“No, I haven’t seen the extra roll of toilet paper. I’ve been here all morning.”
This is about sturgeons, but it’s about other stuff too:
In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2007, a volunteer for the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) approached the sturgeon pond at the Bonneville Dam and found it empty. There was no evidence of struggle, no footprints, no suspicious debris—just the still brown water where seven giant fish had been swimming the day before.
Headlines like “Sturgeon didn’t walk off on their own” and “Game police pursue poachers” flooded the back pages of blogs and newspapers for little over a week. Photos of the five-foot-long, cartilage-cased creatures appeared in print like children on the back of milk cartons.
We Hunted The Mammoths is an excellent site that draws attention to the dumb shit that MRAs are doing online. I barely ever read it, because I am much, much happier not knowing what MRAs are doing online, but I stopped by last night and laughed so hard I cried (it is about how pancake-eating women will try to keep you from being your best self):
Now, if this thing about pancakes seems like a weirdly specific complaint about contemporary women, well, that’s because it’s really a complaint about one particular woman, that woman being Kyle’s current girlfriend, an admitted pancake eater who, on one recent occasion actually delayed his Saturday morning trip to the gym by an hour.
I had a fascinating conversation on Twitter yesterday about wakes and funerals. Basically, that those of us were raised Catholic have seen a LOT more dead bodies than the general population! I grew up going to three-day wakes, where the immediate family would receive mourners for two multi-hour sessions a day, and the kids would mill around the basement of the funeral home once they got bored (immediately.) How many dead bodies have you seen?
I regret none of the time I spent reading about old Warner Brothers cartoons today:
With this bit, Jones and Maltese are goosing their triumphal, self-satisfied 1949 audience, hard. Turn around and look behind you: the Road Runner has been a passive participant, very nearly a bystander, all along. All he did in the first set piece was run away. All he did in the second was stop running, then passively hold up Wile E.’s tray lid. In the third, he threw a boomerang, but didn’t really accomplish anything; what stopped Wile E., and what humiliated him, was his own boomerang coming back. In the fourth, all the Road Runner did was notstop, not react or respond—he was inert, literally: an object in motion that merely continued moving. In this one, he merely existed as an object the main character pursued. He might just as well have been a cheeseburger, or a briefcase full of money, or a rug that really tied the room together.
That’s right: the Road Runner is a MacGuffin! He facilitates drama by motivating one party into conflict with another, but is himself narratively inert. The drama arises between his pursuer, Wile E., and the forces that oppose his efforts to obtain the MacGuffin. But, if Wile E. Coyote is a character, and the Road Runner is the MacGuffin, what is the opposing force? What is the conflict?
A Toastie ran across this piece I wrote for The Hairpin back in the day, and it still me.
SENDING THIS ARTICLE TO MY MOM, WHO STILL TRIES TO PUT Q-TIPS IN MY BABY’S EARS “JUST AROUND THE RIM” BUT I DO NOT TRUST HER BC SHE USED TO DIG IN MY EARS WITH THEM LIKE SHE WAS MINING FOR GOLD:
“Promise me something,” the doctor told her. “Promise me you’ll never put another Q-tip inside of your ear.”
Q-tips are one of the most perplexing things for sale in America. Plenty of consumer products are widely used in ways other than their core function—books for leveling tables, newspapers for keeping fires aflame, seltzer for removing stains, coffee tables for resting legs—but these cotton swabs are distinct. Q-tips are one of the only major consumer products, if not the only, whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against.
The Establishment has a good piece on male survivors of sexual assault.
Oh, there is so much going on in this piece about a PUA moron who gets exposed to his community:
Then she started reading a post titled “A Breakdown of All My Lays.” “I’m going to analyze my own experience with women in order to shed some light on what women are really like,” Jared had written. What followed was a list of his sexual conquests, evaluated with a numerical score that ranked each woman’s face, body, and personality, as well as a brief description. There was something horrifyingly familiar about number four: “Frisky little redhead, early twenties. Not very hot and talked too much … I bailed on her because I wasn’t that into it. I see her from time to time, and she’s letting herself go a little.” C. screamed so loudly that her boyfriend jumped out of the shower to see what was wrong.
On a personal note, my kid now officially has a diagnosis, in addition to an informal diagnosis as “the most adorable child I have ever met,” which came from several highly smitten doctors along the way. My kid continues to be very, very rad, and I am very grateful to live in a time when there are so many cool and interesting people who share said diagnosis writing about their lives and their experiences.
On a parental note, if you have a daughter who you think might not be neurotypical, and your ped waves it off because it doesn’t fit the (highly male) textbook presentation, keep pushing. It can look very different, and a smiley, affectionate, well-behaved girl who doesn’t stim can slide under the radar for years, and miss out on a lot of important support as a result. Listen to your intuition. You can email me if you have questions, I’ll try to point you in sensible places.
More dead bodies than a coroner. I was so baffled in university when I had all these friends who had never been to a funeral, because funerals were literally some of my earliest memories. My godfather’s funeral in particular, and lots of relatives? I guess not everyone brings their kids to funerals? Which I personally disagree with, but whatever.
Also, WOW that PUA article is completely bonkers. My favourite part is how whiny he is that people are unwilling to accept his apology. “But I’m rilly rilly rilly sorry guys! You can’t call yourself a welcoming community if you’re mean to me after I was a douche but I apologized!” Apologies are not a magic go back in time eraser. They are a step in the right direction but not MAGIC. They don’t un hurt the people you hurt.
Like, I OBJECTIVELY know that seeing all the bodies is prob weird and is just normalized for me because of my culture, but it really doesn’t seem strange to me at all! It definitely wasn’t traumatizing.
Yeah, not traumatic at all! It really was not. It was just a thing that was normal, and everyone I knew was there and had the same thing happening in their lives, so it was just part of life.
The first wake my Dad ever attended was for his beloved aunt, and he was pretty traumatized. He deliberately brought my brother and I along to wakes for people we didn’t know (a neighbor’s grandmother, a coworker’s father) so it wasn’t as shocking and awful when it was someone we cared about.
I feel like the traumatizing part depends on how awful the person looks. I have only seen the bodies of my parents, within hours of their deaths, and the experiences were really different. My mother looked awful, and I ended up not being able to see zombie movies etc for a long time after I identified her body. My father looked peaceful and it was super comforting to see him looking like he’d just fallen asleep. Maybe funerals are more normal because of all the makeup etc…
I was raised church of Christ and my dad was the deacon specifically in charge of programs for the elderly, so seeing dead bodies at visitations – Mom, as Deacon’s Wife & All Around Church Lady, always went to the visitation – was normal to me fr when I can remember.
I did once get into trouble at one such visitation by showing off my “new” joke to them: why do you hear music playing backwards if you visit Beethoven’s grave? HE’S DECOMPOSING. Many lulz, followed by a spanking.
I grew up Catholic in Ireland, but I’ve only ever been to one wake, my Grandfather’s. I guess in the city it’s much more common to just send the body to the funeral home, and then see it at the removal (and/or the rosary, if there is one).
The thing that always takes me aback about funerals abroad is when they’re left until weeks after the death. Here, it always happens within a few days. My grandad died on Monday evening and had the funeral on Wednesday morning.
Where do they leave funerals for weeks??? I think the longest wait I’ve ever experienced was a week for my uncle, and it was because there was an autopsy involved. Weeks! Ah!
The UK is where I’ve heard about it the most.
I live in the States and I think out of the eight or nine funerals I’ve been to, about half have been within a week or two of the death, a couple were within a few weeks, one was maybe more than a month later, and one was about four months after. Weirdly, the length of time between the death and the funeral seems to have no relation to how expected the person’s passing was.
For one of them (my fiancé’s grandmother), the funeral was about a month after the death, but she wasn’t interred until about eight months after that, because Arlington Cemetery. (Then again, I guess that’s not such a long wait comparatively, since we’re not interring my grandmother in the family tomb until next year and she passed away about forty years ago.)
Yeah, it is a thing here and I … don’t approve? I think I might be secretly Irish (my partner is Irish.) My grandma’s funeral was put back a week so my uncle didn’t have to come home from his holiday early, and I still think that is quite wtff.
My mum died on a Friday and her funeral was the Monday nine days later. I would say that is about average. Because (white, not-Muslim, not-Jewish) English people don’t have the expectation of a quick funeral, it takes that long to organise. In Ireland, it’s completely normal to take a day off work at short notice to attend a funeral, but you just wouldn’t be able to do that here.
Also, this is not relevant to how quickly a funeral takes place, but just an observation: it is quite hard to cater for funerals as it is one event where you literally have no idea how many people will come. I think nearly two hundred people came to my mum’s funeral.
When my aunt died, we had to add an extra visitation and ended up moving the funeral to a bigger church because so many people showed up. It was amazing but we were Not Expecting That.
Aw, that is amazing. Hurray for your aunt.
My mother runs what we call “hospitality ministry” at our (medium-sized) church and is queen of the kitchen. She cooks all the funeral luncheons and anticipating numbers is always rough, even when you have a general idea of how many friends and family the deceased had. Sometimes she’s spot on, other times she’s raiding the veggie platters in the fridge that were intended for the next night’s board meeting!
An unfortunate side-effect of this work is that my family is a little too comfortable discussing who died/who’s expected to die soon around the dinner table.
I lived in Jamaica for two years (Peace Corps) and attended several funerals that were weeks after the person had died. It gave the families scattered across the world (mostly US, Canada, UK) a chance to make arrangement to return to the country for the funeral. Yes, the bodies were there. With open caskets, for the most part.
I think the only funerals I’ve been to (as a kid or otherwise) were Jewish ones (my dad’s side of the family) so no dead bodies were on display.
The first funeral I ever went to was my great-grandmother’s, when I was eight, and even though it was a Jewish funeral in a Jewish funeral home, her body was on display. Still not sure why they did that – people were really weirded out.
The Jewish side of my family has taken to a “no funeral” policy in the last few years.
My Jewish grandma decided she didn’t want any funeral service, and set some money aside so that we could all go out to dinner instead. We went to a nice hotel restaurant (with a jazz trio playing, which she would have loved), and just reminisced and shared stories about her. It was really lovely, and very much her style.
We also had a similar sort of remembrance dinner for my dad’s aunt and uncle after they died. (They didn’t want any “fuss”).
When my grandpa died this last year, my 39-year-old boyfriend was a bit freaked out at the rosary because he had never been to a funeral and had never seen a dead body. 39 years old! He has a small, not close family and I guess there was never a funeral that he was expected to be at. I had to go to ALL the funerals.
I was also surprised to find out as an adult that taking pictures at funerals is apparently a Midwestern Catholic thing. Group photos, group photos in front of open caskets, etc.
Wow, that’s weird. I think it’s strange enough to take pictures at a grave, because… what kind of face do you make? You can’t smile, but a grave (hah) face also looks kind of weird? But taking pictures in front of the open casket is… definitely interesting.
We smile in the pictures. Death’s a part of life, etc.
There are some pictures in our family albums of people laid out in their caskets (from a respectful distance). It’s a little bit of a shock when you’re flipping through vacation photos, holiday photos and then BAM, body, but I get it even though I can’t quite explain it. It’s just like, documentation of some sort. This happened. It was part of my life. Something like that.
YES, this has happened to me too. I was sorting through my grandmother’s shoebox of snapshots and found a few pictures of deceased people caskets at what was clearly their wake. I had no idea who they were, who made it extra awkward. It wasn’t like, oh, look, it’s poor Uncle Joe.
It’s not an unusual practice among a subset Catholics of eastern/southern European origin. It’s like a final good bye. Or maybe a hey, the undertaker did a really nice job. I’m more squicked out by the tradition of kissing the deceased goodbye (generally a quick peck, often on the cheek or forehead), which is also traditional in the same circles.
Can confirm this is a thing in my midwestern catholic family. Though I think the justification is usually ‘who knows when we’ll see the Iowa cousins again.”
I think the sheer number of dead bodies also has to do with the number of relatives, depending on how old school catholic your family is (my parents both have siblings in double digits). But I have definitely run amok in any number of church / funeral home basements, and stared curiously at dead bodies that I didn’t recall ever meeting while they were alive.
I am 26 and have only had one family member die (I went to her funeral, but did not see her body). My boyfriend has had three grandparents die over the course of our relationship, but I have only attended one of their funerals. 39 and no dead bodies/funerals sounds slightly unusual, but not completely bizarre.
Yeah, not bizarre. I am realizing that my huge family and grade school candle bearing are probably why I have seen so many bodies.
My mom’s side of the family (Irish Catholic) is so enormous and so spread out that it’s rare to get us all together. So a funeral seems like a reasonable time to take group family photos. (And we’re all dressed nicely, unlike normally!)
We don’t take pictures with the deceased or in front of the casket, though– *that* does strike me as a little… unusual.
(Of course, it was a common Victorian custom).
I am 36 and I have been to exactly one funeral and have never seen a dead body. But most of my non-immediate family is far away and I’m not close to them.
Re: PUA article, I’m also confused about his apology logic. Does he think that everyone should be unconditionally forgiven if they apologize for whatever horrible thing they’ve done, regardless of how horrible the thing was? “Oh, sorry I stole $2 from your tip jar that one time” = “Sorry I lit your house on fire and murdered your family?” How is systematically shaming residents of the city online for years supposed to be a thing that everyone is just ok with because, “Oh, he apologized, so we’re cool now.”
Yes! Why? Sorry is not magic! If it was the criminal justice system would not exist. “Sorry I robbed your bank!” “OK we are cool now, thanks bud!” NO.
I’m more angry at the utter disregard for any lingering harm he might have caused his victims, as is made clear in that part you quoted.
Yes, naturally, it is the fault of his victims for refusing to get over it and give him forgiveness in a timely matter. Why are they so inconsiderate? Trauma totally doesn’t exist and they should get over it immediately because he apologized.
This guy is a big flaming box of NOPE.
It’s so clear that he doesn’t actually understand what he did wrong. Trey yelled at him, but honestly… those women were having fun. They were just mad that he said mean things? Can’t we just move on?
I will pray for his therapist.
Heck yes, his poor therapist.
His total lack of understanding was made perfectly clear (honestly before that I was hopeful that he was at least *trying* to work on himself) when he brought up his plans for the future… date until he turns 38 and then marry a 24 year old -_-
*shrieks of horror*
I loved how the writer was Just Done with him as soon as he said that. “‘Why does that evoke an emotional response in you?'” BECAUSE YOU HAVE LEARNED NOTHING, YOU FEDORA.
I’m sure he doesn’t think he needs a therapist.
Am I the only one who thinks “Trey” is the perfect name for this guy? Unless Ian, because https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28S-aOWtFdo
IAN is exactly what I thought of, thank you!
I think that’s exactly what he thinks, yeah. 1. Realise it was bad and hurt people. 2. Apologise. 3. Get forgiven and move on.
Whhhhaaaat? Consequences? But that’s not faaaaaaaiirrrr!
Sadly, I’ve met people who really do believe that.
Then there’s the people who refuse to apologize at all because they didn’t mean to hurt you.
Only a couple funerals as a kid, none with a body on display. My family is so geographically scattered, religiously diverse, and not always in touch with each other, so they just haven’t been a thing? It does feel weird to me that I never saw a dead body until last year, like, isn’t it part of life? How did I skip that totally normal experience for so long?
I have seen one, as an adult, because I went to a friend’s grandfather’s funeral and he was just there, PROPPED UP and sitting OUT of the coffin directly behind the family and it was the worst thing ever (also possibly our first meeting), because in Judaism we do not have to see the corpses which is fine, thanks.
I once read a short story where the friends of the deceased propped his body up and started dancing with him. It was simultaneously gross and hilarious (but mostly gross).
Written before or after Weekend at Bernie’s?
After, and I have no idea if the film inspired this story, but it takes place during the wake, they’re not trying to pass him off as alive.
Has anyone out there photoshopped Bernie Sander’s face into images from that movie? I bet they have.
Back in the days when people would have the wake at home, a man who had been boarding at my grandmother’s house died. They laid him out in the living room, but when rigor mortis set in, he sat up in his own coffin. Definitely freaked everyone out.
I grew up catholic and I definitely saw dead bodies, not a lot, but I guess more than most people? I also I guess “get” the necessity of multi-day wakes for family members coming from far away, can only take certain days off, etc, but as someone who had to sit through all the days of one for my father GOD they are just… so long. Like the dead body part is a little weird I guess, I personally don’t want anyone to see my weird embalmed corpse when I die, but the part I find distressing is just HOW LONG the wakes were.
Seconded, especially as one of the family members who had to stay at the funeral home for hours with both grandparents on the Catholic side. I get that it helps some people (might even have been good for me in short doses) and so forth, but man, my state of mind was not improved by spending the better part of a day doing the grieving-enough-but-not-too-much-plus-small-talk thing with strangers and being unable to distract myself even for a little while.
I feel like either families should take shifts or there should be set times when the family will be there, and otherwise the funeral home people can show you to the coffin and so forth.
So, so, so long. I’ve been to many at this point, and at several I’ve been part of the immediate family who has to stay there the whole time, and even as a grownass adult, they are just beyond long. You wind up talking and laughing incongruously with people because you just cannot be sad for that long at a stretch, and there’s just such a weird vibe. Ugh.
yes! The vibe is so strange. At a certain point, I had to stop myself from giggling every time someone came up to give their condolences, because it was just so absurd and I had heard it 50 million times before. And then I would feel bad joking with my cousins, but after 3 days, you just physically cannot be grave and serious anymore.
I think a little levity is perfectly fine and understandable, depending on the circumstances. Especially if you’re talking about services or wakes that go on for days.
When my 94-year-old great grandmother died, it was kind of a relief to everyone (most of all to her)– she’d been dealing with dementia for the past 20 years, and told us frequently that she was “just waiting for God to take me”.
