RL peeves! >< @$!#
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Ice!? In Texas!?
SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING.
... seriously, please do because we seem to re-enact Looney Tunes every time it happens ...
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Hey! I lived on the western edge for awhile! Not my fault my ex husband ended up being a jackass man-child. >.>
@silentsophia I've seen it happen. Lived in Abilene for awhile. We had an Easter with hail the size of baseballs. The winter that had just passed had seen FEET of snow on the ground. Everyone lost their everloving MINDS.
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@silentsophia At least Dallas sees snowfalls. Like, actual snow. We get a very light dust only every few years.
@Miss-Demeanor I so feel you on the man child thing.
Fun? What is this fun thou speakest of?
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What I don't get is how people can ride their bicycles to work in weather this cold. It makes me feel like some kinda lame wimp when I don't just because it's -23C outside and I don't go around pedalin' away at 7:30 in the morning.
But they do. I don't know if I should hate them or be in awe of them. Bastards. Glorious crazy bastards.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said:
What I don't get is how people can ride their bicycles to work in weather this cold. It makes me feel like some kinda lame wimp when I don't just because it's -23C outside and I don't go around pedalin' away at 7:30 in the morning.
But they do. I don't know if I should hate them or be in awe of them. Bastards. Glorious crazy bastards.
That made me think of the story I had to read for Literature: Fiction, about a man who decided against other advice to take a very long walk in the freezing of Alaska. Something about once it is more than 10 below freezing you shouldn't ever walk alone, and the man doing it anywise.
He died.
Don't bike in freezing weather, @Arkandel.
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@Cobaltasaurus said:
@Arkandel said:
What I don't get is how people can ride their bicycles to work in weather this cold. It makes me feel like some kinda lame wimp when I don't just because it's -23C outside and I don't go around pedalin' away at 7:30 in the morning.
But they do. I don't know if I should hate them or be in awe of them. Bastards. Glorious crazy bastards.
That made me think of the story I had to read for Literature: Fiction, about a man who decided against other advice to take a very long walk in the freezing of Alaska. Something about once it is more than 10 below freezing you shouldn't ever walk alone, and the man doing it anywise.
He died.
Don't bike in freezing weather, @Arkandel.
-10C? -10C is weather I'd consider wearing a t-shirt for at this rate.
It's shocking how quickly you get used to cold weather. But anywhere under -20 is where I draw a very definite line.- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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The dental work needs to stop making with the ow.
The one crown is.. off-kilter. I think. It occasionally catches oddly and leaves my jaw aching for days, and naturally... it happened again this morning. Cue stabbing pains down the left side of my face until Tuesday, probably.
Along with zero solid food.And here I'd been hoping the crowns to replace the teeth cracked by grinding the dang things in my sleep might not suffer the same dire end.
Good luck with that, you wee porcelain bastards.
Hope you last until they can replace the chompy-block device.(It is strangely apt to post this right under your sig, @Cobaltasaurus.)
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@Arkandel, It may have been more than ten below freezing. I don't remember. But the story was depressing. Like everything else I have to read for this damned class.
@surreality, that sort of sums up Nightvale. "Oddly apt".
My Peeve:
My ficton class.
I like to read.
I like to write.
I like fiction.
I like stories.
I fucking hate this class.
We spent four weeks reading stories and then discussing plato's allegory of the cave for them. Four fucking weeks. Yes, there was "setting" or "theme" questions thrown in. Or "symbology" questions. But for four fucking weeks it came back to "explain the character's cave journey from this story". Every. Fucking. Time. For 4-6 short stories a week. I am so fucking sick of answering the same goddamned questions over and over. Yes, different short stories, but it is the same goddamned thing. It takes all the fucking joy out of reading fiction! It destroys the uniqueness! LETS DISCUSS HOW EVERY STORY IS EXACTLY THE SAME!
adsfsdfsdf sdfsdfsdf sdfllkjdf >_<sd sdfsdfdf
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@Arkandel said:
What I don't get is how people can ride their bicycles to work in weather this cold. It makes me feel like some kinda lame wimp when I don't just because it's -23C outside and I don't go around pedalin' away at 7:30 in the morning.
