no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Haha, totally, yeah!

(But, as more sensible brain takes over)...

Delightful fantasy, but probably not. Because 1) Having been on the receiving end of crazy-shaming so many times, I am really loathe to use "therapy" or "unresolved issues" as a zing or a stick to beat someone with, no matter how appropriate. And 2) I don't actually think that the vast majority of this shit *is* unresolved mummy issues, I think it's just the constant, pervasive societal (and individual) level sexism that teaches men that women are only ever present to smooth and lubricate the ~feels~ of men, and should never display emotions or motivation or requirements of their own. And though I am sure that there are many men with mummy issues, that totally play into and reinforce this whole mess, it's deeper than mummy.

Aaargh everyone OTM.

OTM about "why are you getting so upset/irrational?" when stating yr opinion exactly as rationally (or more so) and forcefully (or less so) as they are.

OTM about being typecast and abt realising that I am not pretty or non-schlubby enough to be received as Nice Lady Is Being Nice so why bother? oh, because any minor infraction of niceness will be totally put down as Hey Look At The Crazy Shrieking Ugly Fat Woman Who Is So Stupid And Loud And Totally Flipping Out For No Reason.

And OTM about the poisonousness of the whole women = irrational, men = logical unemotional fact-diviners thing.

Was reading some article about the importance of teaching young children and in particular boys (since the girls get told parts 1 and 3 anyway) "this is an emotion, it is OK to have emotions, and it is also OK to say 'I have an emotion but I could calm down for five minutes before acting on it'" for their own good. And, yeah probably that is for their own good! But maybe also just as a tiny unsettling of the idea "the thoughts in my head are the logical result of Universal Truths as processed by a series of mathematical functions, and the thoughts in YOUR* head are spontaneous bubbles of emotion, and if they disagree I get to tell you you're being shrieky and hysterical"

(* where YOU are usually a woman but sometimes another man whose masculinity is obviously in question as a result of this suspected feeling-having)

Haha but '

"this is an emotion, it is OK to have emotions, and it is also OK to say 'I have an emotion but I could calm down for five minutes before acting on it'" for their own good.

(And there's a part of me that wants to stamp my feet and shout "if I can fucking learn to do it, at the age of 40, why can't ~AAAAALLLLLL MEN~?" This is not a healthy emotion.)

I have a v good male friend where the only time I've come close to pure hated of him is when he did this. 'i'm not getting angry? Wtf?' 'you are! You are getting angry!' Until upshot I got really angry.

It is one of my pet hates and I need to learn a more effective response.

(xp) OK, yes, to be honest I am not super-good at reacting well to emotions myself (I do "fly off handle", "burst into tears" and "remain silent so as not to burst into tears but seethe about for weeks even though I probably totally misunderstood anyway"), but I've never been left in any doubt that my emotions were emotions, and were unseemly and illogical!

I would like to learn more about overriding that default emotional burst-reaction though. When I was waiting for a depresso-therapy appt once, the only reading matter in the waiting room was an anger management booklet, and I found it p. interesting.

I do have a temper that gets away from me in ways I find super-embarrassing - I can shamefully recall almost toddler-esque tantrums from the past couple of years over the most minor of irritations or perceived slights, plus a whole bunch of nasty "why did I even have to get that dig in when I knew it wasn't worth it" moments - but I suppose it's never been in the top 3 things I've wanted "fixed" by therapy, so I've never really got onto managing it.

I have a v good male friend where the only time I've come close to pure hated of him is when he did this. 'i'm not getting angry? Wtf?' 'you are! You are getting angry!' Until upshot I got really angry.

It is one of my pet hates and I need to learn a more effective response.

Ugh yes. See also "Don't be so defensive!"

"I was just kidding, can't you take a joke?"

Being accused of humorlessness is my personal curse. Don't get so upset!

It's almost as if they're trying to create a situation where they get to tell you what to do or how to feel.

Wait wait sorry to interrupt, but can I back up?

Man, I was in such a GOOD MOOD this morning, because I went to a botanical walk given by this guy:

http://www.plant-lore.com/

THIS. SOUNDS. AMAZING. I want to *be* that guy someday. You guys don't live in Tucson, so I can share my favorite fact that the golden barrel cactus always grows south! It is nature's compass, and it does not give a fuck about your standard map orientation.

