Winter's a-coming! Season of Death Mini-Rants

The BBQ Pit
341

I think you should test the literalness of that assertion.

You said it was natural for kids to scream. It is, in the same way that it’s natural for them to shit their pants. As a parent, it’s your job to socialize your children, which includes training them out of things that are natural but not appropriate for polite company.

If your kid shat herself on the lawn, would you say, “Oh well, kids will be kids”?

You know what else is natural? Smacking someone upside the head when they annoy you. But I bet you wouldn’t be too happy if I were to slap your daughter on the back of the head every time she screamed outside.

I have nothing against loud noises. I’m bothered by screaming in specific. Yelling and shouting are fine. Screaming is not.

And if your daughter is eight and can’t be taught not to scream unless there’s an emergency, I’m pretty sure that qualifies her as literally retarded. So, sorry for expecting more of her than she’s capable of. Good luck with the special education classes. I hope she eventually gains the ability to care for herself so she can lead a somewhat independent life.

Nope, I have no kids, because currently I want no kids. But, as usual, I do know what I’m talking about. This may come as a shock to you, but I actually was a child myself. For several years, in fact! And, as I’ve already mentioned, my mother had no problem training me (or my brother, or our friends) not to scream unless there was an emergency.

So, were we all that much smarter than your daughter? Or are you just a worse parent than my mother?

Awww, I’m touched! New title! Unfortunately, the whole thing wouldn’t fit. I hope you’re not too disappointed.

No, just those as deserve it. And you wouldn’t even have to hear them if you didn’t come into the area reserved for–wait for it–rants.

Does this mean you’ll go away now? Please do say yes.

Wait, she was eight a second ago. Oh my, do you have problems with numbers, too? Are these mental development problems something that run in the family?

Here’s a helpful hint for when you want to count past 10: take your shoes off! You’re welcome. :slight_smile:

Oh, great, so now everyone gets to be annoyed by the leaf blower *and *your little banshee. Why couldn’t you just egg his door like a normal person?

342

I have as little love for leafblowers as I do for screaming children. Way to encourage your daughter to stoop to his level, though. It’s possible that there was less-juvenile behavior you could model for her.

343

I was kinda behind you, LavenderBlue, when you clarified that you don’t consider it acceptable to let your kids scream non-stop, but the occasional shriek wasn’t going to garner any significant reprisal other than a “hey, knock it off” (at least I hope I read it right and that you do address it, while not reading them the riot act); however, you lost me when you said you encouraged your kid to scream in front of a neighbor’s house for five minutes over a leaf blower. That’s pretty nasty behavior for an eight-year old kid to engage in, when they ought to know better. Encouraging it seems like you’d encourage it other places, too.

Couldn’t you have called the homeowners’ association? I know they’re not the cops, but most people are usually pretty embarrassed when they get a nasty-gram from their HA.

Of course, my kids are hardly perfect. Hell, a few weeks ago, I posted a thread about my four-year old throwing a shit fit in a store. (I’m happy to say it hasn’t happened again - apparently the incident was memorable enough to leave an impression.)

344

Screaming is only for emergencies or pissing off a neighbor. Got it.

345

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that your reaction wasn’t, “Oh well, she’s four, that’s what four-year-olds do!”

346

Uh, no. I threw him over my shoulder and carried him out of the store with one hand while wheeling his sister’s stroller out with the other.

347

So, i managed to offend one of the regulars at our gym today by suggesting that he might like to put his weights away when he was finished using them.

We go to a great little neighborhood YMCA, and everyone is generally very friendly, and there’s a real no-pressure sort of attitude in the place. Plenty of people are a bit lazy at putting their weights away, and it’s not too unusual to come in and find a pair of dumbells lying next to one of the benches rather than back in the racks. For the most part, i don’t bother saying anything, partly because it’s not worth the aggravation, partly because i often don’t see who the actual culprit is, and partly because it’s often just as easy to just grab the damn things and rerack them myself.

But today was different.

The guy was doing deadlifts, and left the bar right in the middle of the fucking floor, right where other people walk, and where people are using the cable crossover and cable pulldown machines. At first i thought he had left it there temporarily, because he was cycling through three or four exercises, and he came back to it a couple of times.

But then he grabbed his keys and phone and headed for the door. I asked him if he was leaving, and he said yes. I then said, “Mate, are you really going to walk out of here and leave a barbell with 180 pounds of plates rights in the middle of the floor?”

He looked at me like i was speaking a foreign language. Well, i guess that was partly true. He’s a native Spanish speaker, but i also know that he speaks English just fine.

