Walking the dog
An open thread for personal stuff, continuing from here.
As usual for these threads: no trolls, no MRAs, no I’m-not-really-an-MRA-buts, don’t be mean.
Posted on October 6, 2014, in no trolls allowed, open thread. Bookmark the permalink. 510 Comments.
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Sleep well, gilshalos!
::thinks of London … Chiswick House … the V&A … Museum of London … WAAAAHHHH!::
I did sleep!
OK, there are some nice things in London. I’d love to visit the British Library and the V&A, but I’ve been there, it’s a toxic horrible city.
*Not likely true if visiting vute guy/gal*
vute=cute!
It’s twenty years since I last visited, so I imagine it’s changed a lot in that time. I loved it, then, including the Underground. Went everywhere by Tube.
National Portrait Gallery … National Gallery … Wallace Collection … The Tower (I got to have tea with the Curator of Firearms!) … the Queen’s Gallery …
I love Edinburgh, too. Stayed there three weeks in 2000, my first trip all on my lonesome. Well, except for Miss Dinah, who was extremely popular with the locals. :)
I’ve always preferred Glasgow to either, it just seemed freindlier.
A friend, native Glaswegian, missed the last bus to his home, started walking home, over a mile in the rain. He was stopped by a drunk asking for money for a drink. He explained that he didn’t have much money on him, otherwise at this hour he be getting a taxi home. The drunk gave him a fiver. That has just always spoken to me about Glasgow.
Gorgeous picture, Kitteh!
That’s a hell of a nice drunk to meet!
I liked Glasgow too, but I only had two day trips there, so didn’t have time to get a feel for the place. Edinburgh seemed pretty friendly to me, but then when you’re you’re a customer service person on holiday, and thus go into automatic Be Nice To Staff mode, and have a tartan-clad cat with you, it’s pretty easy to get a friendly reception.
Thanks re the pic! Stirling Castle was beautiful. I’d love to see how it looks after another fourteen years of restoration.
The guide at Stirling couldn’t believe Dinah wasn’t local. The idea she’d come all the way from Melbourne – and in that dress! – was just too much. :D
One guy in the group asked to take a photo of her, ‘cos she looked like his real kitten. Presumably he had a marmie!
! was born in Stirling, lived in Bridge of Allan for the first 5 years. My dad worked in Stirling Uni on the Admin side from before it opened.
@gilshalos, aw, I wouldn’t say London was a toxic, horrible city :(, whereabouts did you go? I mean, there are definitely places to avoid (Leicester Square just isn’t my bag, especially after 6pm, and personally I don’t get the tourist appeal of Piccadilly Circus. I think it’s just a big junction permanently jammed with traffic. And don’t get me started on Harrods).
I’ve lived about a 40 minute train journey from Victoria for years and I’m always dropping in to see friends who have moved up there. St Albans is beautiful, as is Primrose Hill, and Southbank on a summer evening. And the Parks!
I went couch-surfing in Edinburgh last year :), everyone was so, so friendly. Being used to London, that was a huge culture shock for me!
Glasgow really is much friendlier than Edinburgh. I loved London though, if I ever moved back to the UK that’s where I’d go.
I’m not actually sure where I went in London, as I was about 7. I just have memories of traffic, crowds, badly-driven taxis. It might just be me, I hate cities in general
I also embarrassed myself by screaming, loudly, during the performance of the Mousetrap. Though I really enjoyed watching it.
Oh no, I’m sorry you had such a bad experience. If you ever go again there are some truly beautiful areas. I’m not a big crowds person, so I tend towards the more quiet and scenic.
I never saw the Mousetrap, though I do remember seeing Cats a bunch of times as a kid. It was magical.
And the killer is….! It was the 30th year of it being performed when I went. Lots of jokes about people lurking outside threatening to reveal the killer unless money was paid. Only professional play I have ever seen, and I totally had a (useless) crush on the gay guy in the story.
Hope that didn’t sound too flippant.
OK, this is difficult, and embarrassing. I’m hoping that here people will understand and not think of me as well…I do.
I was diagnosed with depression 25 years back. Personally, I think it started a decade before that. Up until a decade ago, soaking in a bath was my preferred medicine. From then on…the mere thought of water on my skin made me cringe and feel bad.
I think that it is part of my low self esteem. On a day I manage to clean myself, wear clean clothes and then do something like bake or cook a good meal…it’s…half of me says ‘This is the minimum a human should be expected to do. And half of me wants to scream ‘I climbed a mountain to do this! Don’t you understand ?” But because it /is/ the minimum a human should be expected to do, no-one does. So I hate myself and when I feel proud at having achieved it, no-one else does. So I feel…deficient.
Oh, gilshalos! That’s the depression monster talking! On one hand, of course every human ‘should’ be able to bathe, wear clean clothes, and prepare food daily, but that’s assuming the particular human you’re talking about isn’t weighted down with a giant depression monster chained ’round their neck, gnawing on their soul. Remember, the depression monster will tell you all sorts of horrible lies about how worthless you are so that it can keep sucking the life out of you! It feeds on the hopelessness and despair that it creates in you by nattering its evil lies in your ear and robbing you of your good feelings.
You do deserve to feel good about the ‘small’ things! That’s why the depression monster doubles down when you start to feel good about them. It knows that if you get enough small things to feel good about, you’ll feel strong enough to do medium things to feel good about, and then, you might start to feel strong enough to do big things to feel good about, and the depression monster can’t stand the thought of losing you!
If it helps, I would be very proud of you, if you did any one of those things today. (and I’d still think you were pretty nifty, even if you didn’t)
@gilshalos
MAN do I know about the depression monster, the you’re-failing-at-human monster. Here is something that helped me and perhaps it will help you:
http://captainawkward.com/2011/09/12/reader-question-110-how-do-i-claw-my-way-out-of-this-depressing-living-situation/
Scroll down to #4: the Gold Stars. Do this, for real, at least a few times. I was shocked by both how much giving myself a stupid little star motivated me to do things like take a shower, and by how many stars I wound up with at the end of the day. It was a great way for me to remind myself just how much I do accomplish, even when I am at my least effective. I would look at the list, and the items I didn’t get to sort of disappeared in a sea of gold stars. Doing laundry turned into like a dozen stars (because each step is a list item: gather clothes, sort clothes, put clothes into laundry, add detergent, turn washer on, come back when the cycle is finished, etc. etc.) I felt so accomplished! For doing laundry!
It sounds stupid, but doing laundry actually is an accomplishment, and you deserve to have concrete and visible representation of your success.
Not flippant at all! Reminds me of when the sixth Harry Potter book came out and folks who had read it were holding fans who hadn’t to ransom (“Do you want me to tell you what happens? I totally could”, “Please god NO! Anything but spoilers!!”).
I’ve struggled with depression on and off for years. If it helps, I used to think of depression as having huge lead weights attached, which made doing anything and everything that much harder. At times it genuinely felt as if there was a physical weight pressing down on me, so accomplishing something like having a shower or getting dressed took so, so much more and became, during the down times, exactly that. An accomplishment.
I would look at other people completing ordinary, everyday things without a care and feel better because I’d remember, “Well, that might be easy for you, but you don’t have to do it all with ten-ton weights strapped to your back!”.
Well, I managed the wearing clean clothing and eating. Cleaning myself…uh…nope. But right now I’m focussed on mainly ensuring that I eat Cos not bathing is unlikely to kill me, though it might make me an outcaste, not eating is deadly.