After her funeral, my mom and her siblings took turns getting high in the basement and we had a pretty fun time. (Though I was 18 or 19, and annoyed that they decided not to share with me).
I’m not from a Catholic background, but grew up in a heavily Catholic area and so ended up at a lot of visitations and funerals for my parent’s colleagues and friends. (And weirdly, sometimes my friend’s relatives? I’m not sure why funerals were a “bring a buddy” situation, but we did have fun)
Funerals were just a big deal where we were. Funeral processions slowing traffic down were a daily occurrence.
I was raised Catholic and my only real memory of my uncle is seeing his body at his funeral. My mom explained to it me as “he’s just asleep… forever…”
I’ve been to a number of funerals, but only once was a body on display & it was when I was 16 for a classmate of mine who had OD’d. It caught me off-guard & really disturbed me – half because wtf dead body of a teen girl on display how is that not messed up?? half because she was wearing this yellow floral sundress that she would NEVER have worn while alive.
The rest have been graveyard funerals, with ‘wakes’ after that were essentially parties at the house of the family of the deceased, blissfully free of dead bodies. I’m fine with cadavers! I think it’s just when I know the dead person that it wigs me out…
I was raised Catholic and I’ve been to the wakes/funerals and seen the bodies of pretty much every family who has passed away while I’ve been alive. My grandpa died when I was around 6, and my one of my memories from the experience was daring my cousin to touch my grandpa’s ear in the casket. When my grandma said that she had kissed him goodbye, we were horrified! Despite my exposure to dead bodies, even now I am not too enthusiastic about touching them, even to say goodbye.
I’ve been to a couple funerals as a kid, but there were never bodies on display (I think most people I’ve known who have died have been cremated). We didn’t even really have formal funerals for any of my grandparents, more just informal gatherings? We also have a very small family.
When I was in elementary school (Lutheran, across the street from the church) we were occasionally called upon to sign at some deceased elderly parishioner’s funeral. I think this was mostly when I was in 5th and 6th grade. (Old enough to be well-behaved and not too freaked out, but young enough that the boys still sounded angelic.)
In later years, this struck me as a little odd.
Grew up Catholic in a very Catholic area. So many wakes. I can’t even begin to put a number on it. I feel weirdly comfortable in funeral homes? My dad died when I was young and that was my first wake, so I guess after that, no other wake seemed as bad.
My family collects those little laminated memorial cards like some people collect baseball cards. They pop up in every junk drawer in everyone’s house. My grandmother had a special little box for them that she kept in her desk.
One side of my family is Irish Catholic (and very into the whole open casket/ wake thing), and the other side is Jewish (but totally secular and not into elaborate funeral services).
I don’t think going to open-casket funerals did me any harm as a kid, by any means. But I’m not a fan of them, and would MUCH rather not have an open casket. It’s not that it’s traumatic, but it’s not the way I want to remember someone.
Both of my very beloved grandmothers have passed away within the last few years. My last memories of my Jewish grandma are very peaceful (she was in hospice and mostly sleeping, but was able to tell me she loved me)– I think of her mainly the way she was when she was alive. My Irish Catholic grandma had an open-casket funeral, and really didn’t look like “herself” at all. I just don’t like that to be the way I remember her.
Q-tips are the devil’s tool, and dear god did it take me a long time to get myself to stop using them.
I didn’t know they were this bad! I don’t think they carry the warning in the Netherlands. But just the thought of not using them makes my ears itch – I’ve forgotten them on holidays before and it was the worst.
I never used to use them, but now that I have a hearing aid I HAVE to. My ear gets so, so itchy. I need to find an alternative.
!!!
But there’s more. Using Q-tips leads to what dermatologists refer to as the itch-scratch cycle, a self-perpetuating addiction of sorts. The more you use them, the more your ears itch; and the more your ears itch, the more you use them.
I am so grateful that I never liked having things stuck into my ears. I fall into the itch cycle all the time when I have the least bit of scratchiness in my throat, and I’m sure I would have destroyed my eardrums by now.
any tips? I’ve tried and failed to quit. Is this what it’s like to be a cigarette smoker?
I went cold turkey after I developed tinnitus that wouldn’t go away (which, to be fair, is mostly due to dumb, loud music related choices as A Youth, but is at least a small bit to blame on Q-Tips). But! After not using them for a bit, my ears were significantly less itchy all the time. They do still itch sometimes, but not nearly as much as when I was constantly using Q-Tips, if that’s any helpful motivation. The tinnitus is still there though, and will annoy me until my last breath.
as a woman who had such terrible earwax as a child that i periodically lost hearing in either or both ears and had to be taken to the pediatrician who attempted (usually unsuccessfully) to extract it with an incredibly painful, sharp tool that did FUCK-ALL except make me cry in pain and was then introduced to the joys and subsequent auricular clarity of q-tip mining by my partner at the relatively late age of 20 i say —
hang on my ear itches i have to q-tip real quick
Yeah I have eczema in my ear canals so it tends to cause them to get plugged from time to time. I use a baby syringe bulb thing to flush them out in that case. But I use q-tips (without pushing in too far) or it’s super itchy all day.
PREACH. The pediatrician used to have to clear out my ears with hot (HOT) water. It was terrible. Painful, humiliating, gross, etc. I have no idea what else to use if I don’t use a q-tip! And my earwax builds up too much to just…not…clean my ears? How do people do that???
the best was one time i went to an ear nose throat doctor and he had a special ear VACUUM where they just stick it in your ear and turn it on and it sucks all the wax out. i was hearing sounds i’d never heard. it was like when someone gets glasses and is like “there are LEAVES on the trees!?”…but apparently you’re only supposed to do this very occasionally or else it can pop your eardrums or something.
when i’m feeling careful i put some hydrogen peroxide on a qtip and stick it just a little way in so that the peroxide will break down the wax which can then be picked up by the qtip
but nah, mostly i just stick a qtip in there. LIVE DANGEROUSLY. (i refuse to read the linked article, don’t tell me anything.)
you can buy one of those at home! There were a lot of articles about this after that episode of Girls where Hannah perforates her ear drum with a qtip.
Warm up some olive oil to body temperature, put a few drops in your ear while you’re lying on your opposite side, then roll over onto a towel and let the softened oil and wax run out your ears. It’s gross, but effective.
They sell hydrogen peroxide mixed with something else (glycerin?) to do this with too. It fizzes, though, which tickles like MAD.
Yeah, the oil doesn’t fizz. It just glug-glug-glugs its way through your outer ear, slowly dissolving the wax.
My earwax got removed by some sort of tickly method (vacuuming?) when I was about six or so because I had a ridiculous build-up. I remember getting my hearing tested a bunch of times, too; in retrospect I wonder if it’s because of my undiagnosed ADHD. (“She’s not responding when I call her name/speak to her, let’s have her hearing checked.”)
I didn’t start mining my own ears until I was in high school and I’d sneak into my parents’ bathroom to steal q-tips. It felt so good I just kept doing it.
I totally get the itch-scratch cycle that they’re talking about. I have pretty waxy ears, and usually try to stick to using carbamide peroxide to partly dissolve it and then rinse it out with warm water using one of those rubber ear bulbs. But sometimes it itches, and I just gotta scratch it.
It’s not just itchiness, though. I’m a cyst person. There. I said it. I am. Lots of cysts all my life, everywhere. And let me tell you, ear cysts hurt like a mofo. So, some light, responsible removal of oil and wax and I’m still doing alllright.
Also, this one time, my husband had something in his ear and he went to a doctor and that doctor WOULD NOT REMOVE the thing from his ear, so I had to do it at home, with tweezers and it was large and so very disgusting and what, no one can use q-tips now? Not even doctors? Crazy. I mean, they just sent him away! “It’ll work its way out naturally!” Doubtful!
Pro Q-tip use, won’t read article, living life on the edge!
“Pro Q-tip use, won’t read article, living life on the edge!”
Hell yeah. from my cold dead hands. And my ear canals will be spotless.
I once had a small hair (probably cat hair) find its way into my ear canal and I couldn’t feel it but I could HEAR it! Anytime it moved it crackled and it was disturbingly loud!
And yeah, I got that fucker out with a Q-tip and I will never apologize.
Oh god, what was in his ear?!
A huge nasty ball of wax around…something. Not sure. Didn’t dissect it. Nearly vomited. It had been in there for years, too. Oh, god, I’m gagging now. I’m so sorry.
CIA blacksite
My body also just enjoys the hell out of making cysts, but only on mucus membranes. It’s been a while since one was bad enough to need removal, but I can remember going to a pap smear and asking “So….what is that?!”
We are living parallel lives, you and I.
If I don’t get the water out of my ears after a shower, I WILL get swimmer’s ear, and using rubbing alcohol every day dries your ear canal out and irritates the ear skin. I’m careful! I’ll be fine! Probably!
I have an eye infection that flares up from time to time and I wake up and there’s weird yellow flakes on my lashes. The only (non-prescription) thing that will get rid of it is warm water mixed with Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo applied with a Q-Tip.
Ears, though, man. The mere idea of putting one in there makes me cringe.
I can’t stop and don’t plan to. I even bring them traveling because otherwise after about three days my ears itch nearly constantly.
I feel the need to eat more pancakes.
Man like just seeing the word pancake and I’m like: ooh I could go for some pancakes.
I’m suddenly reminded that I have two unopened jugs of maple syrup at home. Maybe pancakes for dinner tonight…
That would be an excellent plan.
Pancake party at Thujaplicata’s place! (Don’t worry, we’ll all help clean up after!)
Sounds like I might need to get more buttermilk at the store!
I was always afraid that I never ate enough pancakes and now I’m absolutely sure.
Yeah, my thought process reading that post: “hey, it’s been a while since I made pancakes for brunch in the weekend! I should totally go get some buttermilk and sour cream at the shop so that I can remedy that this Saturday”
If you like pecans, add pecans and butter to that list- toast up the chopped pecans in the butter until they smell beautiful and dump the whole mess in the pancake batter instead of whatever you use for the fat- so good.
Yes! I read that and I was like “I could really go for some pancakes right now”
Just another example of women’s pancakes leading the downfall of their men.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puck-daddy/king…
LOL @ “Aunt Jemima’s Revenge”
What if we started organizing regular lady brunch meetups? Pancakes Against the Patriarchy?
How is this idea only now coming into the world?
I am 1000% down for this.
We should have pancakes for supper.
I mean, if I HAVE to, as a form of passive protest, I guess I’ll just have to soldier on and eat more pancakes. For the Cause.
Last weekend I was really craving pancakes and mentioned I wanted some, and WHY do we never make pancakes? Then I remembered we have a waffle maker.
Well, I guess we’re a Waffle Family I thought to myself, as if that were a thing.
I have a waffle maker that has plates that flip over to be a griddle, so I make pancakes when I’m lazy and don’t want to whip egg whites, and then I make buttermilk cornmeal waffles when I’m feeling more motivated. Mmmmmm waffles.
If I’m honest I’m much more of a waffle person than a pancake person. I will eat waffles for ever but like 2 pancakes in and I’m already strongly considering tapping out from boredom.
ETA: which is not to say I don’t make pancakes more or less monthly.
But she didn’t have work until 2pm – so of course she dicked around my apartment (of course, didn’t make herself useful and clean up my apartment or anything) until 1:15pm…and ended up being late to work anyway.
…is there a private investigator Toastie on this site. Because I want to send this rant to this dude’s girlfriend so she can NOPE THE FUCK OUT.
YOU DO NOT GET A GF SO SHE CAN CLEAN YOUR SHITHOLE APARTMENT why am i explaining myself to an MRA why do i do this to myself
I was getting enraged at that and the PUA article, but then I realized that these boys are …just so pathetic and are never going to be happy. They’re incapable of human interaction without keeping score, so they’re always going to feel insecure in themselves. But I can be happy, by totally ignoring their existence. And I can really piss them off by doing that. Win win.
That’s the point that bugged me the most. So she has to work. Let’s assume an 8-hour shift. 2 pm to 10 pm. So you expect her to get up at 6 a.m.? And then clean your apartment? When it’s clear you have nothing else going on that day? And she still has to work? Dude, if you want to go to the gym, then by all means go to the gym. Why do you need a witness?
So many things bugged me. Like the 8% tip.
I’m thinking his thought process goes something like this:
“You know how I save money? Don’t tip well if the waitress is a woman. Female waitresses are patently lazy. For example, when you order them (as is your right as a man) to get you more tabasco for your steak and eggs, it takes them like 2 whole minutes to come back. Those bitches go and check on other tables first. WTF?”
I frequently wish I was Veronica Mars, does that count?
Hi, sorry to hijack your post, but I still have a question about the Victorian mail chain – in the Google form, do you want my real name already or is my commenting handle enough for now?
Most people have been giving real names, but if you want to give your handle that’s fine too!
I realized later that it didn’t matter anyway because my email has my real name in it, so it was a foolish thing to ask, but thanks for answering 🙂
As I was reading the quote you pulled, I thought this was in reference to another link about ADHD/spectrum/mental illness and executive dysfunction and wondering if I scrolled past it, and then I got to your last paragraph and was like NOPE.
It’s like night and day, the way the same line can read differently depending on context. (I read the parenthetical as wry humor coming from a sympathetic/self-deprecating pov at first.)
I love that he goes through his day and does not acknowledge WHERE and HOW he finds all this time for intense MRA blogging? Women: very lazy, very little commitment to trashing another group of people on the internet.
Caps addition mine: “That usually involves the 9-5 gig, a minimum of 2-3 hours a work on side work (10+ a day on weekends), an hour workout, and I still make time for friends, dates, 2-3 HOURS OF BURROWING MY BEADY RODENT EYES INTO THE GLOW OF MY COMPUTER SCREEN, MAKING ANGRY INTERNET COMMENTS ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF 51% OF THE POPULATION AND THEIR INTEREST IN BREAKFAST CARBOHYDRATES IN A FORUM FILLED WITH OTHER SIMILARLY CAGEY AND MEGALOMANIACAL MALES, etc.”
Well he references how his father never lifted a finger around the house because he worked a stressful job and how SELFISH would it be to expect him to help with cleaning or child rearing after HUNTING MAMMOTHS AND OFFICE POLITICS.
There was no discussion of how ‘MY FATHER DESERVES TO RELAX BECAUSE MAN WORKS’ linked in with his ‘women work and come home and just go to the gym or watch Kardashians THOSE LAZY SLOBS where is the commitment to self improvement AM I RIGHT BRO?’
My ex would never admit this is why he has a gf, but it totally is.
See, what really gets me is that he’s complaining that a (presumably attractive, if he’s living his best PUA life) woman wants to stay in bed with him rather than get up and go to the gym. I thought that having attractive women clamoring to be in your bed was the point.
You’d think so, but apparently that just means women can inject you with mind-controlling vaginal secretions, even just by being nearby.
Jewish funerals are closed-casket (this may possibly be one of the things about my religion that I am most thankful for), so I didn’t have my first open-casket funeral until I was 16 and my grandmother (on my non-Jewish father’s side) passed away. Suffice it to say I was very traumatized just in general by having to spend several hours in a room with my grandmother’s dead body in view (I was very very close to her and she died on my birthday which only made it worse), but also really upset when I was told that my sister and I had to go stand right in front of it and pray/look down at her/whatever, or people would be offended somehow.
I remember voicing my discomfort with open-casket funerals in another online group and the consensus their was “if you don’t like it don’t go up to the casket!” so I don’t know what funerals they were going to because like your experience it was always full view to the whole room and while I wasn’t forced to go right up to it the receiving line funneled you right past it so unless you cut everyone you had to go right up to the casket (and then hover their if the line got backed up).
Ugh yeah like, even if you manage to avoid going right up to the casket, it’s there in view the whole time for hours! That’s why I prefer Jewish funerals so much more. There’s no wake, you just have the closed-casket ceremony, go to the cemetery, and then after everyone goes back to someone’s house to just spend time together, eat, etc. (Or sit shiva, depending on how strict you are, but still.)
I was raised nonreligious but have all Catholic extended family, and I remember going to funerals as a kid and very awkwardly kneeling at the casket and pretending to pray while being terrified that I was obviously, visibly DOIN IT RONG and I would get my parents in trouble for raising me heathen.
Pious Face!! I am religious but I still need to have a facial expression I can pull out when I know people are watching me. Sometimes I use it for non-religious events too. Very helpful.
My parents are both CommieAtheists™ and raised me as such, so I was also the awkward kid at Irish Catholic funerals who didn’t know the words that everyone else was reciting.
Oh, that reminds me. All of a sudden everyone would be murmuring “Peace be with you,” and someone would stick out their hand, and I’d return the handshake while gaping like a fish and then finally remember what the response was supposed to be after the person had turned away.
Although I think peak mortification came when I was at the house of a religious friend (some flavor of Protestant, I think) and one of the parents nominated me to say grace before the meal. At the time, I thought that there was a single accepted set of words to say, and I was panicked at having been caught not knowing them. To this day, I don’t remember what I said. It might have been something generally appropriate like “Thank you God for this food and, um, thank you for my friend,” but then again it might have been “In the name of the father, son and holy spirit, God bless the chicken and the potatoes, I pray the lord my soul to keep, Amen.”
ugh, yes. I am also jewish, and my first open casket funeral was also for my grandmother on my (russian orthodox) father’s side, and first of all, it didn’t even look like her. or, maybe it looked like the her of 20 years prior, but not the her I knew. It seemed so out of place to me to be honoring that physical vessel that was so removed from the essence of who she was.
second of all, people were kissing her! on her face! people were kissing a dead body filled with embalming chemicals on the face!! it really squicked me out.
also after the viewing, the russian orthodox priest tried to convert me. not the time, dude.
Charlie Potato Hashbrowns chewing on things what he shouldn’t. Again. This time in the living room upstairs, which we are slowly transitioning to since I have been HEARTLESSLY ABANDONED by my dad and his girlfriend.
