I cannot believe you did this to me!

The BBQ Pit
1

I am SO glad I don’t have to live with you guys anymore. I am SO glad that I don’t have to hear you argue, or put up with your stupid questions, or tolerate your ridiculous double standards.

Yes, family, I’m talking about you. It’s enough that you have screaming matches five minutes after I walk in the door; it’s enough that I had to wait several minutes outside for someone to even OPEN the front door for me.

But no, it’s late and I want to look at my floppy disk full of poetry…and it’s not in the A drive.

It’s not anywhere around, in fact.

And then I remember that Mom just did a big cleaning purge of the computer room…

And I swear, if you have thrown three years of work away (90 poems), I will not visit here again. I won’t come home again until Christmas, when I absolutely have to leave the dorms. I don’t have ALL of them saved to my webpage or on the hard drive. Several of them still needed revising…

And you probably threw it all away. 3 GODDAMN YEARS’ WORTH OF WORK!!!

I know none of you understand what that meant to me, since none of you really care for the fine arts, you uneducated philistines, but you could at least have a little respect for the things I care about.

I told you soooo many times to leave that disk alone because it was my poetry. I know you went through and read it all; I’m not stupid. I just didn’t care.

You did really well up until I left the house.

I fucking hate this place. I hate the fact that you’ve never understood me, that you’ve told me you love me but you don’t even know who the hell I am. This was just the last straw.

I really hope you can pull this disk up from the depths of hell where you put it. I really really hope so.

Fuck you. I was going to bring this disk in so I could show the English professor who runs my program at the university my stuff. And you KNEW that.

Fuck you for not giving a shit about what I do. Fuck you. Fuck you. FUCK YOU.

2

I made my father swear on a stack of bibles that if anything of mine was in his was after I moved to California that he would move it and not throw it away. Fortunately, my mother (although also ignorant about what is and what isn’t important to me) has the self-respect and respect enough to honor that request and they just pile everything up in the attic for me to worry about when I come home next to ship it out here.

I feel for you, I really, really do.

Esprix

3

I empathise with you; I had similar feelings at your age. Hell, I moved out and lived in a car when I was 17 I was so disgusted with my folks. But I’d be interested in your opinion on that post in 20 years, especially if you have kids. I suspect it’ll be very different.

4

It’s just a parent’s gentle way of saying there’s no future in writing poems.

::runs for the fallout shelter::

5

I sympathize, totally. My parents weren’t as bad (on paper) as your’s sound, but they could be clueless at times. One thing they didn’t do, though (usually) was destroy any of my creative works. Well, at least my dad didn’t. My mom had a really BAD attitude about my artwork. (Horrors! I wanted to draw and paint, instead of play the piano, or do needlework! Sheesh - she could have gotten a kid who wanted to get high and be a juvenile delinquent. But somehow I was a disappointment because I wanted to draw and paint?!?)

No…no bitter memories there… :wink: Fortunately, my mom actually got over that. She apparently got abducted by UFOs one day, or had a brain transplant, or something. Because eventually she started to actually be “proud” of what I (and my sisters) do. See - people can change. Just so you know.

I disagree with Bill H. on one point. I doubt you’ll be so clueless as to throw out your kids’ POETRY, no matter how old you get. My dad knew that. He never threw anything that important away. It was my mom that had the problem.

Not all parents do this. Some parents respect and are proud of their kid’s artistic/creative achievements. Some have a clue.

6

Fortunately my sister recognizes this in my 4-year-old niece and is encouraging her by making us buy her different kinds of paints and creative stuff. She loves to draw, and I’m glad she’s letting her do so (this is good for my Evil Sister, who is usually a bitch).

I think it’s called menopause, combined with “empty nest” syndrome. :slight_smile:

Esprix

7

yosemitebabe wrote

I don’t want to get thrown into the opposite side of this; as I said I really empathise.

But… Many things are possible here, including
a) The parents didn’t throw the disk away. from the OP, I gather we don’t know yet.
b) The parents threw away an unlabeled or badly labeled disk. It’s not their fault that it wasn’t backed up and left around carelessly, in a room that sounds like a “public” family room.

