Gaashk
1mo ago
Everything I've heard of dating apps lately sounds awful, I'm hoping my kids will be able to find someone in some sort of organization like I did and my parents did and their parents also did -- college, church, volunteer work, whatever.
Not sure what's going on with the woman in question, though, or the in person compliments.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Is that how it's usually meant?
It seems like I've mostly heard it applied to women in a context I assumed was criticizing the tendency to want a man to take initiative, but maybe that's just my interpretation, and not the actual intent.
Gaashk
1mo ago
The whole thing seems very weird, probably fake, and not primarily about "agency." What kind of weather situation were they in where he was actually cold, not just making idle chatter, and a "nice scarf" was going to fix that? And then he just went around wearing some random woman's scarf the rest of the evening? It sounds funny, I guess they could have a good laugh over it? Definitely manic pixie dream girl vibes.
But, also, I've been confused about how "agency" is being used lately. Assertiveness? Willingness to take action? It seems kind of new to hear that discussed in terms of agency, but seems to have become a thing lately.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I'll tell you what the real scissor statement part of that story is - I can't possibly have been the only guy to read this guy explain how he told his girlfriend he was cold and immediately think 'cuck' can I?
I wouldn't take it that far, but do also feel that stealing a scarf because your man is cold seems more snarky than caring. Could be in a fun, flirty way, it would depend on specifics.
If it's actually cold, because it's cold out and he isn't dressed warmly enough, go into the hotel and drink a coffee with him. A scarf won't help all that much. What, the hotel happened to have one of those enormous chunky knit wool scarves on hand that's kind of a long blanket? Really? If he's not particularly cold and is just saying stuff, the way everyone in Phoenix mentions that it's hot every day, then a scarf will also not help, there's nothing to be helped. I have a lot of scarves, and do like wearing them as wraps, but no man would be willing to do anything like that unironically.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I worked at a large corporate coffee chain for a while, and the entire charm of the job was a series of short, easy, straightforward interactions. Someone wanted a mediocre but predictable latte and a smile. I would smile and make them a latte. It was positive and predictable for all concerned. Everyone was happiest during the rush phase of the day, when these small positive interactions happened in quick succession. Everyone was least happy during the slow part, when we had to engage in daily cleaning tasks like restrooms, mopping, drains, and sometimes odd customers who would try to chat about my ethnic background or something.
The interaction described above sounds quite unpleasant from the perspective of the worker, more than remaking a coffee. But, yeah, mostly it's because he isn't actually a customer.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I'm just skeptical of uncritical complementarian narratives that declare that men and women are simultaneously unequal in their dispositions and yet equally valuable in their own domains, because it seems pretty obvious to me that men get the better deal.
It doesn't seem obvious that men get the better end of the deal in the current society, which is admittedly working pretty hard to make sure that they don't. They probably do have a better deal in a state of nature, but nobody who's posting on online message boards is living in a state of nature. Very obviously, whether it's more of a hinderance to be a neurotic woman or a man who can't control his temper will depend on what kind of society you're living in -- in ours it seems likely that the latter would be worse.
Why would you remove conformity? It seems useful for both the society and the individual that most people are fairly high conformity, and there are only a few highly disagreeable outliers.
Why should women take more risks? What kinds of risks should they take more of? We've probably gone a bit too far into saftyism, but high risk taking in men pays off in winning wars or having lots of sex with women they're attracted to. What does it get women?
I'm not sure what you mean about agency in this context. That they should be more assertive?
I guess the positives you listed would be nice to have more of. We can have even more aspiring novelists who run half marathons and organize aesthetically pleasing parties that they post on Instagram (though observationally this seems to be an occupation for thirty something women without children to show that they're still important, interesting, worth attending to, etc).
Gaashk
2mo ago
I think women are also more likely to be good at signs and calligraphy, due to caring more.
Gaashk
2mo ago
They're significantly better at getting men to do things for them, even men who aren't getting anything in particular out of it other than "you remind me of my daughter" or some such.
