Whining: “My parents refused to by me a 2001 Jag, so now I have to use last year’s model!”
Real Problem: “My mother beats me every night.”
I’m sure you’ll find a line in there someplace.
sigh
You too, eh.
Wow.
I read that thread Drop, and while you might have come off sarcastic, you were right.
Kids DONT have a right to privacy - not a legal right, a moral & ethical right??? Perhaps. I think it depends on the kid.
I dont feel sorry for your kids. Not at all. I wish my parents had been more involved in what I was up to. I wish my boys had a dad like you who gave a rats ass.
I dont understand this cutting business. I just totally dont get it. Why mutilate yourself? I really cant fathom what the appeal is. It seems to be so common too! WHY???
Why do all the teen dopers seem to be cutting themselves?
Does this mean that this place attracts self destructive kids?
Are cutters more intelligent?
It seems to be mainly a girl thing…what do self mutilting boys do?
I really dont get it. I mean I REALLY dont understand.
As far as personal privacy as a teen:
Here is something you have to know - NEVER EVER write anything down that you dont want read.
Simple enough.
No, you dont have to keep a journal to pour your heart into blah blah blah… Its the same as talking out loud as opposed to thinking to yourself: dont say it out loud if you dont want anyone to hear it!
Even if your folks/siblings/friends wont snoop: what if you get hit by a bus tomorrow? Do you want your poor bereaved family reading about your sexcapades? Or whatever you really thought about them? Maybe you ‘hated’ one of them for something, wrote it down, and die before you can make up. Nice legacy.
Before anyone freaks about that - I want you to know that I have nothing in my possession that I would be embarrassed to be seen if I was killed/hospitilized/evicted… whatever.(except a vibrator - and dammit! I am a 31 year old single woman!! I am entitled!!)
You know, its funny… most of the anti-parent stuff came from people with no kids… the ones with kids largely backed Drop…
When I was a little kid, I hated to go to bed. I loved staying up late. And I loved salt. Lots of salt.
When I grew up, I was gonna stay up all night, sleep all day, and eat buckets of salt and chips all day every day. With dip.
And I did… till I had kids. Then I had to sleep at night to be up with them all day. I couldnt eat crap all the time - I had to demonstrate good nutrition. I couldnt get high or drunk every night either.
If you think you are a grown up at 18 - forget it. I am still waiting to stop ‘growing up’. My beleifs and feelings about stuff change as I age…
So as Drop said so eloquently: when you have kids you will understand.
(if someone can explain the cutting stuff: I really would like to understand)
When I was a kid, all we had was 1978 model Jaguars. But you never heard us complain.
You kids are spoiled.
Just popping in to provide a link for more information on cutting, the causes, effects, and treatments. It’s a serious compulsion, and not one that is usually controllable without help. It’s hard to understand because it seems so odd to hurt yourself without trying to commit suicide, but a few minutes research on the site I listed will yield a lot of good info.
http://directory.google.com/Top/Health/Mental_Health/Disorders/Self_Injury/
Zette
Happy New Year!
I read the thread in question, and have a question to ask dropzone. Earlier in the thread, you said things like:
and
Please tell me you were exaggerating your point of view to get it across. 'Cause some of that stuff… I’ve read lots of your posts and you strike me as a person I’d like. Clarify, please.
If you really feel that way, though… ah, I’ll wait to use all my witty insults 'till after you reply ;).
Dropzone, I’ve cut my father as far as possible out of my life. I talk to him when I can’t avoid it. He has permanently fractured the relationship between him and me, and his treatment of me drove me out of the house a year ago. I will not share any further personal problems with him, and I have no regrets about this position. And to merit this he had to treat me with one-fifth of the viciousness and bloodthirstiness with which you treat your children.
My mother, on the other hand, treated me like she should - no snooping through my personal papers, no ultimatums, no verbal abuse (and especially no telling my brother that he’s the favourite son). And I’m at her house right now. (Dad is skiing.)
All I can tell you is, as much as you like to think you’re doing right by your kids, you are setting yourself up for a long and lonely retirement. You can lose your kids by overprotectiveness as much as by apathy - and even by the same ways.
Sorry. For
read
.
You’re pissed because of all the bitching and whining. Then proceed to out bitch and whine everyone else. Yeah, go on. That girl really got to you, huh.
As strange as it seems even to me, I agree with your first paragraph, dropzone.
But I think that there is an explanation for all of the things you mention.