But they do. I don't know if I should hate them or be in awe of them. Bastards. Glorious crazy bastards.
I tried riding my bike in cold weather. Every time I did it, I'd wake up sick the next morning. Maybe some people build up their resistance, I clearly haven't managed to. When temperatures are around 10C or above, I can ride the bike. Anything below that and I risk getting sick. I think it's because of sweating during the ride, and then that sweat cooling off rapidly on the body. Not sure.
@cobaltasaurus
Welcome to why I dropped out. Fucking academia bullshit.
(For me it was Roland Barthes trying to shoehorn De Saussure's linguistic theories so they fit in the completely unrelated area of myth. A whole bunch of mismatched bullshit posing as the ultimate in intellectual achievement. The emperor has no clothes. Barthes died from being hit by a truck, it warms my heart to know this.)
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My creative writing teachers (at a school known for it, at least regionally) were all about domestic fiction. We had one visiting writer in who talked about how she wanted to show the "positive side" of alcoholism.
I say this completely unironically: fucking white people.
The lit was somewhat better, there at least we got a ton of variety, and I learned that magical realism is weird, yo.
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn -
@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
who talked about how she wanted to show the "positive side" of alcoholism.
So much twitching. So much, much twitching. We had to read a story about a heroin addict and his family. And one of the questions we had to answer that day was what we might tell to the family member of a drug addict, what advice we might give-- the story was about being understanding, and stuff. And I all but lost my shit in my answer. I grew up around a lot of substance abuse (alcoholism, pot, prescription narcotics, god only knows what else). I drama queened a bit in my answer. The question, and the story, really upset me. Especially since the story was like "how can you help them in this situation" and I was like ... this story doesn't really cover addiction. Not someone who is actively abusing substances at least.
There's no talk of the family member begging, borrowing, lying, stealing, etc from their own family to fix their habit ---
Yeah. Ahem.
Fuck understanding the "messages" and "meanings" from fucking short stories.
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It's educated folks who try to find meaning in bullshit that makes uneducated folks believe that education is pointless.
I don't think I've ever met someone whose had to deal with substance abuse on a real, personal level either as an addict or with a close family member who was an addict who could find a single goddamn positive thing about the experience.
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@Admiral I can see positives. It's not positives I'd want to trade in for the misery of the experience, mind.
Your asshole of a stepfather treats you like shit and beats you, and as a consequence might develop toughness and a high tolerance of pain (or you might not, perhaps you're just a nervous wreck). You could argue it's a positive. It's not a net positive, though. Nobody wants that trade.
It's the idea that adversity at least gives you something. Putting positive spins on things (and perhaps even squinting with contempt at those who dont, like you just missed an oppertunity) is a big part of modern culture.
Which is not always (or even often, in my experience) true. Most of the time it just destroys. Alcohol abuse, violent abuse, growing up poor and deprived, going to jail, dropping out of school, getting the sack. One in a dozen might twist it around to something positive, but most don't. Nor should they be expected to.
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When I was a child, my dad was out of his mind on speed and tried to carve through the bathroom door with a knife to kill my mother, my sister, and me. I gained nothing positive from it.
When I was a child, my grandfather shot at me with a rifle in the yard because he 'didn't want no sissies in the family'. He was drunk. I gained nothing positive from it.
When I was a child, I witnessed a drunk man dive off a porch, tackle my mother in the yard, and try to beat her to death. I gained nothing positive from it.
When I was a teenager, my dad was murdered by a drug addict who was trying to carjack him. I gained nothing positive from it.
These are just a few gems from my own experiences. Not the smallest glimmer of positivity came out of the hell that drug and alcohol abuse made my childhood. It took me well into my mid-twenties through years of counseling before I came out of being a useless lump of low-self esteem that it made me.
