I would like to brag that Ace's pronouns are finally starting to sink in. Something has finally flipped at a deep visceral level such that they/them seems more correct. It was always fine when I had a moment to pause and use my slow-brain, but not when I was harried and pulled in seven directions. It's finally seeming more right in a harried distracted state.
I still mess up a lot, but it feels like I passed a marker.
1: Yay!
My #landlordlyfe is starting slowly as the seller is renting back for the first month as she moves out. I dropped by & actually met the seller, and a chat revealed she's not being priced out - she's using the proceeds to build her own home in the same metro area. Says after 30 years it was time to move on. Talk about making me feel smug!
The toddler who once asked me to help her draw a big monkey with chalk on the sidewalk is home from college. It feels nice.
Put in the paperwork for pre-authorization for the operation on my torn PCL. Operation is scheduled for next week so I hope it goes through quickly.
Good luck, Barry. Hope the recovery is easy.
Thanks ydnew!
Also, relevant to the blog: https://twitter.com/whotfisjovana/status/1589016067925430272?s=46&t=xRh2CKyA-m5VyjDLCE3S3Q
1: Yay!
5: Good luck! Is it an inpatient or out sort of thing? Will they put you under?
I'm in loosely enforced quarantine at home because of needing to procure a negative Covid test just before they drill my face off in, um, nine days. A preparatory switch to a low-carb low-sodium no-alcohol diet is supposed to help with healing so I'm living off eggs, almonds and celery like some kind of splinter-sect hermit.
Fighting for insurance coverage has been like trying to move the front lines in the Donbas. They've made some concessions but the grind isn't over and I think one possible timeline ends with me filing suit against the university regents, which I can't imagine would be a good look for them.
That nonsense aside, I am the luckiest trans woman in the country because my mother-in-law is flying out to help around the house after my discharge and will be a completely warm and supportive presence. We also started a meal train among local friends to provide nourishment for lurid and Elke (and me, once allowed to chew again) while I'm unable to cook.
Good luck to Barry and Lourdes!
Meanwhile, some not so good luck - my mom fell while she was making herself supper, and was in terrible pain and couldn't stand up. She managed to crawl very slowly to her phone and called a neighbor who called an emergency number and paramedics came and broke open the door and carried her into the ambulance. At the hospital they determined she broke a bone in her hip and she had surgery.
The fall happened on Tuesday night, and I didn't find out about anything until Friday morning when she sent me a whatsapp message. It seems she will be going to a rehab facility soon
Echoing the good thoughts towards Barry and Lourdes!
Peep, your poor mom. I'm so sorry.
Peep, I'm so sorry hear that. Hope the rehab goes well.
8: Best wishes on the surgery. The dietary thing is funny because I'm sitting here in a Panera listening to the staff complaining about people who order here and say they have a wheat allergy. "Sorry, we got nothing for you. "
I'm so sorry to hear about your mom, peep. I hope she recovers quickly.
It's too bad that export controls keep the Life Alert technology from being exported to Israel.
Good luck to Lourdes and Barry.
Best wishes for peep's mom, that's terrible.
15: Actually, my mom said she paid some amount per month to have some kind of alarm like that - but for reasons which it seemed best not to probe at this time, the device was on her night stand (apparently further away from her than her phone).
Thanks all for the kind words and sympathy.
Well, never mind then. Sorry she didn't have it on her.
Probably not related to the above, but you can now legally carry a switchblade in Pennsylvania.
Thanks all and good luck Lourdes!
Yes, I'll be put under
And best wishes for your mom, peep
After our city's committee on homelessness dragged on over the summer with limited progress, there was a major and unexpected turn-around last week. It now looks like we will get a revision to our camping laws that will allow camping by permit, and a safe parking program for people living out of their cars. As far as I know, this will be the first safe parking program on the East Coast. I am over the moon about this.
Best wishes to Barry, Lourdes, and peep's mom!
I know I should stop looking but I can't stop laughing at the ongoing twitter mess. It's unfortunate that success on its new owner's terms, if it eventually finds any, is likely to be a disaster for many, while failure also could be some form of disaster.
25 I can't get enough, it's hilarious. Dog who caught the car and all that. It reminds me of Trump wining the presidency but with less disastrous results for all.
Is the lettuce Musk or Twitter in this case?
26: Less disastrous to be sure, but I think there were activists in other countries who will be generally harmed by this, I.e. they may be less safe.
I don't know why, but every political event since about 2010 has been defined by the pattern of the dog finally catching the car. US politics maybe even further back (the Iraq War was a whole string of dog-catches-car events).
(Tune: The Clash, I Fought The Law)
"...I caught the car and the car won"
but every political event since about 2010 has been defined by the pattern of the dog finally catching the car.
