medical problems from stress, etc. Unfortunately, I see this all the time professionally, and it’s definitely not a situation I would want to place my own loved ones in.
I think you’re right, caring for aging parents can be a real struggle. People often feel obliged to care for their aging relatives even if it is a burden for themselves, but it may not always be the best choice.
I came back to say that exact same thing. My parents took care of a grandparent during his last years, and it was absolutely a huge burden. They chose to do it, and they loved him, but to say it wasn’t a burden ignores all the sacrifices they made for him.
You’re right and I didn’t think my wording through. There’s such a huge difference between the lucky situation my mother had with her mother who was able to get into a wonderful care facility not even two miles from our house and for people who don’t have the financial luck we’ve had and aren’t near a facility they would be comfortable moving someone into.
I was responding to the question of why someone would want to care for someone who could no longer be fully independent. I’m sorry I misspoke in my haste.
Yeah. No matter how much you love someone the particulars of taking care of a failing body are rough – helping a parent use the bathroom, clean themselves after, etc. is awkward for you and humiliating for them. Having to physically help someone who can’t hold themselves up any more get from one place to the next is physically difficult for you and a constant inconvenience for them. Love can be there in ample supply on all sides and the tasks involved with caregiving can still wear both the caregiver and the caregivee down.
Yes, what walrathem said. And adult children, if they’ve turned out okay, remember that you’re the one who fed them and changed their diapers and made sure they didn’t die for those first critical years, and this is when they take care of you now in the cycle of life. No need to assume your hypothetical children are completely heartless!
Heartlessness may have nothing to do with it. I’ve seen many situations where adult children have their own health problems, are already struggling to work full-time and/or raise children, or have to live far away for work and can’t care for their parents as much as they might wish.
If you’re in a position where you need extensive long-term care, expecting your kids to drop everything and provide that care themselves may not be practical or reasonable.
These days, many people can survive for decades with chronic conditions, but a lot of them need physically demanding and time-intensive services in order to make that possible (e.g, lifting, repositioning to prevent bedsores, administration of parenteral nutrition, etc.) The average person is not always cut out to provide that kind of care.
Absolutely, those are all realistic scenarios. I wasn’t suggesting anyone should live a carefree life with no retirement plans because “my kids’ll take care of me, no probs.” My comment was a specific response to achemicaldefect’s, because it made me sad that she thought any children she might have would have zero interest in taking care of her. But part of loving your kids is not planning to be 100% dependent on them later in life.
I’m just being realistic about it. As others have said said, it is unlikely that an only child or a son will take care of an elderly parent. I don’t think a kid would owe it to me to take care of me just because I took care of them as a baby. They did not choose to be born and exist, so I see it as base and manipulative to count that as some kind of weird debt that they need to repay by taking care of old-me.
In my first comment up-thread, I wanted to find some way to say that the natural urge to assist against parents is out of love, not some sense of debt, but I couldn’t find the words to articulate it.
But I agree with you that no one is obliged to care for parents just because their physical needs were provided for as babies, absolutely. And no parent should ever try to invoke that as a reason to their kids — that won’t turn out well.
Obviously I can’t make promises for what your hypothetical kids will do, or what might happen to them to make them willing or able to help out. But when you first proposed the question: “why would they want to take care of me?” — I just. I know there will be lots of reasons why, because you are a person worth taking care of, Toast-friend. And I had to reject the idea that, in this hypothetical scenario, the default assumption is that there would be no reason for them to.
Mrs_Peel, thank you for saying this!
Addendum: my comment above was not well written or completely thought out. People who cannot or choose not to assist aging parents are NOT automatically heartless, that was a shitty thing to imply. I myself am a person who has no plans to do anything for my biological father, in his end stages of life.
Also, children don’t owe parents anything because parents met their physical needs growing up. Also a shitty thing to imply.
It was pretty eye opening for me to talk to someone who was involved in elder care research. Apparently the chances of having your kids take care of you in your old age max out at something like 75%, and that’s only if you have a bunch of daughters. If you only have one kid or have boys there’s a good chance you’re on your own.
I don’t know, but I think having kids with the expectation that they’re going to take care of you is a terrible reason to have kids. Taking decades out of your life on that gamble, signing up people who never asked for it and assuming that of course they’ll turn out to be good people and of course you’ll be friends, and of course they’ll live near you and be in financial and life position to aid whenever and however long is needed? No thank you.
Well, yes, if elderly care is your ONLY motivation for having children, that’s a very bad gamble. Much better to pour all that child-raising money into a retirement fund, pick out exactly what retirement home and assisted living situation you want, etc. The latter is probably much cheaper.