I don't feel sorry for myself. I imagine many of you have had the same or worse growing up. I just wanted to say... I understand @Cobaltasaurus and others having a sense of righteous indignation at being told to find positives in examples like this.
We all have things that set us off. Racism. Rape. Child abuse. Drug and alcohol abuse. And for every X number of cases, yes, there might be Y number of cases where something good came out of it. But the number is slim enough that those of us who are triggered by the subject matter being told to 'find a positive' is a little insensitive to say the least.
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RL Peeve, the lack of /grit/ in most people. Fuck Adam Carolla for pointing it out so that now I can't help but see it EVERYWHERE.
Then when it's all over and the rest of you are ready for Dead Animal Pickup, I'm gonna go balls deep into Dahl. But only because she asked me to. Sweet-like. - Riddick (2013)
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@ThatOneDude I used to eat grits every day. I'm full of them!
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@Admiral said:
I don't feel sorry for myself. I imagine many of you have had the same or worse growing up. I just wanted to say... I understand @Cobaltasaurus and others having a sense of righteous indignation at being told to find positives in examples like this.
Romanticizing addiction (and mental illness) is all the rage in a lot of creative writing. I'd say "high school/college creative writing classes," because that's the first time I can remember being viscerally bothered by it, but it's not like it isn't a thing in general pop culture. As the child of an alcoholic...yeah, I am not so much about that. It doesn't exactly make me angry anymore, but I don't have a lot of patience for it, and I think it's quite different than the healthier "triumph over adversity" that can add dimension and flaws to a story. It's really hard to get away from in settings where a lot of young writers are trying to be edgy (not that I think all addiction stories are bad, even if they aren't for me), and there's not much you can do about it, except internalize that it's often a dumb trope and it's OK not to embody it. That's what got me through sophomore year, at least.
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@Three-Eyed-Crow, I am not a mental health professional, but I think Addiction is now considered a mental illness by the APA.
But you see a lot of addiction and mental illness in art because a lot of artists are addicts/mentally ill, as well as many of the "greats" which people emulate.
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I can understand people writing or even seeking out and reading stories about their particular issues (addiction, abuse, etc). Hell, a main storyline in the book I've got to /someday find the time/ to edit is the main character dealing with her drug-addict sister lying, stealing, etc from her. I'm writing it because it's good tension and conflict, and it's something I have experience with, and frankly it's a little therapeutic.
However, I would never want someone in the future to read my book and sit down and have to answer questions like: "What advice would you give the main character in this situation? How would you have helped the sister?"
My problem isn't that they exist. My problem isn't that it's in media in general. My problem is then being expected shift through all of it and find "hidden messages" and, in that particular case, being expected to come up with advice other than "if they want help, help, if they don't want help, drop them from your life".
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Because the level of ignorance, stigma and confusion surrounding mental illness is immense. Someone I know joked about bringing extra ammo with whenever they took me to the mental health clinic. I told him not to worry, most of us would just want to shoot ourselves. Things got /real/ quiet. I honestly can't think of a whole lot positive that I got out of my rough background (aside from being a resilient motherfucker, and really good at diving for cover at the sound of bullets and explosions).
Even something as 'simple' as depression or addiction is massively misunderstood. Throw in the fact it really does vary a lot from person to person and things get really muddy. It's not like I can just not be depressed, but it does take a lot of effort for me to get going. And I know that's the thing I need to do, even if it feels like I'm rolling a boulder up a hill with pelvic thrusts. It feels vaguely weird knowing one's condition is being used as an exercise in analysis (hurhur, anal).
Cruel as it sounds, sometimes one does have to detach from a mentally ill friend or family member to save oneself. It's rarely intentional on the part of the ill person, but that's how it goes. Sometimes that's the impetus that gets one going to get help, sometimes not. Sometimes, I have to stop talking to my friend with a mental illness because she's worked up, which gets me worked up and suddenly we're two mixed nuts flailing around. A lot of people just don't know how to handle a loved one or friend with these kinds of illnesses (including addiction).