I was really commenting on statements like

As I say, I suspect in time, Nocturne will view the relationship differently.

Or not. Plenty of people hold that stuff to their grave.

8

Not to pile on – and I agree that deliberately throwing away something you don’t understand or haven’t ensured is truly trash is a Very Bad Thing – but I would place a small portion of the blame on Nocturne’s shoulders, in that any important work that’s not backed up is a disaster waiting to happen. Making backup copies saves you not only from well-meaning-but-ignorant family members, but also from truly malicious family members, inopportunely-placed table legs, inopportunely-placed magnets, and random media failure.

I hope the disk turns up, Nocturne. Good luck.

  • Rick
9

I have no sympathy for anyone who keeps their life’s work on a single floppy disk with no backup copy.

10

Best of luckk finding it, but you are aware of how often floppy disks fail, or become corrupt?

When I was working in the computer lab, I would get somebody every day or two who’d just lost their moderation project/senior project/very important paper on a screwed-up disk. Or hadn’t saved in on the hard drive when the PC crashed. So…for the love of god, back things up!

(of course my mad computer skills…failed to save them 9 times out of 10)

11

::Raises hand:: I moved out of my Mom’s house in Setember of 1982. I am married but we don’t and will never have kids. In retrospect, in every case where my parents and I had a major disagreement, I was right. They gave me so much shit over stupid, stupid stuff. Nothing was ever good enough. Life sucked sucked sucked up until I left home. Things have gotten steadily better since that date. I love my life now.

Ninteen years later my parents admit that they were mistaken about most of that stuff. In fact, they ask me for advice. They love my “individuality” and respect that I stick to my morals. They are ridiculously proud of me.

Hang in there. It will get better. Years ago I gave my parents ground rules under which I would see them. If they violated them, I would leave. Immediately. Once we established mutual respect, things got much better.

Haj

12

Nocturne, hon, I totally understand. 'Tis the reason I live many, many miles from any relation of mine.

Tell you what, if things get worse then you are welcome to stay with Mr. Bobkitty and I during the holidays… we can commiserate on bad, evil families, watch terribly artsy films, and have lots of fattening foods. :slight_smile:

I hope you find the disk, I really do.

-BK

13

Nocturne, I can relate to family not understanding you (see my thread whining about my big sister if you like). Some people here have said it will get better as you get older, and it might (I’m almost 35, though). What worked for me, though, is trying not to care what my family thinks (note the “trying”), and keeping my life mostly separate. My family are not the people I go to for support or positive feedback - they don’t seem to know me very well, and they don’t mind saying negative things when it is just as easy to say positive ones. I go to my friends and fiance for the good stuff - these people give me the lift that I need when I’m down and just need someone to remind me that I’m good, talented, smart, okay, whatever. It’s a shame, but not everyone can count on their family to give them the support they should, but then we find ways to get it somewhere else.

14

Well, no one seems to know where it’s gone.

And yes, it was labeled, with a sticker that said “poetry” on it.

Good thing: I have a great deal of the work on it written down in notebooks. A few poems are on my website. I even found a second floppy with a handful of the poems on it.

Bad thing: I had poems on there that I won’t be able to replicate.

The computer room is pretty much the family’s room, even though only my sister and I actually USE the computer. She and I rarely move each other’s stuff and never throw anything away.

It was either my mom or my dad, and I’m putting bets on my mom.

To those of you who told me to have backups: well, I sorta did, just not for all of it.

To those of you who have expressed sympathy: thank you.

To bobkitty: I might move in. :slight_smile:

15

Nocturne don’t give up yet. The poems are still there; they’re in you.

Semi-pro writer talking here. Yes, you can’t recreate the exact words. Yes, they’re probably gone forever. But you’re still here and you’re still writing.

