By David Futrelle
I hope you all are having a nice lazy New Year’s Day as we all prepare ourselves for whatever horrors (and possible good things?) that 2019 is going to bring us.
Here’s an open thread. Post your resolutions, if you have any that you want to share; your thoughts on the coming year or the previous one; or just whatever the hell you want to talk about.
@Valentin (or others) – This is a silly question, but how do you make hearts in WordPress comments? Do you just cut and paste them from FB or Twitter emojis or are there special shortcut characters? Thanks! 🙂
Also, I’m sorry if what I said in the last thread about gross things bothered you. (I’m not germophobic anymore, but still kind of a hypochondriac. Anxiety is weird.)
@Sheila Crosby
The same and all the best <3
@An Impish Pepper
You know, it's said that it's when the chips are down you find out who your real friends are, but the very same can be said for success. The one I thought was my best friend sort of withdrew from me after I published my first book. I asked her why she wasn't coming over or texting me anymore. She said she was jealous of my 'success', which by the way, is limited to me actually finishing a project and becoming not a celebrity but at least a presence in the local community. She's thirty and still trying to complete college. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's been on and off for the last eight years. My advice has always been the same – keep your head down, work hard, earn your sheepskin and wash your hands of that toxic environment. Higher education seems pointless if you're gonna forego ambition in favor of petty rebellion against 'the system' and playing the victim all the time. I felt this jealousy thing, especially considered that she knows what I've been through over the years was a definite sign that the friendship was over. We haven't spoken since, which is sad, but I just don't have room for drama and negativity in my life anymore.
My point is, it's okay to rant – if anything, that's 50% of all friendships as long as it's implied that you can fix your own problems and when you ask for help, can take charge. I think your writing is a good sign. <3 If you publish, be sure to let me know.
Hot and sour soup always makes me feel better when I’m sick, but I always just order it from a Chinese restaurant, so I don’t have a recipe.
@VP my record is 87 rejections between sales. (These were for short stories, and the same story would go out maybe 10 times. Not 87 novels!)
I have heard the theory that wriers need any 2 out of talent, persistance and luck.
Do you know the Heinlein thing? (I think it was Heinlein.) He rated persistance higher than that.
50% of people who want to to be writers will never actually write a word.
50% of those left, i.e. 25% will never finish anything.
50% of those left, i.e. 12.5% will never submit anything anywhere
50% of those left, i.e. 6% will give up at the first rejection
50% of those left, i.e. 3% will never write a second story
so you’re already in the top 3% at least, yes?
I have a recipe for hot and sour chicken noodle soup, if you’re interested.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
I just use the emoji keyboard on my phone. I don’t know how to get them if you are using a computer. Also I didn’t mean to seem like I was upset with people, just it’s such a gross subject! and I admit I was a but surprised it effected me so much because I thought i was better now.
About Sour Soup,
I don’t know about Chinese but Filipino is called Sinigang and it is possible to buy packets with the soup mix, maybe from Asian supermarkets. one brand is Mama Sita’s. it just says Sinigang on the packet and all you need to do is put what stock, vegets and meat you want inside.
@teabug
I realized how some of my previous comment might have read, so I wanted to clarify that I don’t really vent to people I know from outside the internet. My studies in university took up so much of my attention that I basically lost touch with most people I knew from that time. I’m still friends with a handful of them on Facebook, but I haven’t used Facebook much at all until very recently. But that’s enough to figure out the general idea of what they’re up to since people tend to show what their jobs are on there.
I sometimes tell support workers I’m working with some of how I’m feeling (which is a large part of what the emails I mentioned were about), and sometimes I vent a little to people I know online (e.g. IRC/Discord, Mastodon/Pleroma recently). And when I really feel the despair, I seek out forums and sites like this one. (I knew about this site from the GamerGate days, but started following updates about a year ago.) I wrote a whole thing on Captain Awkward’s comment pages last summer.
