Goodness. That is sad. As apo (I think) likes to say, you really, really don't know shit about anyone's marriage but your own.
My first thought when I read that an hour or so ago was whether it would/should show up here. It seems like such a tough situation, where she'll have to blog it to keep her numbers up and her kids fed and yet that seems like it could feed into so many negative things. Sad, yes.
you really, really don't know shit about anyone's marriage but your own
And sometimes not even that one.
She's generally impressively honest, but I don't think that anyone who blogs non-anonymously can possibly share the good, bad and ugly very freely.
As soon as you set up much of an online identity for your pseudonym, you can no longer do as much there, either.
4: Heh. A former friend (who, and I should apologize for it, showed up here a few times) is sort of the epitome of non-anonymously blogging the good, the bad, and the ugly insanely freely. I can't say it seems like a very good idea.
I was just thinking about this sort of thing in a different context: I'm fascinated by honest, personal blogs about people's lives. And I can't imagine why or how anyone blogs like that: I'd think you'd irretrievably piss off the people you were talking about.
You mean non-anonymous blogs? Or just the threat of getting your pseud blog discovered? I can't figure out if I'm in the group you're referring to, or not.
It's hard to exaggerate what a bad idea blogging "honestly" about your divorce is. As just one of about a thousand reasons not to do it, you are unlikely to be self-aware because the emotional rollercoaster is too extreme.
Actually, I can't even think about this topic. Back to looking up amusing theme cruises for the other thread!
8: Blogging honestly about your divorce will cause your cat to eat your balls while you sleep.
7: You mean your live-journal? I can't think of much I've read of yours there that would be outside my comfort zone -- like, I don't know if Jammies reads it, but I don't see why he'd mind. But you're not doing a whole lot of relationship stuff there.
Yeah, that's what I was wondering. He does read it, but no, I don't generally talk shit about other people there. On occasion I do, and then I try to go back and friends-lock it before it disappears into the big spiral of history.
I write about Lee negatively here and on twitter to some extent. I probably shouldn't, but she shouldn't give me the fodder either. Or something.
No, it's okay if it's fascinating.
Joan Didion's truest line: "A writer is always selling someone out."
Dooce used to come over to my apartment when we were in college, because she was friends with one of my roommates and she didn't have MTV (her apartment complex thought it was evil) and thus needed a place to watch the premier of the latest Blur video on 120 Minutes. I wish her and Jon the best.
Her apartment complex manager could see into the future, I guess.
As apo (I think) likes to say, you really, really don't know shit about anyone's marriage but your own.
Ayup.
12: Actually, I was kind of thinking about you. I'm not saying that it's wrong of you to write negatively about Lee: you sound like you need the support, given what's been going on, you're certainly not unrelentingly negative about her, and and the 'rules' you two have for your relationship aren't the rules in anyone else's relationship. If in your judgment, it's okay, it's okay, and as heebie says, it's fascinating.
But any relationship I've been in, either romantic or close family, my personal sense of what the rules are for talking negatively about the other person in public are way, way tighter than that, to the point that I really couldn't do that kind of personal blogging. If I were talking about Buck the way you talk about Lee, it would mean that I were on my way out the door, or at least seriously considering it -- not because the way you've said she's behaved is unforgivable, but because talking about it in public (and public is a funny word there. A longstanding pseudonym still seems 'public' to me, if it's out where anyone could read it. Oral talking with a friend or friends is different, partially because of the smaller audience, partially because it doesn't leave a record) would be not okay unless I was done with the relationship.
My sense of where the line is isn't everyone's, but it precludes any kind of emotionally honest personal blogging -- nothing importantly negative would be all right for me to say in public.
Joan Didion's truest line: "A writer is always selling someone out."
I feel like this says a great deal more about Joan Didion than writers.
it precludes any kind of emotionally honest personal blogging -- nothing importantly negative would be all right for me to say in public
Would you be able to say it in person to your friends? I.e., is the problem just the permanent public record? Or are you not supposed to talk about it at all?
Because, if the problem is just the permanent public record aspect of it, I'd suggest that, e.g., a comment in a thread at unfogged is a lot closer to a conversation among friends than a permanent public record. Obviously, it straddles a line, but even though we're constantly exhorting people to go back and RTFA, I don't think all that many people do.
Speaking of the archive, did I miss a ghost-plumbing updatge?
22: We decided to drop it. Everything seems to be functioning normally now, and we talked informally to enough plumbers who all said "I dunno" that we figured it wasn't worth paying one $150 to come to our house and say "I dunno" in person. If anything happens again, we'll call someone. In the meantime, we'll spend that $150 repairing the first floor ceilings.
24: Well, I do too, and I'd probably even be willing to pay for it. But, again, our strong impression was that with no active problem we were very likely to pay someone to come out and fail to diagnose the issue. None of them will accept a contingency fee.
Paying somebody to come and fail to find the real issue is what home ownership is all about.
1) A while back I said I was interested in reading more RL-relationship-blogging, and I enjoy Thorn's posts, even as, or because I find them disconcerting.
2) We do get quite a bit, in the mode of "That jerk made a left turn without signalling." We even get interactions in comments that I find interesting. "What did you mean by that" stuff.
3) Divorce, deaths, family breakups, extreme financial difficulties were more extreme than what I had in mind.
4) What I find amazing is the way we are all fools and saints in our most quotidian existences, and how that contrasts with the rational stable images we project of ourselves. and "great event" theories of bonding. "He didn't take the trash out and forgot to get the milk" or "She didn't hear me when I asked for the salt." or "What the fuck was that expression about when I talked about Deadwood?" or any number of very positive actions and reactions.
