bolido_sentimental
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User ID: 205
I'm going to Pittsburgh this weekend, mostly for business though. What's the signature food, and where do I get it? Somebody tag the Pittsburgh guy!
Update: I'm in some place called Fiori's Pizzaria currently. This feels very Pittsburghy.
Update 2: I had an Italian hoagie. It was really very good.
I am originally from Tennessee, and UT is the SEC school there; I wonder how similar the experience is. Throughout the state, there is this sort of low-level obsession with UT; when I tell people I'm from Tennessee, even now, they say, "Oh, did you go to UT?" even though I grew up 200 miles away from UT's campus.
Then as now, I was not interested in the "SEC lifestyle." It all sounded like a very poor match for my own personality, and I never even considered going there, though many people from my high school did. I ended up going to a much calmer public university in Tennessee; one which had a Greek life, but where the Greek life was not the center of all social life by any means. There, I was able to just nerd out and focus on academics in relative peace. I made friends and found romantic interests through "normal" channels - through classes, campus clubs, intramural sports etc. After various twists and turns, I am living the normal middle-class lifestyle of a State U grad.
I wonder where I'd go if I'd grown up in similar circumstances in Alabama. Maybe UAB? Or UNA?
I feel like even now, I mix more often with people that, like me, went to places like Northern Alabama, Northern Kentucky, UT-Chattanooga or whatever than I do with Ohio State/Michigan/Alabama/Duke sort of people. I'd be keen to read more about that kind of social sorting. I probably missed out some access to elites, but I don't think I belong in that stratum anyway.
bolido_sentimental
10d ago
Not especially. I appreciate when our forum members provide these humanizing elements; especially since we have a core of users that has been stable for a long time, it makes me feel like I know them a little bit as people, instead of just as collections of culture war viewpoints.
bolido_sentimental
11d ago
Ahahaha I'm not there yet if it is. Can't wait lmao.
bolido_sentimental
11d ago
I'm not sure about that, honestly. From that specific ATM, I have never withdrawn more than like 80 dollars at a time; though I know it can do more.
I was more weirded out by the way he kept picking the "credit" option. My understanding is that this incurs big fees for people that use a credit card to get cash advances. It made me think that he was using a stolen card. But - I don't know that much about the ins and outs of that, so I might be mistaken.
I am reminded of the posters I used to see in airports and on public transit, that said, "If you see something, say something!" I suppose they were looking out for bomb threats, etc.; but how do I know if the "something" I've seen is pertinent to anything?
bolido_sentimental
11d ago
He was in his 20s.
I didn't look at it from your perspective, but now I'm really starting to see it that way, actually.
bolido_sentimental
11d ago
It does. I don't know if he knew that, though.
bolido_sentimental
11d ago
Yesterday, I stopped by a CVS to use the ATM there.
I ended up stuck behind a man who used the ATM as follows: he inserted a card he had, entered the PIN, and pressed the "Credit" option and withdrew 100 dollars. He then repeated this same process probably 10 or 11 times: using the same card, he did that and withdrew 100 more dollars, over and over again.
Is this is a legitimate thing to do? I can't think of why someone would do that. I got a feeling like it was some kind of fraudulent behavior, but I just don't really know. I guess maybe he didn't know how to use the ATM properly, but that doesn't feel likely to me. He was a younger man in apparent possession of all his mental faculties.
As a secondary question: if you see someone who is definitely using some kind of stolen card, or tampering with an ATM in some way... what do you even do then? Who would you tell? (Assuming you didn't want to just ignore it, which is what I would probably do by default.)
On this forum, I'm less concerned about giving offense, and more concerned that spelling out the N-word will make readers think I'm trying to be "edgy" on purpose; which reduces the odds of their being willing to have a serious discussion with me.
For better or worse, I can't write anything without imagining what it will make the reader think.
Adding a second reply here, because I had an interesting CW-ish experience over the weekend.
One of my church's book clubs read Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman this month, and yesterday we had the discussion at the church. As you can probably imagine, apart from me - a 35-year-old man - the book clubs consists exclusively of women aged 50 to 90.