Gaashk
2mo ago
The recent trend in schools is that if a kid tries to bite you or break your stuff or something, the adult should say “no thank you” very firmly. One of these days No a Thank You will probably be mildly offensive, like “bless your heart.”
I appreciate rude yokels sometimes, as a balance to the euphemism treadmill.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Most of this doesn't sound right.
I think first of all, as a culture, we must start taking academic achievement much more seriously. America doesn’t take education seriously, and instead tends to be rather casual about tge project.
I'm not completely sure what this is supposed to mean. PMC Americans and aspirants take it very seriously. Others take it pretty seriously, but from what I've heard there are a lot more PhD graduates or MA graduates than positions that really need that level of education. The government takes it seriously and pours enormous amounts of money into the project. Teachers generally take it pretty seriously, roughly proportional to how much they can get their students to do. Perhaps lower class blacks and hispanics and trailer type whites don't take it seriously enough. America and the various states keeps trying to push at these groups, inspire them, prod them into loving books and whatnot, but it mostly doesn't take. There have been a lot of educational reform movements. It is perhaps not very effective in terms of value for money.
What would greater seriousness look like? Perhaps more removal of disruptive children from classrooms? That is, of course, very political.
If we took school and education as seriously as we take sports, with high achievement being celebrated and rewarded.
It is. People are very happy when their kids do well in school. They get awards, congratulations, eventually scholarships. Lots of kids are not involved in sports.
If you haven’t earned the grades and done the work, you will go to lower colleges, trade schools, or vocational programs.
That is a description of current reality.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I am not a stay at home wife, but both husband and I have tried it out, and it is not significantly easier than paid work, and we're both more prone to depression when house parenting than most jobs we've had.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I haven’t observed it either, but it is rather difficult to raise small children Orthodox, everything s long and Sunday School is after Liturgy. It sounds like they have three kids and we’re homeschooling, I could see that being pretty rough if she wasn’t into it. Some Orthodox families I know seem to have the wife going along with homeschooling because the husband has strong opinions, but isn’t that into the actual teaching part.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I used to see that a fair bit back when I was reading bloggers who were trained in marketing. My impression is that it's a reasonably common and effective style, though not on the message boards I prefer, such as this one.
Gaashk
2mo ago
That's interesting. I read a lot of Rod probably eight years ago, though even then he was a bit inconsistent, and wrote way too much chaff, making it hard to find the wheat. I would go to his AC blog on my lunch break, and there would be a half dozen new posts, five of which were just blatant culture warring, but it wasn't instantly clear which ones. So I gave up reading him, especially when he moved to Substack, and I didn't care to subscribe. But I was still very much in the bubble that was interested in his work, and my church did a book study about The Benedict Option. I tried looking up what happened, but he's very vague about the whole thing, and seems to be almost entirely paywalled now.
Gaashk
2mo ago
That brings up part of the oddity of the story about the homeschool prom. Do the teens not know each other? Are they strangers?
I don't remember ever dancing as a homeschooled teen. There was an evangelical youth group event where we were playing games like musical winks, where the girls were in a circle, and then the boys were around them in a larger circle, and when the music stopped we had to make eye contact and wink. Something like that. I didn't like it at all, but maybe they had a point. Several of the youth group members did in fact get married to each other.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Asking a girl to dance shouldn't be anything like slaying a dragon, and if the social scene is managed appropriately, it's higher risk to stand there doing nothing while the girls are making eye contact from a few feet away, and then gossiping about how lame he was for not taking the hint. Clearly, it was poorly set up. Perhaps they should revert to the more conservative circle dances.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Two hours isn't that long. If your daughter is old enough to be out of pull ups, she should be old enough to hold it for two hours. Don't give her a big cup of juice.
As far as the homeschool prom goes, before making any galaxy brained pronouncements about the sexes, one might want to enquire: have they taught the kids to dance? Did they teach them dances that are compatible with the songs they are playing? Do the boys know how to play the role of lead in a partner dance?
One prom I witnessed as chaperone, many of the kids had learned folklorico as kids, and maybe line dancing or something, but the DJ was mostly playing R&B. So they mostly didn't dance, or very badly, or by themselves, until some Mexican folk came on every great once in a while, and then they danced.