OMG, Crabbits, he was sooooo great. So knowledgeable (but a little bit batty, in all the right ways) and telling us which plants you could eat, and which tasted nice and which were "well, you *could* eat it, but I wouldn't advise it, on account of the taste..." And relating flowers' smells to animals such as goat or mouse (which most of us did not know what they smelled like). I picked up a guide so I can see when he is doing other wildflower walks on commons I know.

That is amazing about the golden barrel cactus. I love how plants know more about directions than we do, e.g. moss always on the North side of trees and the like. And how do they have that awareness? Is it magnetic, or is it on account of the angle of the sun?

I really wish we could have a ROLLING BOTANY THREAD where we could share facts like, golden barrel cactus always grows South. Or Brambles reproduce without pollen, as clones. So every different genotype of Bramble is actually a distinct species! That would be the best thread ever, to me, right now. (Except every single thread I either start or participate in lately except this one seems to get invaded by specific dudes following me from thread to thread howling about misandry, so I expect even a thread about botany would get derailed by some guy who simply could not resist howling "NOT AAAALLLL STAMENS!!!!!" at me.) I am typing this kinda in the spirit of LOL but also kinda :-/

I would love to go on a botanical walk! I love walks/hikes with smart people who tell me about things. Jeff and I went on vacation September before last to a "science ranch" and that is basically what it was. Hikes with a geologist and biologist, lectures, star gazing with an astronomer at night. It was maybe the best vacation ever. Well, going to London was probably the best. But then the science vacation.

SCIENCE RANCH!!!! OMG, this does sound like the best holiday ever. Geology, botany, astronomy, all in one cool and interesting location...? Like, science camp for grown ups. I love it!

(I also found out that the South London Botanical Institute are going on a field trip to Yorkshire to lookit a MOOR, I can just imagine a bunch of botany geeks going up on the moor and studying lichens and mosses and furze bushes and this sounds like the best time ever.)

It was in the mountains in Colorado and it was absolutely gorgeous. Sigh. I'm feeling wistful about such a vacation now.

A field trip to look at a moor is super appealing!

M oors are so romantic to me, as a person who read The Secret Garden way too many times growing up.

Ditto. I never read The Secret Garden but moors definitely feature prominently in my favorite books. I would like to visit a moor, a heath, and a craggy, windswept cliff, please.

ohhhh yeah, bring the heaths

Mountains in Colorado? This science ranch gets better and better! I bet that was so beautiful. (I have never been to Colorado, but just flying over it in an aeroplane, the landscape looked so astonishing!)

Moors are one of those things that are just... aaah, I could get all Emily Dickenson about them, except I have actually seen them. I know Cornish moors very well, they're kind of amazing places that are like deserts - they seem barren and lifeless unless you know them really well, and then everything seems so alive and throbbing with vitality. (There's a Daphne Du Maurier quote about Cornish moors I might dig out). Where moors run down to craggy, windswept cliffs, that is the actual best. (Which is Cornwall and Yorkshire, basically.)

I'm literally sitting here with my chin resting in my hand and sighing at the thought.

Found that Du Maurier quote:

It was a silent, desolate country, though, vast and untouched by human hand; on the high tors the slabs of stone leant against one another in strange shapes and forms; massive sentinels who had stood there since the hands of God first fashioned them.

Some where shaped like giant furniture, with monstrous chairs and twisted tables, and sometimes the smaller crumbling stones lay on the summit of the hill like a giant himself, his huge, recumbent form darkening the heather and the course tufted grass. There were long stones that stood on end, balancing themselves in a queer miraculous way, as though they leant against the wind; and there were flat altar-stones whose smooth and polished faces stared up towards the sky, awaiting a sacrifice that never came.
…
Strange winds blew from nowhere; they crept along the surface of the grass, and the grass shivered; they breathed upon the little pools of rain in the hollowed stones, and the pools rippled. Sometimes the wind shouted and cried, and the cry echoed in the crevices and moaned, and was lost again. There was a silence on the tors that belonged to another age; an age that is past and vanished as though it had never been, an age when man did not exist, but pagan footsteps trod upon the hills. And there was a stillness in the air, and stranger, older peace, that was not the peace of God.

Isn't that just the best? I wish I were there right now.

That is lovely.

