So @catches_stars on Twitter is pretty hilarious. She’s also got an OkCupid account, and regularly posts snippets of her conversations with some of the more problematic dudes who contact her, some on her main Twitter account and some on @okcupid_TXT. With her permission, and because I’m too lazy to actually write a post today, I’m passing along a few of my favorites.
This overeager fellow has a rather sudden change of heart when his stated plan runs into an obstacle, that obstacle being that @catches_stars finds him completely repulsive.
This guy is either totally high or trying some weird and misguided PUA wizardry on her. (It does not succeed.)
This foot-obsessed fellow spammed her with the same message from several different accounts.
This guy, who seems to be shirtless in his profile pic, gets what I assume is, to him, a very disappointing answer.
As does this fellow.
Romance is hard.
@Some gal
Sorry to hear that you have a hard time with your mom 🙁
@ Marie
I just put them in the dryer, still in the nets. I know you’re not supposed to, but I only wear bras once before washing them and there’s no way I’m line drying a week’s worth of bras.
@cassandra says
thanks 🙂 I was just curious, since so far I’ve taken the wash them by hand and it gets really tedious.
*wash them by hand approach. Keep making typos today
Hello again anyone who’s still awake! 🙂
Sir and I had a lovely day out – lunch at our favourite cafe (I had crepes with stewed pear, almond and raisins), a wander up to Fawkner to sit under a tree and remember the stuff we did at Home last night (it included Cat Yodelling) and then the stroll back to the Toorak Village to window-shop. TV is a pretentious name for a shopping strip in one of Melbourne’s priciest suburbs – we’re talking $300 dresses. I was rather gratified that there wasn’t a single item that tempted me, not one that made me think “I wish I could afford that”.
@starskita, re Oz bra sizes – yeah, there are still some bras that are labeled 34, 36, etc, but that would just be on the label, along with the 14, 16 and so on, which is what they’re sold as. Heaven help you if you’re something like a 16C, because being bigger but not with a very big bust is something the shops can’t fathom at all.
On the cost (was it Marie asking?) – well, stuff here’s pricey anyway, our cost of living is high compared with the US, but there’s a huge variation with bra prices. If you’re looking at ones that are basically just cloth with elastic straps, or pull-ons, they’d be anywhere from $10 to $20 at warehouse shops like Bond’s. An average price for a structured sort of bra would be around $30, but the fancier ones can easily double that.
Well.
Martyn is finally gone, so I guess I won’t have to formally explain to him that he is unteachable and I’m giving up trying to help him. I thought he might be a Mr. Al in the making, still early enough to be diverted from the path, but no, he’s pretty much gone the full B_n.
Have a baby panda with a ball instead.
WARNING WARNING
IMMINENT CUTENESS OVERLOAD
I had a touch of that this morning, too – saw a dachshund puppy in the park. The cute, the cute!
What gets me with the trolls a la Fartyn is the whole “oh you’re being emotional” shit. First, it shows their ignorance, since all our thinking is influenced by emotions, but second and worse, it makes me wonder if there is something seriously wrong with them, if they’re as divorced from emotion as they present. Of course it’s probably just the “men are rational, women are irrational” attempts to needle and make themselves look superior, but the utter lack of empathy and understanding screams “get thee to therapy” to me.
I hope this isn’t straying into internet diagnosis territory, it’s just the “WTF is wrong with you? What is missing from you?” reaction is my strongest.
Self-awareness. Most people have at least some of it. These guys have none.
Fersure.
@ cloudiah
I have just spent the past week unable to get out of bed. I am fairly used to weeks were i don’t leave my house, but this is a new one on me. Though, in retrospect, i do recall my dad doing the same, sporadically, for the past 20 years. Aside from looking into seeking professional help on monday, I am planning on getting a couple of friends to try to check up on me more often. And try to get them to keep me from withdrawing and being so reclusive.
Does your friend have related mental illnesses? Every permutation is different so I can only speak with limited relevance. I would not be surprised if your friend actually does want to get out of the house. i would almost describe depression and anxiety as social vertigo. At least for me, there is both an attraction and repulsion to social situations.