Once, I went to a Baptist ball for college students. They had three practice sessions before hand, where they taught the dances and organized the pairings if necessary, since everyone was expected to learn and dance every dance. It was polkas and waltzes and such. They were very explicit that the men were expected to dance at least half the time. Most people danced.
Another dance I went to was Greek Orthodox, with an emphasis on the Greek. They were circle dances, and the priest's wife taught them for a couple of weeks before hand at coffee hour. Everyone danced.
There was a quirky Alaskan group I knew that all sang and played music, and liked to dance things like the Virginia Reel. It was very clear that no one was making any kind of long lasting commitment by asking for a dance, and that the lame thing was to stand around while a girl looked around hopefully. Another Alaskan group I knew decided to play rap music at their school dances, but actually taught the kids fan dances to accompany a drum circle. They did not dance at the school dances -- it's really very difficult to dance to rap without looking a fool, and requires a high skill level.
In general, most people will dance the two or three folk dances they know and are comfortable with, and will not dance the ones they don't know, or especially lead when they don't know what they're doing.
The DJ is largely to blame in playing music intended for couples dancing when the kids were clearly not comfortable with that.
It probably is related to the larger social scene, where it's unclear how someone should go about asking for a date -- that the social script has become largely illegible.
Gaashk
2mo ago
My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.
My sense is not that, based on acquiring an education degree and teaching in public schools for quite some time. The trainings lately are so anodyne they are actually contentless -- like to the point of having the ice breaker take up literally the entire training time. For hours if necessary. "Have you heard about the iceberg? Let's talk about your Meyers-Briggs type and your own set of lenses for a few hours."
My sense is more that the teachers lately are very low on autonomy, mastery, and purpose in respect to their main job duties, and some of them have a savior complex which comes out in things like that, or filing false abuse claims against families they don't like.
Gaashk
2mo ago
He was never on my side, but he used to be able to show that he understands it.
That's true for me as well, but I really liked "The Colors of her Coat" a lot, and do enjoy seeing aesthetic takes from Scott, more than political lately.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Orthodox Pascha aligns with Easter this year. No discount items in stores, but I got Holy Friday off. My daughter had half of last week and all of next week off, since this district is still proud of their Spanish Catholic heritage.
The Orthodox churches flip the Matins and Vespers services, so that Thursday evening is the Holy Friday service, and Friday evening is a funeral, Lamentations. Holy Saturday morning, we are already throwing bay leaves of victory, and focusing on the Descent into Hades icon. "Let all mortal flesh keep silence" replaces the Cherubic Hymn.
I had hoped to bring my 5 year old to Pascha, and she wanted to, but it's been snowing all day, we're up a twisty mountain road, and I'm not up to driving back at 3 am, or staying until sunrise. We've got a fire going, and baked tsoureki together today.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Since it's Holy Week this week, it might be worth visiting a service if it's feasible -- Friday evening (Lamentations), Saturday Morning (Descent into Hell), and Saturday night (Pascha) are all highlights, but next Sunday is also very Paschal and lovely.
Gaashk
3mo ago
It’s like having a family budget, and saying you’ll make big changes to protect yourself from too much debt, and never getting around to asking if you’re spending too much on housing.
This is very common, though?
Hence all the back and forth about "you're accusing me of eating too much avocado toast, but I can't rent a tiny apartment for less than $3,000 a month." Or people with 30 year mortgages -- they aren't usually just going to sell their home and move to a cheap house in the rust belt.
In the case of home economies, the solution is often more earners -- move in with their SO, crowd more roommates in, AirBNB the casita. In the US economy, the main thing coming up is increased automation, and I'm a bit surprised that after hearing so much about US economic policy changes, and so much about AI driven economic changes looming, that there seems to be so little overlap in the conversations as of yet. Or perhaps I've just missed them?
Candy: Dark chocolate peanut butter cups from Trader Joes. Like Reeces, but better. Snack: Chips and salsa
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