Children who feel they cannot engage their parents emotionally often try to strengthen their connection by playing whatever roles they believe their parents want them to. Although this may win them some fleeting approval, it doesn’t yield genuine emotional closeness. Emotionally disconnected parents don’t suddenly develop a capacity for empathy just because a child does something to please them.
People who lacked emotional engagement in childhood, men and women alike, often can’t believe that someone would want to have a relationship with them just because of who they are. They believe that if they want closeness, they must play a role that always puts the other person first.
— Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)
Disability benefits should be the equivalent of a full time job on living wage. Things don’t cost less because you’re disabled – in fact you often have additional costs of living. You shouldn’t be forced into poverty because you are disabled.
Before anyone comes in with ’ but then ppl would lie so they didn’t have to work!’
Two responses
Universal basic income + better wages is the way forward
Who fucking cares? Not me. This insistence that ppl lie to get benefits and as a result benefits should be a fucking pittance that it’s humiliating to apply for just fucks over disabled people and is inhumane
*hugs you all* Because today is a day for hugs, and I’m going to run out of spoons if I go putting hugs in everyone’s ask box.
Feel free to reblog this to give a hug to every one of your followers.
*who is comfortable with being hugged. If you do not like hugs or are uncomfortable with physical contact, or even just prefer not a hug from someone not a mutual friend, cookies or other snacks suitable for your dietary needs and restrictions.
Smash that mf reblog button if you stoically ignore all labelled washing instructions and everything your mama ever told you about laundry and just send those bastards hurgling around in an overfilled tub to meet either death or glory
Something I learned from a costume designer: if an item can be washed multiple ways the designer is only legally obligated to put one of the ways on the tag, but if there’s only one way to wash that item they have to put Only on the instructions
If the tag says “Dry Clean” it’s safe to machine wash but the designer thinks it looks better if you get it dry cleaned
But if it says “Dry Clean Only” you will destroy it if you wash it any other way
Reblogging for that last bit which this 37 yr old adult did not lnowy
Fred and George would have been in slytherin if Rowling didn’t hate slytherins so much and that’s that on that
Add Percy to the list. Man’s personality revolves around the central Slytherin trait: ambition.
Truth
The only reason Percy wasn’t in Slytherin is because he had a sternly worded fifteen minute argument prepared in his head about why the Hat better not do such a thing, as it wouldn’t be Proper considering his entire family is in Gryffindor.
The Hat, not wanting to listen to fifteen minutes of a Slytherin who could out-Slytherin every Slytherin in the castle (except for the Head of House) discuss Why The Hat Was Wrong, wisely decided to shortcut the argument and just put the long-winded one in Gryffindor.
Percy is still miffed that he did not get to use his argument.
there’s some assholes out there just letting their baby “cry it out”?
what the absolute fuck?
It’s a baby. It can’t fix its own problems. And it does, indeed, have problems they don’t just cry for no reason. Best case scenario you’re leaving a kid terrified and alone during its most formative years, more likely you’re risking serious health problems or even death by letting it sit in its own filth or starve or whatever because you can’t be bothered to take care of your fucking kid.
If you’re not willing to respond to a plea for help from somebody who is absolutely defenseless, you should not be anywhere near an infant. Put it up for adoption, hire a nanny, whatever, just don’t force them to rely on you for anything.
Oh yeah, that comes from this mentality people that have no idea of how to be oarents fall.
The “I’m not their slave and I won’t let them order me around” kind of mentality.
It’s really really dumb
Worse- these types of parents believe that their children requesting any kind of support, or expressing emotional responses, is a sign of manipulation. They’re a fucking infant. They can’t manipulate the colorful blocks yet, nevermind a whole human person.
Letting babies “cry it out” used to be common parenting advice, specifically meant to help babies sleep through the night better. My mum was advised to do it, but I remember her saying that she really struggled with it (I’m not sure if she ever wound up following it).
It’s not just bad parents who have terrible practices. First-time parents in particular can be prone to following bad advice through fear, particularly if the advice comes from authority figures.
Oh yeah, totally. I was pointing out the logical flaw of assuming that kids crying was for anything that wasn’t immediately necessary (even if that immediate necessity is “attention”) and kids crying is “bad” and “manipulative” and should be “trained out.” A lot of abusive parenting in general is obscured by ignorance, especially of power structures. For example: telling young boys not to cry, not helping them do things and letting them get hurt needlessly.
