A kittens, puppies, bonbons and rainbows open thread

Hello, all–

I’ve been lurking for a while but posted once or twice. Love this community and hope to eventually say something interesting (and to think of a good ‘nym).

(Should I write more of an intro? I’m still not clear about local protocols.)

For now, thanks for all the good music. Here’s one of my own favorite cheer-up songs, though my very favorite singer of it does not have a YouTube video available. (Eileen McGann, not to be confused with the Republican political operative of the same name. Her version is on Pandora if you wanna hear it.) “Another Train” written by English folkie Pete Morton, covered here by Sally Barker.

https://youtu.be/uEocCZALGWg

@Owlaboutit
As much or as little introduction as you feel like. There’s a welcome package around here someplace, I think.

@ FishyGoat
The house I grew up in had a shed out back, and for about 5 years a couple of gray foxes nested underneath it; every spring there was a litter of fox cubs wandering the place. The grey fox is the only canid that regularly climbs trees (AFAIK), and we could watch them practice on the pine tree out back. You’d see a little fox cub take a run up, scramble up the trunk and disappear in the branches. A few seconds later, a branch would shake, then a lower one, then another, and a fox would tumble out of the tree and shake itself while the next one took a run up. It was adorable.
There’s not a lot of really cheerful music on my playlists at the moment, but here’s some relatively upbeat tunes
Young Munro, a Scottish folk song covered here by the Cottars
My favorite of Cyril Tawney’s Engine Room ChantiesLean and Unwashed Tiffy (Other than Gray Funnel Line, but that one’s way less cheerful)
The tune that starts at 3:37 (Which hopefully will link dircectly) has been an earworm for me for weeks.

@Dalillama I am internally squeeing at work. LOL!

Our foxes were never as brave as the one we met a few years ago who had a broken leg. He eventually healed (not perfectly, but enough that he could hunt again) and would do things like steal my husbands shoes and try to run away with them (he’d drop them a few feet away). One time the deck door had opened and Mr. Fox (as we called him) wandered in and tried to wake up my husband (who was sleeping on the couch) by pulling on his pant leg with his teeth. 🙂

The current foxes (whom I assume are grandkits) will happily sleep on our deck but will run away otherwise. And we’ve never seen kits until they were practically adults.

I’ve been waiting for an open thread to share a personal revelation, then my broadband died and I found this four posts back.

So my story will wait for the next one.

In the meantime, I’m excited because on Monday I’m starting a new job, helping a friend with dog walking. It’s not what I’m trained for, it’s not my ideal job, but it is my ideal job right now, as it will get me out of my flat, paying attention and committing to something outside myself (plus money).

We had a dry run today and I can do this. For the first time in about a year I can do something, so yay.

Please forgive me for the giant reply comment, but I’m just now able to go through everything.

@PoM: Good luck! Hope you get it!

@kupo: Congrats on the new hair cut! I hope your bon bon dreams came to glorious fruition.

@IP: I hope your cold goes away soon. That sounds… that sounds not good. :/

@Cleverforagirl: Really nice to see you! Smart of you to take some time away from engaging with awful things. I’m really glad to hear that you’ve found a decent doctor :). Although it’s sad that “my doctor isn’t terrible about their patients’ weight!” is so rare and remarkable.

@Victorious Parasol: Glad to hear about your continuing recovery. It sounds like it’s a bit frustrating right now, and I’m sorry about that.

@Alpine: That is super cool!

@Oogly: It’s seriously impressive that you’ve gotten back up and headed back to school. Props. Glad it’s going well so far.

@Robert: It’s always lovely to hear about your family. I wish everyone could have dads that are as engaged, supportive, and caring as you and your husband seem to be.

@Jaygee: Best of luck during this time of transition. I hope that, once the dust settles, you’ll be in a better place than you were before. Thank you for sharng.

@Dalillama: I was all EFF YEAH after your first comment, and then I read your next one. Uuuuugh, what a giant pain. Still, at least the process is in motion, right?

@ej: Good luck! I hope you’ll give us an update once it’s submitted :).

@PI: It sounds like your new living situation is a vast improvement over where you were before. So happy for you. It took a lot of strength and determination to get yourself out of there.

So I finally managed to make this move real. As in, it’s happening in two days. These last few days I’ve been busy trying to get some work done (spoiler : I failed), fixing my sleep schedule (nope, failing too) and more generally running around from one place to the next to get the paperwork in order.

I finally managed to leave this fucking city, just about a year after it got me in a psychiatric hospital. And that’s five years of crippling depression acting like a bear trap and keeping me in this very room all the time – I’m hoping this at least will change. Clermont is a different kind of city and I feel more at home there, enough to actually go out. Not to mention that this time I’ll be living in the city proper, not an hour’s walk away.

I’m questioning my motives though. I think I only took on this school thing in order to move there, and I think I only really wanna move there to actually get a chance to see the few friends I have left… and I feel like I’ve drifted away from them so much during those five years, I’m not sure where this is going. Sometimes I don’t see them for six months straight because I don’t go out at all. Don’t know if we’re still as close as I want to believe.

The whole point is to break this cycle but I’m not sure the move is gonna fix anything. I dunno, maybe I’m just anxious because it’s getting close now ?

Enjoy some SCIENCE!

Enjoy a Li’l Mabel:

http://i.imgur.com/neE9IIA.png

What could she be so in awe about? Surely not the shading of the final piece, unless she’s in awe on how terrible it is, haha!

http://67.media.tumblr.com/25d94b077f9e9b3a35907f6a6c602e06/tumblr_odziosvMY01ubqfepo1_500.jpg

@Kat

Thanksies. I’m trying to not be too anxious about it.