I suspect that the earlier advice about trying to give options, make choices, etc. are on the right track. But, if your friend is at least considering going I really do think that they want to go on some level, because when I am on the fence about going out it is because I want to but am trying to find ways not to go Be careful about having them lock up. i know my brother, and sometimes myself, can get overwhelmed and just shut-down. If one of the other suggested methods backfire, you might want to ease off and change topic before trying a different one.
If mental illness meant you shouldn’t have children neither myself nor my best friend would have been born.
I don’t think this is the right argument. It’s like when anti-abortionists say that abortion is wrong because if their mum had had an abortion they wouldn’t have been born. As David pointed out in a discussion on abortion, there are countless of things that could have happened that would have resulted in you not getting born, like your parents simply deciding not to have sex on that particular night, or your parents never getting together in the first place but hooking up with other people instead.
If you’d never had been born, that would be completely unproblematic, since you couldn’t regret never existing if you, well, never existed, and nobody would miss you either.
The REAL problem with preventing mentally ill people from reproducing is the violation of the reproductive rights of these people. Not being allowed to have kids is a terrible, terrible loss, not to some hypothetical non-existent children, but to the people who aren’t allowed to have children despite wanting to.
And I don’t write this in order to nit-pick or anything; I just think it’s important not to use the “if X had been a rule then I wouldn’t have existed” argument, since it’s an argument also used by anti-abortionists. There are still plenty of anti-eugenics-arguments to go around.
I follow. No problem.
It’s gonna take me forever to get through 9 pages of comments so I’ll just drop off some okc lols that came up on my tumblr tonight
http://24.media.tumblr.com/f9e76b06c64f971108d8935e5c4997f2/tumblr_mj0ljbf85k1qg9utgo1_1280.jpg
http://25.media.tumblr.com/1fabc0b21a7f5d54e2f2c8b24e19a540/tumblr_mj0ljbf85k1qg9utgo2_1280.jpg
I DON’T GET HOW THEY KEEP COMING BACK? HOW DO THEY NOT GET THE HINT?
And then this guy who is just looking for someone to be a dick to. Guys wonder why OKC doesn’t work too well for them… hmmm… I dunno. Maybe because guys like these douches scare them off. They come to the dating site to date not to be randomly insulted. Anyways, it’s a longer one
http://24.media.tumblr.com/e7fb375d0ff11978346060323ae1b21c/tumblr_mj0jnv46wf1qdw8ono1_1280.png
http://25.media.tumblr.com/c4004f7dc6a1c0877fee0db582feb8a0/tumblr_mj0jnv46wf1qdw8ono2_1280.png
http://25.media.tumblr.com/ba136f2e6d53ab02d24ae49f8c520986/tumblr_mj0jnv46wf1qdw8ono3_1280.png
http://25.media.tumblr.com/2909b8cd468b1ae8467e28816601d9c3/tumblr_mj0jnv46wf1qdw8ono4_1280.png
I think the problem is not “I would never have been born” because, yes, there’s a randomness to that (I probably wouldn’t have been born if my parents’ miscarriages had carried to term, but that would be a lousy reason to oppose miscarriage research), but something closely related: it’s indeed pretty awful to suggest that you SPECIFICALLY shouldn’t have been born and the world would be better off without all the people like you. Might as well go all the way at that point and advocate mass euthanasia.
OK, so, legitimate question for everyone: one of the reasons my partner and I have opted to adopt (should we ever decide to have children at all) is because we have both struggled with mental illnesses that are, going by our family histories, pretty clearly hereditary. We were thinking “why give birth to a child who we can pretty much guarantee is going to suffer”, but are we just being ableist?
(Maybe I should note that we both have depression, so it’s possible the “our kid is just going to suffer” idea is also a depression thought…)
He’s gone? Oh good.
I was going to make the point that just because something positive came out of “eugenics”, it dosen’t necessarily follow that a) eugenics on the whole can be excused or b) that the discovery was not possible otherwise.