I was a baby with a lot of health problems (surprise!) who cried a lot, and the health provider that used to come to our house (a midwife I think) to see how my mother was doing, once told her to put me in the garage to let me cry myself out to “show the baby you won’t be dictated to”.
My mother never followed through with that particular suggestion, but the one time she let me “cry myself out” alone through the night on the advice of the midwife, she opened the nursery door to find me floppy and unresponsive. I was rushed to the hospital where I stayed for some weeks due to a viral infection that ravaged my immune system. After that my mother never let one of us “cry it out” ever again, despite the fact that doctors, nurses and midwives told her to do it again with my much sicker and disabled younger brother.
So yea, it’s ingrained in the system, particularly with older people who were raised by people who were also raised by people who believed that too much affection would “spoil moral character”. And it is some bullshit.
Also just to add, if you are feeding formula to your baby? Thank you for taking care of your child and making sure they get food. Breastfeeding while beneficial for some reasons, is not the only correct way to take care of baby, and people need to stop shaming parents for not breastfeeding. That shit is hard for some people, it can hurt and cause infections and the pressure they get put under to persevere with it to the point of drawing blood is horrible.
If I weren’t fed formula as a baby, I would have starved, because mom could not produce enough milk. Ditto both my brothers. So fuck the idea that formula is universally a bad thing.
Creative Writing Professor at a former college: Welcome to creative writing! By the way,
you will not write fantasy, ghost stories, pranormal, or science fiction
in this class, as this is a creative writing course.”
What the ever loving fuck is with “creative” writing professors who think that speculative fiction of any stripe ISN’T CREATIVE?
Well God forbid they say “I’m not educated enough about speculative fiction to be a knowledgeable judge of stories written in it, so we’re limiting this class to my narrow sphere of expertise.”
Dear fuck, it would be nice if teachers would actually admit that’s why they’re doing the thing.
At the beginning of the class, when it’s still possible to drop it and get the entire cost of the class back.
Instead of concern-trolling and lowering a grade on one assignment because it contains elements of speculative fiction, trash-talk the same student’s preferred playwright to emulate, and completely change the rubric of the weight of assignments at the end of the class when it’s too late to even drop the class.
(Yes, I am still cranky about “beware the alienating effects of fantasy”, the B instead of an A because I used fantasy elements in a historical setting and didn’t write them off as delusions of the character, his saying that Shakespeare wasn’t a suitable playwright for someone writing today to emulate, and the whole “each of these three projects will be equally weighted” that turned out to be “half your grade is your ability to write AND PERFORM a one-act play, and I’m going to reduce the impact of your poetry and prose on your final grade”, which meant I failed the class because I flat refused to perform in front of the class like a trained monkey, because this is a writing class not a theater class. … And it does not feel like it’s been fifteen years since that bastard son of a camel’s drunken party with an equally enebriated horse pissed me off.)
Caveat: This is from my driving experience, from a DC metro area view. Also, some bits are vague-blogging about a thing that set me off specifically because the failure to check a map along routes I have driven several times has thrown me out of a story.
1. Most cars made in the last thirty years, and are available in the US, get between 300-400 miles per tank of gas. (Ok, fun fact. My mom’s civic – 2006 with a roughly 13 gallon tank, the RV – 2007 with a 50 gallon tank, and dad’s Soul – 2016 with I think a 10 gallon tank…. all go about 350 miles on a tank of gas. The RV gets 7-9 miles per gallon, the civic gets 20-25 highway depending on who’s driving, the soul gets 25-30 highway depending on who’s driving. Your fuel efficiency alone does not determine how many miles you go before you have to get gas.)
2. Check distances on a map. Please. Otherwise you risk making locals or well-traveled people twitch a lot. (Yes, I know that TV shows make this mistake a lot. Do you know how much I’ve yelled at every show that is made on the other side of the country and thinks that you can get from NOVA to Baltimore in an hour or less? 45 minutes around the Beltway, plus the time to get to the Beltway, plus another 30-60 minutes to get to the near side of Baltimore, depending on route and traffic. Minimum of an hour and fifteen, if you’re right on the Beltway and just going to, oh, the ballpark.)