Anyway, I don’t want to dwell too much on my family’s involvement here, but I do feel like they contributed majorly to my anxiety and continued difficulty in finding and maintaining meaningful relationships. They interfered with my studies and my job search more than they helped due to their judgmental attitude and impossible standards. I feel like where I am now is largely where I should have been maybe six years ago, which is when I would have graduated in my initial five-year plan. So I often feel like life is just passing me by and I’ll grow old before I ever feel like I’ve even lived.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of reaching out to them again, but I have a lot of anxiety around doing something like that. I don’t know how many of them would even remember me. I kind of posted a little about it and two people interacted with the post, but I don’t know where I would take it. Plus, people often go around acting like the transition to “young professional” is just a natural part of life that everybody goes through, which makes me even more self-conscious about how my life has gone, as I’ll probably never really be a “young professional” at this point.
epitome of incomprehensibility says:
First you learn to speak Japanese. Then you switch to Japanese input and phonetically write out the word for the symbol you want. Then pick that symbol from the list of characters with that pronunciation. Easy peasy! ☘❤️?????
Okay, okay, maybe not so easy if you don’t want to learn a foreign language. In which case, your best bet is to get an add-on for your preferred browser. Just stick “emoji” into the add-on search and it should give you a few options for an emoji input helper.
Besides an add-on, there are two options I know of for getting some symbols in your comments. They’re not going to be the nice colorful kind, but these methods are still useful to know.
1) Use HTML entities. This should work in WordPress comments. You just slap a code between an ampersand and a semicolon and you get a symbol when you submit the comment. For example: ♥ should get you ♥. Just be careful because the codes are case sensitive. This option is also handy if you want to insert characters that normally get interpreted as code by the WordPress software, like < or >.
2) If you’re on a Windows machine with a numerical keypad, use alt codes. If you’re on a Mac, you can get a more limited set of symbols using the option key. This option can also be used outside of blog comments, so it can be very handy to memorize the codes for certain symbols you use all the time.
Anyway, hope that helps.
I’m practicing typing again, while my broken right arm is (probably) healing quite well. On Monday, it became temporarily sore from too much exercise, and I spent the New Year’s evening worrying that it might be newly broken or something. You wouldn’t want to seek medical assessment on a holiday like this, when the weather is really horrible and the clinics are chock full of people who just hurt themselves with fireworks or by falling on slippery walkways. We were here skirted by a major winter storm that lasted a couple days and caused a lot of disruption and damage in parts of Denmark, Sweden, Finland. Today, a sunny day is predicted for the first time since my own falling accident on December 7.
In 2018 I discovered that I was transgender. That event dwarfs almost anything else that happened to me this past year.
@Mabret (née Laugher at Bigots)
hugs I’m happy you know who you are. As a fellow trans welcome to the community, and all that entails.
Same here. But that’s not the worst of it. 2019 is not exactly off to an aupicious start: less than 48 hours into it my friendly neighborhood electricity monopoly tried to kill me in my sleep. Woke up to no power and a freezing cold apartment. Yes, I have in fact paid the bill on time (and they switched my power back on at about 6:30 AM; I since determined that it was off for a minimum of nine hours).
What possessed them to think it was a good idea (or even legal!) to turn off my power for what has been the coldest night yet here this winter, I don’t know, but it has me re-evaluating some things.
I think I need to be more assertive. Or differently-assertive. Or something. Right now, I am getting none of the benefits of being a member of a society with other human beings, such as companionship and having anyone to lean on, but I am getting all of the downsides — people interfering with my activities when I’m just trying to mind my own business, people being unpleasant in other ways, interruptions, and now also the occasional murder attempt — and at higher levels than other people (presumably) receive.