Because the Republican party perpetually says X in order to achieve Y, and every now and then they're forced to reckon with the fact that they caused X to happen.
33: the real dog-catches-car moment of the early 2000s would have been a war with Iran. Sanity, fortunately, prevailed.
just been trying to get a dog catches car cartoon out of DALL-E Mini and the results are too horrifying to share.
I tried "the dog that caught the car" and it mostly gave pictures of a dog in a car looking out the window, although some had weird things going on with seat belts.
But while I was waiting it showed an ad for a tutorial on using different styles and the one shown was ancient Egyptian painting. So I did "the dog that caught the car in the style of Egyptian hieroglyphs" which mostly gave hieroglyph-like images of dogs except for one that was a cool dog-car combination symbol.
That's symbol is proof the aliens built the pyramids.
Oh no, 34 is going to be in my head all day. Thanks for the wishes!
37: Gary Larson did one that infamously looks like the dog knows exactly what it wants to do with the car when it catches it. (This was unintentional.) https://imgur.com/gallery/K8MqicN
Echoing 24, best wishes to Lourdes, Barry and Mrs Peep Sr.
41: He had to say it was unintentional.
Dogs can't control their dreams, ok?
And they don't know where the vagina is on a car.
The dog is obviously fucking the catalytic converter
I have a mild flu or a bad cold. Other than that everything is fine.
I think they should give RSV variants a letter as a suffix so we can track them and so that someone has to say they have RSVP.
"RSV" is short for "respiratory something virus", right? It makes so much sense I'm not going to Google to make sure I'm right.
It's French for "don't make me pay for an extra dinner. "
When someone says "Breathing trouble got I," that's the result of a Respiratory Syntactic Virus.
I'm sure I'm a broken record about this, but RSV nearly killed my niece during the first month of her life. That experience has led me to avoid all contact with babies if I am even the tiniest bit sniffly.
I have a brand new niece. His parents are being very protective.
I was still working in an office when Iris was born. It was mostly a younger/childless group. One of the exceptions was the guy who did project management, who was mostly chill, stereotypical dad vibe. But when I brought Iris around as a newborn, he was surprisingly fanatical about handwashing--not at all the guy I expected it from.
One of my first cousins once removed was in the hospital with RSV as an infant, it's definitely scary for the tiny ones.
Are we seeing so much RSV because it's just bad luck or because the isolation from COVID has weakened immunity against it or because COVID-fucked lungs provide a better environment for it to mutate into tougher forms?
If it were because the isolation ended, it seems to lag a very long time.
57: and the elderly elderly OLDs.
I'm working the polls at the local precinct tomorrow. I'm expecting it to be super slow since it seems like lots of people voted early. Kind of regretting the 14 hour committment, but glad I'm not in a tipping state where things might get weird or ugly at the polling places. Last time all we had was one batshit but harmless old lady 100% convinced that things were NOT RIGHT. Well, that's the only one I remember.
Best wishes to Lourdes and Barry on upcoming surgeries, & to Peep's mom in recovery.
Maybe downtime at the election will let me catch up to the book club people so I can peep at the other thread.
Every now and then I become aware of some new peril that I don't recall ever having heard about before. Usually it's weather-related. But the concept of RSV is, as far as I can recall, brand new to me in the last couple of weeks.
My son's game was finally published on Steam today. He's been working on it for 3 years. I'm not saying its Civilization V or anything, but if you have a PC and can spare $5, why not give it a play?
I'll have a look after the election, only because he says "in the style of the early 90s" instead of "late 20th Century".
Also at polls tomorrow. Swing state, and not really looking forward to it.
I think he specifically meant for it to look like a Super Nintendo game, which was but a brief window of the late 20th century.
Tomorrow we are going to elect a Governor who is one of the most purely full of shit politicians I've ever seen. He's more or less well meaning, so we're doing OK relative to a whole lot of other people, but for pure empty-headed, platitudinous self-regard, he's quite something. He's also an ER doc, confirming again my strong view that doctors, dentists, and airline pilots should never be trusted on anything related to politics (or personal finance).
My father-in-law told me that doctors lose lots of money investing in restaurants. I didn't want to argue the point, so I didn't mention how Subway started.
Omg. Ace has to do a Veteran's day project. They're supposed to interview a ver, but there are no vets on my side, and the ones on Jammies' side are all traumatized.
So the back up assignment is to do a project on a branch of the military. Guess which branch Ace chose...
(Also it strikes me that quite a few vets are traumatized, and elementary school kids aren't the most tactful, and maybe this assignment isn't the smartest idea. But they all do it every year, it seems.)(Usually the back up assignment is to borrow someone's stock uncle vet and use them.)