The struggle to survive is a fundamental factor of the human condition. If that is removed, we are no longer living, we are merely existing. As civilization progresses to the point where we no longer have anything to struggle against, we have to make up things to struggle against in order to maintain equilibrium. This is why scabs are picked at to maintain bleeding.
In any society where people’s big problems are which pair of shoes to wear today and what flavor of coffee to have with which type of readily available, prepackaged, prepared breakfast, it is inevitable that those people will continue to invent ills to plague them. Some people will be affected by this to a more severe degree than others, but overall everyone will come up with things to struggle against in order to feel, well, human.
This is why rich people are miserable anyway.
This is why nice girls date the bad boy.
This is why life is always in a state of flux: either going into a crisis, in a crisis, or coming out of a crisis, with small plateaus of “normalcy” and happiness in between.
I suppose there are others who realize what Buddha was trying to teach circa 400 BC: Life is suffering.
The sooner you realize this, the happier you will be, since you will no longer be surprised when everything turns to shit and sucks. You will no longer go through life expecting everything to be shiny and happy, and be sad when it isn’t. You won’t be shocked at the degree of inhumanity in the world, you will no longer feel bad about yourself when someone else does something immoral. You won’t have to try to be complete anymore, because you will know this is impossible. You will realize that you don’t need to bear the weight of the world on your shoulders, and that you don’t need to make up a god to do it for you.
You are now free to move about the aircraft, as you are no longer restrained by the illusion of the perfect world in which you do not live.
Everyone knows that utopia literally means “no place”. All of it’s other meanings are derived from this, and with good reason.
So fuck off with your crisis situations and teen angst. They do you good, but you must realize that they are only to keep things in perspective in a world of e-this and
e-that and instant gratification. We are a bunch of hunter-gatherers up to our necks in pink, cherry-scented industrial waste. The kicker? It’s still industrial waste and it tastes like shit and makes you feel even worse.
If you ever get the oppurtunity to hear a geezer’s story, any story that starts with “Back in my day…” you may want to shut your festering gob and listen. Many of these people had things to actually complain about, and still do. Today, we have no war, nothing to protest, nowhere to go and too much to say about things we know nothing about.
In a generation of cry-babies raised by jaded yuppies raised by baby-boomers it’s not surprising that people are going to be all kinds of fucked up. Add to that a ton of pressure to be “normal” and you get what we’ve got now:
A bunch of people who were promised that life was a bowl of cherries, crying over a bowl of dog-shit. Or maybe dog-food, some people are luckier than others.
Of course, this is all just my opinion, I could be wrong.
PS. kevja, until you learn to read, (the OP, the thread, or maybe even just in general) tell whoever types for you to get you nice tall glass of shut-the-fuck-up, instead.
Just because it won’t be surprising that Jean Chretien is going to keep fucking up the country doesn’t mean it won’t piss me off or that the NDP won’t keep fighting against it. By the same token, just because suffering is inevitable doesn’t mean that it oughtn’t to be railed against. Our lives can never be perfect, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be better.
And that’s exactly part of what I’m saying. However, as long as people don’t realize the first part, the realization of the second part will remain elusive.
I’m not saying give up and be nihilistic. You seem to have missed the point entirely. I am saying that you must know where you are before you can plot a course to where you want to be. And that you may not get there even so. And that you can be okay wherever you end up, if not where you are.
The point is that even though life can never be perfect, it won’t get any better as long as you’re expecting it to be so.
Excuse me, Lexicon, but
and
and
sounds an awful lot less sympathetic than what you claim you said. Moreover:
Bullshit. At any given time, forty wars are in progress around the world. The planet is ceasing to be capable of supporting human life. The Help Wanted section of my newspaper has ten pages of ads for telemarketing jobs and not much else. Average student debt has reached $25 000. And my government just spent seven years cutting $60 billion from health and education and social assistance and turned around and gave $100 billion in tax cuts to bank presidents and huge corporations.
Make up your mind. Things are either fine or they’re not fine. And if they’re not fine, quit bitching about people who say things aren’t fine.
Hey, Lexi, have I ever told you I like how you think? And it’s because you think like an Anthropologist. We may have a lot of material goods, but we’re just monkeys trying to keep our edge.
LaurAnge, OF COURSE I was “exaggerating (my) point of view to get it across.” I have to listen to the same whining offline as on, so I got pissed. And, if I’m the monster others are making me out to be, why do I put up with the whining until I can’t take it anymore and strike back with SNOTTY SATIRE? Of course, since all that I said is TRUE snotty satire, I can gloat about how the whiners can’t do anything about their situation! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!
matt_mcl, you lost the election. Badly. Get over it. 
