no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Having a job that required me to be friendly to some pretty horrible people (not the clients so much, but their relatives) really, really fucked me up. I'm hoping that I can get a job that doesn't make me deal with the public, but there aren't many or any of those in the entry level category.

"Ruffle butt pants" are really called rhumba pants, BTW.

Today I had the first bout of menstrual pain that I can remember having. I wonder why I'm getting this now, for the first time in decades if not ever.

whoa string of pearls is RAD
succulents are such fabulous squishy space fractals

I love hens and chicks.

I was thinking about getting an African violet.
I was also thinking, with my budget, I need to quit buying frivolities.

I grew up with loads of houseplants all over the place, plants lining every windowsill and hanging from every ceiling.

I really want some succulents. I'd like to make a succulent terrarium.

i have two plants: a v small hens&chicks type plant (i am told) and a medium-sized plant with thick round leaves that is nice and once grew a penis! it was white. then one day it was gone. mysteries.

i would like more plants.

I have six plants. I would also like more. I love plants. Plants in every room.

Hold up.

Your plant. It grew a . . . a penis?

the "nice face" convo upthread is something i think about A LOT, because irl "niceness" is p. much my defining (non-physical, public-facing) characteristic. part of it is due to lolfamily issues, where i took on the role of mediator between my mom and my younger sisters, or my mom and my dad, and was really committed to defusing potential blow-ups and smoothing over small slights that might grow into larger arguments. i've realized that "niceness," the way i practice it, is both self-defensive and self-minimizing, as a way to stave off trouble/abuse. this has led to situations where i've been a shitty ally, though, because the instinct to defuse arguments and "make nice" has basically had the effect of legitimizing others' bad behavior.

another component of this -- that i've hesitated posting about overmuch on ilx, since it's still a fairly tender subject for me -- is the fact that i've been fat since puberty. cultivating "nice" was also a defense against some of the insidious cultural messages re: being a young fat girl -- like, "nice" was something to offer, a consolation prize to the people around me who had to "deal with" being in my undesirable presence. the body positivity/fat acceptance movements have been really helpful to me in rethinking all stuff, but i'm pretty reliant on my defense mechanisms still.

it grew a white protuberance/proboscis from between two leaves and i thought it was perhaps going to be a flower but it never flowered and then one day, after i'd been away for the weekend, it was gone!
xp

Oh!! Is it a peace lily?

http://images.plant-care.com/peeace-lily-sonya.jpg

i have, uh, 11 plants. and 3 glasses of plant bits that i'm rooting into new plants.

the philodendron and the spider plant are the most low-maintenance plants evar, imo. love them. (those are 2 i'm rooting) my spider plant is older than me--it was given to me by a family friend when i was in college.

succulents are pretty great too.

xp i've been wanting to get a peace lily too! (never too many plants!)

<3 reddening

yeah for real

thanks you guys <3

also in some weird synchronicity with this thread, my dad just gave me & my sisters some tulip plants for valentine's day. i only own fake plants and had an honest moment of "hooray, flowers! why are they in a bowl of dirt though."

looooool redd.

Aw reddening also <3 it's so weird how similar experiences can have such different results. I kinda feel like, the experience of being overweight before and during puberty made me feel like "nice" was a game I was never going to win (but combine fat with "too smart" and "have English accent" for maximum pariah effect) so why even try. But I can see how your strategy would come about too.

I have just had an IRL gurl thread in the pub with a lady ILX0r (ignoring V-D guff) and it was AWESOME. I huggles you all especially the people who would h8 being hugged by me HAH!

aw :)

it is not a peace lily but i would like a peace lily now!

Reddening <3

peace lilies are so pretty, and they're supposed to be nearly neglect-proof.

hugglez to everyone here. i really love this thread.

The sales person pitched it as being invented by a woman who owned a vineyard after she noticed how soft the hands of her farm laborers were and I was like… that is highly unlikely and also makes you sound like a shithead.

― carl agatha, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 3:11 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ahahahaha

also <3 reddening and i really identify with the family mediator stuff in your post.