You should always save your uncle for stock-making.
I'm sure you were about to guess that. It's definitely the funniest military branch.
It's the only branch of the military I can name.
Well, it's the oldest and most traditional.
Fighting the Vernicious Knids since aught-19.
71: When Joey had an assignment like that, he interviewed my then co-worker Bruce Weigl. It actually went really well. IIRC, Bruce said "they sent me to Viet Nam to kill people and I wound up falling in love with the country." Bruce's poems about the war are genuinely harrowing.
That sounds like a better learning experience than what we've had.
What I find deeply befuddling is how there can be all these old guy Vietnam vets. They're not that much older than I am. Meanwhile the senior Space Force guy I deal with from time to time is a youthful O-5 who goes by "Wags."
Also, these kids should get the hell off my lawn.
Oh. The Air Force is the one where they have a hole.
I have a very new niece who is so far doing OK avoiding RSV. My cousin's newborn, on the other hand, was just hospitalized for RSV over the weekend. Thankfully, he came home today. Knock all the wood!
I got my flu shot and my Covid booster, so I'm as protected from those things as possible before I go visit the baby niece in two weeks. Cross all the fingers and toes!
I think I was one of 5 people at the 200-person conference I just attended who wore a mask. And even I took it off for eating and drinking and speaking on a panel. But I felt much safer flying and taxi-riding and otherwise mingling with it on.
85: Common misconception. They're actually just wearing their pants backwards.
My niece is in the hospital for RSV. Seems like oxygen is fixing things.
When we had a premie our doctor managed to get him some kind of RSV vaccine that was hard to get or wasn't covered by insurance or something. Might have been that he was born 34 weeks and insurance only paid for babies born 32 or earlier. Wasn't clear on the details of how he got it but I think it was extra material in a multi dose vial, like how with COVID vaccines they got six doses from a five dose vial.
Wishing the best for all the new nieces and removed cousins.
so I'm as protected from those things as possible
Wrong! I got my flu shot and Covid booster at the beginning of September, then got Covid a month later. The rest of you can only envy my immunity.
OT: I've been laughing all day about "the iceberg is getting genuinely mad".
Looks like he's just posting through it.
No legitimate news sources, please.
I had my COVID booster (4th jab) and my son had his polio booster jab (because polio is back, in London, ffs).
[Vent follows]
Life is generally total dogshit, if I'm honest. Work is really stressful and busy, and one of my projects crashed and burned in a way that might still come back to haunt me. Crashed and burned badly enough that I wouldn't be surprised if I take a financial hit from it (lower pay rise in this year's review cycle). Mix of over work, insufficient budgets, very poor scheduling, and a psychopathic client, literally none of which is my fault [our MD owns the scheduling and the budget on that project], but .. I'm the person in the seat where the blame will settle, I expect.*
At the same time, Mrs ttaM is now in year 3 of a long post-lockdown career change, and she is full-time in teacher training at the moment. It's killing me. I've been earning all of the money and doing about 80%+ of the child care, and about 60-70% of all of the other domestic labour for 3 years now, and I have a job that requires long hours and high levels of concentration, and I'm completely burn out. Up until a couple of months ago, I would at least still be able to rely on half a day or so at the weekend to rest or get a bike ride in or otherwise destress a bit, but since September, I'm solo-dad all fucking weekend, too.
This past weekend I stayed up until 5am (literally) helping her through a (literal) essay crisis, and then had to get up 90 minutes later for a full day of child care. Every evening when I should be doing the bits of my job I couldn't do during the day because I've been doing childcare and cooking meals, I'm instead shovelling shit as unpaid IT support--so much fucking IT support, Jesus--and therapist and living on 4 hours sleep a day.
My physical health is in the shit, I don't exercise because I don't have time, and I eat/drink too much.
I'm just holding out for Christmas and 2 weeks off, because right now, I'm about 2 bad days away from just fucking off to live in a cave somewhere.
In summary, fuck it all.
* On the plus side, I'm starting up a new project for a US client where we have a good working relationship and a successful and happy project already finished and where the work is interesting, so there may be some respite.
Sorry, ttaM. That sounds horrible and untenable. Good luck holding on until Christmas but I hope you get some kind of break before then...
Really, ttaM, that totally sucks.
In terms of your physical health, could you do one of those high intensity, brief exercises a few times a week. I think they do *some* good after like 8-10 minutes. HIIT also seems to suppress appetite so that might help suppress your appetite?
Could you lower your standards on ten domestic work? Can xelA help with any of the meal prep? In the US, we have these precooked rotisserie chickens that aren't expensive. That and a quick salad - even just sliced tomatoes and cucumbers with vinegar (not even vinaigrette) drizzled on top with some slices of whole grain bread would be good enough.
