Venting thread

[Travis B.]

malloc:

Just so you know, no one official does anything by phone contact the first time. No one calls you about unspecified "crimes" other than scammers. I remember when I got a call from the "IRS", and of course it was just a scam - I hung up on them, and nothing happened afterwards.

[Linguoboy]

Could it be someone who knows malloc, knows about his anxiety issues, and is playing a cruel prank on him?

It's possible, sadly, but it's probably more likely that he's just getting the same types of scam calls everyone else gets in this country.

ObVent: I have a friend in the hospital in California and he's just terrible at communicating what's going on. I'm not sure how much of this is not really understanding what he's being told (today he admitted he's "flying blind" and just trusting whatever the team says to do), how much is not wanting to burden anyone else, and how much is denial about the state of things, but it all adds up to a very frustrating situation where none of us know exactly what's wrong with him or how it's being treated. Part of me just wants to fly out there and slap some sense into him--assuming he's even conscious at this point and another part just wants to wash my hands of the whole business.

[Raphael]

I seem to have mislaid my nutcracker.

[rotting bones]

I hope this somehow works out and you get better.

Thanks. I don't know what marks I got yet. I hope meltdowns like last week don't happen again. If it does, I'll have to (shudder) see someone about it.

PS. I finished everything, but I stayed awake the whole night and turned in at 11 PM the night after.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Well this week has been truly awful. It started off with me failing to submit one of my grad school applications (for the program I was the most enthusiastic about), through a mixture of poor time management and a technical error (which I would have had plenty of time to resolve if I had managed my time better). I put a ton of work into getting every aspect of the application perfect as well, because I wanted to get in very very badly, and now it's all for naught. The whole time my OCD has been absolutely unbearable, like literally making every day complete hell. And now (today) I find out that our dog, who has had cancer for some time now but we thought would make it several more months, probably only has a few days left. Not only am I incredibly sad, and I've been crying all morning, but I know that the stress of the situation is going to make my OCD much worse in the next couple of weeks and honestly kind of terrified.

[Raphael]

That sounds horrible. I don't know what to say.

[Ares Land]

That's indeed horrible, and OCD really sucks. I hope things work out for you somehow.

[Man in Space]

I had an awful sinus infection. I was given, and took, antibiotics. Now I have antibiotic-induced gastritis. I’ve had it for like a week and a half. When it pipes up it’s unbearable.

Compounding onto this, my father is in one of his fell moods again. If he ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy.

[Raphael]

I hope things get better for you.

[Raphael]

Some people I know have a habit where, when they're talking about something, they jump straight to the specifics of what they want to say, even when those specifics make no sense to someone who doesn't know the general topic they're talking about. It's bad enough that I'm almost tempted to start working on a sort of "philosophical" conlang where the main special feature would be that every sentence would have to start with a declarative statement clearly stating the general topic that the sentence is about.

[MacAnDàil]

That reminds of this linguistics book I found on Google books the other day: https://books.google.fr/books?id=aXhvDw ... cs&f=false

It's written by a Chinese person (AFAICT) in English. It's just the discourse structure and the pragmatics that are slightly jarring, the first line being "This book was written in a plain and direct style."

[Travis B.]

That reminds of this linguistics book I found on Google books the other day: https://books.google.fr/books?id=aXhvDw ... cs&f=false

It's written by a Chinese person (AFAICT) in English. It's just the discourse structure and the pragmatics that are slightly jarring, the first line being "This book was written in a plain and direct style."

It just screams that it is not written by someone truly fluent in modern literary English from simply glancing it over.

[Linguoboy]

Some people I know have a habit where, when they're talking about something, they jump straight to the specifics of what they want to say, even when those specifics make no sense to someone who doesn't know the general topic they're talking about.

I know it's a dick move, but I'll sometimes do this deliberately to pique someone's interest. The odder the statement is out of context, the more likely I am to do it. I used to do it to my partners a lot. I can still hear my ex roaring, "Context determines meaning!" at me.

[Linguoboy]

TIL that my flatmate told his family to lay off the Jesus shit and, in response, all he got for Christmas was a text--no gifts, no cards, not even a lousy phone call. I don't even know these people and I hate them.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Send him some virtual hugs from an Internet stranger. Perhaps the relationship can be salvaged at some point in the future, but should he not choose to pursue that route (and I wouldn't blame him — sometimes, you have to let people go), peace will come with time, though it will probably hurt a great deal in the short term. I also hope he will be nice to himself, even if they won't.

[Travis B.]

Oh that is rotten of them, to say the least.

[Raphael]

Yeah, that's really messed up.

[doctor shark]

TIL that my flatmate told his family to lay off the Jesus shit and, in response, all he got for Christmas was a text--no gifts, no cards, not even a lousy phone call. I don't even know these people and I hate them.

Me too.

And if it's anything like some families I know, there's the expectation that he'll be all "everything's great and we're this happy family again" come the next holiday season. That's more the worst bit, to me: this notion that you're supposed to always be there for family members regardless of how toxic they are and how much they treat you like trash and how everything's rainbows and unicorns.


And on the slightly related topic of trouble with relatives, I've become increasingly convinced with each passing day (and interaction) that my father's wife is a toxic [redacted], but now it's grown into concern for his safety as well.

More: show

Back in September (when I was kinda on a break from the ZBB, though more because I forgot my board password), my mother got this very threatening call from my father's wife, pretty much threatening to ruin her financially by looking to revoke the alimony payments from my father; calling my mother a whore; saying that my brother and I had Down's syndrome and "hiding under her skirt", as evidenced by the lack of girlfriends in our lives (maybe there's another explanation for that?); and generally just making my mother out to be a horrible person. This came out of nowhere: my mother's had very minimal, if any contact with my father, mostly originating from him whining about wanting his father's wedding ring that he's accusing my mother of withholding (that I swore my brother and I gave him already, back in 2018), and there's also a "no molestation" order in the divorce decree. Fortunately, my mother managed to get them to calm down by threatening a restraining order (which, more relevant for them, carries a firearm ownership prohibition), but that still rattled us all. And this was followed up by an e-mail from my father (to me) mentioning how apparently his wife has anger issues and this tendency to "rage" about things.

Fast forward to Christmas. I was planning on calling them on the day of, so I just dropped my father a line to coordinate the timing (since he's in Tex-Ass). He responds "don't call", and calls me later very quickly and sounds like he's about to cry and that she was apparently in a raging mood. And, well, after what happened with my failed attempt to visit them two years ago and this just all sorts of stuff throughout the past few years...

They'd been talking about wanting to visit Europe and wanting to visit me, but this behavior makes me even more apprehensive than I previously was about wanting to host them... and now I'm really worried about my father and thinking about whether or not I should see about contacting his brothers to see if they know anything/they can help. Especially with being on this side of the Atlantic, there's the part of me that can't help but worry (while there's the other part that's thinking "well, you've made your bed...").

[Raphael]

Wow, doctor shark, that sounds really horrible. Puts the relatively mild family drama I had back in the day into perspective. I hope things work out somehow!

[Travis B.]

I'm with Raphael - that sounds awful.