Carl, I just wanted to say: I wish there were a "like" button beside so many of your posts lately.

i'm generally in a pretty good mood too. i'm going hiking in the woods in 2 days w mr and i just finished sewing a cape i started to make like 2 years ago? 18 months? sunday is my 1 year anniversary of having my very own drum set and learning to use it. feeling pretty good about myself in general, tbh. pardon the braggin but honestly i have no one else to tell but this thread. to write to a friend and tell her how great i'm feeling is across the board inappropriate, but somehow telling this thread is ok. i dunno. it probably isn't ok but i'm gonna do it anyway.

omg I saw a woman this morning wearing a cape, or maybe more like a capelet? And she looked AMAZING. I am very excited for how amazing you are going to look in your cape.

This is a good thread for bragging!

La Lech's cape is amazing. Definitely worth bragging about.

Also I love that Du Maurier quote - combined w/ the "spooky Brit TV" bump re: Children of the Stones really has me desiring some countryside desolation.

Isn't that from the adaptation with Jessica Brown Findlay that was just on BBC1, where everyone bitched about the mumbling?

Brag away, babe. Capes are great! Playing drums is fantastic. Gotta have a place for shouting "you go girl!" and slapping one another high fives as well as punching dudes in the dick and upsetting the patriarchs of ILX with our shrewish misandrist ways. ;-)

Oh, I need to lookit the "spooky Brit TV" thread because I really really want to see Children Of The Stones again; have not seen it since I was a wee tot and it scared the shit out of me, then, so I'd love to see what it's like now.

I copied the quote out of the book. I have no idea about the adaptation, except everyone everywhere except Cornwall complained about the mumbling, and everyone in Cornwall complained "you call that a *Cornish* accent? That's Bristol! Up country! not bleddy Cornish at all!"

holy shit LL I just remembered that you were in my dream last night!

Mr Veg and I were in a bar and there was a cool jazz improv group playing and I said to Mr Veg 'Hey see that drummer? That's LL. she's only been playing for a year, isn't she amazing?' and you were laying down righteous beats with those cool brush things and it was a p rad dream

:D

ha! that's awesome! i don't have any brushes but i am going to make a trip to the drum supply store (?) for my anniversary.

also i am really self-conscious about bragging.

This thread made me hungry for other biomes – think I am gonna hit Mt. Lemmon this weekend; they have seven different biomes there. Oh yeah!

It's good to practice bragging sometimes.

I know you are not fishing for cape-liments but I v much admire your cape, and that you made it!

Some shit I am excited about: 1. my boyfriend's family really likes me and is nice to me, which is very weird after my former marriage, where his family was mean to me and blamed me for everything; 2. consequently they got me a composter, which I very much wanted; 3. I shredded up a whole bunch of unneeded work-related papers (felt good) to turn into a carbon source; 4. it means I am feeling cheery about having a big tupperware full of scraps in my fridge.

DECAY!!!

where was the science ranch!? i wanna go!

thanks! i had a lot of help from a friend, who via this process has endeared himself to me for life, so i feel like i got a cape AND a friend. that's my kind of way to pass the time, yknow? he is a costume designer and can sew literally anything. his cape is so beautiful that it makes him look like he needs a throne. it's amazing. we have the same buttons though!

i do need to focus on being positive in a way that i feel comfortable but also allows me to celebrate whatever i please. i think sometimes i hear people around me complaining about this and that and it's partially an effort to not be someone who other people complain about. not only that, but i don't have any kids to be proud of so i just have myself, and i am sometimes proud of myself. i guess that's not such a terrible thing.

I think it's actually really important to learn how to be proud of yourself in a way that's positive and life-affirming (but not in a way that's smug or alienating to others) and it's a hard balance to strike, but what's the alternative? Self loathing or self doubt or constant self effacement? Which is not great to be around, either. I think that burst of pleasure and "yay, this is a great thing" that invites others to participate in your joy is a good thing for everyone around you.

I am jealous of your composter, Crabbits. I mean, we have food waste compost that the council collects. And obviously there is the MASSIVE INDUSTRIAL COMPOST HEAPS at the community garden. (Which gets chipped and mulched and put back into the vegetable beds in winter)

But I wish I had the space and the garden to compost at home. Decay is so interesting, the process of rotting is really kind of amazing. They've got into different schools of woods management locally, and councils have been leaving blown down trees in situ more and more, and watching the slow process of decay and how logs break down, and provide habitat for bugs and insects and STAG BEETLES and then become nurseries for younger plants... it's just amazing. I love watching it so much!