3. It is a minimum 2 hour trip from the MD suburbs of DC to Richmond. Especially if I-95 is part of your driving route. If you’re driving in rush hour traffic, it’s closer to 3, and that’s only if you haven’t managed to have major slow downs at routes 4 and 5, at Dale City, the Occoquan, Fredricksburg, and the Woodrow Wilson Bridge (provided, of course, you’re taking 95, and not 301, which, if you’re anywhere south of 95 and it’s rush hour, 301 might be less hassle. Or faster).
4. I-95, NOT The 95. As seen above, sometimes just 95. (Seriously, West Coast TV writers, will you please fucking not. It’s REALLY uncommon for people in the DC area, at least, to call I-95 “The 95″.)
5. Maps. Are. Your. Friend. For love of fuck. So are calculators. Math is not evil.
6. Speed limits on the East Coast tend to be 60mph, sometimes 70mph, and often 55mph at best within city limits, on interstates. They’re higher once you get over the Appalachians and/or across the Mississippi. (It’s been a couple years since I’ve driven west, it’s a little fuzzy exactly where the demarcation is, and how it differs depending on how far north or south you are.)
7. Please do not have your characters be driving on an empty tank for a hundred or more miles because you did not take into account the distance most cars can go. Or, you know, get from DC to Atlanta in something less than 8 hours of driving and a minimum of two gas stops* while trying not to get pulled over for speeding in a car that someone is looking for.
*one if your car started with a full tank, and your characters are likely to be ditching the car in Atlanta or its greater metro area.
Seriously, if you’ve got other useful things for making travel times feel realistic, please reblog and add them. Especially little local things that can and/or will throw you out of a story which travels in or around where you know well.
For travel out West:
1. Distance is measured in TIME, not MILES. It’s 20 minutes to downtown from where I live (which makes the California part of my soul scream in WTF-ness every time Kidlet points it out) and it’s 4 hours or so to Seattle. We usually have NO clue how far apart things are, just how long it takes to get there.
2. States are generally bigger out here. So travel between them is going to take much longer. Take your estimate and add a good 6-8 hours. Then add another 4. When in doubt, add 2 more. Where freeway traffic doesn’t slow you down, mountains will.
3. When I say mountains, I mean MOUNTAINS. These are not the Appalachians, which are older and much more easily traversible. Out here you have the Bitterroots, the Rockies, and then once you get over those, the Sierra Nevadas. Basically, once you cross the plains, you hit one jagged, hostile set of mountain ranges after another. Most of them are winding roads that tend to be two lanes (near the big cities, you get two lanes for each direction!) but you CANNOT whip around the mountain doing 65-70 unless you have a death wish. Not to mention, there is snow in some places for a good 8-9 months of the year.
4. Gas and food stops are a necessary, even if you aren’t low on either. With large distances, the next stop may well be a good hour or more down the road, so ‘last chance for the bathroom’ calls are common on road trips. And you learn early that even if you don’t think you have to go, TRY.
5. Speed limits on the freeways out here are generally 65, but nobody really drives that. It’s pretty much 70-75, unless you’re absolutely sticking to the speed limit, in which case you should be in the far right lane. If you aren’t, expect there to be many dirty looks and much honking/gesturing.
6. Ahhhh, freeways. Californians have a love/hate affair with them that I don’t think the rest of the world understands. And yeah, we talk about them weird. ‘Take the 210 west to the 605, then head south to the 10 west, and that’ll take you straight into LA. If you hit the 101, you’ve gone too far.’ The Californians go ‘Thanks, man’ while the rest of the nation stares at us in horror. So, yeah. If writing in California/for a Californian, go ahead and use stuff like that. Otherwise, ditch all the freeway talk you’ve ever heard on TV/movies. (We also tend to take the freeway everywhere because we know it’s the most direct route – it’s taken my mom a good 20 years to train ‘take the freeway’ out of me as my automatic answer to ‘how do we get there?’)
While I have serious questions about the miles/tank listings based on 97 Civic, 11 gal tank = 250mi/tank if run to the very last fumes, everything else is dead on. Especially about distance here out West being a matter of Time not Miles.
I would firmly recommend anyone fictional or otherwise to never ever drive farther than half a tank before refilling cuz you just never know for sure & certain where-when the next gas stop’ll be.
I based that first one on what’s been typical for every car I’ve driven, which is both all two of my cars, and all eight of the family/my parents cars, and mostly didn’t get filled until at about 1/8 tank to empty. With a general habit of driving 60-70 miles per hour on the highway*, depending on who’s driving, and the vehicle. (Larger vehicles get driven slower; mom drives slowest, I drive fastest.)
