Hey! LBGT people have just as much right to adultery as us heteros.
When I got back, it did take me a while to figure out how to integrate the parts of my life into each other.
I landed in new city, 3,000 miles away from my family or any part of my old life, with not much more than the address of the school I was enrolled in and a jumble of half-processed memories that barely fit together. My last time living in the US was hazy, distant, and gone forever. In any case I was standing suitcase in hand in a place I’d really never been. I also had the baggage of a couple of disparate lives that didn’t fit together, seemed very immediate and vivid, full of emotional meaning, and were utterly irrelevant to the new challenges ahead of me. Trying to figure out where i belonged in this new city, and find a place for these other lives, so suddenly over and so far away, in that narrative…it was rough, it took time.
With time, I’ve put my experiences in context. I’ve made friends, found people to commiserate about re-adjustment with, had some adventures of my own, watched my old students grow up and mature from afar via email, stopped freaking out about how expensive everything is, fallen in love, got on a career track, travelled in Africa as a tourist, saw the people who replaced me at my posts leave and return again and generally just gained the distance that can give you perspective. As you’d expect, the vividness has faded, and the emotional immediacy has been replaced with things that make a bit more sense in this context. Those parts of my life exist now as a part of a more coherent narrative, just one part of my life. It’s about right, about where it should be. But it was a journey.
But when I got back, yeah, it’s all I had and so my perspective was weird. How could it have been different? I’ve tried to be aware on these boards of how I’m contributing. And, for example, I haven’t posted a ton about my summer in sunny southern Africa because frankly I still don’t know much about Southern Africa than Harare is a nice town, Vic Falls is worth the trip, and a particular small village I worked in in South Africa is pretty dull but has a nice pre-school system. I’m still gonna post my experiences and opinions when they are appropriate, and no doubt plenty of people will disagree with me. But stop hounding me. I’ve got my flaws and I’ve got my unpopular opinions.
But I deserve to be able to post in threads without being hounded by completely unrelated personal swipes everywhere i go. You are hijacking thread after thread with your burning need to make it clear that you disapprove of my sex life and whatever. Stop.
I thought you all might like to know that it turns out that if you mute the volume on your Mac before rebooting, it stops it from making the “bong” sound. So it’s not broken after all! Huzzah!
Carry on.
That’s certainly true: maybe at some point you could address the fact your first post in the thread managed to miss the point so completely that it was painful to read AND dismiss the OP’s complaint?
I’ll be in my bunk.
First World Problems.
You know, strictly speaking, the Holocaust *is *anFWP. And a WPP, too.
Third Reich Problems.
You said it. Too, when I’ve gone through some bad stuff, it’s actually nice to hear someone who’s just having a normal sort of rough patch. Right after I was widowed and went back to work, a coworker stepped in a puddle on the way to work and her shoe got completely soaked. She was complaining about it, then apologized to me for complaining because my life was sucking.
I remember thinking, and saying, that I appreciated hearing about a normal problem instead of something so fucking fraught as my life had become. Looking back, I guess I also just wanted to be normal for a while, not someone’s pet pity project.
And if it had been my shoe, I would have been bitching up a storm because wet shoes completely suck.
It is particularly annoying when the person using it is a chronic complainer themselves. Or if, like comparing yourself to an orange Dalmation, you’re complaining but in a humourous way. I mean, obviously you know it’s a first world problem, but it’s still horrible as well as funny.
But she said:
(My bolding).
She never said “The dark-skinned people of the third world don’t have small woes like we do in the West.” She said exactly the opposite. And her first post in this thread, the one you jumped on, was about how she’d mostly heard it said by people against themselves (when using a brand-name coffee machine), which I suspect is referring to people in the US.
I don’t know if your rant has merit outside this thread (I haven’t read all of even sven’s posts), but in this thread it doesn’t.
It didn’t miss the point, she was just saying how she usually heard the phrase and how she took it. And seriously, you’re ticked because she “dismiss[es] the OP’s complaint”?
Look, obviously you and a few others have been on a low boil about sven for a while. Unfortunately, you kind of look like dicks because your drunken lead off hitter, MOL, went to the wrong ball park.
Sure it did. The OP complained about the dismissive use of FPP to minimize someone else’s complaints, and sven replied (paraphrased) “I only hear it used self-deprecatingly, tee-hee.”
Borderline threadshitting, from a serial threadshitter.
Oh come on. Are all the people coming in saying they haven’t heard it at all threadshitting? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying that you only hear a phrase used a different way.
even sven is sometimes cool and sometimes utterly ridiculous, like, well, humanity.
This just about sums it up.
FWIW, as the OP, I didn’t think Sven was thread shitting at all. Unless everyone who disagreed with me remotely in this thread were also thread shitting.
Oh no! Someone dismissed the OP’s complaint! In the Pit! What has the world come to?
Anyone who finds reasons to get all butthurt about the First-World-Problems meme is being ridiculous.
They’re not all funny, but some are hilarious (“My cat won’t keep his sombrero on … I’ll never make it to the front page”).
I’m sure people around the world have daily annoyances, but I think the difference is that people in the first world have only annoyances to deal with, whereas people in other countries have daily annoyances and serious shit like their government is shooting and killing them (e.g. Syria). It’s possible that having serious shit in addition to daily annoyances helps give you some perspective, whereas dealing only with daily annoyances makes you take them out of proportion. Or maybe not. Who cares? It’s humor, and most humor doesn’t hold up to logical scrutiny.
Bullshit. meanoldlady used her palpable dislike for even sven to take a great steaming piss on the thread. When she was called on it, she ran away. I don’t know either of these people, but i don’t think that even sven has done anything wrong, and meanoldlady is a gutless shit.
Now you’re just being silly and going too far the other way. My life hasn’t been “only annoyances” even if the government isn’t trying to kill me.
Read the OP, monkey-brain. It’s not about the meme, it’s about using the phrase “First World Problems” to dismiss someone’s complaint if it’s adjudged to be too minor. Which is rude AND stupid at the same time.
Agreed. I was being a bit hand-wavy in that description/explanation. As I said about my attempt at an explanation: “Or maybe not. Who cares? It’s humor, and most humor doesn’t hold up to logical scrutiny.”