I’m in the same boat. I’m making it up as I go along. Let me know if you encounter any good solutions.
I work in health care/ elder law. If you makes you feel any better, many people WITH kids aren’t able to rely on them for help later in life (for various reasons).
I suspect we’ll see more “intentional communities” in the future where friends live together (Golden Girls-style) for support and cost-sharing. Those are getting more popular now. We can always start that Toast commune!
I write on this subject for a client and this is a big growing trend. Seniors in a neighborhood banding together to help each other cover the tasks of daily living and hire people for what the other seniors can’t help with for the rest. Since there are so many baby boomers starting to hit their senior years, they’re figuring out a lot of different options for better ways to age that the rest of us will hopefully get the enjoy when the time comes. Unfortunately, capitalism being what it is, many of those options will only exist for those of us who manage to save a lot while we’re young.
I’ve talked about that half-seriously with friends– starting a nerd commune, or buying some land and building a bunch of tiny houses on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if that becomes more popular even among people of lesser financial means.
Theoretically, if you can find an appropriate location (e.g., that’s one story and handicapped accessible, etc.), buying a place and splitting the bills could be feasible even for seniors with modest fixed incomes.
I hope this thread is helping you feel less aid. The silver lining of your fear is that it’s making you think about this important question early, because there’s really no simple answer regardless of whether you have kids or not. My vote is for maintaining meaningful relationships with friends and your community. That is helpful for mental health anyway, but also the only happy old people I know are a friend’s parents who choose to retire and live in a shared house with a bunch of other hippies. It’s not perfect but they are taking care of each other.
I, too, have no kids and no nieces and nephews, and my two loved ones closest to my age (partner and brother) both have major health issues that will likely mean they predecease me. I worry not so much about who will care for me physically, but about a lonely old age.
I kind of hope some of the students I work with at our little alternative school will come visit me in the nursing home? I think I’ll be able to make new friends in old age, but I will want people who have known me a long time, too.
If there is a heaven (doubtful) and I get to see God (ditto) I would ask him what. the. fuck.
Old newspapers are my favorite (and one of the many random things I know too much about) and I am so excited to go home and watch that documentary. I’ve done a lot of work with older papers and it’s amazing to see the choices made in how things were covered and how that’s evolved over time.
Most of my old paper experience is from the 1890s-1920s (and focused in Oregon) but it’s so amazing to see the way information was covered. I was amazed by the amount of coverage the Armenian Genocide received… for something that I have never learned about in school and that many people deny the importance of it was really well covered! And every couple of days during WWI the paper would announce that “the Czar and his Family have been murdered!!” Nothing on the actual date of the Romanov execution though. And I just deleted the last half of this comment because I was clearly rambling.
Just dropping in to say I’ve had a very long and exciting weekend and I spent a long time talking to a very sexy man about Trump and why he won’t win; And then he asked who I was voting for.
I’m not American. I’m not even Canadian. It took a long time to make this man understand this
‘Who are you voting for’
‘None of them, I’m not allowed to vote there’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m not from there’
‘Yes you are’
Nope. Never even been there. Stupid Americans ruining Southern Irish accents for the rest of us. (He was forgiven, because he was that sexy. He also apologized profusely for objectifying my chest. I’m in love.)
Is that why I keep being mistaken for Irish while I live in the UK?
Also, don’t blame us, blame the English for making things crappy so you all had to leave when you had a perfectly good country you weren’t allowed to use. Lots of us are you, just really really REALLY diluted. (like almost to homeopathic levels)
Oh, and Yay sexy man!
First thing I’d do in Heaven: Demand to be shown to my pets.
If there are no pets in heaven, I will demand to be sent to wherever they are because seriously.
If there is a heaven, it stands to reason there is also a Middle-earth, and I’d rather go to Middle-earth.
” Many autistic girls (and males) may present with a more stereotypically “female” social pattern: they are very social, even overpoweringly so. This can actually be an extreme attempt to replicate what they perceive as “normal ” relationships. Clinicians need to look deeper not at the level of social life, but at the quality of it. Is this the genuine self, or are they playing a role?”
I wish I had had this to give to my aunt and uncle ten years ago, because this exactly fits my observation of my cousin, and was the exact excuse my aunt gave (and pushed on my cousin) to reject any kind of spectrum diagnosis (although ADD) was okay. My cousin’s quality-of-life situation now is upsetting to everyone, and it just seems like so much time was wasted.
I sometimes feel weird because even when I was more consciously religious, I always kind of felt “meh” about heaven–or about trying to picture it, because every possibility seemed fraught with complications. The closest I got was the Madeleine L’Engle/Rob Austin idea about heaven being as unimaginable to us as the whole concept of sight would be to a society with no visual sensory inputs.