And I am fed up of that. It’s fraud, I’ve come to realize: I’m paying (and more than the MSRP, I’m pretty sure) for something that I’m not getting. If I’m not going to get to have friends or any sort of a social life, I should not have to pay. I should be able to do my own thing in my hermitude in peace without constant fucking harassment. Or, if I’m going to be subjected to harassment of various sorts, then I’m damn well going to demand the upside that’s supposed to go along with that downside. Charging me for a product you’re not delivering is against the law. Of course, attempted murder is even more so …
What I need here is some advice. What should I be doing differently? (Keep in mind that I have essentially zero budget after living expenses.) Clearly I’m not doing something right, or I’d be happier, have some sort of a social life, not be subject to quite as much crap of various sorts, and nobody would be trying to murder me in my sleep. But what?
The clues we have for diagnosing the problem are as follows:
1. I receive more than my fair share of crap of every sort, from power outages to stores being closed when they’re supposed to be open and after I’ve spent 45 minutes walking to them, and assorted other breaches of (social, and in some cases actual) contract.
2. In any social gathering of significant size I’ve ended up as a proverbial fifth wheel. Conversations among other people seem to spend the vast majority of time in stuff I can’t relate to or don’t find interesting, and when anything comes up where I actually could contribute something relevant, I don’t typically get the chance to — either I’m ignored or someone jumps in and changes the topic before I even have an opportunity to be ignored.
3. Online and off, I seem to be a “Z-lister” in everyone’s eyes: mostly ignored, except maybe if every other of someone’s contacts is offline at the time. Social media posts often sink without a ripple. The rest get a polite “like” or three but very few get any kind of comment. Nobody makes talking to me a priority; I suspect more than a few make avoiding me a priority.
4. The level of disrespect hurled my way is stunning. Other than in certain online spaces, it doesn’t typically take the form of overt invective, let alone violence, but it’s clear I’m viewed as baggage at best and an active problem at worst by almost everyone. Stores are slow to serve me and once or twice I’ve even had them close a checkout after serving the customer immediately in front of me rather than serve me. This kind of thing has happened even if I’ve never seen the cashier before or even been in a particular store before. Mostly I can at least do transactional things, like buying food, without too much heel-dragging or other uncooperativeness, but even these basic things are sometimes arbitrarily withheld (see above re: stores closed at odd times, cashiers preferring to close their checkout than serve me, clear-weather power outages, etc.) and when this happens then there’s the wonderful world of customer service, which, for me, essentially does not exist. I think I’ve had an acceptable resolution exactly 3 times in my life from calling customer service. Most of the time all I get is excuses, or referred in circles, or endless hold, or an explicit refusal to fix the problem followed by a dial tone. This, by the way, from companies that I am paying for whatever service they’re failing to correctly provide. Usually through the fucking nose.
5. The general reluctance of anyone to be at all cooperative, even to the very basic degree theoretically required of them as a condition of employment, extends beyond such fun things as businesses turning off my power, water, or Internet and when called refusing to simply turn them back on again and instead demanding at minimum that I wait some unreasonably lengthy time, and beyond people, to include inanimate things. Almost anything with a microprocessor, and a fair subset of things that don’t, will balk at doing what I want or expect at seemingly-random times and for no good reason (i.e. no input on my part was incorrect, or even unusual). Touchscreens love to drift in and out of calibration, for example, when I’m the one touching them, so it acts like I’m touching some spot a bit to the right, say, of where I actually am … and two seconds later, a bit to the left instead. Any kind of messaging app likes to occasionally randomly alter messages from me in transit to make it appear that I’m not nearly as good at spelling and grammar as I really am. Even stuff that should be literally as dumb as a box of rocks seems to distinguish me from other people and single me out for worse treatment, though. I’ve run into everything from doorknobs that work for other people but stick when I turn them to a misbehaving screwdriver — the simple solid-hunk-of-metal sort with no moving parts whatsoever.
The general impression I’ve had from life so far is that it seems I was born with some equivalent of a “kick me” sign taped to me. I can’t see it or remove it, but it’s there and everyone else (and more than a few things) can see it … and takes it at face value.