Also, you can totally tell me to F off and that my unsolicited suggestions are unhelpful.
Jammies voted on Friday and there was a poll-watcher there. Jammies said the poll-watcher would not make eye contact with Jammies, and also didn't do anything besides stand there, at that point at least.
There was a long line, apparently, roughly 5 pm on the last day of early voting. And one of the new voting reforms in Texas is "no phones or recording devices within 100 yards of a voting machine". And the hallway where they were waiting is within that 100 yard radius. So Jammies had some time on his hands.
101: that's the kind of situation ideal for my standing on one leg exercise.
I sometimes do that. My other one is to try to be so still that I can locate my heartbeat in my body without putting my fingers on my pulse.
My wife and I got absentee ballots, and I dropped them into the county-wide dropbox a week ago. This is an easy way to vote, but it seems like voting should be more of a communal experience.
Sympathy for 97 which sounds like a terrible situation- there's no way for Mrs ttaM to take more of the load? Even just taking a week off the teacher training to allow you some respite? Fulltime job plus most of the domestic plus most of the childcare sounds completely unsustainable.
A single person studying full-time is expected to do 100% of their own domestic work, after all - and admittedly the domestic burden's lower when there's only one of you, but it's not zero. Is teacher training really now so intense that it's impossible to do unless you have someone looking after you?
The Atlantic has been slipping.
Those are tides, Moby. Perfectly normal, nothing to worry about.
Yeah, ttaM, that sounds like a nightmare and completely unsustainable. At a bare minimum, the overnight TLC has got to stop. I know that's easy for me to say from this distance, but it sounds like you're too exhausted to have the bandwidth to enforce boundaries on these things.
I'm farting in apartment vestibules for democracy.
The next two years are going to be really bad, aren't they.
I am choosing to read 109 as a comment on Moby's flatulence.
107 gets it right. I don't have much advice to offer, but that sounds deeply unsustainable.
Ooof. Sounds like there's a huge resiliency gap in your relationship, which sounds really hard, but I'm not really sure how one approaches that. But at any rate it's absolutely not reasonable to ask you to stay up over an essay, and it's really shitty that she did that.
What was it like when she was in her old career? How did she function then? Were you still doing lots of helping her through work crises? Is there reason to think this will change when she finishes training? Surely actual teaching is more stressful and filled with more crises than training.
That sucks ttaM, here's hoping you get a restful break soon.
re: 112
I think that's definitely true now. I think, at the moment, it's a case "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need". If I hadn't done it, she'd have failed the essay, and probably been kicked off the course, with the attendant huge financial and opportunity cost. So, reasonable or not, it had to be done.
In her old career, she was in a very responsible job, and while there was the odd crisis, no more than anyone else, and probably about as often as I'd be going through some situation of pressure and stress, and she was always very supportive of me in those situations. So the dynamic was that we'd each periodically help each other through periods of crisis or stress. When lockdown happened, she took the disproportionate share of home-schooling and child care for the first 6 months as I was just too busy with work to do anything else.
So this isn't something that has always been the case and will always be the case.
However, she doesn't deal at all well with academic stress (specifically) or with very heavy workloads. She doesn't come from that kind of deadline/project culture in her previous career so doesn't deal well with multi-tasking under stress. All of her college studies and postgraduate studies have been characterised by this kind of dynamic. So right now, she's totally overwhelmed, so I just have to kind of suck it up until it gets better. Which might take another year to 18 months, unfortunately.
re: 105
As far as I can tell, the workload really is genuinely incredibly hard. During their university blocks they are in classes more or less as if it was a working day. Seven or eight hours a day. Then they have to do a lot of preparatory working in the evenings. It's not very like a normal academic course and seems stupid and counter-productive to me, but it's all mandated by the university and the government requirements for teacher training.
Similarly, with the teaching blocks, it's a full working day, and then at least three or four hours of prep in the evening to get lessons ready for the next day. There's a complex system of form-filling and record keeping and assessment, so you cannot just wing it. It has to be there and in the right place, right format, etc. So the workload really is very very hard with no respite. It has "junior doctor" vibes about it. Hazing through massive over-work.
Our domestic burden isn't insane. We live in a small easy to maintain place, and in the past, she has definitely had periods when she's shouldered more of that burden than me because I've had demands on my time, so it's not like it's always inequitable.
It's just very very hard to combine my job with doing all of the childcare; I literally do every school pickup and drop off, five days a week, every dinner time, and most of the weekend, because I'm ferrying him to sports lessons, or taking him places because she's 100% flat out on studying. Single parents have to suck that up, all the time, I guess, but they don't also have to do a load of domestic IT support and copyreading, too.