I’m pretty sure Charlie was trying to herd those pencil crayons into the appropriate place before he started chewing them. He also likes to arrange his toys in neat lines in his pen. Possible evidence for “his daddy is a herding breed” theory?
SHEEPDOG PUPPY?! I have an 8 yr old sheepdog puppy. Seriously. She still acts like a puppy. Sheepdogs are forever-puppies.
Oh my godddddddd that is adorable but he’s so tiring. I want him to grow up and chill out!
Is Charlie getting bigger? I feel like he’s a bigger potato.
He is! He is almost ten pounds, which is a very good size for a potato.
I’m trying to do a Paul Bunyan & Babe thing with him by carrying him everywhere so I will get ripped as he gets bigger.
Jewish, so never saw a dead body until I went to a Catholic coworker’s father’s wake. My total is one.
Today in STEM news:
Mathematicians have found a new prime number! It’s 22 million digits long! http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/missouri…
Also a new planet! Maybe. The math is there and they’re trying to get a look at it through a telescope to confirm. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/feature-as…
The new planet feels like old news?
I distinctly remember hearing about the possibility of it in one of my science classes years and years ago. Like back in high school. We found Uranus because Saturn was wobbling in a way that made us suspect there was another small gravitational force on it. Then Uranus was wobbling, so we looked further and found Neptune. Then Neptune was wobbling, which led to the discovery of Pluto, except that Pluto isn’t big enough to make Neptune wobble, so there was always this expectation that we would find another planet and it was called Planet X (for ten) but no one had found it yet. And I remember knowing this while I was still watching Looney Tunes, because it features heavily in the Marvin the Martian cartoons.
It’s possible that I learned this not in an actual class, but from my uncle. It’s definitely something I’ve known for more than a decade, though.
Yes and no. Planet X has been a theory for a long time but these astronomers think they’ve figured out it’s orbit and size which is a big difference. Also it makes the planet much easier to confirm with a telescope if you know where it should be!
Related to this: My son (who is 9 and adorable) just started STEM club at school. To my unremitting glee he is one of only 2 boys in a 10 person club. He just came home and waxed poetic about “Michaela, she’s 10 mom. She has pi memorized to 14 digits. Isn’t that amazing? She’s going to teach me” BEST. CLUB. EVER.
I read exceptionally quickly; I have always looked at a page, and instead of reading word-word-word I see paragraph-paragraph-paragraph and it goes in like GULP, and then I turn the page.
Gurrl this is how I read too. It gives me the ability to read so much more than I might otherwise, which I use, pointlessly, to devour pretty much the entire internet every day during breaks at work.
same same same SAMEEEEEE
Me too! I read quite quickly, but then I don’t retain a lot of details, so there are definitely books I’ve fast-read more than once to remember the same amount of smaller points as someone who’s a slower, more deliberate reader.
Am I the only one who used to read so much that there are books you’ve read half a dozen times just because you happened to own it and it happened to be conveniently there when you wanted to read something?
I keep the details when I read, and also looooove to reread favourite books, so I have to strictly ration myself so I’m not echoing the words as I read them. I have read my favourite books twenty or more times, I think they’re permanently tattooed on my brain at this point.
It might also be just me, since I’m the same way about retaining details in movies after I’ve seen them and I’m sure not watching those any faster than the other people in the room.
But there are definitely books I’ve read about twenty times and have practically memorized in places by now. 🙂
Same! I have a whole group of books that I think of as “comfort books”…I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read them.
The Secret Garden! Beauty (by Robin McKinley)! The Diamond Age! Those are mine 🙂
what no that’s certainly not my third copy of deathstalker that i purchased because the others fell apart
DEATHSTALKER! oh hey, time for a reread
I STILL do this. I have books I’ve read a bunch just cause they were there and I needed something to read. I’m also a gulp reader which makes packing for, like, air travel to be very tricky.
Me too! I have a tendency to pack about what looks like too many books and then have too much downtime and finish all of them when I still have time left on my trip and the whole flight home.
There are books from my childhood/adolescence that I can still tell people way too much about because I’ve read them a dozen times, and when people assume that means it must have been one of my favorite books, I have to say, “No, no, it was just in my room and there.”
I read so many terrible books as a child, frequently multiple times, because they were there and I could not function without reading.
Once when I was a teenager we went on holiday and I ran out of books (I had packed about 20) halfway through the second week. I started having obsessive dreams about libraries.
On our two-week honeymoon, we brought along two BIG books each, and it wasn’t like we had a lot of down time, but we still ended up spending so much money at the used book stores in Monterey that we kind of had to buy another suitcase for books and also wine.
I have read so many Tom Clancy novels because when I was buying books used in Ecuador, they were the best bang for my buck.
Oh man, the sheer number of bad disposable coming-of-age novels from the 70s/80s I read multiple times just because they happened to be all my classrooms had on the bookshelf . . .
My kindle is pretty much exclusively for travel, just to avoid the whole packing dilemma. I basically bought the entire collections of my favourite authors on it to reread again.
Same. Buying an e-reader before my first trip to Asia solved once and for all the eternal question of “books or clothes?” Because we all know what the answer to that would have been.
hahaha, seriously.
“Can you put my book in your purse?”
“…not really.”
“Why?! You carry the biggest purse in the world, it is basically a second carry-on.”
“There may or may not be three gigantic paperbacks in there already?”
I have never understood people buying a single magazine for long flights.
When I started carrying a purse, I decided that any purse I own has to be large enough to hold at least one hardcover book along with all my regular purse stuff. The purse I have currently can comfortably hold four, and I have never been prouder of an achievement in my life.
My purse requirements involve being large enough to hold at least three of these at once: a book, my lunch, a pair of shoes, and a bottle of wine.
Any handbag I buy must be able to contain, as a miniumum, a book, a water bottle, a wallet, a hairbrush, a collapsable umbrella and a lunchbox. I don’t understand why places sell such small ones.
One magazine for flights: done before boarding.
It is very important not only to have a Purse Book on your person at all times, but also an Auxiliary Purse Book for emergencies, like having an extra hour or genre exhaustion.
GENRE EXHAUSTION OMG YES
This is why I have the Kindle app on my phone. Theoretically infinite Purse Books.
Maybe they are the sort who stare out the window and/or fall asleep on the flight?
I mostly knit and listen to music on planes. But on my last flight I also inhaled (well, “inhale” for me, which is slower than some people here) a 300,000 word work of Sherlock fanfiction.
I packed nine or ten books for my weeklong vacation this year and I had finished all of them halfway through Day 5. Thank god for the bookshelf in the place we were staying, and also the fanfiction previously downloaded onto my phone.
Fanfiction, especially once I got a smartphone, is a huge part of why I hardly ever read actual books anymore.
I got called to jury duty last fall and immediately fell into a Rory Gilmore dilemna. “Well, I’m bringing this romance novel because it’ll go fast, and a play, cause they also go fast, oooh, how about a play anthology…but I just got this awesome collection of essays about wild women…and let’s add Anne of Green Gables just for fun.”
Then I got called the first afternoon, of course.
I kind of like the fact that I don’t retain details for fiction, because it allows me to re-read things I liked over and over and stick has a sense of “oh yeah!” when a sticky plot point is resolved.
I mean, I don’t forget everything I read, but some things fade quite a bit. I will remember the general shape of the stories. Given that I only want to own books that I will re-read, this is helpful.
Meeeeee! I generally read new books via the library because I can’t afford to buy books at the rate I can read them, however I tend to purchase the ones I really enjoy so I can go back and read them again. I like to think of it as visiting old friends!
same! I didn’t know anyone else did this! Except I keep the details, don’t know why it happens exactly. I also use this ability in the least productive way possible, which is to try and read as much fanfiction as humanly possible. Because of that I generally only buy books when I think I’d read it more than three times. Otherwise it’s not really worth it imo.
Right, because if you *aren’t* going to read it more than once, that’s what libraries are for. (Until my most recent move, which is hopefully my last, I have always had the eye to “every book I own is a book I have to move. and move. and move.”)
I also read like this! It’s so great (except for when I occasionally gulp down a page and realize I didn’t even chew the paragraphs… oops).
Yes. This got me through a lot of 18th century novel seminars. (Got me through a lot of 18th century novels, too)
SAME!! I read so much faster than my husband that he’s started reading only books that I recommend to him.
Good news: that means we can have lovely chats about the books he’s reading because I read them within the past year or so
Bad news: that’s exposed the extent to which the speed gap is because he really just marinates in every detail while I’m letting the whole book fall into my face. He brings up shit that I do not remember in the slightest or never thought about (like, he’s got fully fleshed out pictures of all of the characters and places, whereas I’m basically like……..I think they had glasses?)
Yeah I can absorb the characters well enough for the duration of the book (unless there are a lot of characters names that start with the same letter) but once its over… if there’s a sequel I better have it right on hand.
I thought it was just me! Incidentally, when I was a child I made my mom stop reading me bedtime stories aloud because she took too long and I could read it faster by myself.
This is why I can’t do podcasts. I had a professor who printed out his talks and had us read them at the beginning of class- we could fit way more in then he could say and we could put notes in the margins and highlight things to bring up. Professor Cain was brilliant.
I do this too, but also I am SO GUILTY of skim skim skim (which only got worse after attending college and being basically required to do it). The bonus for me is that I can totally reread books because there’s almost always a line here or there that I missed the first time!
Thirding/fourthing/fifthing/infinity-ing! I remember there was a reading challenge in fifth grade, and my fifth grade teacher asked me if I was lying about my the number of pages I was reading each day. Rude, lady.
People in middle school made a game of timing me reading a page while I stood in the lunch line.
It was great. They were impressed, and I got to read, AND to not directly interact with anyone expect the person who borrowed my watch since no one else had a digital with a stopwatch function.
YES. I have tried explaining this to people, that I dont read the WORDS, I read the Sentences and the Paragraphs, and I just get baffled looks!
I have used Q-tips for their intended purpose only once – followed by a trip to the clinic because I stopped being able to hear and they had to flush my ears – but cleaning out the wax was SO APPEALING and I have no idea why. If I could do it again with no risk, I absolutely would. Consequence-Free Ear Wax Removal 2k16!
I’ve had my ears flushed on more than one occasion and it was oddly satisfying.
Yes, this. Consequence-free, can be performed with items purchased from CVS/Walgreens. Do this instead of q-tips if you must remove wax.
Tell me what to buy! I keep Q-tipping even though I know I shouldn’t and I am pretty sure that I’ve gotten wax stuck in there pretty far as a consequence and I don’t know what to do about it.
Buy Debrox! Available over-the-counter and an actual doctor told me to use the stuff once so I guess it’s doctor-approved.
Thank you! I’m going to the grocery store today and according to their website, they carry this!
That earwax stuff always makes my ears way worse, but just flushing with the bulb and water works well for me.
I’ve got this blue plastic squeezy bulb thing that I use for self-flushing every couple of months. I lean over the sink and squirt the water into my ears a few times until a HUGE chunk of wax comes out, which is disgusting and awesome.
but I think that is for getting snot out of babies noses??
also disgusting and satisfying, maybe I’ll try your idea instead.
Same! Is this… is this what coming out is like?
I use this too. If you can find the bugger bulbs, they are better.
Yesssss. It’s like when the hairdresser shampoos your hair but INSIDE OF YOUR HEAD…
I have had my ears flushed, because the doctor said I shouldn’t use Q-tips, and the water gets stuck in my ears for days and drove me insane, and so instead of getting them flushed again I just used a Q-tip. 🙁
I know it was wrong but I didn’t know what else to do!
I’ve had a doctor tell me, “You really shouldn’t use q-tips. I mean, I use them, but all the literature says you shouldn’t.”
And then she shrugged.
So, I will continue to use q-tips.
nooooo bad doctor!
As above, try using those baby bulb syringe things, you can use them to suck out water too.
If it’s a lot of water, swishing, a drop of rubbing alcohol should help it flow out. Also good after a swim.
I don’t use Q-tips to clean my ears and still had to get my ears flushed out this summer, because apparently some people just produce a lot of earwax. The doctor at the urgent care very excitedly told me that I had “the most earwax he had ever seen” and that I could “tell all my relatives and friends that I beat them in the earwax contest”. It’s ok to be jealous of me!!!
I had pain in my ears and I went to the doctor, who, like every other doctor, commented how much ear wax I had. As he was flushing them out he made me promise not to ever use a Q-tip again. I told him repeatedly that I hadn’t but he didn’t believe me.
I’ve got some of that stuff to flush them out with myself but it’s a weird sensation to be sure.
Anyway, high fives for people with lots of earwax, I guess?
high five! We didn’t actually talk about q-tips for some reason, he just told me that it’s genetic and there’s nothing I can do about it. I do use those drops occasionally but the feeling is so bizarre.
Both my ears got blocked up with wax last year, and as I was googling around to try to figure out why my hearing was suddenly impaired I kept finding statements like “If you use Q-tips you’ll push earwax into your ear canal and then your doctor will know what you did!” which was very unhelpful since I hadn’t been using Q-tips at all, and I wasn’t very encouraged by the prospect of a doctor scolding me for something I hadn’t done. I finally just went to a Minute Clinic and the nurse practitioner shrugged and said “sometimes this happens.” She flushed out the wax with a little water shooter thing and everything was immediately better.
This is because nurse practitioners are the best.
I like that doctor, he seems to enjoy his job.
He was genuinely one of the most joyful doctors I’ve ever encountered, which was nice!
Ah, Lordy loo, my people. Spring break sophomore year, I went to Florida (Naples, with my grandparents, like a wild one), and between the plane ride and swimming, I got a horrible blockage in one ear. When I got home, I went to the doctor to have them flush it out, and the NP squirted the water in my ear SO HARD, an actual jet of water into my eardrum. It hurt at the time, but then just got worse and worse over the next few hours until I was in screaming pain. Like, crying like a baby, just utterly enraged at how badly she fucked it up. I spent the rest of spring break on couch, loopy as shit from (probably expired) OxyContin left over from when my sister got her wisdom teeth out.
My favorite part of that PUA article is the huge tai chi guy that sits those guys down and just yells at them for an hour.
My favourite part is when the guy, post-repentance and tai chi and apology and epiphany, STILL DOESN’T UNDERSTAND why it’s worrying that he intends to pick a 25 year old to marry when he’s middle aged, because “hotness”.
Oh no wait hang on, that’s the part where I just gave up on humanity
Yeah it’s pretty amazing that not only did he not change that part of his plan, but somehow didn’t even wise up enough not to tell anyone about it. That town needs a better class of villain, tbqh.
Yes!! and not just anyone, but a REPORTER. Who was interviewing him, on the record, for an article, not, like, wire-tapping him. It’s cluelessness all the way down.
Yeah it really belies the idea that Game and Philosophy Degrees are the province of the rational and intelligent corner of humanity.
i really appreciated the reporter’s description of his reaction to that news.
My favorite part is this exceptionally clueless quote: “If you’re going to say you’re a loving, supportive community and then just kick out everybody that does something fucked up — I think that’s wrong,”
Well, friend, you were supposed to be part of that loving & supportive community, and you broke literally all of the rules of decent community behavior, so expecting a hug and an “oh, you” is maaaaaybe a little stupid of you.
Yeah this is surprisingly common, I think — it’s a guy who recognizes that he did a wrong thing, but hasn’t realized that he’s thinking about it in the wrong way. He hasn’t addressed the entitlement that made him do wrong things, so he thinks he deserves forgiveness because he’s repented.
I don’t know if there’s a way around it, to be honest; I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who came out of that mode of thinking. Maybe he should just retire to a monastery for a while.
He’s also not addressing (or really seeming to comprehend) the harm he did to other people by doing the wrong things. It seems very “well, I’m over it, jeez, why are you all still mad?”
A big problem I think with the public Cycle of Apology that we’ve been doing for the last couple decades is that I think it gives a lot of people wrong ideas about how apologies and forgiveness work. This guys spends two seconds on introspection, formally enacts the Ritual of Apology, and the second he doesn’t get what he wants he’s back to blaming the entire town for not being supportive and loving enough.
Yeesh.
Not quite related, but I recently finished a novel (The Cartel by Don Winslow) where the ex-DEA agent retired to a monastery & kept bees for a long time, then came out of retirement when his ex-nemesis drug lord broke out of jail, and – spoiler alert – all that time praying and being austere did not exactly stop the DEA guy from shooting the hell out of lots of people, manipulating others for info, endangering others by drawing them into his obsessive hunt for the drug lord, etc.
So I’m not sure monastic life is as transforming as it’s cracked up to be.
That was a novel though, I am sure in real life the DEA agent would have been a much better person.
Truth is, after all, stranger than fiction!
there is only one way to find out for sure, we must force a large number of DEA agents to retire to monasteries and keep bees
Bee-ware, they might keep a semiautomatic in the apiary. Which would make all of the lovely, soporific bee-keeping youtubes a little disconcerting
http://the-toast.net/2016/01/20/i-found-the-beekeeping-section-of-youtube/
that is beekeeping’s dirty secret, actually all apiarists are secretly retired government agents, dreading the day they’ll be called to action/murder once again
Now I’m even more determined to bee a apiarist some day!
This is a nice summary of why my first marriage was such a spectacular failure, tbh.
They ARE being a loving, supportive community! Towards the WOMEN YOU VICTIMISED. Oh but I forgot, they shouldn’t get support because as far as you’re concerned THEY’RE NOT PEOPLE *splodes*
And also…he seemed to expect immediate forgiveness? The article talks about them putting a plan together with hot tai chi man three days after the news broke in the community. And then being amazed that the community was not receptive.
I’m sorry, but breaking all the rules and betraying people in that way means you might have to tolerate more than 3 days of discomfort! I’m with the former employee at the end who is like – this shit takes time. Even if you took the time to critically evaluate your actions and feel the necessary guilt for what you’ve done, which there is no evidence of in his responses, that is a LONG TERM process.