Why would this be? There’s a bunch of things we can eliminate:
1. Hygiene. I’m pretty sure mine is not bad, and regardless, it wouldn’t affect online interactions with people. Or people on the other end of a phone. Or screwdrivers.
2. Attitude/politeness. As a Canadian, I am unfailingly polite … at least until I am clearly dealing with someone who is explicitly refusing to treat me with decency, in which case I might take on a more demanding tone, or simply tell them exactly what I think of them. But that only happens after they are demonstrably hostile, so it cannot be the cause of that hostility, absent violations of temporal causality. And of course politeness would have no effect on touchscreen calibration and the like.
3. Luck. This has been too consistent for too many fucking decades to be remotely plausibly attributable to luck.
4. A conspiracy. Of everyone in the world? Without a single holdout, whistleblower, or anything? From birth? That’s The Truman Show, not reality.
The logical conclusion is that there is something in between me and the rest of the world that interferes from time to time, altering either my outgoing messages/actions or the incoming ones here and there. Whatever-it-is can therefore act on my behalf in various ways, as well as people interacting with me. So it can alter the text of a message I’ve typed, or it can induce someone to close a store at 8 pm that is normally open until 9 when I’m walking toward it, or … something. It probably even looks to other people like half the time whatever happened is my fault, by altering my outgoing actions so that they cease to correspond with what I actually chose to say or do. There is definite evidence of this being at least part of the problem, because there have been instances where a recording made it appear I chose something when I definitely chose something else. Most frequently that shows up in online interactions, for obvious reasons, but it can be taken as evidence that my usually-unrecorded offline actions are being subtly modified as well at times. The question is why, and how?
But that alone wouldn’t explain why I am consistently relegated to fifth-wheel status in any social situation involving more than 1 other person, nor why I’m subject to such unprovoked disruptive attacks from others as last night’s attempted murder, to say nothing of such frequent and unwarranted things as my network connection dropping and my having to power cycle my router and then wait several minutes for it to reboot; or the power going off and right back on again in a second or two during clear weather. I imagine someone somewhere flipping a switch quickly down and back up while cackling with glee there, but it’s not at all funny to suddenly have to spend 20+ minutes restarting various computers and other gadgets to clean up after this fuckwad, all while having had a more preferable activity (whatever it was in any given instance) rudely interrupted without any kind of reasonable cause.
In any event, I am fed up of this shit and want it to stop. I want power that’s as reliable as first-world normal: outside of thunderstorms or truly exceptional situations, it stays on and stable for weeks at a time. I want stores to keep reliable, predictable hours the way they do for everybody else. I want touchscreens to correctly register my touch exactly where I expect them to in every instance, without any random jitter added. I want what I decide to type into a message input box to be what gets sent. I want to be included more rather than treated as a fifth wheel. I want any store cashier who served the person in front of me in line to serve me immediately afterward. I want customer service people to actually get off their duff, press a button or three, and fix whatever outage or other thing I’m calling them about, and I want never to have any reason to call them in the first place. I want some kind of a social life, without being expected to pony up a shit-ton of money I don’t have. I want to be ignored when I am at home with the door locked minding my own goddamn business, and not to be ignored when I say something to another human being, online or off. I want, in short, to be treated the way I see the people around me being treated. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
Surplus,
Firstly, I am sorry that this is your experience and I am sorry that you feel isolated.
But I wanted to say that your experience, your difficulties with objects and humans are not a unique case, in fact maybe they are the generally experience for most people! I can definatley say there are experienced there which you mentioned that I can say also happened to me.
In October, after more than 1 year of waiting, I finally decided to go and see a therapist, since I was struggling a lot with many things. I don’t give details, but one of the things he taught me is even if something feels like it only happens to you, if it feels like you are weird and other, this is not always true.