Is teacher training really now so intense that it's impossible to do unless you have someone looking after you?
I think if you are rolling straight into it from university as a 23 year old, with no dependents and you are in the full-time studying groove, it's an intense course but do-able. If you are a mature student, with a family, and concerns other than yourself, I think it's really very hard. So, I have to effectively make it so that it's a bit closer to the 23 year old with no dependents sort of situation.
(I'm venting slightly, it's not like she never spends time with our son, it's just very asymmetric)
114 is reassuring, at least if you know academics are the trigger then it won't be like that forever. In my marriage the work-related problem is that RWM somehow often ended up with bosses with bad sense of boundaries and functions poorly under those circumstances. So it was a difficult crisis situation when she's in that circumstance and everything is fine when she's not. She's switched to remote work (which doesn't pay well, but fortunately we can swing it, and local jobs all paid like shit anyway) which has been a huge improvement, just not interacting with bosses ftf has changed the whole dynamic.
Teaching bureaucracy has truly gone insane in terms of lesson plan documentation. It's bad enough here where bureaucrats are generally helpful and forgiving, I can't imagine what it's like in the UK where bureaucracy is not like that. The whole education system is in such crisis, especially with the pandemic.
That really does sound awful. But you'll be able to catch your breath at Christmas, and maybe having a break will let you get enough space to see if there's any creative way to lighten the load -- something you can throw money at, or get help from friends or family with.
I refrained from putting a flyer on the truck with an Infowars bumper sticker.
I have nowhere near the situation that Q-P-ttaM does, but since Jammies switched to teaching, his amount of energy for home stuff has plummeted dramatically, and I'm doing far more single parenting than I used to. Another part of it is that he's way better with 0 to 3 year olds than I am, and I'm way better with 5 to 18 year olds than he is.
I get very exasperated with him, because often he seems to want them to stop being people. Like, they're fired up in a big discussion and talking over each other, and no one is mad. That's not a problem.
At one point last week, Ace came in wearing these plastic roller skates that attach outside your shoes. The kids almost never play with these. Ace had on some costume and was hamming it up, scooching around on the skates.
Jammies looked at the skates and said, "We should really get rid of those. No one plays with them." Ace looked shocked and devastated, like he was about to take them off her feet and throw them away.
To me, this is so borne of stress and nonsensical in the moment. I think I just stared at him and said, "Ace is literally playing with them" and we both started laughing, and I teased him saying, "Who hurt you this way?! Who did this to you?" It was funny but I kinda think it's true. Who the fuck kept telling Jammies that he couldn't be a kid doing normal kid things all the fucking time?!
I teased him saying, "Who hurt you this way?! Who did this to you?" It was funny but I kinda think it's true. Who the fuck kept telling Jammies that he couldn't be a kid doing normal kid things all the fucking time?!
Last night I was reading The Best We Could Do, and it has a scene in which the author discovers that he father had gotten rid of a bunch of her toys and books without asking her, because he thought she had outgrown them.
But, in that case the answer to, "who did this to you?" was that the father was a child in Vietnam during the Vietnam war.
Holy shit Ttam that sounds brutal. Sympathies and improving vibes to all three of you. How very shitty to make teacher training a bunch of pointless hoops like that.
121 I found that book extremely moving, and it made me think more carefully about my relationship with my own parents, who grew up during a war, and both lost parents and siblings at a very young age, and had generally chaotic and difficult childhoods as a consequence. Anyway, related to 120, when I was a teenager my mom threw away all my diaries, because I was "done writing in them." I forgive you, mom!
"done writing in them."
That's not how books work.
my mom threw away all my diaries, because I was "done writing in them."
omg.
124 made me laugh.
125.1 Yeah, jms forgives her mom, and good on her, but I don't.
Wow, 123 is next level...
Another story about my mom, which will maybe humanize her (or not?): when I was little, I really really wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid doll, but they were super expensive and therefore out of the question. But I was absolutely dying for one, so my mom hand made me a doll. She was working two jobs at the time, so she made it during her practically-nonexistent spare moments and it took her, I don't know, like two months or something.
She was the most beautiful thing -- hand-sewn yarn hair, articulated joints, embroidered face, tiny doll clothing. I named her Annie and loved her to death. I carried her around with me for years. To this day, my body remembers the weight of her in my arms, and the feel of her face against my face.
When I went to college, I couldn't take Annie with me, so I left her in my bedroom at home. When I came home for Thanksgiving, I went to my room, and Annie was gone. She was old, so my mom threw her IN THE GARBAGE.