And, even if you do that, nobody has to forgive you. You gotta apologize because apologizing is the right thing to do, but it’s not an incantation that makes people like you again. Just…lotta entitlement, lotta stupidity going on here.
Also, part of how you keep a community loving and supportive is, in fact, by not allowing creeps and predators. Because if a community is loving and supportive to you, it may not be quite so loving and supportive to, say, women.
That article is so bizarre and gave me so many conflicting feelings. Like, I want to believe in the ability of these guys to redeem themselves, but then I hear the one guy say “well I want to screw around until I’m 38 and then marry a 24 year old because younger = hotter” and I’m like, yeah, they still have totally not figured their shit out.
That part made me ragey because it was so clear they only listened to that guy at all because he was acting like an “alpha male”. Then of course they didn’t even listen, and tai chi dude seemed surprised that angry women didn’t want to let a dude take over…
tbh, tai chi guy sounded really out of touch with reality. duh-doy no woman wants to engage in conversations with two misogynists in a public forum.
Yeah I mean, Tai Chi Trey also does not completely understand what’s going on, his plan was…a very dude-based plan. But I definitely get a kick out of the idea of one of these two turds sitting down with him like
“But the thing about females–“
“SHUT UP SHUT THE FUCKING FUCK UP”
Tai Chi Trey appears to have believed, before encountering the Coffee Turds, that anyone is capable of a) change and b) participating in reasonable discourse: “If we just really listen to each other with open minds…”
They broke him.
I love that the women are now all friends. The very thing MRAs fear the most — badass women in a group — created by one of their own!
And their female employee who quit is opening her own coffee shop. Yesss.
And she knows ALL of their secrets to their amazing coffee most likely, so SUCK IT COFFEE DOUCHES.
My favorite line may actually have been: “Nearly everyone I interviewed, even those who are fantasizing about terrible things befalling Jared, spoke wistfully of Waking Life’s coffee,” but maybe this just means I need some coffee.
You’re not alone. My general reaction to the entire piece can probably be summed up by “but what about the cofffffffeeeeeeeeeeeee those assholes ruined a perfectly good coffffffeeeeeeee thiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggg.”
[Ok, i’m not really that callous, but I was definitely disproportionately worried that Asheville was never going to have great coffee again. Thank you, coffee comployee lady, for being the happy ending that I needed.]
Now I’m picturing the SNL Scared Straight sketch *giggle*
yeah, on the one hand I like that tai chi dude Trey was presumably like, “I’m a dude and I will take responsibility for yelling at these terrible dudes.” Because you know they wouldn’t listen to women yelling at them. On the other hand it sounds like Trey didn’t get the social power imbalance there that pressures women to forgive immediately and listen to people who victimize them, which he was then contributing to. And which in this case the community would obviously be like “fuck no keep your $$ go to a mountain or something with an athletic sock.”
I love that the rape crisis center pretty much told them to do exactly that.
“Huge Tai Chi guy yells at useless MRAs” would actually be a really good short play.
Or a reality show! Remember that Pick-Up Artist show from the mid-00s? Do that – hopeless, angry MRAs show up to learn all of Teh Secrets, and all of a sudden instead of a real PUA, Tai Chi Trey shows up and screams at them for the remainder of the show. I could watch at least 10 episodes of that.
Seconded, that would be excellent viewing.
I mean, “Deserving people get yelled at” would in general be a great show. I am going to try to promote this concept, are you in?
And you could call it “To Catch a Redditor” !!!
My only regret is that I have but one thumb to give this comment.
This deserves way more thumbs.
perfection
If the speed of a slow clap is inversely proportional to the amount of approval it depicts, mine can only be measured on geological time scales.
<3 <3 <3
100% in.
Please take all of my money
I had this idea of a series where they round up hate-spewing Call Of Duty (et al) players and promise a Real Military Experience for them, and then follows them as they are flown to Siberia to be broken by heartless Russian drill instructors.
If you make this show, you should definitely shorten his name to “Trey Chi.”
That may be the most Asheville detail of what (to me) seems like a very Asheville story
For me it was this sentence: “The online discussion got so heated that one local yoga instructor created a special series of poses to enable forgiveness and shared it on Facebook.” Oh Asheville.
In the indie comedy I started imagining as I read the article, I envisioned him as a kind of muscle-y Jeff Bridges. Accurate, or is there another actor who’d be a better fit?
Isn’t Jeff Bridges a bit old to play Jeff Bridges now? Who’s the new Jeff Bridges?
I don’t think there is one. We may be experiencing a Jeff Bridges shortage crisis.
My favorite part is the bit where his grandmother was disappointed in him. Although that does mean that his grandmother, who is presumably a lovely woman, had to become aware of her grandson’s nasty sex blog.
I think my family is a mix of random Southern protestant and non religious Jewish, so the only dead body I’ve ever seen was my cousin’s grandfather. He was a terrible human being, but I still thought it was weird that people were just chatting next to his corpse. Lots of dry eyes in that house.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dead body? My grandfather died when I was five, and it’s entirely possible that I did see the body, since it was a Catholic funeral and all, but the only thing I remember is being mad that my uncle invited everyone back to the house after the funeral because I wanted to go swimming.
Since then my grandmother died, but I didn’t attend the funeral (it was midterms week, and both my mother and i deemed that more important). And two uncles have died, but neither had a funeral. So.
I don’t think I’ve seen one either. My family is Catholic and I went to Catholic schools, so it seems like it should’ve happened, but I have no memory of ever seeing one.
Irish Catholic Australians don’t have open caskets. I’ve been to a lot of funerals, but open casket still seems bizarre to me. It must be a regional thing.
Same, all my grandparents were cremated, I don’t think I’ve seen any bodies.
I am so happy for you and your daughter! Between your inspirational words here, the ADHD article and recently finishing Lean In for a *discussion* at my work tonight (I am so exciting and scared to be talking about feminism at my work meep), I am an INSPIRED, ASSERTIVE, INDEPENDENT WOMAN, dangit.
Hey other rose city residents! Despite Nicole’s warning after the New Yorker article about The Big One, there are still some Portland Toast readers. We now have a Pdx Toasties Facebook group. A brunch at Toast is already being considered- please join us!
RUN
NEVER! We will stand and die with our mountains of unfinished wood decor and flannel.
And wool, including wool flannel.
How does one join said Facebook group?
search for “Pdx Toasties” and request to join, it’s a closed group but the person who started it has been very responsive in approving requests. Their schedule makes it difficult to post to the Link Roundups, which is why I put out the word.
I’m looking forward to meeting other Portland Toasties!
😀
Hooray! Thanks for taking the initiative!
You’re welcome!
OMG, thank you! Will join posthaste.
Thanks for posting! I woke up to six requests and have received a handful more all day.
Quite a few bodies, as I grew up at least part Catholic in the Boston area. I did not know that it was so odd.
I didn’t know it was a Catholic thing. Every funeral I’ve been to (including at least one that was not Catholic) has been open casket.
My girlfriend grew up in and still goes to a black Protestant church and she said all of the funerals/ wakes she’s been to have been open casket, so maybe it’s not strictly a Catholic thing? I don’t know.
You’re right, Catholics do it a lot, but it’s not just a Catholic thing. Lots of Protestants, certainly people in African-American churches, do it too. My mother had a lovely colleague and friend (who was Baptist) who offered to do an interpretive dance of a psalm in a white dress at my dad’s funeral. (Sadly, my brother insisted we turn her down). This friend was also visibly surprised we didn’t have an open casket. It’s a tradition in lots of different communities. (But not mine — we cremated).
I’m Catholic and until reading the comments here, I hadn’t known it was a Catholic thing. I’ve been to about nine funerals and more than half of them were Catholic, but only one had an open casket. It was my boyfriend’s grandmother who was also Catholic by pure coincidence, though nobody else in the family was, so I was the only (living) Catholic in attendance at the full Catholic mass funeral service.
Can I just say that diagnoses are GREAT. I am a lady with ADD and getting diagnosed at age 8 made a very real difference in my life. My mother got the same diagnosis at the same time at the age of 40, with both of our diagnoses stemming from my brother’s diagnosis of more “typically” presenting ADD. If Mom hadn’t learned about ADD from my brother’s experience and hadn’t pushed for both my and her evaluations, life would have been much harder. Mom had decades of wondering what was up with her mind, whereas I and my brother got support, treatment, and understanding before we even hit double digits.
Did you read today’s Dear Prudence, about the unmotivated 10-yo girl? Go read it. Ok, so I recognized my own 10-yo self in that description, and my ADHD wasn’t diagnosed until 40.
Um, ugh. That letter could have been written by my mother. Welp, I’ll tack on “asking about ADD” for my upcoming doc appt.
So true! My ADD wasn’t diagnosed until my mid twenties (after dropping out of college and right in the midst of a work stress “why can’t I just do it?!” near breakdown.) Having the diagnosis has helped me SO much. I’ve been able to find resources, strategies and stories of other people who function like me. My parents pushed for diagnoses which fit me well, but we were always told it wasn’t ADHD because it didn’t present in the manner they expected to see it in the mid 90s.
I just got diagnosed at 26! Turns out the depression that I thought was the reason I dropped out of college was actually a symptom of trying to function with undiagnosed ADD and zero support, and I only figured it out by sobbing my way through a bunch of articles about ADD in women and then going to my therapist to be like “this is clearly me and why the hell didn’t anyone tell me earlier”
Next step: working through my feelings of impotent rage at my (otherwise wonderful) parents who utterly failed to seek any help for me whatsoever even though one of them is a teacher who specializes in working with non-neurotypical children, wtf dad
Anyway, better late than never, and methylphenidate is a goddamn miracle drug, and now I’m only haunted by thoughts of what I could’ve been if I hadn’t spent my twenties in a yawning pit of despair/babysitting terrible manchildren
If Toasties with ADD want in on the ADD-Toastie slack, email [email protected] !
DONE AND DONE! My old wee ADD brain just grew three sizes today.
GRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrr
Wakes are very unusual here in Germany, even in religious families (that’s my experience, at least – I grew up in a Catholic family but in a very secular region). But the bodies are laid out directly before the funeral for an hour or so, so people have the chance to have one last look. I think this actually helped me when my grandfather died, because I could see him one last time and get some closure.
When my nana died a few years ago seeing her body was both upsetting – because it didn’t look like her- and good for me, precisely because it didn’t look like her. That was a body, her spirit is elsewhere.
When my grandfather saw my grandmother’s body at her funeral, he just stood and stared for a minute and then said “that’s not my wife.” The pastor, who was standing with him, agreed and said that she wasn’t here anymore, so that wasn’t her.
That really could have ended up a much more complicated and less touching story. (“No, really, that’s not her, I’ve never seen this woman before in my life.” Apparently it happens sometimes.)
Yes, exactly, thank you for putting in words what I meant to say.
The Q-tip article got scary at the end, but arghh it’s so hard to turn off the “purging feels good” part of my personality. I know I shouldn’t pop zits either, and yet…
But I’ve always remembered a teacher (who used to be a nurse) telling our class “you should never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear.”
My mom always said that, at least partly because she likes to watch people try to put their elbows in their ears. But recently a family friend punctured her own eardrum with a q-tip (horrifically painful, do not do this) and now my mom is on a CRUSADE, which seems justified. Don’t get out a q-tip around my mom.
But… EARBUDS ARE SMALLER THAN AN ELBOW! Why is no one going after earbuds???
I’m here for popping zits. They hurt like a motherfucker, and also, sometimes they tend to explode just from my hand brushing against my face, so I’d rather pop them at home where I can scrupulously scrub my hands first and then immediately apply something anti-bacterial, thanks.
Also I love q-tips.
Hey Nicole! Although it sounds weird to be like, “Congrats on a diagnosis for your daughter!” I just want to say congrats on a diagnosis for your daughter. I feel like I read (and, um, experience) so many stories around under-diagnosed women and girls, across many different health care spectra, so hearing a positive story is a nice thing.
Thank you! I feel the same way.
Yes this! I’m so glad that she will get the support she needs. And also that she is so adorable.
Human bodies? 2 already dead, at funerals, and both were so incredibly traumatic that I will not go to wakes/any event if I think it’s going to be open casket. Then while studying abroad in Russia I saw a man die. He was sitting on a bench looking wicked awful and his friend was alternating between shouting at the friend and shouting into the phone and then the guy just suddenly slumped and fell on the street. Members of my group trailing by a few minutes actually saw them removing the body. That was less traumatizing than the open caskets though because it was just so surreal and felt far more organic than my favorite aunt dressed to the nines but lying there immobile like an out of place wax figure.
I’ve also spent over ten years working on and off at a pet store, so my non-human body count is incredibly high. Mice are vicious.
I’ve never actually seen an already dead body (closed-casket funerals) but I’ve seen two people die.
The first one is similar to yours: I was in an airport and this very large older man was sitting on the floor looking very gray with a paramedic standing in front of him and he just toppled over sideways. As you said, totally surreal instead of traumatizing because I didn’t know the guy.
I’ve also seen a woman commit suicide but I’m not going to tell the story because I don’t want to trigger folks. That’s a thing I’m never going to forget though.
Dead human body “in the wild” as it were is very different from “in the casket”. I’ve seen probably two dead bodies that way, one a man who had a heart attach in front of the airport, and one a man in a hospital rushed in after an OD. But I have deniability about both of those- maybe they turned out fine! Maybe they were only mostly dead and therefore slightly alive! A college roommate of mine found a body floating in the Potomac once and it really messed with her for awhile.
I can definitely believe that. I know my dad once witnessed a fatal motorcycle accident and the way he talked about it (once, right after witnessing it, to tell us it happened) you could tell that seeing it had really affected him
When my boyfriend and I were at the movies once, a man came running for help because someone had collapsed in the bathroom. We were all fairly sure he was already dead, but the other gentleman (who was a retired VA nurse’s assistant) did CPR while I talked to the 911 operator and brought over the ambulance crew.
My mother works at the local hospital, and she told me afterwards that the paramedics did actually manage to get a pulse briefly, but he died shortly after.
To be honest, I thought I would be more disturbed if I ever saw something like that, but I felt pretty calm while it was happening. He just looked very peaceful. Afterwards, it didn’t really bother me exactly, I just felt terrible for his family. (The movie theater manager said his son worked there as an usher).
I bet it meant a lot to his family that you tried – an acquaintance of mine died recently and because no one started CPR anywhere near soon enough her family was just tormented by the thought that it might have saved her.
My dad’s side of the family was Catholic, and I think he went to a lot of open-casket funerals as a kid and they really bothered him, to the point where he couldn’t deal with the smell of lilies and he insisted that my sister and I not go to any open-casket funerals as children. My mom’s side is Jewish, so any funerals were closed-casket. While my sister and I weren’t raised religiously, we were raised culturally Jewish, so the idea of open-casket funerals seems very strange to me.
That’s so real though, about the smell of lilies. In particular it always makes me think of the funeral home that almost everyone in my home town uses for wakes. I’ve been there so many times and it has such a distinct scent, it’s so bizarre.
And also hospitals!
I stubbornly resisted looking into the open caskets I was brought to as a child, but I still can’t get over the feeling that Lilies = Death/Sickness. Just a whiff makes me uneasy, like there’s Something Wrong, the association is so thick.
I’ve seen my share of dead bodies going back to my teens thanks to having a large Irish-Catholic family. One of my fondest (well, maybe “fondest” isn’t the right word…) memories is tailgating in the parking lot of the funeral home where my uncle was laid out for two days because his widow figured his being a retired policeman meant two days was absolutely necessary to handle all the crowds that would, of course, be flooding the joint.
That was not the case. Hence, tailgating in the parking lot commenced.
Fun fact: The English term for presenting a dead body to the public, “public viewing”, is widely used in Germany. But it means “public showing of a sports event/TV show” here.
On a parental note, if you have a daughter who you think might not be neurotypical, and your ped waves it off because it doesn’t fit the (highly male) textbook presentation, keep pushing.
(Disclaimer that I have known my daughter’s pediatrician since we were college freshmen) I actually emailed my daughter’s doc yesterday to ask if we could test for something that presents differently in girls and sort of expected to get, “oh, she’s too young,” but got “yup, we can absolutely check her for that” instead and felt a wave of relief that we can be proactive about something her dad & I both struggled with when we were kids.
Seconded. I just commented about this on the ADHD article yesterday, but my daughter has serious but fairly uncomplicated ADD that went undiagnosed for two brutal years because she was so hellbent on pleasing her teachers by turning in her homework on time. The therapist we finally took her to told us it’s incredibly common, even at hippie progressive schools like our daughter’s, for teachers to be looking for dated markers of ADD drawn from historical data based 99% on boys.
wait, shit, there was an ADHD article yesterday? ……. fuck, work is killing me this week, i will need to go back an look at that.
THANKS
Also, quite frankly, a lot of hippie progressive people refuse to believe in or medicate ADHD, at least in my (extremely frustrated) experience.
My favorite is the person who was ranting about the dangers of Ritalin while holding a huge cup of coffee.
This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll read today?
DARKWING DUCK IS COMING BACK
But what does “new ‘gritty look'” mean??
I don’t knowwwww
oh god. It’s ‘gritty’ because thats what ‘kids love’
WHAT.
Yup. Most exciting thing today.
Boo… article update says it’s not. I got SUPER excited there for a moment.
OH FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS
DAMMIT
UGH NO WHY. (that is exactly the kind of quality content I come to this site for though. 😉 )
I was so excited for, like, 15 seconds, and now I am so sad. It is too early in the morning for this emotional roller-coaster ride.
LET’S GET DANGEROUS
When there’s trouble, you
Call DW
(still sing this to myself sotto voce on a maybe weekly basis)
Had to stop reading the PUA article to comment on this line: “But, said Jared, “Nobody reached out to us to say, ‘What do you need to heal, to be better men?’ ”
Aww the poor little baby, nobody reached out to him?? Christ, what an asshole!