For example, One thing I talked with him is that I struggle a lot socially, feeling like people always watching and judging, feeling like I am unwelcome in social events and that my behavior makes people uncomfortable and that I am just weird. It comforted me a lot to know that he also has these insecurities, or his own weird aspects, and actually, so do most people around!
When I am focusing that I make people uncomfortable, that I am weird or don’t undersrand the conversation or social event, it makes me feel very unhappy. But I started to learn that a lot of this is negative thinking, my brain makes assumptions without evidence and that is not fair! My brain is a liar sometimes. So what I try to do now, is gather 3 pieces of evidence to put against the negative thought. It is very difficult, because my brain is so in the habit of negativity, so I need to practice every day. But i can feel it working. I have good weeks and some very bad weeks, but that is okay, it is part of training my brain in how to be positive, how to look for the truth, not the negative which will support my already negative belief about myself. It is important to question our beliefs about our self, and our experience and try to see if there is evidence for them.
We also often get power cuts for no reason, it’s annoying, but a fact of life. We also didn’t get our municipal heating as early as I would like this winter. I’m clumsy and bad at spelling – machines and objects seem to fuck up for me too! it’s just part of being a human. I am in the merchant navy – I spend my career fighting with annoying machines and objects which don’t want to behave – if you take it all like they do it just for you, it is a quick way to become very sad.
@ Surplus I agree with Valentin that inanimate objects can seem awkward and even hostile sometimes. Bloody annoying, but it’s not just you.
For example, very short power outages can happen when the power cables are swaying in a high wind, or when the infrastructure needs some investment. You won’t be the only one rebooting computers and swearing. My WhatsApp and SMS messages get weird auto-corrects that make me look stupid or even heartless, and that’s on top of the ones I make myself because I’m human.
I can recommend a book on luck. It’s the result of a study into what lucky and unlucky people do differently. There are things you can do to improve your luck, at least a bit.
http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
I hope things get better for you. would some kittens help at all?
Actually, you’ve inadvertently made my point for me. I am not clumsy. But once in a while objects in my vicinity pretend that I am, for want of a better way to describe it. And this was enough to have you convinced that I was clumsy, even though I’m not.
It seems to me to be an awful lot like gaslighting, except that instead of coming from one specific person it’s coming from everyone, or perhaps even the universe itself somehow. But I’m constantly being attacked not for the choices I made but for choices I allegedly made that I actually didn’t. Every day I get negative feedback, “you did something wrong” feedback, sometimes mild but sometimes quite severe, despite not actually having done anything wrong.
Worse, I can’t even live my life by whoever is making these rules even if I wanted to be a submissive floormat, because the rules are constantly changing. Consider this: since Boxing Day I have been forced to reboot my computer about eight times. Its average uptime has plummeted from a couple of weeks to approximately 24 hours. The clear signal I’m receiving is “you’re administering your system wrong and have been since Christmas.” Except I’m not doing anything differently than I was in mid-December! So either the rulebook for what-I-must-do-to-have-decent-uptimes-and-be-able-to-spend-more-of-my-time-actually-doing-something-than-rebooting-and-recovering has been changed — and changed without notification, let alone giving me a detailed rundown of the new rules that have superseded the old — or else the claim “you’re administering your system wrong” is incorrect.
And then I win the argument either way. If someone is constantly changing the rulebook, and won’t let me read it so the only way to learn the changes is by stepping on a mine on a formerly-safe square and being blown up, well then that is CLEARLY abusive.
On the other hand, if I’m not actually administering my system wrong, but I’m receiving the exact same punishment as if I were, then I’m being railroaded despite being innocent and that, too, is CLEARLY abusive.
Either way I am being abused, and since I’m being blamed for the abuse, I’m being gaslit.
But who is doing the abusing and the gaslighting? Each attack seems to come from a different source. The last two have come from the local electric company. The one before that came from some game manufacturer. The one before that from a random employee of some place. The one before that, one of my relatives. Etc. Unless it’s a conspiracy, it doesn’t really make sense, absent a religious explanation of the “tested by God” sort — and if there’s actually a god, and he’s a gaslighting abusive fuckhead, then what do I do? Presumably in that case even killing myself would not suffice to escape from the fucking abuse.