Aaaaaaugh! AAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGHHH!!! So much love and horror wrapped up in one story!
Please don't ever let her pet sit your cat or dog, if you have one.
I have thrown away
the doll and diaries
that you left in your bedroom
and which you were probably
saving for memories
Forgive me but
you were done writing
and the doll on the dresser was so ragged
so worn and so old
Happy Thanksgiving!
Best wishes for Lourdes and Barry and swift recovery to peep mom.
I really appreciate QP ttaM and sympathize; it's rough when home gets so unbalanced. I hope that she's better able to to handle the academics as she adjusts to them -- hopefully more classes will build a groove, or desensitize her if it's overreaction to new stresses. I hope a break comes soon.
My own front is going well; I got away to enjoy a great gaming convention just before Halloween; my wife wasn't able to join me at the time, largely because she's got a couple of week long trips coming up in the next 6 weeks, as retail season intensifies. So busy but not overwhelmed, which seems to be our new normal.
re: 120
I don't know. I'm venting a bit, but I only have one kid to deal with!
I sometimes have slightly Jammie like tendencies of the type you describe. My own parents were, on the whole, kind and supportive, and I wouldn't describe them as disciplinarians--they were 20 something hippies during most of my childhood--but there wasn't a lot of tolerance for noise or mess in our household growing up. Total freedom to go outside and wreak havoc, and a lot of independence, but there were fairly strict expectations about the general tenor of things inside the home. I can feel myself slipping into that mode myself sometimes.
We had a whole rooms we weren't allowed to play in, so they couldn't get messy.
Tim had some trouble with the kids as teenagers, along the "respect mah authoriteh" lines. His dad had been borderline abusive and terrifying when angry, and that turned into Tim and his sister being briskly obedient when things were going well, to keep the situation safe. To give him credit, Tim was not abusively terrifying, but didn't manage to process exactly that the result was going to be that the kids weren't terrified, and obedience was going to be more about persuasion and mutual respect, which is less precise than terror. He'd get angry and frustrated, and the kids would get kind of bemused at him, which didn't help because he felt condescended to.
Possibly he's managed to make things work better for him over the last six years; I wouldn't know.
Jammies' parents weren't abusive, but his dad came on the scene when Jammies was 5, and he'd grown up in an abusive family and had Tim's dynamic. Jammies' three much younger siblings, the biological kids, had mellower responses like Newt and Sally. Not exactly bemused, but entitled to argue back with equal force and no internalized fear. Whereas Jammies developed a strong fear/anxiety/perfection response. (Based on Hawaii, some of that is just his predisposition.)
Our kids sometimes do get borderline scared of Jammies, or at least they strongly do not like it when he yells. He's got a really booming, resonant voice. It never goes well for him, and I generally get much better compliance with much milder methods.
And Tim would not think of his father as abusive, but I think he'd agree that he was scared of him and had good reason to be.
Ok, I'm a former commenter and now lurker but I need to vent to online parasocial strangers. I had a very abusive PhD advisor who apparently hated my guts in a way beyond normal, as has been confirmed by my co-advisor. My co-advisor is no longer speaking to my first advisor over her treatment of me. It came to a head near the end of grad school, but I was sheltered by my other committee members and ended up getting a good academic job. During my job interview I was advised to hide that info from abusive advisor as there was concern she'd try to sabotage me. After I got the job, my advisor, working through her favorite student, A, who is a tenured professor at a fairly prestigious university, had her write a letter to my place of employment accusing me of plagiarism because I wrote an article and hadn't cited her (she wrote an article on the same topic, but none of the ideas/theory were original to her article). It was a nightmare way to start a new job and I had to hire a lawyer, but it all went away very quickly when it became clear the charges were beyond bogus. With some therapy and time I've mostly moved on. I run in the same circles as A but mostly I've been able to avoid/ignore her. I went to an event this evening and she was there but I basically ignored her. She got drunk and made a total fool of herself in a really painful way. Then afterwards she asked to talk to me. It was the first conversation we'd had in over 4 years. We talked for 40 minutes and she basically wanted me to admit I was a terrible person. I apologized for not citing her but she clearly was angling for...me to say I was the worst person ever? She then told me that "dozens" of my fellow grad students wrote her emails claiming I'd plagiarized them. It was so awful and awkward and bizarre, I think she's actually had a mental break.
Anyways, it was a terrible encounter and given all the stuff on abuse in academia it was both triggering and cathartic. Like, this conversation was probably the worst possible way a conversation with her could go, but now I've had it and I don't have to imagine it. She's marginalized herself by being difficult and awful and this is just more of it. I'm trying to calm down but the adrenaline is still pumping. I'm not that confrontational and holding my ground and also telling her that her behavior was completely unacceptable was unpleasant.