I half thought that this article was going to try to redeem this dude, but then at the end, it’s so clear that he’s still just a garbage person? He just doesn’t get it, at all.
He just seems incapable of taking any responsibility for himself. I hope they drive him out of town (into space, perhaps).
#AssholesInSpace
I thought it was nice that Troy did reach out, because even garbage humans are allowed a second chance — though, to be clear, no one is OBLIGED to give him a second chance, especially not before he’s done anything to try to make amends.
As it turns out, it would be a waste of time to give him a second chance and I hope those eventual 24 year olds google him and nope way the hell away.
And if he knows he needs to heal and become a better man, why doesn’t he ask somebody specifically to help him do that? Why doesn’t he search out resources for becoming a better man and human being, rather than waiting for Tai Chi man to come yell at him?
(although I suppose looking for resources on masculinity is what led him to the PUA community in the first place)
I’m in the chair getting my new tattoo and I’m so chuffed I nearly forgot about LR. My tattooist is a very brilliant trans man and we’re putting the world to rights at the same time.
I have seen a couple of dead bodies. We had to kiss them
Cool! What does your new tattoo look like? If you don’t mind sharing.
I’ll post a picture to the open thread tomorrow, its easier to show; but its awesome
Yaaaay! I am always super curious about tattoos. I can’t decide if I want to get one or not…it would be just a little one, some sort of memorial tattoo in a not very visible place. Idk. Not sure if I want to do that or not.
TL;DR I’m always super interested in whatever anyone else wants to say about their tattoos that they have or are considering getting!
I’m an enabler when it comes to tattoos, they’re awesome, do it. (I have brought multiple friends for their first tattoo.)
I got my first (and only) a couple of months ago, at the age of 44. Took me that long to figure out what I wanted emblazoned permanently on my body. The tattoo artist was super sweet, the tattoo is beautiful, and I love it (and so does my mom, unexpectedly).
Does it say “Pssst! Wanna see a dead body?”
(Sorry)
kiss them? how was that for you? It is so far from my own experiences, I can hardly fathom.
I was pretty young, but theres a whole thing where you put your hand on their forhead and then kiss it. Touching a dead body was fucking weird
Oh, wait. I feel like I was also encouraged to kiss dead relatives! This is only half a memory but even at 5 or 6 I was like “Nah. You go ahead and kiss Great Aunt Helen, Grandma, I’ll be over here not doing that.” So weird! Why was this a thing?
Ugh, I didn’t care to kiss my grandparents when they were vertical. Forget about horizontal.
Anyone else familiar with Asheville not remotely surprised that the town is not having it with this guy? It seems like a very Asheville thing to do.
It’s a little bit quirky, and it has an interesting reputation for sure, but it fits completely in their vibe to run somebody like that out on a rail.
So there’s some hope for North Carolina.
concur. This guy is fucked because he grew up there, so it’s not like he can just go back to where he moved from and live in anonymity.
Edit to add: Also, I’m always fascinated by the interaction between people who grew up in and around the area, who sometimes come from isolated, conservative, rural, hyper-religious backgrounds, and people who are move into the area for lifestyle reasons, who often came from entirely different backgrounds and whose commitment to more liberal ideals is such a big part of their personality that they chose where to live based on it. I know people from both backgrounds very well, and I swear it’s a book of amazing short stories waiting to happen.
Whenever I go to Asheville, I always wonder how the more conservative people handled the first influx of all the Asheville hippies (as I call them, with much glee). I forgot, really, that there still would be the conservative pockets around. I mean, you don’t have to drive more than a few minutes away from town to find what is apparently the motherland of stores catering to preppers.
Upon reflection, it might be amazing that there’s not more conflict.
Sounds sort of like Ithaca, NY (where I went to college, and near where most of my family is from). The town itself is basically a tinier, patchouli-er San Francisco, but the outlying countryside and towns are EXTREMELY conservative.
I had a college job with the county planning department there (where we used to drive around some of those more rural areas), and I was always half-expecting to get chased away with a shotgun.
Right around Asheville, there are lots of little satellite-Ashevilles. Even the towns with all the prepper stores are these cute little walkable towns that’re quite pretty. Some of them are college towns. But the farther you get into the mountains, it does start getting scary.
That said, I live in east TN. In terms of wondering about potential shotgun wielders, you’re better off in western NC.
This is true of nearly all super-liberal towns! I’ve seen a map somewhere where each county in the USA was tinted on a scale from red/purple/blue depending on how people voted in the last presidential election, and ALSO shaded light to dark depending on the population of the county.
There were lots of little dark blue towns surrounded by rings of bright red that faded as they got further away.
I mean, Portland (where I am) is known as this city of very liberal people–and it is–but our suburbs have some really conservative nutjobs who hate Portland because you have to pay for parking and not run over cyclists and also they got panhandled that once, the HORROR.
I wanted a lot more information about how *everyone* quit! Everyone quit working there!
It wasn’t a big coffee shop, I’m guessing they had less than 10 employees.
Yes, but that’s still a lot of people to all quit in a very short period of time!
Oh no, not surprised at ALL. We moved from Atlanta to Charlotte in 2000, but my mom had really wanted to move to Asheville because of “all the Christians that live there.” That stat was apparently based on zero facts other than “Billy Graham has a retreat center nearby,” because 1999 or 2000 was the year that Asheville was proclaimed the gayest, hippie-est, witchiest town in the South – I heard “New San Francisco” thrown around a lot. My mom was not pleased by this but I was tickled. Asheville is great.
I have a friend who keeps telling me that Ashville is exactly my kind of place and I really didn’t know what she meant. It sounds like she’s right, though!
I’m trying to wrap my mind around “all the Christians” being the selling point of any town. I’m a Christian, but I’m not sure I’d want to be surrounded by them.
All my mom wants in life is to be surrounded on all sides by Christians. It’s the most bizarre thing on earth.
Asheville is weird because both of those cultures still have a very strong presence. The “new SF” vibe is concentrated in the more urban parts, like downtown, but outside those bounds it still has a pretty hardcore religious right presence (that these days includes a fundamentalist anti-vax homesteading contingent that look like hippies to the untrained eye/ Instagramm viewer).
I just moved to Asheville last year, from the Midwest, and it’s SO WEIRD. Ditto what you said about there being strong cultures that circulate independently of each other. It’s super geographical, so in one part of town, there’s a real hipster contingent, and right outside of town it’s more “conservative right-wing.”
It’s odd. And then the Christian circles that I’m in have such a diaspora of “really-super-Southern-transplants” that feel more conservative right alongside the hippies who go to my church. It’s a big bowl of mixed nuts.
But I was SO EXCITED to see that this community, collectively, will *close down* a business if it’s run by a known douchebag.
(is there an Asheville Toasties group? Out of curiosity?)
I would be down for an entire Open Thread that just devoted to people saying “I live in [x] – any other Toasties around?”
Yes! I want to know if there are any Toasties near me!
It’s up-thread, but I did start a group for Toasties in Portland (OR), it’s “pdx toasties” on facebook.
I’m not in Portland, but I will totally hit that group up if I visit again soon.
This would be lovely! I’m sure I’m not the only Toastie in mid-Missouri – it could be fun to setup meetups.
Gville SC, but I WOULD DRIVE.
I was really glad I happened to pick up a local newspaper or I wouldn’t have known why Waking Life was suddenly shuttered!
But GOOD ON THEM, Asheville is such a wacky town, but I’m happy for things like this. 🙂
I’m not from Asheville but I love that the town seems to be just done with him. Also, he doesn’t seem like he actually thinks he did anything wrong. Did you notice that his “apologies” are more like “here’s the things I’ve been told I did wrong” versus “I wish I hadn’t hurt these women”? Also he still plans to marry a 25 year old when he’s 38 because he’s gross and also, as a former 25 year old who thought guys more than 5 years older than me were mostly gross (although of course 36-50 year olds message you on dating sites ALL THE TIME when you’re 25), good luck with that, you jackass.
If pancakes are an MRA repellent I’m buying my daughter her own griddle TODAY.
Seriously, I am much more of a savory breakfast person, but I may make an exception for pancakes next time I go out for breakfast.
WTG girlfriend for living her best life! Now she just needs to slough off the whiny boyfriend and embrace sleeping in and pancakes.
You should do that anyway because griddles are awesome.
And you should make these http://allrecipes.com/recipe/162760/fluffy-pancak… with blueberries and eat them together because they are deliciouuuuuus and I would never give them up, not for Channing Tatum I wouldn’t.
If Channing Tatum were your boyfriend, he would never make you choose between pancakes and going to the gym.
If Nigella Lawson was your girlfriend, she would have the best pancakes ever for you when you returned from the gym.
When I was five(?), my mom took me to the Catholic funeral of the father of a friend of hers. Why? Because she told me that she didn’t want my first dead body to be someone I knew.
That said, open casket funerals freak me the fuck out if I did know the person. They always look wrong. When my grandfather died a few years ago, my parents let me be the one to greet people as they came in to the funeral home, thereby making sure that I’d be the last one in: all the seats would be taken and I’d need to sit in the overflow seating in the side so that I didn’t have to go in the main room. My grandfather was such a warm, gentle person; I didn’t want his body to be my last memory of him.
Your last line sums up my feelings, too. I WILL NOT approach an open casket anymore, that body is not the person I knew and loved and I do not want that memory.
I was fine with open casket funerals until I was 9 or 10 and went to a closed casket one. “Why can’t we see her?” I asked. “She didn’t want to be embalmed.” “What’s embalmed?”
And now I can’t go to an open casket without thinking about how the deceased has had all of the air and fluids inside of them replaced. Which is not a nice thing to think about, especially when the deceased was my brother. Plus, yeah, they always look like your loved one was made into a wax statue by someone who wasn’t quite sure on the details.
I found that my last ‘memory’ of my grandmother being what she looked like in her coffin to be comforting. She had been so very ill and was nothing like the bright, loving woman I grew up with the last few times I saw her before she died that her body looked more like herself than she had a few days before in the hospice, probably because her face wasn’t twisted with pain anymore. But I am someone who grew up with open casket funerals, so I guess I knew what to expect in terms of how like/unlike her she would seem, and wasn’t put off by that.
The one funeral experience that I was really creeped out by was the one where they had a memorial slideshow video playing that included picture of my friend a few hours before her death giving a thumbs-up in response to her sister asking if she was ready to go to Jesus. Annd also a (slightly) cheesecake picture that I had taken of her on my bed about a decade before.
Born Catholic but only seen the one corpse. Possibly because I only lived near my extended family for about 4 years.
Oh wait! 2 corpses!
I was thinking about funerals so I forgot that my GiL was staying with us for the last month or so before she kicked it. She died in the night (possibly it was her time, possibly the doctor prescribed a euthanasia strength painkiller dose) so I saw her too. She was a very well dressed corpse.
This is pretty much how I read the pancakes post.
I couldn’t help noticing his own complete lack of cleaning the apartment. Nope! Just whining that his girlfriend wouldn’t do it for him instead of enjoying her morning before having to work that morning. Not to mention he could have spent less money if he didn’t insist on STEAK AND EGGS WTF (seriously, dude, split the pancakes with her! They usually give you a lot!).
or just Eggs! Lots of Eggs!
I mean fuck that dude but okay I get it carbs are the debil. Double order of scrambled eggs done.
“But, said Jared, “Nobody reached out to us to say, ‘What do you need to heal, to be better men?’ — except Trey.””
““If you’re going to say you’re a loving, supportive community and then just kick out everybody that does something fucked up — I think that’s wrong,” Jared told me. “You don’t get to say, ‘We’re loving and supportive and inclusive’ and not put in the work to be that. ””
oh my god. OH my god. THIS GUY. THIIIIISSSSSS GUYYYYYY.
maybe it’s the upcoming election, maybe it’s the migraine that has survived two advil liqui-gels so far this morning, but is anyone else finding it hard to see the humor in douchebags anymore? It just makes me feel tired, and angry, and makes the little orb of pain behind my left eye throb a little harder.
I read it last night and it just really bummed me out for a couple hours. I don’t want to think about having to share a world with guys like this and the fact that you can’t always even easily spot them – this one seems to have spent a while successfully posing as an Actual Human
Read the Internet too long and you will be overwhelmed by the sense that you are sharing the world with a majority of guys like this. I can’t tell you what’s taken down my opinion of men more than watching how they conduct themselves online.
also JARED you don’t get to say “I’m sorry” and not put the work in to be that??? Fuck you
Buddy needs to stuff a whole wad of q-tips in his ear because something is preventing him from hearing the words coming out of his own dang mouth.
So you exposed cringingly upsetting and personal details of a lot of women who now have to face the fact that community members know about their weight struggles and first experiences with anal sex and you’re confused that your community is angry with you? SHUT UP.
I’m p sure we’ve entered a world where douchebags are the basic and indivisible building block of the universe. Inside you, me, everything, billions of teeny microscopic douchebags delivering sanctimonious little speeches to each other on how you’re supposed to be tolerant of their intolerance
I don’t see any humor, but I did really appreciate all the awesome bits about the women he was douchey too coming together to form a community and be awesome to each other. When the consequence of men being shitty is women banding together and being good to each other, it’s the best possible outcome of a bad thing.
“You know,” his grandmother told him, “we’re women too.”
Just think about how awkward that must have been for him. There’s at least a little fun to be had in that.
Everyone in my hometown does 3day wakes similar to what Nicole describes, Catholic or not. They are the worst. Everyone is already emotionally raw and then you want to drag this out for three days? And multiple events each day means that anyone who lives further than the next town needs somewhere to go in between and food to eat but no one can cook because they’re always at the funeral home. If you’re very close to the deceased a friend will usually step in to essentially take over your household for a few days- they’ll receive the food that literally everyone brings (and keep track), store it properly (in their own fridges when you run out of room in yours), set out food for whoever comes over between viewings, and clean up before and after. I didn’t realize this wasn’t how everyone did it for the longest time.
oh wow. As the next of kin of two deceased people, I would have died myself if I had to be present and (semi)social at a wake for 3 days. Do the most upset bereaved at least get to go off to their bedrooms and lie down??
I don’t know how many dead bodies I’ve seen. Several funerals since age 12. The uncertainty comes from the time in the mid 90s when I had an opportunity to tour the Cook county morgue. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen an autopsy, but the scale of it! Several autopsies, concurrently, with many more on deck. It was almost incredible.
That sturgeon article…wow, I did not expect that to be so interesting (and the writing just kept getting more and more top-notch).
Fish, feminism, and mythology, all in one place!
I really enjoyed it too! Although as a born & raised Oregonian, I do quibble a bit with the author’s assertion that sturgeon are the “apple of Oregonians’ eye.” I really appreciated her rumination on the road trip with her mom and the difficulty of not discussing the things which weighed on them the most.
Yeah I mean sturgeon definitely have a place in the everyday Gorge self-mythology but the Gorge is A) both Washingtonian and Oregonian B) is not Oregon as a whole.
Perhaps apple of Portlanders’ eye”? The fish hatchery is a fascinating place to visit (weird since I’m not really into fish). If Herman had been taken, I would have been oddly bereft.
I am a Portlander and have visited Herman many times! I also like buying fish food pellets and feeding the hatchery fish, as well as seeing how many birds are suddenly Very Interested in me when I’m holding the pellets.
Holy shitballs. I know a woman who was in a relationship with the PUA in that article and she is one of the most amazing, self possessed human beings I have ever known. Like, memorably so. Maybe she was in a relationship with him before his PUA phase, but the connection between the two of them is so bizarre I’m having a serious problem processing it this morning.
Sometimes amazing women end up in relationships with shittastic men. 🙁
(And women with women, and men with men, and men with women, etc., but you get the point.)
This is a common problem I see with a lot of my super amazing badass women friends, that often they spend a lot of their lives dating crappy partners. I think it’s because a lot of women still have an internal monologue cataloguing all their flaws and telling them they’re lucky anyone will put up with them. Not to mention that a lot of things seen as admirable or quirky in many men are seen as flaws or worse in women! Have you ever been told you’re “too aggressive” or “too intense” or “too weird” or “too brainy” or “don’t take shit from anyone” (but it’s not meant as a compliment)?
Also, there’s the eternal narrative of “fixing” damaged men.
It sounds like all the women involved with that PUA are pretty amazing though. Sounds like he was exceptionally good at hiding his grosser side.
This seems like the right place to ask this, haha. I use qtips on my ears once or twice a week because I wear foam earplugs while I sleep so I figure that stuff’s getting put in my ears ANYWAY, might as well clean them out. I’m lucky enough to have never had an ear infection, so that hasn’t been a concern. Should I stop using qtips and just deal with replacing the earplugs more often?
(Don’t suggest I switch to the silicon ones–I’ve tried them and can only get a good seal the first time I use them. Also my hair gets stuck to them, which is gross.)
I don’t know about earplugs, but I know you’re not supposed to use q-tips even if you also wear hearing aids. And I know from personal experience q-tip use can lead to a super gross infection even if you’re sticking them some where hearing aids also go.
I can only sleep with the silicone earplugs in, and (if anything) they’re even WORSE for your ears. So don’t worry about that.
I am an unrepentant daily Q-tip user.
As a silicone earplug sleeper, do you have any links on why they’re worse? (I don’t really want to know… but I should.)
I mean, I don’t really have any scientific evidence, but my ears get a lot more sweaty and gross inside when I use those (versus the foam ones)– it’s a tighter seal around the ear with less air flow. But I could be totally wrong!
I’m literally reading out this entire pancake thing to Matt and we can’t handle it. Though he is unloading the dishwasher as we speak because he’s a big, motivated man and I just can’t handle everything he does on a daily basis.
One does wonder what there could have *possibly been* to clean up around the apartment. I mean certainly this Superior Man keeps thats place ship shape and bristol fashion on a daily basis.
I’ll just bet he doesn’t clean his own damned apartment. Run, Lady Pancakes!