Fun fact : I’m renting an apartment in a sort of housing project (link’s in French, sorry, I didn’t find an equivalent in English). They gave me one in the women’s building. There’s two entire floors reserved exclusively for women (it’s meant to be a safety measure because that’s where they put minors). And even the third and last floor, while technically inclusive, is only women at the moment.

MISANDRY !

They didn’t have a lot of empty apartments left, that’s why they gave me that one. Apparently it’s usually a deal-breaker for guys, that’s why they asked me if I was okay with getting that one. I had a major case of the gigglesies. To be honest, I’m actually glad about it. Given my track record of actual misandry, it’s for the best.

Given that school only starts a week after I get there, this is what monday and the six following nights will look like :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49VhygQwaXw

PS : @EJ

That place (not a club !) I mentioned before ? It looks pretty much like the video. I mean, the video was actually made in a pretty similar place. Also I think you’re the one who gave a shot at translating “bande de sales gueules”, right ? Well that’s the kind too. Ours are even more beautiful though. Okay, so we don’t have our own Lebanese rappers yet, but there’s a Palestinian who’s got some great texts, so close enough. I’m working on a few instrumentals for her with a friend – since her voice is pretty raspy and deep, like my own, we already have some experience on working with that. Sadly she also shares my habit of generally being a mess when it comes to writing, so there’s not a single complete text to work on right now, just a few loose sheets. We talked about joining forces on a song or two though, so hopefully we can manage to plug the holes into each other’s texts.

Yeah I’m definitely excited about that part of the move.

That sounds amazing, Sinkable John. I wish you the very best for that collaboration. Sometimes when you’re working with another person it creates an energy which makes the end product incredibly good.

Also, congratulations on managing to move. That’s a very difficult thing to do when depressed, and can really help. My fingers are crossed for you.

@Viscaria

Congratulations! Another heavy blow for MGTOWs.

@Viscaria

True and somewhat funny personal story:

I didn’t grow up with any kind of romantic tradition surrounding marriage. My parents have never been married, but they are still together. I never went to a wedding growing up, since all my uncles and aunts were already married, and most of the cousins were younger than me. As far as I know, I’m still the only cousin who’s married.

My wife came from the opposite tradition. She grew up in a conservative Christian home, where marriage was seen as an obvious life goal, the gold standard for success in life (for women, at least), etc. She was also heavily steeped in Hollywood romcom culture (and still is, in my opinion, but I wouldn’t say that to her face ;)).

When we first met online, we got “official” almost instantly. I went to visit her in the US a few months later, and it was pretty obvious to both of us that we were a great match. We were also both worried that things would cool down and we’d drift apart while living on different continents. We promised to make an effort to move in together, somewhere and somehow.

At that point, I was aware that she really wanted to marry eventually, and I understood that marriage was a big deal to her. However, I didn’t at all understand how important it was to propose in a romantic fashion, buy an amazing ring, pick the right moment, pop the question in the right way, and so on. I just wanted to show her that I was serious about our relationship, and I wanted to give her the opportunity to “be married by 25”, which she had mentioned as a personal goal (she was 24 at the time).

On my first visit to her parents’ house, we stayed in her younger brother’s basement bedroom (while he was away at college). Long story short, this was how I proposed: “So, uh, do you wanna get engaged?” We were in bed with the lights off, naked, 5 minutes after sex. This, I eventually learned, was NOT GOOD ENOUGH AT ALL.

She said yes, and the next day we went together to pick up an engagement ring for her. She picked out the ring and then she left the store, expecting me to buy it as a “surprise”. I didn’t have any American cash, so I had to go make a withdrawal from an ATM, wasting tons of money on conversion fees. I then walked out of the story, found my girlfriend, and handed her the ring, like “here ya go!” She was not happy. She said I should hold on to it and give it to her at a special occasion.

Now, I thought “later that evening” was a sufficiently special occasion. It was not. Eventually she accepted the ring when I gave it to her at a restaurant, with her parents and sister present.

She moved in with me in Sweden 7 months later, on NYE, and we started planning for a wedding the following summer. As the planning started coming together, she suddenly seemed hesitant about going through with it all. She kept saying maybe we should cancel the whole thing, or at least postpone it. I tried to figure out why, but she didn’t want to talk about it.

Then, one night, she lashed out at me for not proposing in a proper way. In a way, she thought we weren’t really, truly engaged since the proposal was so underwhelming. She said she didn’t want to get married, because we didn’t have a good proposal story to tell.

I spent the next few days googling “awesome proposal”, “breathtaking proposal ideas”, and so on, but I didn’t find any ideas that seemed doable and special enough. In the end, I stole the ring back and made a three course dinner at home, dressed up in my nicest suit and even wore a tie, and I gave her advance notice so she could get dressed and do her make up. I had set up the table with candles and nice napkins, turned off my phone and all.

We had a nice time eating and talking about all kinds of things. Everything was going well, and before the dessert I got up, went down on one knee by her chair, took out the ring and asked “would you marry me?”. She just looked at me like “………that’s it?” She said yes, but the rest of the evening was awkward and we didn’t talk any more about it.

When the day of the wedding came, we woke up together in the hotel. Several hours that morning were spent with my fiancée in a panic over how this wedding was a sham since we didn’t have any nice stories or a proper engagement. Eventually we had to get moving in order to set everything up for the wedding, so we had to leave it unresolved. The wedding itself was great, and almost everything went as planned.

Now it’s 5 years later. A few times per year, she will still bring up the botched proposal and I’ll have to spend some time reassuring her that I do love her, despite not proposing in the right manner. Sometimes when we’re having an argument, she’ll bring up the proposal as an example of things I’ve fucked up. I expect this to go on forever.

So, my point is, good luck with that whole thing. :p