BTW that 'noticing how soft the workers' hands are' has I'm sure been used for everything from olive oil to, I don't know, nappies or something. I feel like I'm always hearing that line!

tbh that would be my cue to crack the whip

"look how lilywhite and silky soft your hands are,
they should be in shreds from the sting of the bitter grape's thorn as God promised"

i think i posted about this before, but once i was drunk in nashville and tried to give myself gram parsons' haircut. it turned out to just be a huge bang cut very crazy. bandmate upon first viewing of haircut: "this is grim"

― carpathian florist (roxymuzak), Friday, July 3, 2009 11:17 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

still growing this out tbh

Hahaha

Y'all I have had a peace lily for almost three years and it is not only not dead, like every other potted thing i have attempted to grow, but it looks amazing. Jesse gave it to me for my cube at work. It even bloomed again, which I read is somewhat unusual.

BTW that 'noticing how soft the workers' hands are' has I'm sure been used for everything from olive oil to, I don't know, nappies or something. I feel like I'm always hearing that line!

Honest to god, when she started the spiel I really thought it would end "when she noticed how the workers' hands were rough and chapped from labor so she invented this amazing hand cream for them." Seriously.

Nice face is required from me at work much of the time as my job is all about persuading people they want to do stuff. Recently I've noticed I'm rebelling and getting snappy at certain people. I take my job too personally.

This is probably a bit heavy for a Monday morning, but here it is anyway:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/25/child-free-women-jody-day

I can't decide if articles like this make me feel better or make me feel worse.

On the one hand it's like, OK, sure, this is a thing, it's not just me, there are a lot of chords being struck. But on the other hand... The social ostracism thing. That's just depressing as fuck, and it seems unfair on both sides, but geez.

I have the experience that friends cool off vastly when they enter long-term partnerships, get married or whatever, but when they have children, it's like they drop off the face of the planet. Except, I never looked at it this way before, actually, it's that they drop you off the face of the planet. Eh, it's probably nicer thinking that than the truth that people drop you coz you're actually kind of a weirdo freak asshole.

But, the whole thing is very melancholic for a Monday morning, and now, here, you can have some of that melancholy, too.

^I read that too and while some of it was familiar, she didn't engage with the whole SINGLE PERSON IN THE BAGGING AREA paranoia in certain friendship groups who are coupled up and then only remember to socialize with friends who mirror their own coupledom (or parenthood). Are the women threatened when I talk to their partners? Maybe there's something at the animal level that mistrusts the rogue female, but I can't be responsible for someone else's neuroses and projections. I will grant that for a lot of my friends with kids, it's easier for them to socialize with each other because they don't have to worry about where to park their kids if their hosts have children too. Having been one-half of a very social couple, I can report that a lot of our choices involved seeing a friend of one partner or the other (and that person's partner) of an evening, going to less private views and gigs, and that multi-friend gatherings had to be more planned out than the impromptu nature of a social life when most people are single or in short-term relationships, or expected to socialize a lot with work colleagues.

I've known since I bought my first box of tampons/read my childhood oncology reports that I'd probably never have kids, partner or not. What I really don't like is a suggestion that parents are acting in a more age-appropriate way than I am; it's condescending and I'd rather not throw around my medical records as a guiltweapon against people who patronise or pry. Some men I know fall into a pattern of taking childless people less seriously because they're a parent now, as if any of their parenting involves the heavy lifting or they want a medal from womankind for meeting some very, very basic responsibilities. I actually got fed up with one acquaintance's New Man dadbragging and asked if he was the one with the stretch marks.

Glad to see you're posting, WCC. I refrained for six months (and am only really dipping in on grrrlsthread for this one comment) because I had a last-straw moment with the way male posters were treating you at the time. I hope you find a non-soul-destroying form of employment ASAP, as you must be due some redistributive karma soon.

SUZY!!!! pleased to see you here.

You too - come over after Kernewek this week, yo. Might also add that I'm procrastinating a deadline wherein Antony of the Johnsons goes on AT LENGTH about how 'toxic maleness' is killing the world (but I'll be finished by then).

I need to unload a teeny bit today, I'm sorry. Something has been bugging me. A few days ago, a friend I rarely see confided that her boyfriend is physically abusive, and showed us bruises on her wrists. She has...taken some legal & protective steps but hasn't made the break-up stick.