I like to think in some vague, ephemeral way my maternal grandparents are back together in some sense–my papa never really recovered from my nana’s death, and it was almost 15 years.
Very late to commenting on this, but is there an LA Toast group? I recently started the Elena Ferrante novels, and if anyone in the area is interested in starting a book club I’m down…
Seconding this–I’m interested in meeting LA Toasties too! And..I’m on book 3 of the Ferrante books.
This is just the excuse I need to start reading those novels!
I would love to meet LA Toasties as well. This would give me the push to pick up book 2 again!
My takeaway from the Trump/Burns article was “oh god somebody let Donald Trump touch their baby why would you do that”
P.S. one of my priests posted this on FB this morning:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-louder-the-m…
A+ Priesting.
She’s amazing, and I want her to stay forever. I’m almost certain she won’t, but it would be nice.
So I was watching QI last night, and apparently, a common theme of Medieval Art was Knights vs. Snails, and I’m thinking that would make a good subject for the 2 Monks to cover.
Anyone else concur?
But would this include wyrms, or just snails? Because I like to think of the floppier, less obviously dragon-type wyrms as shell-less giant knight-fighting snails.
– That quote from “Race in Hollywood”: Pretty much true.
– The heaven thing: Hmm. I don’t spend a lot of time on that because I don’t really believe in the afterlife, but after I got over being flabbergasted that there was one, I’d look up my parents and have a long talk, then sit down with God and ask him what the hell the deal was with the aliens. Are/were we alone in the universe? All those other stars and planets, and they’re just empty? Was Earth like the person who got a pottery wheel and took classes and threw one jar and then decided, meh? After that, I guess I’d get caught up on my reading and TV show watching.
– Sveta is awesome, and Yeva is hella cute.
– Dolores Westfall’s story is kind of my nightmare.
Even from the upper mezzanine, Hamilton does, in fact, amaze and astonish. That is all.
I picked up a copy of Rose Madder a little while ago and actually started it before It, but couldn't get past the first few pages because of the abuse. Not that the content makes it a bad book, obviously, but if I'm already in an anxious state an entire book about domestic abuse is not going to be good for my own mental health (Beverly's husband was bad enough). I might give The Dead Zone a try, though, and maybe the Dark Tower series, one day. I've read some good things about it and about how it integrates characters from different novels, which I noticed a bit in It, as well.
Oh my, thank you so much! I'm going to save these email notifications and read over them some more. I'm not used to thinking about emotions in this way, so it'll take some time to examine how I deal with them now and integrate this information into my life. Thank you for taking the time to write all of this down. I love learning new stuff like this!——– Original message ——–
Good point. Insomnia has some of that–King went through a period when he was writing a lot about domestic and sexual abuse, like he was trying to work something out–and even The Dead Zone has a section with a serial killer.
SO MUCH LOVE
Oh my god, it is so freaky. You kept adding more and more items on to the list of things the animal needs to do and every time I was like YES THIS IS AN IMPORTANT THING but at time same time NOOO HOW WILL THIS EVER WORK OUT. I'd never thought of it like that before but man, it's amazing we don't have MORE problems than we do. Like, on one hand we obviously design our society to be human-centric, because we are humans and we don't know any other way to do things. On the other hand, where we've ended up is so different from its amazing we fit into this set-up as well as we do (though granted, it's not all that well for some people).And the self-awareness thing! What's up with that? What benefits does it give us, evolutionarily speaking? I read a SF novel a while ago which basically had the premise what if human consciousness is an aberration, and there are aliens out there that are intelligent but unconscious. The aliens got pissed at us, because they came across all the information we sent into space and decoded it, and found that it was (from their point of view) gibberish. Whoever was spewing out all this gibberish was obviously an assholes, because why else would someone send out messages with no useful data? What else is art, or Hamlet, or a TV show, to a creature that has no self to examine? I probably missed a lot of stuff in that book. It was a lot to wrap my mind around.——– Original message ——–
It seems likely that ESL kids would be underdiagnosed with autism – I think they typically are underdiagnosed with learning disabilities in general, simply because the language issue is a convenient catch-all for any problems they're having in school. I used to work here: http://www.speakla.com/programs/early-interventio… and you might peruse their blog or see if there are any links to resources you might be interested in? (I only worked in a preschool/ early intervention classroom for a summer, several years ago, but their population was largely ESL or at least dual-language. The younger kids are considered "at-risk" for delays, they also have an older "confirmed" autistic population.)
Leta was a good friend of mine. As was Frank. I sometimes, late at night, do a google search for anything about her. That's how I found this blog comment. The need to know what happened never goes away, it seems.