I have never been to a funeral! This is what happens when your parents move you halfway across the planet at a young age – you’re excused from funerals because attending would mean $1000+ in airfare and taking a week off from school. Honestly, just visiting my grandfather’s grave 2 years after he died was hard enough, I don’t know how I would have gotten through the actual funeral.
Cradle Catholic, though pretty much everyone has lapsed now. We do not always do a wake in my family, but USUALLY there is one — open casket funeral unless there are strong reasons for avoiding it. Which leads to the inevitable wake and funeral convos about how “good” “they” made the deceased look (sorry). tl;dr have seen and made awkward funerary smalltalk over many a corpse in my day.
That is always the weirdest part – my mother had such a great time saying “Well they cleaned her up at least” at her mother’s funeral which is I guess what my grandmother used to say at every wake she went to when my mom was little? Irish Catholics are weird, is the message, I think.
OH MY GOSH I have had so many “he/she looks good” or “that’s more makeup than she ever wore!” (DUH??!) conversations at wakes.
South Louisiana cradle Catholic. My raised-Baptist husband once pointed out that he’d been to exactly one funeral before he met me and eleventy billion since. Welp. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“He/she looks so peaceful.” No shit.
Yes, the hair/makeup is always a little bit wrong and the waxy sheen of the face makes the corpse look more like a Madame Tussaud’s version of themselves, which somehow stops it from being so horrifying to me.
Wake small talk and the post-wake review! In which, if you are a member of my family, you discuss how “good”/”bad” the deceased looked, how many floral arrangements there were, who sent flowers and who did NOT send flowers, and how many people were in attendance. Bonus conversation: observations about relatives you have not seen in years (Charlie got old, Mary wasn’t wearing a wedding band, Did Frank get hairplugs?, Anne snubbed me, &etc.)
Italian/Irish Catholic, for the record.
My extended family is Catholic so I have been to a few open-casket funerals over the years. I was never afraid of the bodies but also never wanted to go near them and was grateful that my mom never made me.
Also when my grandfather died it was across the table from me at a restaurant (my mom and sister and cousins were also there but I was the one who looked death in the face), and that really wasn’t so bad. We’d all had our appetizers, and we were having sangria, and he sort of just closed his eyes and died. Very peaceful, and also I am very glad it didn’t happen 30 minutes earlier when he was driving us to the place. (And then I graduated college the next day, so I kept getting weird greetings of “oh I’m so sorry! but also I’m so proud of you! congratulations! was it weird to have someone die in front of you? what are you gonna do after college?”) It was the most bizarre moment of my life.
whoa.
oh my god
it wasn’t that bad! it was just completely surreal.
I’m sorry, I just have so many questions. Like – did the restaurant comp your meal? Did they comp all the other patrons’ meals as a “Sorry that your lunch got interrupted by someone dying”? What even is the protocol for a situation like that
I’m secretly glad I’m not the only person who immediately goes to the logistics in the face of unusual situation.
Yes they did! Not only did they comp the meal, they sent us home with our entrees, but very tastefully they did not give us my grandpa’s entree.
I glad you included these details, because I was also morbidly fascinated but thought it would be rude to ask.
From the pancake article – wtf is a “pre-wall broad”? Born before the fall of the Berlin Wall? Not yet meriting an introduction on your facebook wall? An undergraduate majoring in finance?
MRAs say women “hit the wall” in their early thirties/late twenties.
I wish I didn’t see this. To the sea I go.
Ugh. Sorry I asked.
I would like someone to hit a wall after reading that
I would like to hit a wall with the someone who wrote that as my sledge hammer.
Not that I would do it. I deploy words instead of physical violence. Physical bruises heal. My ruthlessly chosen words echo in their head for the rest of their long, miserable life.
Good Lorde, really? You can’t make this stuff up (and speaking as a 40-ish year old lady, I’m just starting to hit my stride so F*** RIGHT OFF JUNIOR).
They’re frightened of us mature, self-possessed women with enough experience to put them in their place with just a look. And they fear we will time our take down for the most public exposure possible. Of course we will. Experience allows for effortless timing.
It’s so much nicer on the other side of the wall, too! I’m so much less likely to put up with any crap from men in my early thirties than I was in my twenties. Yesterday I leveled a Look at a man who had been taking up more and more of my space on the bus until he was basically leaning on me and he backed down meekly. Let’s all leap over the wall gracefully with snakes wrapped around our torsos and angry flower crowns on our heads!
“I’m so much less likely to put up with any crap from men in my early thirties than I was in my twenties.”
for all their bluster about hotness, THIS is the real reason MRAs like em young
I am 35 and have a custom flower crown, all I need is to conquer my fear of snakes.
Wow, that’s early. I am already post-wall (or peak-wall?). That means I never have to worry about MRAs bugging me, right? It would help to have an exact age they consider “the wall” so we know when to pop the bubbly.
I refuse to look into this but possibly trophy wall? Or like some sort of age cutoff?
From the PUA article, it seems that MRAs use ‘hitting the wall’ to mean a woman ageing. So a pre-wall broad is a young woman who they consider to still be attractive – which she inevitably won’t be when she ages like a normal human person.
At which point she will stop putting up with MRA jackasses and find herself someone who makes her pancakes in bed!
And can actually make the bed himself!
I actually found the answer to this question in the PUA article: apparently “hitting the wall” is PUA for “aging”. So I’m guessing pre-wall is <25, or something like that? I’ve definitely hit the wall at 30, and now realize that a huge advantage of that is not being attractive to PUAs any more.
It’s my birthday today and I’m so thrilled to be less attractive to PUA types than ever.
Happy birthday! Congratulations on becoming ever less attractive to PUA assholes 😀
Happy birthday! Will you be roasting men over a fire, or subtly mocking them with your dry wit until they fall over into a heap of self-doubt?
Do the dry wit one! It’s fun for (almost) all involved!
Happy Freedom From Those Idiots’ Disgusting Attention Day!
the best take away from the whole fiasco!
that’s hilarious, because my aunts and their friends say “she’s hit the wall” to refer to a friend who got too drunk and needs to go home. “The wall” is like the limit of alcohol you can consume before embarrassing yourself in public.
that was the part where I remembered why I don’t read We Hunted The Mammoth regularly, as much as it makes me laugh when I click a link to it. My life is better for not knowing MRA language.
Yeah, I read it for a long time, and I’m glad Futrelle’s out there documenting this stuff, because you know these assholes will try to wash it down the memory hole when they get burned like the assholes in that article, but it’s fucking toxic and after a while I just got exhausted of reading the same misogynistic horseshit from the same assholes.
I regret to inform you that the “wall” is a PUA term for whatever age it is that women hit where PUAs deem them “not attractive.” Not sure if there’s a commonly accepted age for this to happen because you could not pay me enough money to poke around for that.
Because I have this information in my brain, I am going to have to throw my head away. It is the only solution.
Another Jewish Toastie here whose only exposure to corpses is through Southern Gothic literature.
The Flint water crisis is making me so upset. A friend of mine lives there and has two little girls and they’ve known there’s an issue with the water for ages and so to hear Snyder’s government was going “NOT OUR PROBLEM” despite appointing emergency managers left and right is making it even worse.
It’s fucking ENRAGING. I saw a tweet (I think) on Snyder’s “heartfelt” apology last night that was like: “You are not sorry you poisoned children. You are sorry the media found out.”
I am SO ANGRY that Snyder has said ‘oh yeah, we totally knew this was a problem in the summer’ and he hasn’t resigned or been charged with anything.
My rage against Snyder has been increasing literally everyday. I was listening to NPR last night and they quoted his speech, and I just sat there going “fuck you, Snyder” over and over.
Ugh. I’d rather stay here in Missouri than go back to Michigan right now. And a lot that has to do with Snyder.
(and now I need to contact some MI friends about good places to send money to help out with water bottles)
How fucked up is it that if you’re a parent and poison your kid, you go to jail, if you are entrusted as a public servant with the basic responsibility of not poisoning kids and you fail spectacularly, you’re not even forced to resign.
I have seen no dead bodies, but have been to two closed-casket funerals where I spent the entire time being uncomfortably aware that there was a dead person inside. One of those funerals also involved a pallbearer almost dropping the casket (and therefore almost dropping Grandpa) on the way out the door; the other one involved family members being pressed into service as funeral bouncers. My family is interesting.
Also, while I know this is not the open thread, I cannot wait to let you all know that I saw Hamilton yesterday, and am a changed woman. A woman who also cried all the tears in her body over the course of the show (and continued slowly leaking at inopportune moments the rest of the evening, including at a very fancy French restaurant). Leslie Odom Jr. is a national treasure, and he broke my heart as Burr.
The dead person being inside but not on display grates at me. We know they’re in there! If they’re going to hang out but not be visible why are they there in the first place?
Hey! Congrats on your diagnosis! My brother got his when he was 8 – way older than typical age – and the delay was mostly because he was super friendly, honest and open with people and used hugs and cuddling as his stim. Nobody thought this kid could be on the spectrum – he was too warm to support the Refrigerator Mother myth, I guess (this was the late ’90s, some really dumb shit was still flying around). Even with terrible eye contact, dyspraxia, and a whole bunch of speech / socialization issues they were still unsure as to whether he was on the spectrum because of how damned charming he was. Sure, he didn’t talk in sentences that weren’t movie quotes til he was 4, but he looked like a Disney cherub and smiled at everyone. How could that be a Spectrum kid?
Good luck and good for you for not giving up.
I have never heard of hugs and cuddling as stim! This could explain a lot about my own issues–I’ll have to think about that.
It’s very similar to the desire for heavy blankets/clothing. A lot of people on the spectrum (according to what I’ve gleaned from the Livejournal asperger’s group over the last 10 years) really like the feeling of being held close, but not so much being held in place or close to other people. If you don’t mind those two things, I can definitely see how cuddling and hugging would be ideal.
I mean, personally, I really like thick/heavy sweatshirts and cardigans and close-fitting trousers/tights, and I like to pile the blankets on my bed so that they’re really heavy, but I can’t stand being restrained or close to other people’s faces, so I hate hugs and cuddles. (But I am all about cuddling with babies and animals and stuffed toys.)
Hah, me too with the blankets and the intense dislike of being restrained! Didn’t Temple Grandin have similar issues with pressure as well? I seem to recall her building a “squeezer” to help her relax.
Oh, yeah, i think so! and they make those “hugging machines” now for kids who really crave the sensation but just don’t feel comfortable with hugging people (or people-hugs don’t fill the need quite right, i mean, a full-body hug is a bit different)
Yes, she did! She also designs similar types of devices for animals (for calming purposes).
Looking back on it I can think of quite a few kids I went to school with who were probably on the spectrum but undiagnosed — or, if they were diagnosed, not getting the support and accommodations they needed. There are still kids I meet where I think, based on what I now know, ‘hmmm maybe,’ and I think in many cases their regular pediatricians probably aren’t seeing some of the signs because the typical ped’s office screening is geared toward catching certain things and not others. Higher functioning* kids and neurodiverse girls who don’t stim a lot, as Nicole said, really are under-diagnosed and can miss out on some crucial early intervention and support as a result. I’m grateful for the diagnosis our youngest did finally get on the third ped (second specialist!) after more than a YEAR of Trying to Figure Stuff Out; I can’t imagine where we’d be right now if we hadn’t gotten it.
* the term “high functioning” itself can be problematic/misleading since every kid is so different and someone can be high functioning academically but have much greater social needs, or be incredibly verbal but have needs in other areas, etc.
Hold up- dyspraxia is sometimes part of Autism? I’m so confused- I have dyspraxia, am prone to spoonerisms and malapropisms, am bad at eye contact, do some OCD tic-like things, hyper-sensitive in the physical sense (easily over-stimulated) but am super-super verbal. It’s like I have many of the sometimes-autism symptoms but none of the always autism symptoms.
I don’t know that there *are* “always autism” symptoms– since it’s a spectrum, it’s highly variable amongst individuals. You don’t necessarily have to have [x] trait to have an autism diagnosis.
My family has a lot of folks on the autism spectrum– they have a jumble of different traits, but none of them have any apparent problems with language or verbalization (so that’s not a given). Hyperlexia (advanced reading ability) and use of long/ complex words are both pretty common features of Aspergers.
A number of people on the spectrum also have OCD– the two can definitely co-exist.
Possibly worth looking into!
I will bring this up with my therapist – I’ve been wondering if some of the things people do to cope as late-diagnosed spectrum havers would be any help for me. Thank you!
I love this place, The Toast has been so darn helpful and funny. “Useful as well as ornamental” as my mother says.
I grew up in a highly Catholic area, and leaving it has been a continual process of revelation that many of the behaviors I thought were perfectly normal, or at least Christian standard, are in fact weirdly specific. Wakes for sure (I wish I could do justice to the face made by my friends when I asked, “what, they DIDN’T make you kiss your grandmother’s corpse goodbye?”), but also confession and the Kiss of Peace at Mass.
My husband and I are both recovering Catholics who had a secular wedding, but we incorporated the Kiss of Peace into our ceremony because it’s one of the few traditions we actually like and we figured it would be a touchstone for all the various flavors of Christians in attendance. Turns out everyone except our immediate families thought we invented it and complimented us.
Kiss of Peace isn’t a thing? Was when I was little. Mostly just an air kiss and a handshake.
Apparently for many Protestant denominations it is not!
Also that sturgeon article is making me very wistful for the northwest.
this.
Same! I am going back at the end of the month to visit with my own mother. I’ve missed it so much.
Best part of the PUA article is how all the women have come together in a coven and hang out on the reg. And, you know, Tai Chi Trey might be a little misguided, but he seems like he might also have the ability to learn from mistakes/past experiences, so, I’m holding out hope for him.
For those on the east coast/in the path of this major winter storm: what books are you stockpiling for the endtimes? I am going to finish the last Elena Ferrante novel, I think, but not sure where I’ll go after that.
I JUST finished the last Elena Ferrante novel and my suggestion is that you just read it again once you’ve finished it because it was so. so. so. good.
I just finished it too, dang Elena! The whole series just blew me away. I cannot stop thinking about it.
I’m finishing up Fates & Furies this weekend, which has been so good! The next book for curling up in the snowstorm will be apt, as its about traveling through snowy Russia, Midnight in Siberia by David Greene.
I can never manage to read one thing at a time, so in addition to being halfway through the Chernow Hamilton biography, I’m reading Kindred by Octavia Butler and the new annotated edition of Little Women, which is particularly good for cozying up with a cup of tea when it’s cold out.
I really like Elena Ferrante’s first three books written before the trilogy. Be a completist, why not!
I said this on Twitter yesterday but I love that the guy from the PUA article has like, *kind* of gotten to the point where he gets “publicly dissecting my sex life without the consent of people involved is bad” but still hasn’t figured out that maybe objectifying and shaming women is bad? And also the part where he’s like “why is it bad that I want to get to 38 and marry a hot 25 year old? It’s such a DOUBLE STANDARD no one minds when DEREK JETER does it!!” Buddy. PEOPLE MIND WHEN DEREK JETER DOES THIS ALSO. Plus: you’re… not Derek Jeter?
Also have you considered that maybe there is a basis for a relationship that isn’t 100% based on physical attraction and sexual compatibility, because uh
there are other things that matter in long term relationships?
Right? Derek Jeter has money and fame, which seems like something that could be worth dating despite the age gap (I mean, I don’t find him appealing in the slightest but whatever), what does this guy have? His sparkling personality?
Plus, did Derek Jeter set out to marry a 25 -year-old when he was 38, or did it just kinda happen? Because that kind of age difference *can* happen without being creepy or dysfunctional, but when you deliberately seek it out? THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE.
And yeah. I mean, I’m not going to say that nobody should ever, say, post an account of a bad hookup on LJ or hash out the details of Saturday night over Sunday brunch with friends, but again: there’s a line.
There are a couple of bits from that article that make a lot of sense when they’re put together: “even as Jared was getting what he purportedly wanted — plenty of sex with plenty of women — he became increasingly bitter and judgmental” and “when a woman turned him down or canceled a date or otherwise didn’t live up to his expectations, he lashed out online.” The PUA thing is really about power, or at least the illusion of power, and nobody’s angrier than the guy who thinks he has power and then loses it or finds out he never really had it in the first place.
“other things that matter in long term relationships”
No, there will be no “long term” for Jared. He might find someone immature enough to marry him. But she will *not* put up with his shit for long.
I agree with you completely.
Ha! I JUST said this in reply to someone else and wish I’d read the whole comments thread first because this is exactly right and <3
Raised Catholic and spent many hours kicking around in the “kids” room of various funeral homes while the growups did the visitation thing. Two days seems pretty standard to me, and then the funeral on the third day? I remember being mildly freaked out but not traumatized. It probably helped that the first few funerals I remember were for very elderly great aunts or uncles that I wasn’t close to. Still objectively a weird experience though.
I was raised Catholic and I didn’t go to a huge huge number of wakes/funerals, but they definitely happened, maybe one or two a year? The first was my grandma when I was 4 I think, and my brother and cousin and I just spent most of the wake sneaking cookies from the refreshment table. I was also an altar server and since I went to a Catholic school we sometimes got to get out of class if we volunteered to serve at a morning funeral on a weekday. Naturally there were always way more volunteers than there were spots to serve at. It never struck me as weird at the time but looking back now a bunch of 13 year olds jumping to go to a stranger’s funeral is maybe something of a Catholic anomaly.
Ah! I was trying to remember why it feels like I went to a million funerals as a child, and I’m now realizing I was probably acting as a candle bearer for some of them. Good times.
At my school you would also sometimes get $5 for altar serving a mid-day funeral.
whaaaaaaaaat my school was way too cheap for that. the most we got to do was snag some extra hosts because we were less supervised than at a regular school mass. we would sneak them out and pass em around during recess. wild catholic school antics, i tell ya what.