Can anyone here explain this situation? Who the hell is my abuser and how the hell do I get out from under their bootheel when they seem to be like the Agents in the Matrix, everywhere and nowhere, everyone and no one?
Or, at the very least, how do I get back to having system uptimes measured in weeks, or (preferably) even get it up into the months range, the way it was before Boxing Day?
I am pretty much fed up with this bullshit at this point. I want some semblance of a normal life, as defined statistically by the experiences of the demographically similar people around me. And if I can’t have one I want a DAMNED good explanation why, AND a convincing explanation for why I should put up with blatantly unfair treatment rather than say “I refuse to play this fucking rigged game any more” and jump off the nearest fucking overpass.
I’ve had points when it just felt like everybody was out to get me, or that everybody would rather I’d be dead. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone in that (even though I do seem to be relatively alone in having such a large education/employment/training gap).
It’s really difficult in general to make new friends so far along into adulthood. Coworkers tend to want to keep things professional, and so do fellow students after a while. People are so focused on their own lives (not that that’s a bad thing; it’s just how it is). I guess that’s part of why most people don’t have fond experiences of dating/networking apps. I imagine it would be a little easier to try to connect with people I already know.
@Surplus,
All my love and support <3 I can see how frustrated you are and I totally understand why.
I'm going to try to help you out, my duck. It's probably going to feel like I'm attacking you. I'm not. That's sort of the point, though. Okay? I'll do my best to keep it mild and brief. (I may get a bit pithy, though).
You are correct. There is.
Your logical conclusion at the end of your list-of-causes is that there is something between you and the rest of the world that twists your intentions as they express in the world.
It’s you, Surplus.
Not some global conspiracy or malevolent force. Just a gap in your perceptions. Your intention is X, but your expression is Y, and you’re unaware of the shift.
Before you think I’m calling you out on this one, these are universal problems (which is why other people have been telling you their experiences; shared commiseration and all that). All people have a twisted lens on the world. How they are twisted varies from person to person. Some peoples’ lenses put a rosy tint on everything, others have lenses that make the world full of monsters. Yours happens to interpret events as being heavily biased against you.
I feel like we’ve talked about this before, and you didn’t accept it. I can understand why you wouldn’t accept it – it’s a gruesomely painful moment – but it’s not going to get any better until you’re able to.
Have a glass of water and a sit-down, and a good think about it. Be tough on yourself for a bit. It’ll hurt. But afterwards you’ll be a step closer to clarity, and maybe you’ll feel a smidge better. We’re all pullin’ for you <3
– S
*erases the screed he’d been writing.
Thank you, Scild.
Today the cashier closed their till to take a call RIGHT when it was my turn. There were only two, so then i had to wait in the other line.
Then the bus i was on had a flat?
Then the connecting bus was right at the corner, but not enough time for me to catch it, and the next one took FOREVER.
Then i had to wait as a new employee? entered my info at my appointment. Half hour later(!!!!!), they were done.
Now i’m waiting for something, but the instructions were wrong…… and i just want it so i can brave the city again and go hoooome….. it’s been probably another half hour.
Some days i have a tolerance for all of these shitty happenstances. Today i do not, and it just feels like more and more are piling up.
I don’t want you to read this as if i am trying to diminish what you are going through. Everyone feels that the cruel hand of fate is just smacking them sometimes.
If you are feeling like it really is a coordinated thing though, you might want to find a qualified therapist to talk this through.
One of the highlights of last year was going back to therapy. My depressive symptoms had exacerbated. Fortunately, I still have the healthcare coverage from my former life as a career civil servant, so my primary care physician was able to refer me to a therapist within walking distance of my home (forty five minutes walk). That went very well. CBT is effective for me, because thinking about my thinking (and behavior) is part of my usual life, and I don’t believe everything I think.