I repeated my question, and he still didn’t seem to understand what i was saying. So i said, “If you leave that there, someone else has to pick it up.” He started bluster a bit, and i said, “Look, you don’t have to pick it up, and i can’t make you pick it up. But someone has already tripped over it since you left it there [True - he even saw it happen]. I’m just saying that it’s not really fair to leave it for other people to deal with after you’ve left. You do what you want to do.”

His response?

“It’s a gym, man.”

“Well, yes,” i said, “it is a gym. And this gym, like just about every other gym i’ve ever seen, has a rule about putting your stuff away. As i said, you do what you want. I’m just saying that it’s not very considerate.”

I went back to my workout. He stood there for a couple of seconds, clearly annoyed, and then proceeded to put the bar away. I thanked him as he was on his way out the door, but he wasn’t very interested. I hate the angst that goes with confrontations like this, and you never know when someone is going to be offended enough to get aggressive. But a deadlift bar in the middle of the floor? No fucking way.

ETA:

And why is it that the inconsiderate jerkoffs at the gym are nearly always the huge guys, the guys who lift 100lb dumbells or 600lbs on the leg press? If my wife left her dumbells behind, at least it would be easy for anyone to move them. But moving this guy’s deadlift bar took him two separate trips across the gym, would probably have taken me three trips, and might have taken some people five trips, one for each component.

348

Shot From Guns,

Please don’t have any kids. Don’t live in a neighborhood with kids. You’re going to be very unhappy all the time if you do. My daughter is seven. She’s going to be eight soon. Some of her friends are eight and some are seven.

This is not 1840. My little girl will not be taught to sit in corner somewhere quietly embroidering and learning to be a little lady because people like yourself cannot deal with chidlren. I want her to go outside and play with her friends wearing pants. If she makes the occasional shriek or loud noise I’m not about to tell her that I will punish her severely over it.

The whole thing is rather ironic on my end as my daughter is very much a bookworm and would mostly rather sit in a corner reading quietly. But once in a while she likes to play with her friends and if they get a little loud you’ll just have to deal with it.

Everyone else,

I do not encourage my daughter to scream at all. In fact the very opposite most of the time. I tell her to use her indoor voice. But the neighbor in question is constantly running the goddamned leaf blower whenever she feels the neighborhood kids are getting a little loud. My daughter was literally crying because the goddamned noise was so loud. A little civil protest is not a bad lesson at all.

I am no longer speaking to her because she did so for three hours last year and called me a bad neighbor when I begged her to please not do that again in the future.

We have been told there is nothing we can do about it by the police and local officials. At least three other neighbors are furious with her over it. She does it all the time and does so deliberately. We have repeatedly begged her to stop it. She has refused.

Meanwhile she’s the one complaining that our children are too noisy.

Yeah right.

349

Thank you, mhendo, on behalf of whatever shin didn’t bang right into the stupid thing next.

350

Lavender, your neighbor sounds truly, soullessly, cocksuckingly awful. Doesn’t make your response any less immature. But a complete fucktard of a neighbor, nevertheless.

351

I admit it wasn’t exactly the most mature response on my part. But it felt good.

:smiley:

A child who is throwing a temper tantrum should be removed and reprimanded. A child who is merely playing outside and making the occasional loud noise should be admonished to tone it down a bit. They should not treated as if they’re offending the civil order and ruining the neighborhood.

352

See that, LavenderBlue? That’s a good parent. She understands that her job is to turn her children into productive members of society instead of spoiled shits, so when they do the things that kids do, she teaches them how they should act in public.

Good for you! If you lived anywhere near me, I’d make you a genuine offer to buy you the alcoholic beverage of your choice. (Or a non-alcoholic one, if it came to that.)

Because the point is to remind everyone else how strong they are.

Ah which would be why you said “But she’s seven and so are her friends.” Gotcha.

Where have I ever asked for this? Personally, I’d come running outside deliberately freaking out every time I heard screaming–to emphasize that SCREAMING MEANS EMERGENCIES. And if she couldn’t figure it out, she’d get to come inside for the day, and try again tomorrow.

Okay, we already know you have developmental challenges. But are you so retarded that you literally cannot read the myriad times that I have said that it’s okay to be loud, and shout, and yell, as long as you don’t scream?

Look, I even made that bit really, really “loud,” so that you can’t possibly miss it this time, unless you’re also blind. And even then, you’d be using a screen reader that would speak it out for you.