Two stories to let you know you’re not alone:

**Ernest Hemingway. **Before he became Papa, he was a poor schlub writing for a newspaper as their Paris correspondent. He had written a bunch of short stories thus far, but nothing published. While visiting in Germany, he asked his wife to bring him from Paris a suitcase containing the manuscripts.

She got to the station, set the case down on the platform, and wandered off. When she came back, it was gone.

Everything he had written was in that case. Oh, he had made carbon copies, too (this was in an age before computers; ask your grandfather about that time). They were in the suitcase too.

(Actually, he had a few stories that weren’t in the case, but you get the point.)

An even more extreme was in the case of Thomas Carlyle, who had written a history of the French Revolution. He took part of the manuscript with him to a friend’s house, and the maid there burned the manuscript trying to start a fire. Carlyle was rather philosophical about his manuscript being destroyed. He went back and wrote it again.

The same impulses that fired your imagination to create those poems are still in you. Let 'em do it again.

16

Ack. I can sympathize with you on this one, Nocturne, having lost disks before, and having had parents who lack the decency to even show at the public readings I did during high school (which were, to me, a Very Big Deal). However, I can promise that it will get better. My dad, who has up until recently been an engineering-based asshole (no offense to engineers :wink: ) has finally started realizing that writing well is a really big deal, and praiseworthy. He even attempted to read some of my short stories! Maybe it’s going to take your parents longer than that, and maybe they need to review some Sesame Street type courses on respecting others’ property. . .but they will eventually come around. And fuck 'em if they don’t.

And to the person who claimed poetry will take you nowhere in life: Bite me :stuck_out_tongue:

17

I really do feel for you, but everytime I read yet another post about asshole parents, I remember to give my mom a hug the next time I see her (which is often) and e-mail my dad a big “I LOVE YOU”!

I must have really lucked out in the parent department.

18

I really hope you find that disk. If not, I’m sure that there’s more where that came from.

My mom also refuses to listen to anything I say. She means well, but it’s like she has a mental wall in her her head whenever I ask her not to do something or say something to anyone else.

19

This wasn’t family but I trusted a friend with a disk years back who wanted to see what advanced BASIC programs and DOS BATCH shortcut files I wrote. He wanted to learn some stuff from them. I told him I wanted it back since it was the only one I had. Why no back-ups? Well the computer at home was not compatible with the 3 1/2 disks that the school’s PCs used. I figured this person would give it back to me within a day or two since he only wanted to borrow it and would return it quickly. Well, he left it in school where he was starting to teach and the “students” got it and erased it on him. Asshole!!! I will never lend something to someone without having a backup myself.

20

Nocture, I can sympathise!!

In my teen years, I had a running battle with my younger brother over the computer. While he was running around getting disks from anyone and everyone and installing programs of dubious quality on the computer all the time (on our 40 meg hard drive!), I was stuck cleaning up after him, removing the viruses he always managed to get along with the games, and making backups of all the stuff we actually wanted to keep. I used to keep two copies of every disk - one copy that we would actually use in the computer, and one to be filed away in case the working copy died. There came a day when the virus my brother managed to get on to the computer damaged so many of the files that we had to format and start again. It was after I’d discovered that nothing could be saved but before hitting format that I discovered that my brother had lent out, copied over or just somehow lost every single backup disk I’d made. I swear I could have killed him in that moment. Years of everything we’d ever done on the computer, lost for good. Eventually, we managed to get some copies of some of the software, but our originals and the backups of our originals were gone.

My mother and I never saw eye to eye either. What she called “junk” and “boxes of useless paper”, I called “my manuscript” and “a box full of poetry I’d written”. One day I came home from school to find all of it gone. I was about 12, I think, and I was heartbroken. Mixed messages - on the one hand, she encouraged me to write, and tried to get me to submit my poetry to be published, on the other she never even asked me what the “bits of paper” in the boxes were, and threw them away without looking.

I don’t write poetry anymore (I just can’t), and she gets all sorrowful and tells me how talented I was and how sad it is that I don’t do it anymore. I can’t help but wish I still had some of my childhood poetry to look back on.