In that situation I would be inclined to get back in touch with my lawyer and request they write a letter saying, more or less,
"Dear Dr A: if you recall, the last time you accused me falsely of plagiarism, back in 2018, I responded with legal action, which you lost. During our conversation yesterday at the Conference of the American Association of Applied Demonology you repeated the same false accusations of plagiarism, in a public setting at which many of my colleagues were present.
My patience with you is at an end. If you ever voice any of these accusations in public again, in any form written or spoken, I will immediately respond with another legal action, which you will also lose. I should inform you that, in such an action, I will seek punitive damages to the highest degree possible, reflecting the damage which you are wilfully trying to cause to my professional and personal reputation, and the emotional harm ensuing from this.
I am confident that I will get them.
Love and kisses
La Presidentessa."
139: Yikes. The post-academia nightmares ended for me a few years ago, but I certainly remember. It's hard to become untouchable in academia, but every year makes you a little freer from this kind of weirdness - people will know you and your reputation, so bizarre accusations and grudges will start to look more like what they are. My therapist mentioned in passing that there are therapists specializing in issues with academia (she has a side interest in what a terrible environment it is). I'm not sure whether you see one already, but you might want to reel in a specialist if that is practical for you. Eventually, I bet you'll reach full "fuck-you money" academic equivalent status. But that sucks, and academia selects for a special flavor of cruelty and beyond-the-pale behavoir.
Oof. What a complete nightmare. Thank goodness you had a coadvisor, and good on your new school for backing you.
Stepping back a bit, most advisors are fine, but the power dynamics in the advisor student relationship are just beyond awful, and so if things go bad it's just such a disaster. In some fields changing to a two advisor model might work, but it's impossible in the lab setting, and for a lot of subjects it's just hard to find a second person at the school who will understand the research topic at a helpful level of detail.
That sounds awful. I'd just sue without warning if it doesn't stop or you come across a smoking gun.
Wow, that's amazing and horrifying. But it does sound as if she can't hurt you much, so that's some comfort.
Holy shit. I'm so sorry, La Pres. I hate confrontations too and feel like I can't calm down easily afterwards.
That's terrible and just so weird to me. Is there some special significance to the citation/non-citation, or is this all part of a second-generation grudge?
Society is in decline but at least my new recliner is going to get here before Thanksgiving.
147: Surely given the context it's just a weird grudge/obsession focusing on something not that important. The whole thing is weird, but so is stalking and that happens regularly.
149: No, stalking makes perfect sense in comparison. I guess academics are just insane in a way we normies can't grok.
re: 139
God, that sounds horrible. Hopefully it resolves itself with time (or with you forcing it to go away as you did the first time).
148: When society is in decline
Get a new chair to recline.
I really have trouble sleeping laying flat when I'm stressed because of reflux.
Yeah, I think it is even stupider than the lack of citationality. The titles of our articles are similar in that they contain the same obvious pun, although the reference is slightly different, we have the same word but they have different meanings. In the confrontation, A wanted me to admit that I stole her title which I refused to do (also I didn't realize exactly what she wanted until after the interaction). She had given a conference paper with that title at a conference I'd attended 7 years before I published my article, and she refused to believe that (1) I didn't remember her title 7 years after the fact, and (2) independently came up with the pun. (I've seen at least two other unrelated papers that have the same pun in the title, it's low hanging fruit.) It's completely nuts because similar titles are simply not plagiarism. She also accused me of plagiarizing her citations, which...again is not a thing. Also the citations I supposedly plagiarized were to well known theoretical texts in my field, including those of a professor at our shared graduate institution, published and widely cited years or decades before her work.
I think this is obviously not about the article. One possibility is that she's suffered some professional fallout over all this and blames me for the consequences of her crazy behavior. Another is that it's highly like crazy advisor was also abusive to A, but she has developed a completely codependent relationship where crazy advisor lashes out at A and then she grovels and crazy advisor magnanimously forgives her. My friend speculated that she was trying to recreate this dynamic with me, but I didn't play along by groveling sufficiently and now she's even more angry. The same thing happened with crazy advisor and me, except she didn't like me enough to do the love bombing part and instead cut to creepy demands of codependency (she was once mad my boyfriend and I didn't want to sleep in her bed) and verbal/emotional abuse. Crazy advisor actually was a very good scholar and did like my work (and when she could be bothered to care did provide good feedback), and I think that actually made her hate me more. I think the reason this article made her go ballistic is I published with the help of committee member X, who is probably the most famous person in my field. Crazy advisor was angry I accepted X's mentorship when I was "her" student, except she hated me so no way in hell would she ever do something so helpful as to help me publish in a top journal. (BTW, the article is considered to be an important contribution to my field, is mentioned in "state of the field" reviews, has well above the median citations of articles in my discipline and is assigned in graduate seminars. Most people reading and citing this article are also very familiar with A's work.) Crazy advisor and A escalated into legally actionable behavior after I got a TT job without her, which is the academic equivalent of the abusive spouse who tries to murder his partner after she's left him.