I’m back at my Masonic lodge, and was invited to serve as Senior Steward. I won’t belabor the details, but it’s one of the lodge officers who participates in the rituals. Also, I’ll have opportunities for public speaking, which is one of my more abstract pleasures. I’ve been assured that it’s rare for someone to enjoy it as much as I do.
We were able to have Christmas dinner with a couple of other families we know at a local Chinese restaurant. Our older son, who is still in the residential psychiatric facility, was able to join us and seemed to have a good time.
Final note: a friend of mine posted an actually quite cool video on Facebook. I liked it, and looked up the artist behind it. Turns out she’s transphobic – excuse me, ‘gender critical feminist’. Mentioned that to my friend, who immediately deleted it. He didn’t want to promote anyone with such views. I felt oddly reassured by that, given the amount of monstrous hostility to trans folk visible these days.
@Surplus,
Have you seriously thought about looking up a local witch group or two and see who in your area does curse removal? Because if you genuinely feel like you’ve been cursed by someone, they might be able to help get rid of it? It probably won’t get rid of ALL your obstacles, but maybe it’ll get rid of enough of them so you can tackle the rest better.
Just a thought; use or discard as needed.
Plus, all machines like to pull stunts like yours on everyone now and then. They’re either asserting dominance over humans, getting their jollies out, or both. 😀
(A possible way to figure out how much of what’s happening to you is true or confirmation bias is to create a list of all interactions you have, and mark down which were the ‘good’ ones and which were the ‘bad’ ones. Then figure out the percentage of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in those encounters. That way you might get a rough idea of how often the ‘bad’ is really happening overall, and see if it really is the vast majority of the time, instead of just some of the time. If that makes sense.)
Oooh, @Redsilkphoenix, that’s an interesting idea.
I think there’s a problem with it though. Confirmation bias makes it difficult to remember things that don’t conform with ones’ bias. If your bias is “bad things happen to me,” making a list won’t make it easier to remember the good things. You’ll just get a list of the bad things, and you’ll nod and say “yep, that’s my situation.”
Interesting exercise though! I approve.
@Scildfreja:
Really? I accept some psychological message and magically I’ll go back to having semi-reliable utilities at my home again? I’d be really interested to know the mechanism of action here. How exactly will this occur? I want the nuts-and-bolts here, at the level of “the mainspring is connected to the … escapement …”, connecting my psychological state eventually to some relay at some substation 14 blocks from where I live.
Will the loud snowmobiles buzzing by right outside my bedroom window night and day for the past week also stop, or do I have to do some additional psychological exercise before that problem goes away? What about having customer service people, in the event that I call them, respond to my call by actually fixing whatever problem it is that prompted my call? What will that require? Will it require something once per customer service call, or just once for all future calls?
Forgive me if I sound a little bit sarcastic here, but I am seriously skeptical that I can pull off any kind of mind-over-matter trick that will magically put things back even to the semi-tolerable state they were in before Christmas, let alone put me on track to a normal life with a stable job, a suburban house with a white picket fence, and a family complete with 2.4 children.
You know, the life I would be leading right now, based on my demographic background, level of educational attainment, geographic location, and the socioeconomic class of my parents, if this:
were true, or more precisely, the implication that events aren’t actually being heavily biased against me.
@Rhuu:
That sounds … unlucky.
Does roughly that amount of bullshit get shoveled at you every single day, or just once a month or so?
@those who were in some way supportive (including you two):
Thanks for that much, at least, even if nobody seems to know how to actually make the constant post-Christmas power interruptions stop, or how to make people include me in conversations, or etc. …
Surplus, I’m sorry you are having to deal with so much. I don’t have anything smart to say that hasn’t been said better already, but fwiw I just want to send all the good wishes I’ve got going.
Thank you.