jadislefeu: (moon)
(Belatedly.)

I was given a fair pile of presents, mostly snacks and candy, but very touching to have so much to open. The presents I gave went over well. I got a nightgown, which I knew I was going to because I'd suggested it as an alternative to pajama pants when I was told those were a traditional gift and asked for a size, because I don't wear pants, but I hadn't realized that getting a nightgown for Christmas would remind me of when I was little and my grandma got me and my cousin matching nightgowns for Christmas morning photos every year.

It continues to be really disconcerting how nice and welcoming my friend's parents are being, and how so many unspoken rules I'm used to from my family don't apply. They keep assuring me that I'm welcome and encouraged to eat any food in the house, and it's just so weird compared to being faced with a fridge full of food and no idea which items will get me yelled at if I touch them. My aunt chewed me out for like twenty minutes once because I ate some of the wrong cheese on a family vacation. And no one got annoyed at me for being antisocial when I spent a couple days locked in the guest room recharging my ability to interact with other people? Which is even more of a standout, since my dad explicitly said the reason I wasn't welcome in his home was because I spent too much time in the bedroom on my computer.

I called my grandma on Christmas Eve, which was uh actually the first time I'd managed to get ahold of her since the phone call during which I texted my dad and then decided I wasn't going to Arizona, so she didn't know I was in Georgia and had had a Christmas floral arrangement sent to my house, as discovered by the catsitter. Whoops. (I also then had a panic attack on hearing about this from said catsitter until I got confirmation that it had been locked in my bedroom with the hibiscus, because what if it had lilies or poinsettias, Koschei is an idiot and would get into it (as he did with the hibiscus, he ate half a leaf and then barfed everywhere, but lilies or poinsettias are more toxic), and it's been a year since Tabby and Bluebell died and I got him and it all kind of came crashing down on my head.)

But anyway. Other of my friend's relatives came over on Christmas day itself for dinner, and I did an excellent job being gracious and gregarious and glossing over the part where I'm unemployed because I'm super mentally ill, and apparently they liked me. Even though I was in the dregs of a really brutal cold, which thankfully I am mostly over now, my throat's just slightly off and my nose is just slightly stuffed. Which is greatly preferable to not being able to breathe through my nose, or at one point even talk.

It has also, of course, been really nice hanging out with my friend. She is a lovely person and it's great to finally be able to spend significant time together.

I'm in Georgia for another week before I go home.
jadislefeu: (Default)
I spend so much time seeing people be thoroughly frustrated by unwanted/intrusive replies on twitter that it makes me really chary of replying to basically anyone anywhere that I'm not already close friends with, because I've had a deep horror of imposing on and annoying people for most of my life. (I am a very loud and strange person and was rather singularly unpopular in school, because I was annoying. I'm not very good at settings between 'talking incessantly' and 'not talking at all'.) I do a lot of typing out half a comment (or a whole comment), and then deciding I'd better not and closing the tab.

This makes it rather difficult to make new friends, and I really don't know what the solution to that is.

Relatedly, I made a new OKCupid the other day on a whim and have been confronted with the necessity of actually sending messages to people, and man I am not sure how to do that anymore.
jadislefeu: A black cat with his mouth open (koschei)
(Via [personal profile] umadoshi )

"GenX Tribe: Breaking Bones and Other Stories of Walking it Off"

CW: Link and this post contain stories about injuries, treated and untreated.

I'm not Gen X, but my dad's a Boomer (I was a late in life baby), and he was (and is) very much in that medical mold. He liked to call it 'caveman medicine'. (Luckily my mother was not as much, so I was actually taken to the doctor for things like dislocating my elbow as a kindergartener or having a 104.5 degree fever because I had swine flu.) His opinion is that you should walk it off if you possibly can, and that superglue (with baking soda on it to make it cure faster, and an ice cube on that to keep the exothermic reaction from burning you) is preferable to going to the hospital for stitches.

He yelled at me once because the wound care clinic visits prescribed to keep my feet from going septic after I had to go to the hospital for burning all the skin off my feet cost money, and apparently I should have just stayed at home and suffered? And/or gotten sepsis? (I went into shock! Twice! I burned all the skin off my feet and there was asphalt ground into them!)