LL, I love that you made a sewing and design friend! Some of the best friends I have made in life have been other knitters. Sharing skillz together is an awesome way to bond with people! Also gives you someone to *share* positive accomplishments. No one else is going to recognize how much work your thing took!

It took me a long time to learn to say "hey I did a thing" and it is a good skill to have.

sciencegetaways.com/science-ranch-2012/

They do it every year!

*Suggests group gurl thread field trip to science ranch*

xps fwiw none of what you posted had the slightest whiff of bragging imo

i think it sucks when you get to place or point where you feel bad sharing the positive stuff in your life. it's good to be happy and proud of yourself, i don't think you can really be of positive service to other ppl unless you have at least some small piece of happiness or pride in your life.

I have happiness, I just feel uncomfortable sharing it! Thanks though -- I've always had trouble releasing anything from my inner thoughts.

I will brag:

We just had a meeting and were joking about how to turn our team meetings into drinking games and one coworker suggested "drink every time carl agatha makes a wise crack and everybody laughs." Granted, there's a low bar to humor among a bunch of attorneys specializing in a notoriously esoteric and non-humorous area of law but still, it made me feel good.

That's awesome, CA.

OK me too. I got an email from someone at work recently thanking me for always being so professional and reliable. That felt pretty great even though it took me a second to realize that he wasn't being sarcastic.

This morning on a very crowded bus a lady shouted over two people to tell me that she loved my haircut an that it looked gorgeous on me. That was pretty neat too.

I am doing super intense and hard therapy a lot right now but it's kind of awesome and I'm proud of myself for it.

You should be. That is hard work!

Oh man somebody put a copy of Lean In in the mother's room (a room set aside in a workplace for nursing mother's to pump breastmilk, for those unfamiliar). I'm side eyeing that so hard.

My feeling is that if a woman leans in, some arsehole will find a way to look down her blouse.

HA

I've been visiting with family recently, and one of my cousins said "Aunt J (my grandma) you remind me of Grandma B (my grandma's sister). Whenever we compliment you, you say something negative about yourself." Is it a family thing? Or a generational thing?

I recently had a friend tell me he likes hanging out with me because I don't talk about how I hate myself or put myself down constantly.

I have a posi-brag! My volunteer newsletter got a lot of praise last week, including maybe was shared with a whole coalition of other neighborhood groups as an example of how to make a great community newsletter (I wasn't at that event but I was told beforehand that they wanted to share it). People have noticed! My neighbors in my block assoc are all proud that we have the BEST newsletter of any neighborhood association, like they won't say it to me directly but there's a lot of competition to be the BEST at things like lushest gardens, nicest houses, cleanest streets, coolest public events, and I'm glad I'm holding up my end so ppl can be proud of us. :D

I dunno; just years of experience have taught me that whenever I try to do a posi-brag about myself, someone (usually a man, but y'know NOOOOTTT AAAALLLL MEEEENNNN) will always pop up to tell me I'm not all that and to get over myself. So it's really hard for me to say something good about myself without a kind of automatic flinch. I'm insulting myself before someone gets the chance to.

And for years, I kinda believed that I had to do this constant ... I dunno. Compensation? Like there was this constant need to big up ~things I was doing~ or ~projects I was involved with~ because the kind of validation of "lookit this record I've made, or picture I've drawn or story I've written" was a substitute for that inability to ever believe that people might like the actual me. (And most people don't like the actual me anyway!) But it becomes kind of a vicious circle, because people see that as arrogance or attention-seeking or whatever, so slap you down harder.

Until it gets to the point where there's such a panoply of hatred to choose from, like, I can get whatever negative self-image of myself validated from any number of helpful people getting ~irrationally angry~ about me on the internet!

This isn't fun to talk about, though; I'd rather talk about compost or excellent capes or neighbourhood association newletter competitiveness (it is funny how community groups turn out the same, the world over.)

i'm wearing a cape right now!
ok it's a fleece throw tied around my neck because I couldn't be bothered to go and find a jumper

i sometimes worry that my friends are being dishonest when they compliment me, tell me they love me, that I'm awesome, smart, talented, whatever ... that i'm part of some enabling self-deception ... but then I am a good friend to my friends, so ... maybe not? Maybe I am actually making good decisions about people?