Insights Discussion

[Marxo Grouch]

Holy shit! That was unexpected. Good to see you, brother.

[Marlowe]

Blame Deeky! I'm trying to get back in the message board habit, mainly because Twitter stresses me the heck out, but it's going to take some adjusting. (And good to see you too, Grouch.)

[Count Zero]

Great to see you, dude!

[Deeky]

Sept 19, 2018 7:37:49 GMT -5 Marlowe said:

Blame Deeky! I'm trying to get back in the message board habit, mainly because Twitter stresses me the heck out, but it's going to take some adjusting. (And good to see you too, Grouch.)

To be honest, I had to stop looking at Twitter first thing in the morning. It was not a good way to start the day.

[Dr. Kobb]

I'm not on Twitter (or any of the other social media platforms actually).  What is so stressful about it?  Politics?

[Marlowe]

Politics are a big part of it. It's also just a bunch of stuff at once, and people can get very loud. (And I make stupid posts more often than I'd like.)

[Dr. Kobb]

Yeah, for now I'm content to just read funny tweet aggregates on Buzzfeed every so often, rather than actually participating in further online lunacy personally. 

[Dr. Kobb]

Have you ever heard the saying that if everyone around you seems insane, then it must be you who is in fact utter nutters?  Well, apparently I'm batshit, because I was hanging out with the family yesterday and everyone seemed legit crazy.  The only person who seemed less bonkers was a brother-in-law who was drinking the entire time. 

[Killer Goldfish]

Great to see you here!!!

[Marxo Grouch]

This better not have been a big tease, duck.

*shifts toothpick from one side of the mouth to the other*

[Killer Goldfish]

Nov 17, 2018 13:17:57 GMT -5 Dr. Kobb said:

Have you ever heard the saying that if everyone around you seems insane, then it must be you who is in fact utter nutters?  Well, apparently I'm batshit, because I was hanging out with the family yesterday and everyone seemed legit crazy.  The only person who seemed less bonkers was a brother-in-law who was drinking the entire time. 

From what you told me about that enchanted evening, I think I would have had a few extra vodkas myself.

[Lemmy Caution]

Jumping topics: anybody besides Marxo (and yours truly) went to a boarding school at some point?

I'm taking a really interesting course as a kind of 'side dish' on the way to my PhD and we did some reading of Native American SF --some of which touched on the 'residential schools' that Native Americans were forced into.

I'll spare you guys all the whining I've done that poor Marxo has had to put up with over the years (I'm sorry, buddy). But now I really am thinking hard about the various kinds of total control environments that are out there, and the different ways they can shape and/or screw with your consciousness. Freaking wild topic...

The most relevant text we've read was Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway, which is a really beautiful (and sad) work about Highway and his little brother who, sadly, was claimed by the early years of the AIDS epidemic..

[Marxo Grouch]

I guess it's just you and me, tovarisch.

Number one, you're always welcome to talk to me about what was, you must admit, a unique experience no matter how you cut it, which we shared during four important formative years. And I haven't forgotten that the ball is my court in our dialogue on it; I just need to process some thoughts on it, and there rarely seems to be time.

PS: I will now be adding at least one Native American SF title to my on deck list.

[Count Zero]

I went to private schools up until I started college, but no boarding schools, thankfully. In regards to "total control environments," Catholic school was bad enough for me; I can only imagine how awful boarding schools must be, whether it's having to live with the kids who bully you or with the faculty, who can often be just as bad if not worse.

[Killer Goldfish]

I have been having yea problems with my sister lately, but nothing at all compared to what my brother's been going to -- he just lost his job, in part because of her depredations.

It hit me the other day that something we talk about fairly frequently at work applies to my sister.

All these years I've known her, we shared a bedroom for 11 years, and I never realized before this week that she has Munchausen's by Proxy.

[Lemmy Caution]

Dec 8, 2018 14:02:17 GMT -5 Killer Goldfish said:

I have been having yea problems with my sister lately, but nothing at all compared to what my brother's been going to -- he just lost his job, in part because of her depredations.

It hit me the other day that something we talk about fairly frequently at work applies to my sister.