Also, not a lot of city/surface road driving where there’s a lot of stop and start except with dad’s cars. Mom and I tend to do a lot more highway driving when we actually drive anywhere. Which does tend to change the gas mileage, and I neglected to mention that when I made the original post. (Probably because what sparked it was a fic involving lots of highway driving.)
93 Toyota Carolla, the mid-90s Chevy Astro van, and the Nissan w/manual transmission all got about 300 miles per tank, give or take ten miles.
The first civic hybrid we had, mom’s 2005 civic, my 2007 Hundai (forget the model, I don’t have the car anymore to check), and the RV all got/get about 350 miles to the tank (and the RV is filled between ¼ and 1/8 because really don’t want it out of gas).
The second civic hybrid got closer to 400 if someone other than dad was doing most of the driving.
Dad’s current car, a 2016 Kia Soul, has generally gotten 350+ miles on a single tank of gas on the highway. It’s also pretty new, so that might change as it gets older.
*Mom apparently drives the RV closer to 55 most of the time to optimize gas mileage. It’s also carrying the entire set up and goods for the shop between SCA events, which is approximately an extra ton of weight, which tends to mean the gas mileage starts seriously tanking above 60mph. Like, below 7 miles per gallon sort of tanking, which when we can get 8 fully loaded at 55, is just. Not worth it.
last comment before I shut up. State of the roads also really influence driving speed and can again really differ from one place to another. To again parallel Belgium and the Netherlands. Dutch roads are well maintained and when not choked up ( 17 million people in a place that’s a third of New York state gives a lot of traffic jams) are a dream to drive on. The belgian roads uniformly drive my boyfriend to swearing fits.
I lied. I have another tip. The concept of what consists of a long trip also really differs from where you live. Being Europe-bred for me a 2-hour car trip is already considered to be longish and not to be done casually, 4-hour trip is long and a whole day trip is really far away.
The boyfriend who is in the states on a regular basis is starting to take over the american concept of far away and considers 2- hours peanuts, 4 hours more than doable and a day trip is long yes but acceptable.
The delayed fan favorite, Absolem, dedicated to Alan’s specific portrayal of everyone’s smoking caterpillar in the recent live-action Alice in Wonderland.
Abselom:
Dyed Shell, Fire-polished Crystal, Smokey Agate, Vintage German Glass, Czech Druk AB Glass, and Stainless Steel Beads on 49-strand coated Stainless Steel Wire with Stainless Steel Lobster Clasp. 21.25″ in length. Stainless Steel etched Pendant is 1.75″ from bail to tip.
Price: $50.00 USD + Shipping
Abselom Earrings:
Smokey Agate, Fire-polished Crystal, Vintage German Glass, Czech Druk AB Glass, and Stainless Steel beads strung on Stainless Steel with Stainless Steel posts and stainless steel backings. (All of my earrings are made of surgical stainless steel unless otherwise specificed.) 1.5″
Price: $25.00 USD + Shipping
Stellar Take Two:
1.5″ Stainless Steel Pendant on Woven Velvet Choker with strands of silver wire and strands of rhinestones with a Tibetan Silver Toggle Clasp. 15.5″ in length.
Price: $25.00 USD + Shipping
How Do I Count the Ocean:
Delicate 2.5mm Fire-polished Crystal and 3mm Silver-plated Stainless Steel Beads on a 49-strand coated Stainless Steel Chain with .925 Sterling Silver Toggle Clasp, and is 19.5″ in length. Pendant is is beautiful Blue Druzy Quartz set in .925 Sterling Silver. Pendant is 1 3/8″ from bail to tip.
Price: $75.00 USD + Shipping
How to purchase:
Send me an *ASK* (not a Message) through Tumblr asking for the shiny you’re interested in. I accept payment via PayPal for ease of tracking and shipping. You may also email me at deadcatwithaflamethrower@gmail.com; I’m rather prompt. I will simply ask you to go to PayPal, select Goods and Services, and submit the total payment agreed upon for the item + shipping.
Shipping Rates: in the US, I ship USPS First Class at $3.95; Priority in the US ships at $7.95. Outside the US, I ship USPS First Class International at rates averageing $15.99; Priority for overseas mail averages $37.99.
Thank you! Every purchase contributes to me paying the bills this month. ❤
There's a Mirror on the Wall 