On the way home from seeing her, the other person I was with was expressing how sad and confused she is that anyone would stay with an abuser. THEN SHE SAYS, "On the other hand, what if {the abused girlfriend} is the only person who can do this really good thing for him, of staying together until he figures it out?" Like she was genuinely looking for something good FOR THE BOYFRIEND WHO HURTS HER to come out of our friend's suffering.

O_o

Yeah that is totally backwards and strange. Until he figures out what? How not to be an abuser?

Also I don't get this: taken some legal & protective steps but hasn't made the break-up stick. Most legal and protective things I can think of would sort of either necessitate or cause a break-up, no?

Calling the police somehow turned into "he's going to court-ordered anger management therapy but I'm required to go with him, because you know how a lot of women don't press charges?" which the other two of us cannot understand and never got explained in the short window of time before the guy came back over.

Yeah, I don't understand that either. :/

I rly feel for the woman in the relationship, but I'm kind of unfairly ANGRY with the friend who said maybe it was all for a higher cause, like, because maybe she could HELP HIM. I know she didn't mean that our friend should be sacrificed to her abusive bf but it was such a WTF thing to say.

help him, how? like, does he have some other problem that makes beating his gf from time to time understandable?

That is WTF, I agree. However maybe you're also partially channeling the anger at the boyfriend at the more accessible target who happened to wind you up right after having your head filled with bad thoughts abt the asshole?

Or maybe not, I mean!

(PS this is so sad, I worry so much abt a friend I basically never talk to any more because she's not allowed to see anyone and the occasional emails all end "got to go, he's back soon and will be angry if he knows I've used the computer, got to leave it enough time to cool down" and blah, we don't even know 100% that he's physically abusive as well as emotionally and we don't know what to do)

i think i can understand a lot of reasons people don't "press charges" (is that how you do it in new york, does the victim have a choice?) or don't follow through with or cooperate with prosecutions for domestic violence. the way it's handled is really shitty for everyone and i hate it.

yeah otm. i have been thinking a lot about how shitty the existing systems for handling complaints of domestic violence and also rape are legally. sometimes i wonder if it's even possible to make them better? like there might need to be a whole new way of addressing these things. i don't even really know what i mean by that it's just so shitty for victims of abuse to then have to put up with added horribleness.

i'm really sorry this is happening to your friend, Laurel.

one of the things that started me thinking about the inadequacies of the system was this about the dominique strauss-kahn case. it's kind of hard to read, but it seems fairly otm? (nb: she is apparently a defense lawyer and i kept thinking of harbl the first time i read it.)

there is a part of me that wants all these assholes hurled in jail but it just doesn't seem to work out very well for the victims in question.

sorry, that's just her tumblr. this is the post i meant to link.

i like that but i was even thinking of something different that i think about every day. in the county i work in they are really good at acting like they want what the victim wants, until the victim doesn't want what they want, and then the patronizing but-we're-helping-you-you-just-don't-know-it-yet game gets started. imo even given situations like fear of testifying and battered woman's syndrome, making someone come to court (sometimes under threat of arrest) after they told you that they don't want to is not making it better. even fearful or battered people should have some control over the thing, and who gets to decide why they aren't interested anyway?

i think some people who do domestic violence can be changed in some circumstances. usually if they have money and education and can get into individual counseling rather than a one-size-fits-all state certified anger management class. they make people do ywca "abuser intervention programs" here and i don't know what they do there but i am skeptical of their effectiveness given the people they are dealing with. most abusers i think were exposed to violence as children and have other mental problems that are not going to be fixed so easily. also alcoholism is a big thing. should just ban alcohol.

in the county i work in they are really good at acting like they want what the victim wants, until the victim doesn't want what they want, and then the patronizing but-we're-helping-you-you-just-don't-know-it-yet game gets started. imo even given situations like fear of testifying and battered woman's syndrome, making someone come to court (sometimes under threat of arrest) after they told you that they don't want to is not making it better. even fearful or battered people should have some control over the thing, and who gets to decide why they aren't interested anyway?

yes, that all seems otm