Yes, just like when Rosa Parks punched a white guy so he’d stand up and let her sit down, or when Martin Luther King, Jr., led people on marches to burn down white churches.

Oh wait… I keep forgetting, you’re a fucking moron. If you want to punish the neighbor, punish the neighbor–don’t bother *everyone else *in the area, too.

353

Shot From Guns,

Kids scream once in a while. Get the fuck over it or you’re going to be just as unhappy as the idiot neighbor and her overused leaf blower. You’re making ridiculously meaningless distinctions. I doubt she heard us over her damned leaf blower anyway.

My daughter is a very well behaved little girl about to be eight. She reads and does math three grades higher than her current grade level. Calling her (and her equally well behaved friends) spoiled little shits because she (or they) occasionally let out a scream or a shriek when playing hopscotch or frizbee is completely absurd.

Sheesh. Take your meds and relax a little. Don’t visit the local playground or you’ll probably completely lose it.

BTW, the noisiest kid around here screams a lot actually. But he has low grade autism and can’t help it. I pity the idiot who raises a stink about it to his parents.

354

Thanks for continuing to prove that you’re a shitty parent raising a shitty child. Because that’s what happens when you let them do whatever they want with the excuse “kids will be kids.” And if that’s *not *what you’re doing, then you have absolutely no cause to get pissy at me for people who *do *do that. So either admit that you misread me, or admit that you’re a bad mom.

As for the noisy autistic kid, if he shat on me constantly in public, would I not be allowed to get annoyed about that, either?

My cousin is autistic. And none of that namby-pamby “oh he’s an Aspie so it’s okay if he’s an asshole” shit. Serious fucking “he will never live on his own, not even in a group home” autism. And you know what? He doesn’t get away with screaming in public.

355

I’m no good at the recreational bitchiness thing, but I would like to join in to agree that there is a difference between *yelling *and screaming, and I think parents ought to teach their kids the difference before kids are seven or eight. They did when I was a kid, but they apparently don’t any more. The thing is – as an adult, the screaming organically makes me panic and want to rush to the screamer and manage whatever emergency my lizard brain assumes there must be.

I get that kids make mistakes and make noise and that’s all normal. But I seriously think screaming needs to be way higher on the list of no-nos, and parents these days need to get more on their kids’ cases about it. I’ve groused about this enough to my husband to qualify this as a pet peeve. You’ve heard about what happened to the boy who cried “WOLF!”, right? Like that.

–emmaliminal, new parent whose infant still screams all the damn time

356

Exactly. The screaming is like a combination of fingernails down a chalkboard and someone pushing on a button in my head that says SOMEONE’S IN TROUBLE. It’s impossible to relax or enjoy yourself when it’s happening.

357

I remember a post on here where someone’s neighbor would spend every weekend working on motorcycles for hours at a time revving them in the driveway and rattling windows. Eventually the poster decided that one of those yard clearing mosquito foggers was ideal. So if the neighbor on the other side of leaf blower agrees with you, one of you will always be pretty close to upwind. And I doubt that a leaf blower will be too effective as a defense.

Ah. Here it is.

358

I think you have a different definition of “scream” than I do - especially if you’re conflating it with “shriek”. Screams require f’ing effort.

Also, you’re kind of being a self-entitled twit here. In case you hadn’t realized it.

359

I think the responses to the word scream here are completely over the top ludicrous posturing by people who’ve never spent much time around children. I think some people would clearly nearly faint should they have the misfortune to visit a local playground on a Sunday afternoon or come within one hundred feet of an elementary school.

FYI, the principal of the school responded. She’s determined that the bus stop can stay where it is right now. I fully expect my neighbors to continue their assholish campaign against our children. We all look forward to the day when they and their bratty adult children and their vile leaf blowers finally exit the neighborhood for the local child free retirement community.

Maybe then we’ll get some rational neighbors who don’t bother local school officials with trivial nonsense.

360

Trivial? I have to leave the room whenever some monster screams (or shrieks). Literally, it hurts. I generally don’t say anything because the kids are uncontrollable anyway and usually the parents are usually assholes when anybody tries to censure their snookums/criticizes their parenting (hmmm), but the simple fact is that some of us are not yet deaf, and it actually does matter, in some cases.

On the other hand, I personally suspect that the level of screaming at this bus stop is overstated, that the open space very very very likely diffuses the noise, and that the neighbors were probably already awake and chafing for trouble. So action in the case of the busstop is almost certainly unnecessary. But that doesn’t make the general case of screaming unimportant, or defensible.