Anyway, I enjoyed that book immensely. It is the autobiography of a white woman called Mary Hamilton, who lived in the Mississippi Delta around the turn of the 20th century; she married a timber man named Frank, and worked ridiculously hard her whole life to keep her family alive and fed, surviving natural disasters and the early deaths of four children. They lived on the very edge of civilization, mostly in wild country, far even from any neighbors. I absolutely couldn't put the book down. Every page brought either a new threat to life, or the practice of a cultural custom that has now just about faded out of memory. I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the real business of how the American continent was settled, or in how ordinary people lived outside of cities, just over 100 years ago.
Now, Mary Hamilton does relate a number of encounters with black people. The descendants of slaves, freed some 50 years prior to the story, were building up their own lives in Mississippi and Arkansas, where Mary spends much of the book. She honestly describes black criminals and black nurses, neighbors and scoundrels, men, women and children, young and elderly; she relates good ones and evil ones, she talks about racial conflicts that occasionally would spring up, and she transcibes their patterns of speech as she heard them. She does use the N-word and many variants thereof, but in an entirely natural way that reflects how they were referred to at that time, in that place As far as I could see, Mary Hamilton had no special racial prejudice, but neither was she a particular supporter of black improvement or uplifting. She was simply focused on keeping her family alive.
In the book club, we were asked to give a 1-10 rating of the book. I gave it an honest 10 - too generous perhaps, I admit it's not an utter classic of all-time, but that's how much I enjoyed reading it, definitely. But the woman next to me would go no higher than 6. She said, "Every time [Hamilton] started talking about black people, I cringed. There was an incident where there was a black convict who escaped from the prison, and the police chased him down and beat on him, and I just couldn't stand that. I don't like to think about that. I loved the hard-working pioneer spirit stuff, but I kept cringing and cringing when she would use the N-word, or write the way they talked where they sound all ignorant."
I said, "I wouldn't say that I found that completely enjoyable, but I felt like reading it enhanced my understanding of life in those days. I wouldn't want those parts to be cut out." She responded that she wouldn't want to recommend the book to black people she knew because of those passages; and that furthermore, she didn't watch the news because she didn't want to know about bad things that are happening.
A lively discussion ensued on this topic generally, and to my surprise I think more of the women had my view, than that of my interlocutor. But still, I had never heard someone express that so directly before: that if it's bad, they don't want to be aware of it; and if it portrays black people badly, they don't want to read it. I have a little bit of sympathy for the first point - the world can produce negativity longer than you can remain sane if you have unlimited empathy, and maybe it's healthier not to dwell on that stuff. For the second, though, I got the sense that she felt it was "punching down" to portray poor blacks as they really lived around 1900; and I just find that nuts. I believe there is a strain in our culture that want to see all minorities as wise and saintly people we should look up to, instead of being complex people, some of whom are smart, some stupid, some evil, some virtuous. It results in a highly inaccurate understanding of the world.
bolido_sentimental
12d ago
Adding to the pile - please do, it would be awesome.
bolido_sentimental
12d ago
Currently reading Germinal by Emile Zola.
I love it. I love the subject matter - any story about miners, factory workers, farmers etc. gets me going. And Zola has a great, engaging writing style, full of rich images and sharp emotion.
bolido_sentimental
13d ago
live innawoods with your cousins and live off the fatta the land
Just by the by, can you explain why you typed this in this way?
I've seen it on the Internet before, and it looks like it must be a reference to something, but I can't think of what.
bolido_sentimental
18d ago
Flout, not flaunt.
bolido_sentimental
23d ago
I still want to hear someone using the term "far-right" make a distinction between that and just "right."
I got on there recently myself. It made me feel a lot less alone, in that I finally found people who are noticing the same things I notice in the world around me. It also made me realize just how small the Overton window is virtually everywhere else.
bolido_sentimental
23d ago
Lol, that would be nice. Unfortunately it must be purchased with money.
I keep trying to draw some sort of second-order conclusions from the Haitians eating cats thing. Is it supposed to sway people who were on the fence about border controls? Like, if it is true - then what? I imagine the leftist response to this story being absolutely confirmed would be:
0.) Continue to deny it anyway.
1.) When they have learned our country's norms they'll stop, it's not really their fault.
2.) Even if it's true, it's their culture and we should respect it, not try to change them to be like us.
3.) Either way the good they bring outweighs the bad.