I was definitely told that if I pulled something in my back or twisted my ankle (or possibly sprained my ankle!) I should just get up and walk it off. One time when he was in college, he fell roller skating to class and twisted his whole leg and could barely stand, but he got up and kept going and it was fine!

I don't think I've ever seen someone talk about growing up with this kind of thing, except maybe jamethiel, and her dad's a doctor, so there's another kind of dimension going on there. Very interesting for me to read, and really makes me appreciate that my mom actually believes in doctors, because I got off damn lightly compared to some of the stories in the link.

(My dad is even more anti-doctor now, he's been inducted into the weirdo We All Have Candida Overgrowth and Microwaves Cause Cancer and Wheat Binds To The Opium Receptors Of The Brain nonsense via his girlfriend, sister, and mother. I think my mom was a lot more of a mediating influence on him than I ever realized before the divorce.)

I definitely didn't come out of that upbringing unaffected. I'm disinclined to go to doctors for anything I can possibly deal with myself, which ranges from 'treating my ear infections with neosporin' to 'lancing my own boils'.

new CW: animal death

It's also, frankly, to blame for the deaths of my cats, because he doesn't believe in veterinary care any more than he believes in doctors--he bought vaccines from the feed store and gave them himself when they were kittens and then nothing else ever--and I had no money for emergency care, and I knew he wouldn't give any to me, so I tried to nurse Tabby through her final decline without asking (after he refused for Bluebell and my mother cleaned out her savings for her) because I didn't want to live the rest of my life knowing he'd refused to give me the money that could have saved her, and that her death was 100% his fault. (So now I just get to know that it's my fault, instead. Both of them. If I had just realized that Bluebell had gotten out of the house sooner, I could have found her before she froze to death somewhere lost and I never saw her again, it's my fault, if I had fundraised if I had put up posters if I had tried harder--) (I miss them so much. Koschei is a darling and I love him, but Tabby and Bluebell were the first pets I ever had and I'd had them as long as I could remember and they're gone.) But my dad, who cheerfully talks about Tizzy kitty, who was two years old when she never came home but he doesn't see this as a reason to stop having outside cats because he has no goddamn empathy--

This got away from me. I don't have a conclusion.

I want my girls back, and I'm never going to see them again, and I don't even have Bluebell's ashes like I managed to hysterical breakdown my father into paying for cremation for Tabby. (More willing to pay for death than life.)
jadislefeu: (moon)
Pulling this out of my linkdump because I wrote enough on it to merit its own post.

A Design Lab Is Making Rituals for Secular People via [personal profile] umadoshi

I'm uncomfortable with this. Not the concept of rituals for atheists or whatever, I'm uncomfortable with it being part of the mindset of startup culture. Putting people's spiritual lives in the hands of Silicon Valley--that feels really predatory on a really vulnerable axis. I mean, if people actively want these classes on how to make their own rituals like it says, there's clearly a demand and not everyone is comfortable making their own stuff up on the fly like is common with modern polytheism (and paganism and witchcraft and etc), but... it really puts my hackles up to commoditize spirituality. (Especially in the environment of venture capitalism, where every company eats itself and its customers alive to milk the last drop of profit out of a business model before self-destructing in a rain of fire, because growth is more important than stability.)

Probably I'm thinking about that all the more right now, with the interviews that have come out with the people behind Patreon being unhappy with their steady sustainable profits and their "generous 90% payout model" and wanting to milk their customer base for more money (probably because they were funded by venture capital, which demands more than just return on investment), and the horrible Activision Blizzard layoffs after a year of record profits to funnel more money to the shareholders. CAPITALISM IS THEFT EAT THE RICH okay I'll stop now.

It does say they don't "currently charge", but I agree with the quoted detractors that the commodification and isolation aspects are troubling regardless. And I don't really trust anyone in Silicon Valley to stick to that, anyway.

Also, honestly, a lot of why I'm not currently an actively practicing polytheist is because of the incredible isolation of practicing a bespoke religion without coreligionists and how dispiriting and lonely it is, so bespoke rituals sound like... more of that. So much of our modern culture is isolating, and inventing new isolating spirituality doesn't seem like a healthy or helpful response to that, to me. (And then we're getting into my endless paralyzing indecision about whether I want to consider approaching organized religion to counteract that isolation, and if so, which (judaism? unitarians?), and that's really out of the scope of this.)

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