Hell, Dr. Mengele’s actually made useful discoveries, but that dosen’t excuse the horrors he committed, nor does it follow that such discoveries could not have happened under ethical conditions. You don’t need the idea that there are “superior” and “inferior” humans to want to determine potential health issues as soon as possible. Had there be no eugenic movement, we’d still have genetics, natural selection and the desire to check the health of potential children as early as possible. Without eugenics, wouldn’t have the judement call that says that caring for a child with those heath issues is less moral than one who chooses an abortion.
… but then I went out for Hobgoblins and swiss cuisine with co-workers. Mmm, Raclette.
Emily,
I think you have to make that decision for yourself. You and your partner can choose that creating a person who will probably suffer isn’t a good idea and that you don’t want to do it. (Note that this person DOES NOT CURRENTLY EXIST) But nobody else can decide for you.
If I had my druthers, i would prefer that my parents had had a healthy child who wasn’t me, instead of me. But now that I do exist I don’t want to stop existing.
An actual person who exists deserves to be treated with respect and kindness. Sperms and egg cells do not. Where you draw the line when it gets to a more gray area is a personal matter. (i.e. are you physiologically intertwined with the potential person? Then you get to make decisions about drawing the line)
If you accept that somebody else in your situation might make a different choice, I don’t think you are being ableist. Your potential adopted child may have equally difficult, or worse problems than your potential biological child would, but the adopted child is already in the world at the time you adopt, but when you are making this decision, the potential biological child does not exist.
emilygoddess: For what it’s worth, I believe its morally neutral. No-one can guarantee for certain that their children, even healthy ones, will grow up with untroubled lives, and even healthy children can strain the resources of a family to the breaking point, if they are unprepared or have limited access to emotional and financial support.
Indeed, if you know what to expect genetically, you have a head start on identifying and treating the problems your children may have. I doubt I would have survived Jr. High had I not had strong unconditional support from my family, and that was “just” bullying. Being able to deal with depression without denial from the family is a huge step up for many people.
@emilygoddess
My personal thinking was that everyone is going to have difficulties, at least by sharing genetics, I up the odds that it is a problem I know how to deal with. I understand my bipolar pretty well and could help a child with it. There are lots of problems that I don’t know how to deal with (that could still happen with my own child, but are more likely if we don’t share/know anything genetic). FWIW, my partner who has depression had your impulse though.
Caveat: I have decided not to have children because I am never doing that to my body, (at least currently) I can barely care for myself, and I think a life without children seems pretty good for me. This is all theoretical for me, but it didn’t used to be. I don’t know if that matters re: my advice.
Oh! Adoption is a great thing. I think the choice of whether to have your own or adopt is a good choice to be making no matter how you decide. More people should at least consider adoption.
Ugh… I know I’m picking at a scab… but I gotta get this off my chest…
This is completely wrong. Science always starts with OBSERVATION. Only after observation then create a testable hypothesis which is constructed narrowly to filter out alternate explanations, then tested to see if the hypothesis is correct. That experiment is then reiterated, replicated and expanded upon. The theory is a proposed mechanism that needs to explain current observations, and predict future findings, and that theory lives or dies based on it’s ability to explain experimental results.
Computers could not have formed without the observation and testing of phoenomena long before the theories computers were based on were created. Nothing “abstract” about them.
Abstract theory is the core of PSUDOSCIENCE: every crackpot, crank and political hack starts with the theory, then gathers evidence to support it, ignoring or handwaving evidence which contradicts their ideas. Whether it’s a creationist who starts with “The Bible is in-errantly true” or some crank with a revolutionary math-free “Theory of everything” like Velikovsky or the Time Cube guy, or alternative medicine practitioners which never seem to account for the placebo effect.
@emilygoddess – I don’t think so. You’re not advocating other people make the same decision as you. If you adopted a child and that child turned out to have a mental illness or disability or any of the myriad of other problems that people can have, you wouldn’t mistreat the child for it. You’re making a decision about hypotheticals, not about an actual existing person, and making the right decision for you personally.
@leftwingfox
I think it is good we are continuing on Martyn’s bullshit in a way. There was, as I said before, too much if it for all of us to catch and respond to. I’d hate to think that just because we missed something (like the “acquired disability” bit) that someone would think that meant it wasn’t wrong or wasn’t a big deal.
I mean it about Martyn having a shot at TOTY. It is going to take a lot to top this.