Even my liberal dad admitted, he would feel concern about having 20,000 Haitians added to his community all at once. My impression as a private citizen has been that this reinforces something already true about America: the only way you can control who lives near you is to make more money. You have to continually move up the housing ladder so that you can live only near people who can afford to do the same thing; this is the only way to ensure you live near pro-social people. The poor people who were not able to leave Springfield when its industries crashed - they are "suffering what they must."
bolido_sentimental
23d ago
Did you get his book yet? It's a very handsome volume.
bolido_sentimental
25d ago
I live in a bubble and I don't know what other people do, but to me Substack has brought a real renaissance in self-published long-form articles; the discoverability and follow-ability, and ease of doing these things, is greatly improved from anything else I knew of before.
To give kind of a corny answer to your broader question: I more or less agree that most things have gotten worse, including several things which were really important to me. (The landscape of fiction publishing is a big one.) But it's not entirely a bad thing; to some extent it forces us to define what is important to us and actively fight for it, instead of assuming that a gentle and friendly world will keep providing it without our doing anything. For example the smartphone problem: if you respond to this by intentionally selecting for "people who have fought this off and remained unaddicted" as your friend group, you may end up with a cooler and more resilient friend group than you would have if it had never happened.
TL;DR I agree with you, but let's make the best of it.
bolido_sentimental
28d ago
Geriatric psychiatry sounds like a truly miserable way to spend your time. I'm no doctor, but it seems like there's little improvement you can provide for most people like that.
Curious to know if you've met any other Indians about the place? And what are you missing the most from home? I recall when I did my year in Asia, my parents sent me a box full of American candy; little knowing that I could buy basically the same things at the corner store. But the sentiment was nice. (They also sent me a lot of underarm deodorant at my explicit request, and that was a lifesaver.)
I appreciate the update. We do miss you. Hang in there and try and make the most of it. If nothing else, as you continue to suffer various indignities, bear in mind that these will be great sources of stories you can tell in the future. "I'm telling you, it was 2024, and I had to try and use a bloody digital camera. What's that? You don't even remember what that is?"
bolido_sentimental
28d ago
Having a beer this evening, and I realize that my knowledge of beer trends is very old. In the 2010s, there was the big shift to IPAs that I remember, as well as lots of people complaining about only being able to get IPAs at bars. Then in the 2020s, there seemed to be this tilt towards sours and goses. That's the last I heard, honestly.
Does anyone know where the beer trends are going? What's cool now?
bolido_sentimental
28d ago
Personally, I nod along unless I foresee some reason to have significant future dealings with them. I tend to leave stupidity unchallenged; "let wrong people be wrong," is what I usually say in life. If I'm in a room with people who say things like "our underfunded schools," I'm generally thinking about how to leave that room and go somewhere else.
With people who I respect and who I know are actually open to thinking about the topic, I would ask them if they could describe to me what the schools need more money to do; if they could name specific budgetary shortfalls, or if they had any idea of the amount that is currently spent per student, and what they think that amount should be instead. Questions like this can lead to an interesting discussion with a non-hostile interlocutor. With a hostile interlocutor, they'll probably see you're trying to trap them and terminate discussion somehow.
I'm trying to model their responses in my mind now, and I know I've often heard, "Pay teachers more." But I don't see the path for that leading to better educational outcomes, and indeed if we pay them more for shitty educational outcomes, that would work against incentives.
Anyway, as you know, few people are actually thinking about the issues to this level of depth. I rarely have these conversations in real life.
bolido_sentimental
28d ago
My honest-to-God answer to this is that for daily use, I just buy simple, conservatively-styled Rockports, and replace them when they wear out. Like this. Yes, it's just a basic-ass black shoe; but it feels and performs very well, and it looks okay.
Real shoe connoisseurs will not be impressed by this, but the man on the street or the lady from Inside Sales might. And after all, I live in Ohio. People's expectations are easy to exceed here.
I do believe that durable, comfortable, good-looking true dress shoes exist, and I also think there are some Mottizens who will be happy to chime in with recommendations. I feel like I've seen them talking about it before.
Gonna be giving out candy. My neighborhood is full of kids. Something I've noticed: they hardly ever remember to say "trick or treat" these days. Halloween has fallen.
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