All these years I've known her, we shared a bedroom for 11 years, and I never realized before this week that she has Munchausen's by Proxy.

Ack!

An ex- of mine once tried to pull me into a godawful child custody case* that involved one parent that exhibited signs of MbP. It involved a bunch of illegal moving of the child and at least one attorney who cheerfully took the millionaire husband's money and fucked off to wherever.

Pretty sure it was one of the last nails in the coffin of our post-relationship friendship.

Really sorry your family is getting hit with that kind of shitstorm :(


*Not my kid. Or hers, for that matter. I have no kids; no idea if she does, these days.

[Lemmy Caution]

Dec 7, 2018 6:01:06 GMT -5 Marxo Grouch said:

I guess it's just you and me, tovarisch.

Number one, you're always welcome to talk to me about what was, you must admit, a unique experience no matter how you cut it, which we shared during four important formative years. And I haven't forgotten that the ball is my court in our dialogue on it; I just need to process some thoughts on it, and there rarely seems to be time.

PS: I will now be adding at least one Native American SF title to my on deck list.

Indeed it was.

And yeah, take your time. As a personal wondering, it's sort of a phantom itch --not really relating to anything I do now, but occasionally it pops up as irritating thoughts.*

I think it put the concept of a total institution on my radar, however. And in Arizona, where there is a large Native American population, you really just keep bumping up against boarding schools even if (as in my case) you're studying the impact of computers on language. 

Funny stuff.

One thing I keep in mind whenever I read Native American SF is that for many NA authors, the alien invasion has already happened and "post-apocalyptic" basically means the world we live in today.

*Such as "how the fuck do I get Facebook to stop suggesting Joe C. as a 'friend'? fucker and i didn't get along 35 years ago..." 

[Portrait in Flesh]

When I was about 13, I came close to winning a scholarship to a boarding school in NH, but it went instead to a fellow classmate who was on the track team and, therefore, had a better extracurricular thingy-dingy than I did.

Even if I had won it, it's unlikely my overprotective mother would have let me go. As it was, she didn't let me skip a couple of grades because it would've put me in P.E. classes with "developed girls" or some such thing.

Touching a little on the Native American boarding school topic, I'm embarrassed to say I actually know very little about whether this relates to my ancestral past, as the only person I really could have asked about it (my grandmother) is long gone. And she would always clam up about the topic. For example, even though she was born in Costa Mesa, CA, and her parents were originally from the Tucson area, my grandmother always insisted that she was "from Mexico" rather than an Indian. (If pressed, she'd probably admit she was American, but otherwise she was "from Mexico"...probably because she knew she couldn't pass for white and, at the time, there was less stigma attached to being Mexican than being an Indian.)

I don't know if my great grandparents were ever on a reservation (although they were both "full-blooded" they were from different tribes). I do know that my grandmother and her many siblings had little formal education, and even then it was probably Catholic Church-sponsored and, since my grandmother's English was always pretty broken, most likely in Spanish. But as the majority of her sisters were married off and having kids by 14 (my grandmother was the exception) and her brothers joined the army as soon as they could, I don't think any of them were ever in a residential boarding school. It could be too that they grew up during the Great Depression and they kept under the radar.

[Choconado]

Dec 8, 2018 14:02:17 GMT -5 Killer Goldfish said:

I have been having yea problems with my sister lately, but nothing at all compared to what my brother's been going to -- he just lost his job, in part because of her depredations.

It hit me the other day that something we talk about fairly frequently at work applies to my sister.

All these years I've known her, we shared a bedroom for 11 years, and I never realized before this week that she has Munchausen's by Proxy.

Yikes.  Also what is going on with this world?  It seems like at least 3/5ths of the people I know at all across this big blue marble, myself included, are just basically going through some serious "when it rains, it pours" levels of bad news among themselves and their families, whether its injuries, or sudden revelations like this, or financial woes, or just all kinds of things.  It's really distressing just how widespread it seems to be right now.

[Marxo Grouch]

For what it's worth, the school that Lemmy and I went to was Episcopal, not Catholic, which made a difference. As I've said many times, quite possibly on this board, if you're going to be Christian, Episcopalian is the way to go. Much less guilt, better music and better cocktails.