[sub]OTOH, you are at least an ACTIVE young person. You don’t just GRIPE, you actually try to CHANGE THINGS. For that I congratulate you. Now, get off my ass.[/sub]
zette, thanks for the links. Thankfully, my kids don’t seem to cut, finding their outlet in driving their father crazy, and I understand why I do my own self-destructive things, but I may look there to get a better understanding why others might.
Uh, matt? That’s a Dennis Miller rant.
I don’t think Lexicon wrote that. At least, I THINK it’s Dennis Miller.
Let me break it down for you.
What I “claim to have said” was not sympathetic in the least. I don’t have any dichotomy going on at all, get it? The very idea that
is ridiculous. Life is constantly changing and there are always elements of both good and bad, and like I said, life is in a constant state of flux.
Further, allow me to introduce myself as someone who is not so naive to think that there are no wars going on in the world. A statement more consistent with my meaning would have been “My generation has no great World War with which to gauge our existence.” but I didn’t say that. Oops. Sorry. But that is what I was talking about. Besides, I’m an American. While I do have to deal with things like this:
just the same as you do, I do not have anything by which to measure that which I should find crucial to my existence. There are no carbombs going off in my street because there are people who want to kill me who live a few miles away. There is not a war that has been going on for hundreds of years in my backyard. I don’t have to contend with these things, so I could make mountains out of every mole-hill problem that arises in my life. But I don’t. A shitload of people do. And that’s the bullshit, my friend. Instead of considering a banker’s tax cuts and shitty health care and in spite of increasing consumer taxes, people bitch that their latte tastes stale.
Look, I’m not humanitarian of the year, but I think that there is nothing that is going on in the lives of several hundred million people so horrible that they shouldn’t be happy. It’s all a matter of perspective, and that’s all I’m trying to say.
You can take issue with my opinions all you want, that’s not what bothers me. I don’t need to make up my mind, my eyes are wide open. I can tell you, things are not fine. And more importantly (you may want to pay attention at this point, it is crucial to what I am trying to get across) they are not supposed to be fine.
I don’t know what makes you think that I’m
I’m not. In fact, I am one of the people who are saying things aren’t fine. I am also taking it a step further, in that they aren’t meant to be fine. If we could all adjust our perspective to focus more on the points that you bring up (see second quote) instead of all our petty little problems maybe we could do something about them.
Everyone has a ton to say about what some rapper says on an album and how mommy won’t let me borrow the car. Everyone wants to complain about how they got honked at on the road, and how they had to come to work on a holiday. With all things that you mention, and more, going on in the world, one would think that it would be easy to see one’s problems as small in comparison, eh? But no. Just so: Your problems are your own, but it makes more sense to me to realize that they are not what define you. I don’t see what’s so complicated about this. Your problems have only as much power as you grant them.
I don’t see why you have taken issue with me, matt_mcl. Not that it matters. I feel that no matter what I say, you’re going to have some stupid comment about it. If you want to get into some gratuituous flaming, then fine. Start another thread about it. I’ll be there.
But it’s going to be hard, becuase you seem to me to be someone with whom I have no problem. You seem to be one of those people who are well-adjusted enough to realize that a flat tire on the freeway is not the end of the world and it’s something you can handle and get on with your life.
You seem like the kind of guy who doesn’t sweat the small stuff but still wonders where we’re going and why we’re in this handbasket.
Why you are even disagreeing with me (I don’t think you really are, at that) puzzles me.
But oh well. If I gave a fuck about what every stranger thought about my personal philosophy I’d be even crazier than I’m credited to be.
Honestly, I think we agree, you and I. It’s only that it is beyond my meager wordsmithing to adequately convey my meaning.
But like I said, who cares?
In any case, dropzone put it nicely when he said
Personally, I like the way I put it:
But whatever. Matt_mcl conveniently left that part out when he quoted me, but oh well. Part of me thinks that matt is just looking for a fight.
And lastly: Guinastasia, I don’t know if you were joking, but if that was a Dennis Miller rant, it is an incredible coincidence. For the ever-fucking record, I wrote every letter of my post off the cuff whilst sitting here at work enjoying some server down time. Please don’t insult me by implying that I would be stupid enough to plagerize one of my idols. If the smily is supposed to indicate that you were joking, then thanks! Having something I wrote compared to someting Dennis Miller would say is a huge compliment to me. And it doesn’t happen that often, in fact, it’s only happened once other than now, if it happened now at all.