I took gross anatomy and occasionally work in an anatomy lab. I have seen so many dead people, but all for science!
Me toooo! (Well, I don’t work in an anatomy lab now, sadly, but took a lot of gross anatomy.) I’ve seen way more dead strangers than dead family members.
I’ll speak selfishly for a moment and say that having a neuroatypical kid has made me re-evaluate MY ENTIRE childhood. Thanks, teachers, for running around after the boys who were screaming and throwing things and failing to notice the low-simmering, utter panic I was experiencing because of the noise they were making/the overhead lights/how slow-moving the class was/the constant, confusing social demands being made of me. Thanks so much.
Reading this made me glad that my parents and teachers figured out relatively quickly that the reason I wasn’t liking kindergarten at first was that they started the day by letting everyone run around on an indoor playset and shout at the top of their little lungs. Thankfully they eventually let me stay in the other room with a few other quiet kids and play with dolls or read to start the day.
Parenting elementary school-aged kids has been so full of flashbacks and, like, triggered reactions for me. For real! Seeing something start to happen to my 8 or 9 year old daughter, quickly deciding to step in, parent, whatever, and then saying to self, “Wait. Wait. Wait! That happened to me only no one stopped it. Worse, I was told it was my fault. Holy crap, that shouldn’t have happened.” Like, before kids I was going along, accepting it was my fault, like an idiot, but then watching it happen to someone I’m responsible for was a) extremely upsetting but ultimately b) extremely motivating both for doing better by my child and also better by myself. Like, accepting that it wasn’t my fault.
This happened to a slightly lesser degree when I was briefly around middle schoolers as an adult (I worked at a combined middle school/high school for a year, but only taught high schoolers). I saw how small they were and at the same time vicious and then realized, “Hey! It wasn’t you. And also, it kind of wasn’t really them, either. They were horrible, but *they were children too*.”
Anyway, phew! Congrats to Nicole for good neuroatypical news. Also, sorry mmejoy for your crappy teachers.
I spent a lot of time in secondary school (so from the age of 11 onwards) sitting there digging my nails into my palms or scratching at my skin in an attempt to distract myself from the intense distress I was feeling due to all of the noise and disruption and lack of control on the part of the teacher. I am sorry you experienced that sort of thing too, but am selfishly glad it wasn’t just me.
Those lights do too hum. and flicker. Drove me nuts.
It’s not the humming and flickering, though I understand that that’s really hard for some people. It’s the sheer intensity. I cannot think straight under bright overhead lighting. I have a dimmer switch in my office and many low-wattage lamps scattered around my house.
I wonder how many grade points I and others who are troubled by them lost to overhead lighting? Probably best not to think about it, right?
Yeah. There’s a meeting room in my building now that’s at over-saturation point light-wise and I keep falling asleep in there. Thankfully we never had all of our fluorescents working at the same time in my classrooms as a kid so that wasn’t really a problem. (So much cheaper to replace them when you have to do more than one at a time. Or just do a full replacement in June after schools out no matter how many have gone bad.)
I know quite a few people who’ve had similar realizations about themselves, after having their kids evaluated for autism, etc. (e.g., that they or their spouse have a lot of the same traits and are probably on the spectrum as well).
Not in any way trying to minimize your experience, which sounds crappy, but… what would you have done if you were the teacher in that situation? Genuine question (I’m a teacher myself and spend a lot of my time doing exactly this kind of triage).
Grew up Catholic in an Irish-American community. I’ve been to so many wakes. Wakes are great if you’re not family or a close friend of the deceased: you show up, pay respects, and are out of there in 20 minutes or so. Plus, discussing the funeral home’s work with makeup and lighting is always a topic of conversation for the ride home.
That said, I don’t think I’ve ever been to an open-casket funeral? They close the casket for good at the home, and the immediate family has a final, private chance to say goodbye. I’ve always liked that.
The only dead person I’ve seen was my mum. She died in 2010, and it was incredibly important to me to see her. She died on a Friday afternoon and me and my partner got home that night, and me and my dad sat on the bed and talked to her and said goodbye, and then that night my dad slept downstairs with her.
My brothers didn’t get home until the next day, and they emphatically didn’t want to see her. (Well, my little brother emphatically didn’t, I don’t remember whether middle brother was emphatic or not.) She was taken away about 3pm on Saturday. I still remember sleeping upstairs on Friday night and knowing she was downstairs and not suffering any more as one of the most peaceful and gentle things I’ve ever known.
Then we got the giggles because the funeral home men were so serious, and we wondered whether their black suits were real suits or whether they were like one-pieces with zips down the back.
I’m English and we are a bit crap at funerals, tbh. I’m glad we don’t have open caskets or embalming, but I feel like none of us know how we’re supposed to do it and we do it in a welter of embarrassment and, “is this the right thing? idek”. In Ireland everyone goes to a funeral – you have the removal, the funeral, the wake, and some of it is for family and close friends and some of it is for everyone including your boss’s friend’s bus driver’s cousin because they used the same post office, and people generally know which bits are supposed to be sad and serious and which bits are for getting drunk and telling stories and laughing. On the other hand, Ireland is a more culturally homogenous place than most of England, so maybe that’s why the traditions feel a lot clearer.
This is a really beautiful memory. I am very, very glad I didn’t see my mom after she was dead, but I think the most important thing is getting to the choice, not being forced into something that’s not comfortable.
We are also English (but in Canada now), and yeah, I don’t really get funerals. My siblings and I are slowly developing plans for our own funerals so that we can alleviate some of the awkwardness, hopefully!
My little brother has Asperger’s and he is the best most adorable and accomplished tiny human (he’s very tall and in his twenties, but still tiny 2 me). I think it took a lot of work on my parents’ part to teach him things like “yes, humans sleep with their eyes closed, you need to shut them at bedtime” (which had just never ocurred to him) but he is the greatest, wouldn’t change him for the world, proudest wee aspie there could be. Just in case it is an autism-spectrum thing – Nicole, your kid sounds like she already is the best, get ready for her to continue to be The Best, plus some confounding unusual Best things.
I’m not sure if this is even related to anything, I think maybe I just wanted to talk about my lil bro. Tell me about your brothers if you wish, toasties!
My “baby” brother (who just turned 21) is an all-round awesome and wonderful human being. We just went to his senior college cello recital recently, and I cried buckets at how talented and grown up he is.
He’s studying to be a music teacher, and will do a fantastic job of it, I’m sure. He’s very kind and patient!
(My mom has Aspergers and is also a fun and utterly delightful person).
I loved reading that PUA piece yesterday and am so so happy that it was posted here, as I pretty much figured it would be. Also v proud of the domestic violence center that was like “we don’t want your filthy blood money.”
Maybe it’s because I just had a rough morning or it’s because my standards for humanity have fallen so low, but I found that PUA article oddly cheering. So many douchebags get away with low-level douchebaggery because they haven’t broken any laws technically, plus they’re “job creators,” or they’re “just really rich and that’s important here because idk.” Meanwhile women and people of color can risk their careers just by (deservedly) calling someone out…. or like, wearing the wrong thing or not having the right “attitude.”
But now this guy’s douchebaggery is enshrined in a national publication. As is his total lack of remorse. Good luck, Jared.
I felt the same way! Good luck, Jared, no woman with the inclination to google her dates will ever talk to you again! Hope you enjoyed your little blog while it lasted.
Yeah it was a bit of a let down at the end when he was still being a huge douchecanoe, BUT the entire article was a bit uplifting. To see the whole town come together and declare him an ass was great!
Off topic, but I will be missing the open thread because today I am flying to a different state so that tomorrow I can interview for a postdoc at the National Laboratory that I REALLY want to work at, please send good vibes! They paid for the whole trip – airfare, hotel, rental car (guys I’m old enough to have a rental car! Wicked!) and have sent me an incredibly detailed schedule for my interview day – legit every 10 minute increment in between 8:30 am and 6:30 pm is accounted for, and then I have dinner with the researchers at a fancy place. I am so excited and slightly terrified that I’ll give a terrible seminar/be my most antisocial self and wreck this.
For awhile after the miscarriage I didn’t care about anything other than getting to not hurt anymore, and only this week have things like ambition and wanting to make a difference in the world reappeared. I know I won’t go back to 100% the way I was before I got pregnant; in the very least, I’m tougher now about pain haha. But I do want to be as ambitious as I was before and I don’t know if I am. I will do my best.
I’m sending all the good vibes I can for your interview! I hope you get the post doc and it ends up being a wonderful lab with lots of collaboration and not too many assholes. (Because I think it’s a requirement that every lab, no matter how wonderful they are, always has to have That Scientist.)
Wow! That’s so intimidating but SO AWESOME. You can do it!!!! Sending all the possible good vibes your way!
This sounds so exciting! I’ll think about you tomorrow, and I hope your interview experience is great !
I am so excited for you!
That’s so exciting! You’ll do great!!
Hurray for better feelings reappearing! Sending massive good thoughts your way and I know you can take that place by storm.
what, that’s awesome. Good luck at the interviews!
Rooting for you! Good luck!
Congratulations!! I’ll be keeping my finger crossed! I’m sure you’ll do a great job.
Just yesterday, my Stitch n Bitch group was chortling over a Return of Kings article about women with dyed hair and one of my friends pointed out “These are never about women in general. By the time you get to the end, the details are so specific, you know this guy is writing about a very specific ex-girlfriend.” I sent her the pancake article immediately.
I grew up in my Mom’s funeral home, so I have seen dozens of dead bodies and even handled more than a few.
I lived above a funeral home. So did my landlord, the funeral director, next door to me. His little boy would sometimes accompany him into my apartment when dad was repairing something for me. (Dad knew I welcomed the child.) 7-year-old child was always bubbly and excited to tell me the latest thing he learned and I (usually) encouraged him. One time, though, his dad interrupted him after the boy said, “Miss Rose! I watched how fast you can drain all the blood from a big dead man! Guess how long it takes!”
“Son, Miss Rose does *not* want to hear anything about that. Remember the talk we had about discussing funeral home business only with me?”
That was 20+ years ago. I feel sure the little guy grew up to join the family biz or to go into the medical field.
Oh man, I would love to have an enthusiastic little kid tell me all about how embalming works.
Aw, I actually do want to know how long it takes.
My Baptist grandmother had an open casket funeral and I was bewildered by this, because I didn’t think Protestants generally did that. My Catholic grandmother did, and I refused to go look. My agnostic grandfather did not, and it was a very good funeral in my opinion.
I think it is a thing in the Campbellite denominations like Baptists and Churches of Christ, because if before this thread you had said “protestants don’t have open caskets” I’d have been like whuhhuh?
Every funeral I’ve been to, wherein the deceased wasn’t cremated, was open casket. I’ve only ever heard of closed-casket funerals for when the body was too mutilated to possibly display. (I’ve never been to a Jewish funeral.) Or maybe just visitation is open casket and then it’s closed for the ceremony sometimes? (Baptist, Episcopal, Catholic, non-denominational… I guess all the atheists I have known were cremated.)
Perhaps my grandfather requested it? He was raised some sort of Protestant (Methodist?) but was pretty much against organized religion. Apparently, a Catholic priest in the 40s when he was engaged to my grandmother, pissed him off. I think they were married by the chaplain on base because of it. I think she was pretty miffed by that priest, too. Not enough to lose her faith tho.
For your morning squee: http://goodstuffhappenedtoday.tumblr.com/post/137…
In continuation of the husky/cat buddy post from yesterday….
This is my favorite of all the gifs: kitten is nuzzling around, husky attempting to sleep and then more nuzzling and the “OMG why are you still up go to sleep” look:
That husky/cat buddy photo montage was THE BOMB (I know this is outdated slang but I still love it and it applies so perfectly here). Now off to your lovely link…!
I felt pretty outdated with “squee” honestly – but it seemed apt – so thank you for this.
ETA what is more important I have never wanted a husky more than I do at this moment.
I read like that too -and I thought I was the only one. In school teachers treated me like a freak sometimes, (You can’t be through with that already!) so I learned to keep it on the DL, Happily my kids inherited it from me and now we trade books back and forth. My husband reads like most people (slowly, only sentence by sentence,how did he get his masters, I’d wonder. That takes forever.)
The internet is a powerful distraction/temptation for superreaders.
Ugh, I am also a fast reader and I have a clear, angry memory of a fifth-grade teacher who yelled at me for getting up during silent reading time to swap out my book for the next one in whatever sequence of assigned texts I was supposed to be reading.
(The same teacher later yelled at me for turning in a test too quickly, then yelled at me during the next test for “cheating,” i.e. looking around the room after I had finished my test and was waiting for someone else to turn theirs in and not get yelled at so I would be assured I had taken “long enough.” Some people maybe just should not be teachers.)
This exact same thing happened to me
Grew up in a culturally Catholic city so I’ve seen a lot of neighbors and acquaintances laid out. Our family is a closed casket family (but most of them I saw die so that’s a whole different thing. Natural causes–I’m not a murderer I swear. Just a person who can see Thestrals)
I’m Jewish, but have spent time with a couple of bodies. We don’t have viewings, because bodies are meant to be buried as soon as possible, unembalmed, as dust-to-dust as possible – and between death and burial the body is forbidden to be left unattended, even for a minute. In fact, watching over the body in that interim and helping with burial is considered the highest-level mitzvah or kindnesses one can do. My mom instilled this sense in me/us at an early age, so I’ve spent time sitting with loved ones who had just passed away (a catholic grandmother, a great aunt) as well as some elderly neighbours. Just being there, often alone. I’m grateful to have been able to do that, and wish that death, along with other key realities of embodiment were less hidden away these days. Like it would make us value time and one another more? Maybe make us less afraid of it, or at least able to go deeper with that fear. Makes me think of this always – http://www.jstor.org/stable/25293714
a hundred times yes
It’s a huge mitzvah. I remember when my grandmother died, the fact that someone had been with her every moment until we buried her was very comforting to me.
I have seen a handful of nicely done up, embalmed bodies at funerals, but I also saw my mother-in-law at the funeral home just a few hours after her actual death, and, oof. That was super weird. She was cremated so it was just the straight up dead body. I couldn’t really deal.
I was raised (loosely) Catholic because my mother is Catholic, but my toll of bodies is low because we lived an expensive distance from her side of the family. So, not many Catholic funerals in my younger years. The last one where I viewed the body was my uncle in 2001, and I promised myself I would never approach an open casket again – I hated that my last memory of a person was their dead body. My family is fortunately pretty understanding of this and doesn’t pressure anyone about viewing up close.
Open casket funerals were the thing where I grew up, but usually only for two days: viewing in the evening, burial and wake the following morning. The only three-day funeral I’ve experienced was my grandmother’s, but I have to say that it was kind of nice and necessary. She was very old and had many friends, relatives, and acquaintances, and although it was exhausting to meet all those people, it was also pretty touching.
Besides, that was the very funeral that introduced me to “jedi hugs,” now widely in use among Captain Awkward readers.
Hey! Cool!
Toasties, I am here to invite you to check out the web series Her Story, which Mey from Autostraddle, who is a friend of The Toast, reviewed the other day. It’s a story about trans women made by trans women and it’s REALLY GOOD. It’s all up on youtube. You should watch it so we can talk about it in the Open Thread tomorrow…
http://www.autostraddle.com/her-story-delivers-on…
Ok. I have seen people talking about this and was v. confused since there is an interactive video game with the same title which people seem to love. This seems to be a separate thing from the game according to my googling just now, can anybody confirm that these are two separate things?
They are totally separate.
I thought this was a lovely piece I just read on Serious Eats, which Toasties might like as well:
Saapaadu Ready: Travels with My Mother’s South Indian Kitchen
May cause cravings for Indian food and a desire to call your mom
What a great article (and what an awesome mom)! I am now very hungry.
My mom is a terrible cook, but I’ll call her anyway!
I have seen precisely two (2) corpses, both of my maternal grandparents. I still regard it as a creepy experience for children. /Episcopalian lapsed.
and for the record, I have instructed my family that, when deceased, I wish to be ‘flung into a ditch.’
So I was raised protestant (Methodist) but half of my family is sort of Catholic (most have either lapsed or converted to other denominations), but every funeral I’ve attended was open casket. So I’ve probably seen 10ish bodies? Maybe more.
Any other folks raised protestant have open casket funerals? I didn’t realize that it wasn’t normal. And for us it was always a one day wake and then the funeral the next day. Yes, children hung out in the funeral home basement and if you were very lucky there was a pop machine.
I have always wondered…What is the “Method” espoused by ‘Methodists’? Is it secret?
We never really went over it? But I later learned it had to do with the method of worship, I think.
Yes, Baptists and others do open casket funerals. (Not me, I’m not raised that way, but I’ve definitely encountered it when attending funerals at large).
My grandparents were Presbyterian and both had open-casket funerals. I seem to recall a cousin on the Lutheran side of the family having one as well, but I was little and don’t remember it very clearly.
“Any other folks raised protestant have open casket funerals?”
Yep, at least some. But they’re less and less common now than they were when I was a kid. I went to one a couple days ago, for a friend from choir. Before that, the most recent open casket funeral I attended would have been my aunt, about 6 years ago. Between then, there have been a *lot* of memorial services with no body.
When I was young, both my parents were pastors and performed funerals / memorial services as needed. My job was to sit up in the choir loft and ring the bell at the appropriate time.
YOU CAN PRY MY Q-TIPS FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!
But seriously, I am doubtful of the vehement hatred of q-tips in the absence of any actual evidence that they regularly cause problems for the average user. ENTs saying that a lot of the people they see have problems caused by q-tips =/= q-tips generally cause problems. So yeah, if you are prone to ear infection or produce a lot of earwax, maybe don’t use them, and certainly don’t be shoving them so deep in your ear canal that you rupture your eardrum, but in the absence of anything more than anecdata, I will happily continue to use them.