I, at least, am a discontinuous maelstrom of instants, and I mean instants, of rage and joy, love and hate, pleasure and pain, that I try to ignore in order to pretend there is an internal identity and a steady perception of the Other.
Fiction really doesn't capture this very well, although I think good movies are better, because actors remain human and imperfect.
What I hope to see with this ever finely grained observation is that there is a lot more love and loneliness around us and within us than we ever publicly acknowledge.
19: My ex-brother-in-law A believes that the cause of his divorce from my sister A was my divorced sister B when she moved up near the A couple. Once sister A had someone to talk to, her relationship started to seem unbearable, and sister B has already successfully escaped from an unbearable marriage.
You do have the thing when two two very happily married women grumble to each other about their husbands when they're alone together but always knuckle under when a husband shows up. But not talking about it to anyone seems to make escape even from the worst relationships impossible.
You do have the thing when two two very UNhappily married women....
Watched Blue Valentine last week, and one way I had of reading it was that the wife had a Big Narrative and the husband was the Careful Moment, although if anyone wants to tell I have it backwards I will listen.
Dogs need some quality time.
My wife's the person I talk about other people with. Wouldn't work the other way around. The graph must remain acyclic.
(INFP - very marginally on the first, and between 25 and 50 on the rest. This result surprised me a little. I was expecting INTP)
19: Yeah, there are actual rules even if it doesn't look like there are and even if I've posted in anger (especially here) when I maybe shouldn't have and yet did because I was feeling desperate. The relationship was in trouble for a while and now is doing so much better, and I think if I hadn't gotten the support here from people saying that yeah, I was responding understandably to things as I was portraying them, I think I would probably have melted down and caused more problems for myself. Fostering friends suddenly came out of the woodwork saying that, yeah, their spouses don't pitch in or are actively resistant to their fostering but I need to do what they do and just buck up and learn to fake being happy with it because it's the only way I'll get to have kids, which seemed wrong. Real-life friends were saying that, well, fostering is just weirdly unnatural and of course having someone else's kids around would make a person go off the deep end, so it made sense that Lee wouldn't be able to handle it and I needed to be more sympathetic and probably just move the kids as soon as possible to make Lee happy.
I'm not even entirely talking behind Lee's back; she knows about the blog and that I talk to people here, though maybe she doesn't understand how negative I've gotten or what sort of details there are. I know she knows that I've shared certain things that may have seemed over the line. I'm sure if she actually read all my comments together, she would probably feel hurt. She feels hurt when I talk about how upset I was. She's good at forgetting things she doesn't want to think about and she genuinely does feel a lot of discomfort talking about some of the things she's done and how hurt I felt about them. I think she'd be more upset by being reminded than by the privacy violation, but I could certainly be wrong. I wouldn't really like to be reminded of times I was jerky and what others had to say about that, but I have the kind of personality where I think about that a lot anyway and she doesn't.
She also has some very clear lines about things she doesn't want me to discuss, and I respect that even when I'd prefer not to. My other rule is that I'm not putting anything up that I wouldn't want our social worker to know. So there are certain other things that are off limits because of that, many of them quite banal. I know I'm choosing to be "out" about certain things and I know some of the benefits and drawbacks to that, but there are probably all sorts of horrible outcomes I haven't foreseen that could still clobber me.
I thought we were trying to keep things interesting.
20:I feel like this says a great deal more about Joan Didion than writers.
I feel like this says a great deal more about you than Joan Didion.
(Sorry if I killed this thread. I do feel bad about that!)
I love this thread!
This thread is awesome.
Best thread.
That means you have to start over-sharing.
If that doesn't rev up this thread, nothing will.
I can definitely provide updates. I'm eating some jerky; not sure how that will affect things.
Using the power of imagination, maybe.
Imagine there's no pooping
It's easy if you ride
No bike below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the pooping clogging up the drain
Keep it clean
They don't write songs like that anymore.
For what it's worth, none of Thorn's comments struck me as inappropriate. No, I'm sure that Lee wouldn't be happy to read them, but I thought they consistently took the position of, "this is driving me crazy, but I know that Lee has her own perspective on it." Which I think is important. In my recollection the follow-up comments were about Thorn, and how she could stay sane, rather than about Lee and why she was being impossible, which is how it should be and seems like a sign that Thorns comments were carefully written.
Yeah, this isn't something where I'm committed to thinking that my lines are in the right place -- Thorn's discussions of what's going on with her and Lee don't seem inappropriate in general to me, they just read like something that I wouldn't myself say in public. (Also, I'm not certain where my lines actually are, as opposed to where I think they they are -- in six years of chatter archived here, I'm not clear in detail about what I've said about people.)
But whether or not my lines are in an objectively correct place, I can't imagine moving them.
Heebie: are you preparing us for something??
Halford: Why are you f'ng with my business!??!?! I dont give people advice of how to spend less with you, do I?!?!
If you are not my client, please post information about your divorce, custody case, criminal case, or generally naughtiness online. Blog it. Facebook it. Whatever. Please include pictures.
Dont both Husband and Wife work for Dooce?
If so, could this be a part of a business plan?
I do not read it, and maybe I am just being cynical. But, happiness only sells so much. Into every blog must come some sadness, blood, or intrigue.
Every happy blog is unsuccessful. All unhappy blogs are successful in their own way.
Dont both Husband and Wife work for Dooce? If so, could this be a part of a business plan?
He addressed this at his site, that he's looking for outside work now.
I didn't know! Sad. But not shocking. In fact, almost sounds like a good move.