**PS. kevja, until you learn to read, (the OP, the thread, or maybe even just in general) tell whoever types for you to get you nice tall glass of shut-the-fuck-up, instead. **
I laughed out loud. Not a ‘LOL’ but a “Haaaaawww!” sitting alone in my living room - on the floor - too lazy to get a chair, at a quarter to one in the morning.
“A nice tall glass of shut the fuck up” (laughing again)
I hope you dont mind if I use it on my brother (the intellectual snob) next time he gets wound up.
Night all.
Lex:
Right, but:
-
I don’t think Hypergirl is sweating the small stuff. Her problems aren’t exactly global in scope, but from what I’ve read, she has a legitimate and serious beef with her mom’s parenting practices, of the kind I had with my own father. A young adult with serious emotional problems and a mother who’s determined to destroy any shred of trust her daughter may have in her when she needs support the most is not just bitching about stale latté.
-
Bitching about stale latté doesn’t preclude trying to change the world. I was grumpy about the long bus ride to Washington and I was grumpy about the institutions I protested against when I got there. What makes you think that Hypergirl is unaware of the problems in the rest of the world? What makes you think she thinks her own problems are more important? Even in my darkest hours, I’m aware that my problems are not as important as the fighting in Israel, but that doesn’t make the pain any less severe. (It usually worsens it, in fact, since I get a nice fat guilt trip on top of everything.)
-
Hi Opal.
I’m not picking a fight. (I rarely pick fights, being the sissy that I am.) I’m just saying that I think that certain people are being excessively vicious to emotionally vulnerable people and speciously cloaking their vitriol (or having it cloaked for them) in big-picture worldliness.
Alright. I think one thing dropzone is trying to get across is that parents should have a healthy disrespect for the opinions of their children. Sure, listen to the kids. But the parent has to play the alpha-primate. You can’t let your kids run the asylum, that job should be the parent’s.
Look, as a parent you’re going to have to make decisions that will make your kids dislike you. But that can’t paralyze you, you’ve got to do what you think is right and hope that someday they’ll come around. And even if they never come around, you’ve still got to do what you think is right, even if your kids hate you.
Now, if the parents are psychos and child-abusers we are talking a different story.
But all you kids keep talking about trust. Well, the only way a parent can earn a child’s trust is if the parent does the right thing. You can’t earn your kid’s trust if you cave in. Sure, every parental rule can be questioned, as a parent you constantly have to question yourself. And a parent can change their minds. But they can’t cave just to get their kids to like them. Your children will have lots of friends, it won’t do them any good to gain another friend if they lose a parent in the process.
Then well met, Ser Knight, as I am not even talking about hypergirl, god bless her. I don’t know where you got this idea. I never mentioned her, and I think that her beef with her mom is a very real and legimate one. I guess I should have put
[slight hijack]
at the beginning of my initial post in this thread, because I was talking about dropzone’s first paragraph and not the rest. I guess saying “Dropzone, I agree with your first paragraph” and going from there was not specific enough for you. I will try to be more implicit in the future to avoid such misunderstandings between you and I. In short, you do not need to defend hypergirl or her actions or issues. At least, not from me, since I am not referring nor have I ever refferred to her in any post I have ever made.
So, to reiterate:
-
I was never talking about hypergirl.
-
I never said that a small gripe precludes larger ones. It’s when the small ones are all that are there that I get my dander up. That’s a lot of dander.
-
Hi Opal.
-
You and I are very similar in our views, you just seem to think that I am inveighing at hypergirl when she and her plight do not enter my mind at all. I hope everything works out, but in my posts in this thread, I am not talking about her or anything she posted.
I am presenting my views about society at large, and was set off by dropzone’s first paragraph in the OP. I don’t know if I’ve made this clear: Everything I wrote is not about hypergirl, you chivalrous dick!* In fact, nothing I wrote is about hypergirl. Just in case I forgot to mention it or you missed it the first 136 times: I am in no way referring to hypergirl.
I think before you can begin to try to grasp what I am trying to say, you need to get hypergirl off your mind. I think that you need to re-read my posts and think about your guilt trips resulting from your awareness of the world’s shitiness.
Of course, as in item two in the above list, small problems do not preclude large ones. But that is only the tip of the iceberg.
*“chivalrous dick” comment to be taken well salted. I despise smilies and refuse to use them when at all possible.