Yeah, I think of what I do with a q-tip and it’s not anywhere near my ear drum? Like what are you DOING with that thing?!
Thank you for making me feel better about my life choices.
Yeah, that’s me. Mom taught us to be really careful to leave Q-tips sitting not too deep in the ear so the wax kind of melts onto them, and never to go deep with them, and I’ve never had a problem. I also don’t do it very often, so I don’t think I’m running afoul of the over cleaning thing.
yeah, I don’t jam them into my ears, but I do use them after a hot shower (occasionally) to remove some softened wax. It’s not a mining expedition, you just twirl the Q-tip gently around the ear and get the excess wax. I’ve found that my ears *quit* itching after the Q-tip use. But I don’t do it that often, and I don’t have trouble with ear infections.
I don’t know if it’s from being a swimmer for years and years, but I absolutely HATE having wet ears. So I will join you in your bunker, fighting against those who would take them away from us.
Seriously though, all I’m doing is keeping my ears dry. You would think that would be a good thing.
Reformed Catholic here (and Irish-Sicilian to boot), and I don’t even have an estimate as to how many dead bodies I’ve seen in my life, it’s that many. I’m also the youngest child of much older parents so there were ALWAYS wakes and funerals to go to growing up. My mom grew up in a very close knit Irish neighborhood in our city where out of respect you go to services for someone you might not have seen since 6th grade. She’s 80 now and I swear she still averages 1 wake every week. I’m not kidding. On our Sicilian side, mourning is very performative and the times I’ve felt closest to my large extended family (and some of the only times we see each other these days) is at wakes, funerals and funeral breakfasts. At my dad’s funeral, my uncles and cousins spent an hour eulogizing him, telling crazy old family stories and tearing up about what a wonderful man he was. In my experience it’s so important to the grief process to allow for that open and emotional mourning.
I didn’t see a body up close until a couple of years ago (29-30 years old?). It was my grandmother.
She’d had Parkinson’s for 30 years when she died. It was actually comforting to see her resting and not moving, because I don’t remember a time when grandma didn’t have tremors. She was finally still and peaceful, like she must have been before I knew her. It didn’t feel good that she was gone, but it was a relief.
One aunt, one uncle, one grandfather, one grandmother, a whole bunch of my grandparents’ friends and more distant relations, and possibly two baby brothers (I was two so I am not sure.)
Boo MRAs and PUAs! Yay diagnosis!
I’ve seen two, both family members at viewings at the funeral home. For one, the viewing was open to a fair number of people and lasted several hours. For the other, it was just close family members and we stood in a clump and looked at the casket from several feet away for a few minutes and then sat in the next room and cried for a while. The actual funerals were closed-casket, as were all the other funerals I’ve been to.
Even though I know closed casket viewings/services aren’t uncommon, it would be weird to go to one. Every casket with a body in it, I’ve seen the body, too. It would seem weird otherwise, somehow.
This got buried in the comments yesterday at around 8pm eastern, but since Nicole’s daughter has a shiny new diagnosis, maybe more people would like to see it!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/health/what-is-i…
“What it’s like to be a girl with autism” is the headline, which is a little bit misleading, because the story (from July 2015) is about a group of girls at a school in Surrey who collaboratively wrote a book about being a girl on the spectrum – M is for Autism.
Beth Worboys was desperate to read a novel aimed at girls like her. “All the books about autism were for boys,” says the 17-year-old. “I wanted to read a book aimed at anxious, isolated girls like me”.
Thanks in large part to Beth, that novel now exists. At a 2014 autism event, the teenager, then a pupil at Limpsfield Grange, a Surrey-based school for girls with autism and communication difficulties – and the subject of an ITV documentary tomorrow – cornered Robert Pritchett, a leading figure at the National Autistic Society. She persuaded him to fund her book. The resulting novel, M is For Autism, was published last week. Co-written by the entire cohort of the school, it allows the reader to view the world through the eyes of a girl with autism. And with experts now recognising that female autism often goes undiagnosed, it’s a novel that could change lives.
“I started having open conversations with the girls about their struggles to get diagnosed, and their anger that people didn’t believe the level of difficulty they experience in day-to-day life,” says Sarah Wild, headteacher at Limpsfield Grange. “They’ve spent a long time feeling really alone and don’t want other girls to feel as isolated.”
I was disappointed that they didn’t catch the thief in the sturgeon article… 🙁
Me too! I’m so curious about who is stealing giant fish, and why.
I have a very solid alibi for that night but Me, Personally, I just think it’d be cool to have 300 pound living fossil.
Re: Wile E Coyote: This just went up on our local 911 service’s Facebook page. They are, needless to say, extremely popular in the community.
Grand Traverse 911
17 mins ·
It almost looks like an episode of Looney Tunes on East Bay right now. We have received numerous calls about a dog type animal out on the ice however, we have sent deputies to the area and they have confirmed that it is Wile E. Coyote. Coincidentally, Mr. Coyote happens to be in the Acme area (not kidding), and is walking on thin ice. (Maybe he is searching for the Road Runner?) This is a wild animal, and we will leave him be at this time. We just hope he didn’t take an anvil out there with him…
***This animal is not in danger, and is moving about just fine. The intent of this post is to let you know we are aware of the situation smile emoticon
Did they literally type the words “smile emoticon”?
My wife and I often type out the names of emoji, instead of just hunting down the particular emoji. Or, in the case of my most-longed-for nonexistent emoji, “crossed fingers emoji.” (Seriously please invent crossed-fingers emoji, I find praying-hands an imprecise alternative because prayer =/= hope [or lies].)
Aw, no, apparently that’s what happens when you c/p the smile emoticon from Facebook. I sort of wish they had. It would’ve been very in character.
Aw, too bad.
(Breaking news: I just now typed “tearing out my own hair emoji” in a text convo about Chris Christie.)
My grandpa died a few years ago, literally while I was en route to my grandparents’ house to try and see him one last time, so I got there before the coroner did. He died during a morning nap in his bed, while my dad was sitting with him. Maybe it’s weird, but it’s comforting to remember him there all tucked under the sheets in cozy pajamas in his own room. We didn’t have a funeral, just a memorial gathering, so that is my last memory of seeing him.
My parents always used to use matchsticks to clean our ears (I don’t think we ever had cotton swabs/Q-tips in the house, possibly due to my parents’ intense frugality), which can be quite painful; there’s nothing like the feeling of a bit of wood scraping against the sides of your ear canal. They have since switched to the less-invasive method of putting olive oil in the ear, lying on one side for a bit and then letting it drain out, which is less painful but feels very weird.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a (human) dead body, although this is less to do with religion and more to do with having been lucky enough to experience very few deaths of people close to me. I’m pretty certain I did not see my great-grandmother’s body when she died. (She left it to medical science, I think, as did my grandfather, who died before I was born; there are no graves to visit that I know of, and almost nothing is said about them. Possibly my family is weird about death.)
Matchsticks?!?!? That sounds awful, especially to have someone else doing it to you! As a kid I couldn’t stand the thought of sticking something in my ear. Luckily my dad didn’t try to push on me his habit of pulling the cotton off of cotton swabs and sticking the bare stick in his ear.
My mother used the loopy ends of bobby pins to do her ears. *shudder*
I think open casket funerals are creepy af and, for me, unhelpful. I’ve been to two like that. Don’t recommend.
(Unhelpful because that means the last memory I have is seeing their corpse, which I then try to expunge from my brain by remembering, or trying to remember, when they were alive.)
These days I avoid funerals as much as possible. The worst one I’ve been to was the one for my grandfather (dad’s side) in 2004. Ugh ugh ugh.
Aside from like, going deaf, I’m never going to stop using Q-Tips. Never. You can’t make me. Also, no doctor has looked inside my ear and been like, “Yo, you need to stop swabbing.” None ever. I feel like if it were some actual problem, every doctor would say “you need to stop swabing the wax” just like the dentist tells you to floss.
I have the worst sinuses, and my ears get clogged constantly not with wax but terrible sinus fluid that shouldn’t be there. And it is the most uncomfortable feeling, like your whole head in attacking you from the inside and is seeping out. That’s like telling me to stop blowing my nose during allergy season. I once had a doctor stick a giant q-tip up my nose to swab out my sinuses, which lasted a good few weeks before they were stuffed up again. it’s EAR nose & throat. My ears are affected. Eff you, anti Q-Tip conspiracy.
Also, really helpful for touching up liquid liner and cleaning the filter on my air conditioner. SO MANY USES.
So Catholic. So many wakes/funerals. So many bodies, both in caskets and at the hospital. Honestly though, for me, the whole Catholic wake and funeral mass and burial service provides a sense of closure and… continuity with the past, maybe? Those shared mourning rituals – even the shitty coffee and little sandwiches in the funeral home break room – feel comforting, now.
Weirdest funeral experience though – my grandmother passed away ~3 weeks after my wedding. She was a popular lady, so there were MANY people in attendance who knew this, but had neither been at the wedding nor met my husband. This made the receiving line very odd. “I’m so sorry. But congratulations! [to husband:] So nice to meet you!” O_o
I like to think of PUA Jared as being too lazy to ever actually leave Asheville, so he stays forever, and maybe when he’s in his late 40s people don’t necessarily remember exactly what happened, but they remember it was Something Bad, and he shuffles around town and people warn each other to stay away from him for nebulous reasons.
I love this slow-burn revenge!
“That’s Old Man Jared. We tell the women to stay away from him, after all that trouble years ago” is straight up Southern Gothic in the making and I am enjoying it way too much.
A note on neuroatypical diagnosis, which is evidently still giving me the feelz in a way I didn’t realize I needed to write out until I started reading the comments.
My brother was tested when he was 4–I remember they brought me in to see how we interacted (I was 3), and when the doctor would direct questions to him, I would answer. So we left with the child psychologist saying it was my fault (?) and that our parents should stop me from answering for my brother and encourage my brother to speak for himself. Okay.
In elementary school, my brother was a total wiz kid & would get called out of class to fix computers in the offices (when he was in 2nd grade). He had an incredibly high reading level, started reading when he was barely 2. Was award, gawky, got picked on all the time, but was very much so a stereotypical/archetypal nerd, which my parents encouraged in a you-do-you way. He was great at school, until around 5th grade it all fell apart. He could not do homework, like could not do it. I spent a lot of time kicking the shins of kids who bullied my brother, because I’ve always been tough as nails.
In middle school, my parents took him to get tested again because how could their brainiac child be failing school? From that, they learned that my brother, when he was 11 years old, had the reading comprehension of a junior in college and the listening comprehension of a 4 year old. So the only piece of advice was make sure that teachers wrote homework assignments down on the chalkboard so he could read and retain it, rather than saying it. That’s it. Did any teacher every cooperate? Nope.
My brother’s grades continued to sink, he was bored out of his mind so he engaged less, he was terrible at reading people/kids are cruel so he lost all his friends. The school system lost track of him, basically, and he was in these terrible, low-level classes because his grades were bad. My parents in the midst of a terrible divorce, didn’t have the means or capacity or money or resources to intervene. I continued to talk for him–now it’s called advocating–to explain to teachers/administrators that he was really smart, that our school was designed to support dumb do-gooders (assignments weren’t graded for being right, but completed), street-smart kids get by or thrive because they play the system, and fails the really smart kids who need more in other ways. A few teachers heard me, but my brother was just so lost. My mom, towards the end of high school, had him tested yet again, knowing that there was something wrong, and he was misdiagnosed with ADD, because he couldn’t pay attention. He went to work at Nintendo directly out of high school for a year, because his computers were his only outlet and had talent for it, but failed miserably because he didn’t have the life skills to survive. He’s 30 now, still living with my ever frustrated mom, not doing anything. Adulting is just this impenetrable world.
He reads constantly, retains everything, but just can’t function in the world. He can’t read facial cues. Since failing at Nintendo, he doesn’t even have his old world of computers. He’s never had a relationship. My parents tried so hard and spent so much money to get him help and all the people didn’t know what to do. The experts missed it.
I met a kid with Asperger’s in college and it was like meeting my brother. I called my grandmother and was like, “I Know What’s Wrong!” and my grandmother said, “I think so too!” Mild dyspraxia was written off as “gawky.” Unfocused eyecontact, so he got glasses (his eyes are a little bad). Lots of social things were just nerd-stuff. It’s such a shame. It’s awful to see how depressed he is, how lonely & isolated, and a real diagnosis and help could’ve made all the difference. Basically, be glad it’s no longer the 80s & keep working when you know something is wrong. Because it probably is.
I relate to a lot of this. Here’s hoping things will get better for our loved ones.
I’m so sad for him. Could you help him find an Internet community at least?
Actually, the thing that’s been the best, that he’s put effort into, is a Dungeons & Dragons group! He feels like he belongs with them, and they accept him for who he is, which is great. It’s once a week, so he doesn’t get overwhelmed. Next step is him getting a job that isn’t stocking shelves in a grocery store. But without having finished school or any real work experience, it’s hard. So, I told him to pack his resume with volunteer work. last week he goes to work for this Friends of the Library group. and on his first day, he found a bunch of accounting errors on tax forms for the 501-C3 that he’s never even seen before. I hope this will be a boost of confidence that he is capable of so much, he just needs to be in a place where he can do his thing. And that he’s appreciated just as much as when he was 8 fixing computers in the elementary school lab.
I will psychically send him toastie internet hugs though!
This is such a sad story. At least he had a kick-ass little sister* to stand up for him.
*assuming gender here, sorry if I’m wrong
Dead bodies! Here’s one I am comfortable with. I used to TA a human anatomy dissection lab. I’ve seen lots of dead bodies, and even sawed the head off of one with a hack saw.
Bone dust smells like Satan’s doritos, by the way.
Is it the same as the smell when they drill your teeth? Because that’s weird.
I can’t say because I’ve never actually had a tooth drilled (knock on wood). I would think no, though, because in the US bodies used for anatomy labs and the like are embalmed, so they smell really different than either a living body or an untreated cadaver. Also I HOPE it’s not the same because the bone dust smell was literally the only thing that ever made me ill in that class. It was so awful.
I was raised Catholic, so I have seen my share of bodies at wakes. Being Irish Catholic adds another weird element to it (at least in my family). I remember getting very angry at my parents and relatives during my grandmother’s wake when I was 11–I didn’t understand why they were drinking, laughing and smiling like it was a party. Of course, they were sharing happy memories of my grandmother, but to my very serious 11 year old brain, this seemed disrespectful.
This past year, I’ve experienced dealing with the whole “making your loved one look natural for the wake” issue from another perspective. I helped plan funerals for my uncle, grandmother and father. The whole process involves a lot of weird conversations on which clothes, make-up and accessories will make your family member look best. I never thought I would need to go clothes shopping for deceased loved ones.
I went to school for a degree in funeral directing and embalming, so probably more dead bodies than anyone else here, unless that person is also an embalmer or a pathologist!
I just finished reading the Washington Post article on the rise of hemlines in men’s basketball shorts.
YES, LET YOUR THIGHS RUN WILD AND FREE, O YE MEN OF THE NBA!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wizards/the…
Bring back the short tight running shorts of the 70s!!
AMEN!
Can we get tennis shorts back, too?
Also swim trunks that don’t hang down to mid calf. I wish to objectify the men!
I’ve seen four dead bodies. Three were my grandparents whose wakes I attended. (I was too young to remember one of my grandparent’s death so I don’t count her.) The fourth dead body was a guy who got murdered in my apartment building. :/
I HAD NO IDEA IT WAS WEIRD TO BE COMFORTABLE AROUND DEAD BODIES UNTIL I WAS AN ADULT! I went to Catholic school k-12 and all of my family, friends, and acquaintances were practicing or reformed Catholics. Yeah, so anyways, there’s the dead body and the good cookies are in the basement.
Oooo, I do remember some delicious cream puffs at one funeral…
The whole “Catholic funeral” discussion reminded me–
My mom had an uncle who was a priest in a small town. (He also wrote a column for a Catholic magazine, and was rather well known). When he died, well-wishers sent EIGHTEEN HAMS to our family. Every time the doorbell rang, someone would say, “Not another ham!!”
(We managed to divvy them up amongst the family, but that was still rather a lot of ham…)
“In lieu of hams, please consider making a donation to Uncle Peel’s favorite charity…”
I am a neurodivergent cis-lady who was diagnosed a bit late (11ish), but received absolutely zero (not an exaggeration) support post-diagnosis from parents and educators except for the occasional prescription, until I took it upon myself to start going to counseling in college. And to be honest I really could have used the help. It’s disorienting and frustrating, to say the least, to know you are different, but not have any tools at all to deal with the difference.
Your brief updates about your adorable child make me hopeful. I’m happy that there is one kid getting more support than I had, and I also hope that others will see these updates and it gives them the push to really advocate for and support their kids.
Parents of autistic girls represent!
My kid was unmissably weird but she is also a great self-advocate in many ways. There was no way she was ever going to skate by failing quietly. She fails (and does everything else) loudly. I gather it is otherwise with so many autistic girls and that’s heartbreaking.
Yes yes yes on not-so-NT girls. My daughter was lucky to be #2, and I went through the whole hits-every-box-on-the-list diagnosis with #1, and met a ton of people who were already in the thick of it, and heard a lot about how different girls were and had tons of models. So yeah, I was ready for it with her. She is doing great, even though I still haven’t quite figured her out yet. I’m confident we’ll get there. Finding a small, trustworthy community of other parents living through diagnosis helped me a ton. Hope you are able to find something like that, Nicole!
Also my family is Italian and everyone kisses the person's (body's??) cheek one last time during the visitation? Apparently this is weird?
YES. I have tried explaining this to people, that I dont read the WORDS, I read the Sentences and the Paragraphs, and I just get baffled looks!
"I can quote fragments and paragraphs of books – without a clue of the author, or even, sometimes, the title."
YES, and then I'm sitting there trying desperately to remember even a GENRE. "Where there aliens? No..it was set in the ..South? GAH."