Anyways, crazy advisor and A are examples of how simply focusing conversations on academic abuse on clear cut sexual harassment just gets at the tip of the iceberg of academic shittiness.
The good news is also dragged into this mess is B, A's best friend from grad school and also a student of crazy advisor. Crazy advisor and A accused me of stealing B's work and passing it off as my own because I didn't cite them in my paper either. B is a legitimate super star at a top university and has never been anything but kind and helpful to me. The idea that B didn't like me made me upset and could have real repercussions on my career. After my confrontation with A, I ran into B at the same party and asked them if getting a letter from them for my tenure file would be a good idea. B told me that they really liked me, liked my work and would write a glowing letter. B said they knew the whole story and that crazy advisor was crazy and that they were sorry I had to go through this mess. I apologized for not citing them and told them I felt mortified, and B was just like, WTF that is not a big deal at all.
Anyways, I think it's becoming clear to everyone that A is increasingly unhinged and that these charges are baseless. Having B's support is really key, both emotionally/socially and professionally.
I'm still struggling to wrap my head around the fact that a tenured professor at an R1 university would spend 5 years holding a festering grudge at a graduate student and then very junior scholar for publishing an article with a similar title and not citing them. I guess I shouldn't be because academia attracts petty, but this really feels next level.
147
Not citing someone in my intimate academic circle who works on something similar could be read as a snub, but it's at most a fairly minor faux pas, the sort of thing that maybe would result in the person not asking you to be on their next conference panel or something, not to spend 5 years attempting to torch your career. I actually wrote an apology email to A over 4 years ago when I realized how much she hated me about this where I let her know the snub was unintentional and a result of being a naive grad student not thinking about the politics of citationality. I ended it with the line, "and I look forward to citing your work in the future." A never responded and clearly still hated me, so I decided that her response was so OTT I would stop feeling bad about it. (And made the decision never to cite her socially as a collegial move).
149
Yes it's clearly a weird unhealthy obsession of both A and crazy advisor, both of whom have extremely successful careers. It's unnerving to know I'm the object of two people's intense hate, but I guess I should be flattered that two really successful academics let me live rent free in their heads? When I told A she was punching down she was just like, no I wasn't, like somehow I had this omniscient evil power in our field. My co-advisor thinks there are likely some messed up gender politics involved. I just don't understand tanking your own reputation over hating a graduate student so much, if not for me, then for their own sakes.
Well, after reading La Prez's extended explanations, and clicking on every link in 158, this all makes perfect sense to me
Humanities abusive academics are just so much weirder than science ones. We have sexual harassment and all the overworking and stealing credit stuff, but the "I'm mad that you and your boyfriend won't sleep in my bed" stuff or literally everything about the Ronell scandal just seems so bizarre. Part of me wonders if it's all just normal sexual harassment stuff somehow channeled through more unusual fetishes. Like if you'd refused to have sex with your advisor rather than refusing to sleep with your boyfriend in her bed, then it's "why is this one person I rejected years ago still stalking me" (which is a fair question, but it somehow happens all the time), but since this is somehow sex adjacent without being directly sex we don't know how to deal with it.
Gosh, that sounds terrible, La P. I'm glad that it sounds like its getting better.
"I've invented a totally novel type of squick."
I am currently barricaded in a Toronto hotel because of an ongoing armed robbery in a nearby pawnshop. It's been going on since five or so, and I missed meeting Newt (who I'm in Toronto visiting) for dinner.
And yet people tell me that crime in NYC is out of control.
Wait, I just checked Twitter and it's apparently all over twenty five minutes ago. Dammit, I asked the front seat to call me if they were letting us out.
I'm not a professional crime-guy, but it seems to me that if you're going to try an armed robbery, you shouldn't take several hours.
I should have probably lead with 168.
holy shit! yes, stay safe. Or glad you did.
The real treasure is the unredeemed pledges we stole along the way.
hmm the kid is visiting a friend in toronto hopefully this is a v localized phenom & you are safe lb!
Very local -- it was just three guys barricaded in a pawn shop, but it was right by my hotel. Nothing to worry about if you weren't on the same block of W Queen St.
159: I assure you that you're wrong. Be glad you haven't run into the sort of abuse that you associate with the humanities (and non-quantitative social sciences), but rest assured that it exists.