'No' Means November Rants

There’s an article being reposted around that started on the Gawker network, written by a woman working double-shifts trying to make ends meet. She talks about how cooking and dirtying dishes attracts bugs to where you’re living and how you need the time and energy to both cook and clean before you fall asleep, how she’d buy a bunch of frozen burritos for a couple bucks just to get protein and try to fill her stomach.

If you’re in a desperate situation and your kids are miserable, and you may not have the skills to cook well or anything to cook on where you’re living - I can’t really begrudge a bit of money spent on fast food.

Studies have shown that (going by memory here) welfare fraud is 1% or less, so the actual cases of abuse are damned few.

My work here is done…

I have to work Wednesday evening at our grocery store. I fully suspect I’ll be heading to the bar directly afterwards.

My mother: “If **TOS **didn’t have so many grills and was outside grilling all the time, maybe that mosquito wouldn’t have bitten him.” That’s all I gotta say about last weekend.

I agree. I’m always reminded of a line from the poem Desiderata. ‘If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter.’ Given how many people seem to have a penchant for being that way regardless, it’s probably best to not add fuel to the fire.

Terry’s Dark Chocolate Orange makes the best hot chocolate - just sayin’. :slight_smile:

Could you sit down with the choirmaster and have a discussion about whether or not you should continue, since it is a voluntary commitment and you won’t always be able to make it, and if that isn’t good enough for her, you’ll go your separate ways now?

Could you send your mother my way so I can have a very polite conversation with her about using her Goddamned brain when speaking to you?

Oh, purplehorseshoe, that’s got to be one of the most WTF statements I’ve ever heard. I’m so sorry. :eek:

Stupid thing to say, but she’s trying to rationalize his death and is in the Denial phase.

I joined the SD because someone IRL figured out my username on the message board I used to frequent and would actually ask me out loud in Cubeville about things I posted. I didn’t feel safe or anonymous there. You guys don’t know me from Adam so I feel better here.

So I got bored one day and went back to old board just to kill time. Changed my username. Well she figured it out pretty quickly so there goes my anonymity again - looks like you guys are stuck with me here. :stuck_out_tongue:

**FUCK **your mother.

Ah, that’s a rational, drama-free, sensible solution, so sadly I’m almost entirely incapable of doing it. But thank you for the suggestion, I’ll bear it in mind if I’m feeling sane-ish next time I see her :wink:

Christ, purple, that’s awful. Not that it makes things better, but Chimera is probably spot-on with that guess.

On a smaller issue, I’ll put this here since it’s more related to inlaws than work - I’m transferring to a different department at work and they’ll be looking to hire a replacement. I have an inlaw who has done similar work before and has been out of work for over a year. I believe this is by choice, contrary to claims of job-hunting, as she claimed ignorance of the temp pool at her previous workplace when she had worked with said temps frequently. (Either that or she was actually fired for cause rather than being laid off due to budget cuts, and the institution won’t rehire her.) She is a medical conspiracy theorist and woo-peddler which would make her a poor candidate for my job, and I am hoping against hope that she doesn’t ask about the position or ask me for a recommendation. Expecting an awkward Thanksgiving…

I’m fairly positive somebody must have covered this somewhere upthread, but fuckity damn, coworkers–no Christmas music before Thanksgiving. And if you must listen to it, don’t sing it out loud so it gets stuck in my head.

Also thinking of protection of the rest of the people in her life. I know this doesn’t help PHS but she’s trying to find a reason why it happened so she can both be sure it won’t happen to you and to stop worrying about every single thing that could possible kill someone. When you can reach out and touch someone that the 1% probability hit it’s hard to feel safe.

Now, saying it out loud to you makes her deserve everything that everyone has ready to do to her but thinking it is just the way our stupid brains work.

This really pissed me off. Laser Toys Can Damage Eyes: Report

Basically these are high powered blue lasers you can get online. OK, sure, people are idiots for screwing with these things in the first place. All you probably have to do is go to youtube to find any number of morons endangering either themselves or others. And this isn’t even mentioning the danger to air traffic from green lasers.

And considering the fact that you can get stuff shipped directly from overseas, I’m not really sure how you really protect people from themselves. [shakes head] IDK. I just hate to see things like this. It really bums me out.

I will hold her while you slap her. Deal?

Thank you, kindly, and I’m not sure I deserve it. She was pissed at me because, frankly, I was less-than-sober by the time she showed up. In my defense, I’d been drinking because, well, I knew I was going to spend the evening with someone who says things like that to me in the first place.

My mistake: inviting my parents to dinner at my home. Aaaand drinking while listening to NPR and cooking. Lesson(s) learned.

I know that back when I was on food stamps, my relatives would send Christmas money either ‘for the kids’ or ‘for something nice and Christmassy.’ I’d have felt like I was scamming them if I hadn’t followed the suggestions.

DAMN! So sorry you had to hear that. Assuming she’s still alive, I salute your restraint.

Maybe smoking a bowl rather than drinking would be one way to go. You’ll laugh at everything they say and they’ll think you’re wonderful. Well, either that or they’ll think you’re crazy and will be too afraid to criticize you. But it’s a win either way. :wink:

Oh, tell me about it- same thing for country dancing for me. Every group run by someone who doesn’t seem to appreciate different time demands (and levels of skill). And we don’t even ‘perform’ in public.

**{{purplehorseshoe}}
**
A follow-up to what I posted before: One of my astrology-believing friends was posting on Facebook about some things that had gone wrong for him today. I was so tempted to say that things were going wrong because maybe Mercury was in the wrong part of the sky. :wink: