solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
Not OP, but no.
If anything, I'd argue that black Americans having the highest in-group bias disguises the fact that Americans as a whole, black Americans included, really aren't that racist.
Supermajority black places in America tend to suck either because they're super rural literal plantation country equivalents to the crappy left-behind parts of Appalachia (The black belt in Alabama is like this.), or because they had/have sufficiently severe crime problems that all middle class people including the black middle class fled the place.
If anything, judging by hiring patterns alleged and observed I'd be fascinated to see where various immigrant groups rank in terms of in-group bias. Alas, the famous graph had small sample sizes for even black and Hispanic Americans and the Asian-American sample was so small as to be useless.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
I don't think it's so much that (The Fed did keep rates low in Trump's first term, after all.) as a bias toward "low rates good", belief that inflation was "transitory" and would correct itself more quickly than it did (Strictly speaking, it was, in the sense that inflation in the late 40s was also transitory.), and fear that raising rates would slow down the economy more than it did (Volker's rate hikes made for a nasty recession in the early 80s.). There's also the inconvenient problem that high rates are bad for the government's balance sheet.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
It is sickening, but that's the world. Absent foreign intervention (and Ukraine has been lavishly supplied by foreign benefactors relative to the Confederacy) Ukraine finds itself in roughly the same situation as the Southern Confederacy did during the American Civil War (and the combat looks a lot like the eastern theater of that war, aka. a static attritional grind with both sides unable to adapt to the fact that technological advances have invalidated their tactics,), outnumbered by the foreign enemy and stuck with frontier territories of dubious loyalty (There are probably more Ukrainians fighting in the Russian army than all foreign volunteers fighting for Ukraine combined. General Sherman's personal escort during the March to the Sea was a cavalry regiment from north Alabama.).
As a Southerner, at what point did/does the dying cease to be worth it? In retrospect I find myself angry with the likes of Jefferson Davis, brave with the lives of people like me and for what? Being perpetually poorer than the north? The "slaveocracy" whose idea of white supremacy was to import, support, and nourish ever more non-whites? The CSA richly deserved to die, and the only tragedy is that Southerners were shockingly able and brave enough to keep the war going and incur genocide-tier casualties in doing so. Ukraine pre-2014 had transformed itself from one of the better off Soviet republics to one of the poorest countries in Europe, literally worse off than Belarus.
I don't proclaim myself able to speak for Russians or Ukrainians, but from my perspective as an American this war isn't our war. I don't like the eastern-European emigres who have far too much influence in our government. There isn't going to be justice in that region. Justice probably entails digging up the graves of those responsible for failing to manage the fragmentation of the USSR into at least a customs union.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
I don’t actually believe Russia has an overly functional nuclear arsenal
Why do so many people say this about Russia, but not China, India, or Pakistan? Say what you want about Russian military performance in Ukraine, their equipment does conspicuously seem to work. The armored vehicles run, drive, and shoot things (Even the Ukrainian T-64s, which had a reputation for being garage queens during the Cold War, don't seem to elicit complaints about being unreliable.). Their planes fly and drop bombs. Even their navy, ridiculously expensive method of storing and launching cruise missiles that it's been in this war, has to be blown up by Ukrainians to sink, and the missiles do launch and hit things if not shot down first. My Twitter feed is bereft of Russian missiles blowing up during launch N-1 style.
Their rockets were recently considered good enough to send American astronauts on. Ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads aren't exactly new technology. "Lol their nukes don't work." strikes me as the same caliber of cope as 2022 predictions that Russian military logistics would collapse for lack of tires.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
For me, the frustrating part is that I could be a lot better at this, but the training was just so limited that there's far too much that I don't know or don't know enough about to speak with confidence on. Post training, the problem has been similar to the problem I had during training: most of our calls are fairly unsophisticated stuff and our call volume has been low, so it's hard to learn and retain knowledge. TBH, while my supervisor is prone to excessively exuberant positivity, it appears that our standards are just low (in keeping with the pay).
During a call earlier this week I noticed a massive nitrogen leak on something someone else had done (I suspected us due to the fact that the gas lines were the same brand we use.), due to the fact that every crimp connection on a splitter was loose (fitting was too small for the size of gas line used, clamps can only do so much). I mentioned it to my supervisor and she laughed; apparently we installed that setup last year. I don't know if it was our install team (wouldn't be the first time) or the previous service tech (also wouldn't be the first time) that did it, nor am I immune to making mistakes, but come on, at least make sure your crimp connections are tight. Oh, and to add insult to injury the same supervisor forgot to add a gas regulator to the quote on the job I did. I should've caught that (and called my boss and was like "I feel like I'm missing something here."), but for some dumb reason I assumed that the pressure straight out of the non-adjustable blend box would be okay to run cold brew coffee since it isn't carbonated. Our parts inventory is a total shitshow so our other guy who could've done it today didn't have a regulator, nor did we have one in our storage unit, but I have two in my truck (but was on a call 200 miles away from where he was), so I get to drive 5 hours round trip to deliver him a regulator tomorrow and run one call, with another call possible/probable depending on customer approval.
The drive time can wear on you (I was a delivery driver for 14 years and loved it, but driving on the interstate is mind-numbingly boring.). If I'm lucky my calls are an hour away. My shortest drive this week has been two hours to the first call, 90 minutes home from the second call. Three days with 5 hour round-trip drives. I drove six hours round trip today to sell a restaurant manager a $30 coupler and tell her that her line was foaming because that product was either improperly handled, defective from the brewery, or had a bad keg seal (My guess is one of the first two because the seal looked fine, but I'm certain it was a bad keg. If you swap products to different tap lines and the problem follows the keg, it's the keg.). We charged her nearly $500 in labor for drive time (not so much because of pure distance, but because it was to a part of the state that we don't normally do much business in). I get that we quoted her that much in hopes that she'd call someone else, and it's not my fault that the restaurant manager didn't think to swap the kegs before assuming that her system was broken, but man it's hard not to feel like a bit of an asshole when presenting that invoice for 30 minutes of work.
Apparently I have a call lined up next week that's a 9-10 hour round trip drive for a 1-2 hour job.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
This job fuckin’ sucks, man!
I’ve been meaning to write this update for 4-6 weeks, but here we are. The last week of training wasn’t any more illuminative than the three before it (for the same reason; low call volume; my trainer apologized to me several times for the “bullshit training” that I was receiving), and apparently the folks up north had intended to keep me for more time to make up for the slow pace, but due to communications SNAFUs they called it at that and sent me on my own.
The first week on my own nearly broke me. Lots of calls, almost all far away, and I barely/didn’t know what I was doing. Too slow/disorganized and not good at diagnosing, and there was one particular call where I had what I thought was the gas leak isolated to a bank of four lines and just couldn’t find it. I found and fixed a leak, but it wasn’t the leak. Not being able to fix a problem bothers me in a way that I can best describe as ego-killing, and adding salt to the wound my supervisor got bitched at for me getting too many hours when four out of five days involved 5-hour round trips between the calls and home (Uh, I was under the impression that overtime was expected with this position. I drive more than any service tech in the company due to the low-density market I work in.), which in turn meant that I got bitched at/nagged to take lunch breaks. Apparently the company is in the middle of an overtime crackdown. I asked to be demoted to line cleaning and was denied.
Since then, things have been weird and, well, slow. I have good calls and bad calls, and have gotten better at not letting the bad calls make me want to end it all (I’m not being serious, wasn’t in any danger then and am far from it now, but good God those first few weeks were rough.) while allowing myself to feel good about the good calls. We’ve been so dead in service that I’ve been repeatedly sent to cover line cleaning routes for lack of service calls.
The problem is twofold: The first one is the most clinical. I don’t make enough money at this job to afford doing it long term. Adjusted for inflation, I make about what I did delivering pizza for Papa John’s 10 years ago and could probably match or beat it if I went back to the Papa. I could almost certainly make more money delivering pizza for Domino’s. Overtime hasn’t happened, so I’m stuck in the worst-case situation where I drive 10 hours a week for free (first and last hours of one’s daily driving are unpaid) and simultaneously struggle to get close to 40 hours a week. It’s a nonexistent to negligible gross raise and a significant hourly pay cut.
The second problem is that I mostly hate this job. I’m better at not taking it personally, but I’m not good at correcting foaming beer problems. I’ve gotten better at finding gas leaks but am far from a maestro. I’m not as fast as I would like to be but I’m getting better at putting kegboxes together (I didn’t know how much that aspect of the job would resemble working in construction.) I can change parts and within the parameters I’m trained on (aka. Not involving the HVAC side of things) I like working on glycol chillers, if only because the problem is usually obvious (My most common calls there are either a broken/ pump/motor, failed temperature controller, or total loss of coolant due to a coolant leak.).
My supervisor is blowing nothing but sunshine up my ass about how great of a job I’m doing and judging by the shoddy previous work we’ve done I’ve had to correct on some calls I’m at least partially inclined to believe her, even adjusting for the fact that we’re longtime friends, but I don’t feel like I do a good job. I’ve done some good jobs and gotten lucky draws here and there, but that doesn’t mean that I’m good at my job. Good would mean fixing the hard calls. As of last Friday I was allegedly the top-grossing service tech in the company for the month of February (This probably means that I was the only one to install a glycol chiller, our biggest ticket item.), something that “never happens” coming from my market. If true (and I don’t think she’s lying), my response is less self-congratulation and more “Holy fuck, I guess everyone else is as dead as I am or worse, because I’m not doing shit and my sales are well below the old goal to make commission.”.
The good news is that I should be able to pass a drug test (My new year’s resolution was slow to get off the ground, but I’m pushing six weeks without fake weed, and I don’t really miss it.) as of next week and start shotgunning applications. I don’t know what or where to do next, but this ain’t it. If I fail such that I’m still working here mid-April, I’ll make my one year anniversary and get a week of paid vacation.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
Depends on the job, I guess, and I haven't taken the test in awhile. I usually get ISTP, but if I'm emotionally dysregulated (therapy-speak for "excessively stuck in my feelings, usually with a connotation of despair and self-pity but on rare occasions excitement?!) I'll score ISFP, and while I haven't taken those tests in 5-10 years I would consider myself a lot more extroverted than I did then (but probably not enough to earn an E over I).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
I'm kind of there right now. I had a successful gig in food delivery (owner's crony/right hand man at a small company) for a long time before the market got oversaturated/our customers got broken by post-covid inflation and the company I worked for had the bottom fall out and blundered into the draft beer industry, which is also facing rough times (or, at least, my company is; I'm apparently the top grossing service technician in the company for this month right now and that's insane because I'm A. straight out of half-assed training and barely/not competent at my job and B. have been so slow that I haven't hit 40 hours in three consecutive weeks).
I loathe my job and can't afford to live on what I'm making, but I have enjoyed working on glycol refrigeration units (They're the closest thing to working on cars in this job, and that's the vocational area I have past experience/strength in.) so I'm thinking that I should look into working on refrigerators.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
In my experience, the Trump voters believed that we were already in a recession or heading there. One happening now will just cement their belief that we were already there.
I will admit to being surprised that DOGE wasn't just shunted off to a room to spout hot air and do nothing. Government budgeting is messy and the real problems are extremely difficult to solve (bad demographics and a basically unreformable healthcare sector; we can't grow our way out of the debt when our post '08 growth has been pitiful compared to Reagan, Clinton, or even Dubya). Are social conservatives brave enough to suggest that MAID is the morally correct conclusion to Boomers and older Xers' fondness for aborting future taxpayers? I doubt it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
A similar thing happened with Millennials and the skilled trades/manufacturing. The '08 recession wrecked those sectors and in the absence of opportunity people went elsewhere, i.e. to college. As a then-student in the early 2010s who was handy with cars I worked with a guy (mechanical engineering major who was a significantly better mechanic than I) who'd quit his entry-level automotive job because slinging pizzas for Papa John's paid quite a bit better than being an apprentice mechanic, in addition to being a much easier job.
One of my uncles is a tradesman (a painter) and spent the early 2010s so broke that his wife and children occasionally lacked electricity. It was such that I emptied my wallet (We're talking like 50 bucks here.), and left it in the bed they'd let me sleep in during a visit (He'd have never taken a dime if I offered it to them, not even as a Christmas gift.). My uncle called me a few days later mentioning the money and I told him "Merry Christmas". It was the least I could do, and I wish I'd been in a position to do more.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
Plus, in an accelerationist sense, social security saps popular impetus for a UBI in the same way that medicare/medicaid sap the will for universal healthcare.
The only way that America will get either of those things will be in the name of of bailing out the Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
Anti-old paramilitaries? Welfare for the old has been a core Democratic policy for nearly 100 years at this point, and old women are arguably their most loyal demographic. Add in the medical practitioners and their auxiliaries whose jobs are to care for the old in some variety and you have a massive chunk of the Democratic coalition.
Democrats at best are every bit as much a party of Gerontocracy as the Republicans are, if not moreso.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
As an American it remains an insane oddity to me that Pakistan wasn't given the Gulf War treatment in 1998 after its nuclear tests. We didn't even totally suspend aid!
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
Disability prevalence is geographically concentrated, but largely in dying to dead rural areas where the working-age adult population skews old and uneducated and non-physically demanding jobs are scarce, but rents are cheap enough that it's viable to eke out a living on federal benefits, places like Hale County, Alabama, also profiled here by NPR.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
I'm a big fan of the Car Scanner app. Combined with a $20 Amazon OBDII reader the free with ads version is highly useful for the shadetree mechanic on a budget.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
Another update to the situation.
The job situation is...meh. On one hand, the company fixed the issue of commission being unattainable by scrapping it in favor of a modest hourly raise. If I get the sort of overtime I anticipate (10 hours of OT a week) the new position will at least constitute a meaningful raise, hopefully one where I can start getting ahead even if it won't get me to pre-covid financial status. Mercifully, the company saw fit to send me home for the weeks of Christmas and New Year's and run odd jobs instead of marooning me out of town "training" during slow weeks.
On the other hand, the hours are not fun and training has not been going well. The devil's bargain in "You'll get a lot of hours" is "You'll usually do two hours of unpaid drive time a day, one there and one back.". It's a first world complaint, but I didn't get to have much of a NYE party because I'd worked over 12 hours (including 5 hours of driving there and back) starting at 6AM so I was done for by midnight. The company truck I drive has been this market's service truck since April of '22 and has nearly 150,000 miles on it, so I'm looking at driving a shade over 1K miles a week.
Training has not been what I was hoping for. There's been no theoretical/classroom type training or assigned reading at all (I suppose I should just start binge-watching Micro Matic's Youtube channel.). I feel like it took me far too long to learn what, say, a John Guest fitting is. Service call volume has been very slow in the training market so most of what we've been doing has been low complexity. The week before Christmas was a joke in which we barely averaged a call a day and I found myself organizing shelves in the warehouse. I came in hoping to address my weakest area (troubleshooting a malfunctioning draft system) and I feel like I've made very limited progress there (because we've done very little diagnostic work). What diagnosis work I have seen us do has been of mixed quality and has often struck me more as guessing and aiming the parts cannon. I've been sent on service calls back home and feel like an incompetent hack because I can't give a diagnosis that I'm confident in and/or take far too long on a given job because I'm doing things that I've never done before and spend forever rifling through the truck to find the tools/materials in the truck (I'm going to have to reorganize that thing because it's a barely organized ADHD hoarder mess and it's somebody else's mess.). I am aware that theses things will improve with experience, but I was really hoping to get more of experience during training. Here's hoping this last week out of town will be better in that regard.
Installing cooler units is technically simple but can be brutal if they're mounted high on the wall or in the ceiling. The one we did involved (after removing the existing 100lb) manhandling a 150lb cooler unit up a ladder with one assistant below onto a wall mount 8 feet off the ground, using adjacent shelving for assistance. The 100lb one wasn't fun but was doable. The 150lb one exceeded the limits of my upper body strength (which isn't great due to a half-useless arm from a football injury). Aggravating the problem, the new cooler was larger and didn't really fit on the shelf, and we lacked the tools or materials to revise or replace the mount, so we made it "fit" (The install looked like shit, the sort of stuff you'd take pictures of to post a bad review.). I have no idea how they're getting these things into ceilings on top of the cooler without some variety of mechanical assistance. The only silver lining I have on that job is that I was probably getting sick without realizing it at the time, which probably didn't do my my lifting strength any favors.
TL;DR, I'll make at this job and give it a fair chance for a few months out of training, but it's probably going to be another trip to the occupational drawing board.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
Stop smoking weed. It's not that I'm a big stoner or have ever been, but I dabbled in weed vapes a bit because they're by far the cheapest way to get intoxicated and it's just a waste of time. Aside from being high being kind of fun I can't think of any real positive. I tend to wind up staying up too late/sleeping poorly and get nothing done around the house/at all. I also really need to get a better job soon and pissing hot on a drug test isn't a restriction I can afford right now.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
I would add (while still oversimplifying; Japanese history is not my strong suit) that there was a strong internal rivalry between the army (who wanted to fight the USSR) and the navy (who wanted to fight the US/UK). The army faction sort of got their wish in 1938-9 but blew it by being defeated by the Soviets (General Zhukov won his first big victory there.) and were in turn discredited in favor of the naval faction.
This scene depicting that battle is hilariously inaccurate in some ways (No, the Japanese weren't using Kamikaze trucks; they had tanks, planes, and artillery of their own.), but the moral of "Oh fuck, the Soviets have more tanks." was true. Unfortunately for Japan, America had just as much overmatch in ship and airplane production as the Soviets did in tank production.
I've lived in Alabama my whole life. Spoiler alert: our second generation Indians are plenty fat themselves, my personal favorites being the one who talks endlessly about his bodybuilding/going to the gym (He's not fat now, but nowhere near as buff as you would expect for someone who allegedly puts that much effort into the gym.) but is so lazy that he refused to change his own tire for years and the professor's kid who had a master's in economics but couldn't quite hack delivering pizza (The latter also happens to be one of the most insufferably arrogant and patronizing people I've ever met. He once told me that delivering pizza burns 250 calories an hour and that sort of fat logic, my friends, is how you wind up morbidly obese.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
I'm not sure what insurance actually adds to the system
Health insurance companies are a tax collector (and insurance premiums a de facto payroll tax) that doesn't get voted out of office for raising middle/upper-middle class taxes, unlike politicians. Also, they (and the provider-level admins fighting them) are a massive white collar welfare program, with millions of marginally to highly educated workers drawing salaries to perform the office work equivalent of digging holes and filling them back up again for no reason.
Update on my economic and personal malaise. I wound up sticking with the beer line cleaning gig and got promoted to service tech faster than I found the motivation to job hunt (My self-imposed deadline there was Jan 1.). It wasn't great, but about another month in I improved at it enough that it became dead-easy and never difficult unless I slacked badly and backed myself into a deadline crunch to hit the bonus.
Apparently I interview better than I thought, as I was the "emotional choice" by the service manager who hired me (backed up by my immediate supervisor whose coattails are a good place to ride behind). This is good because I'm going to have to be the emotional choice a few more times until I earn myself a better resume. I'm not exactly brimming with excitement about the new position, but it's a rational step forward. If it goes well, I'll make enough money to make my life a bit more tolerable. At worst, I'll at least break even compared to the line cleaning gig (and I get a company truck, so I won't have to worry about commercial insurance and running my 15 year old car into the ground) and should make more money if by virtue of getting more hours if nothing else. Overtime is a useful antidote to crappy hourly pay. I care less about beer the older I get, but IMO learning how to fix anything to do with a draft system and demonstrating competence at it would be useful for the purposes of either moving into a gig with a distributor or making a career change into some other variety of repair work (I’m told that the usual career trajectory with this company is that people put in a year or so and then bail for a distributor with better pay/benefits.). I'm currently training for the new position at the company HQ for a month and my trainer is good. I like him, and he strikes me as doing a commendable job of being demanding enough that I actually learn quickly while not being an abrasive dick about it.
The not-so great news is that my suspicions about it not being a great pay boost appear likely to be correct. I was pulled aside by an assistant manager in my market and told not to take the job because the sales quota to actually earn commission is impossible to hit in my state's relatively poor, low-density market, and I likely wouldn’t be able to beat a retreat back into line cleaning without relocating unless the guy replacing me doesn’t pan out.). I don't know how it's all going to work because the company is presently restructuring the service department's role and pay structure. My first service meeting was...something, almost unnerving, dominated by 45 minutes of heated back and forth between a disgruntled tech and the new big boss/designated scapegoat about recent changes in pricing, low service call volume, and being diverted into non-billable (aka. line cleaning) work are going to fuck himself and several other technicians out of hitting commission right before Christmas (The consensus seems to be that said tech was badly lacking in tact, but wasn’t wrong.). I didn’t know that one could speak to a superior like that and remain employed outside of the restaurant industry or construction site (Then again, this is still food and beverage.).
I spoke with my trainer about this and got the following: The restructure is probably going to lead to his exiting the company, as it appears that it will badly limit his upward mobility within it (The management role he was being groomed for will no longer exist, and he’ll be stuck competing for other management roles that have far longer tenures with the company and thus deeper personal relationships with upper management.). The technicians’ complaints about changes in pricing and so on are valid. My predecessor (who was with the company for almost a decade) often missed the quota to make commission and he wishes he could’ve swapped markets with my predecessor to find out how much of that was him being too lazy/hungover to get out of bed on time versus the market itself being challenging.
Whatever happens, I figure that this is worth doing because even if it isn’t what I want to be it’s unlikely that I’ll wind up making less, and I need to push myself and become vastly more familiar with stepping outside of my comfort zone because being spending far too much time being overly comfortable, complacent, and okay with a mediocre but overpaid and easy job is how I got myself into the predicament of having mostly wasted the last ten years of my life in the first place.
How’s that for a segue into my personal life? It’s somewhere between “not great, but manageable” and “a falling apart disaster” depending on how neurotic I’m feeling on a given day (In therapy speak this means “I am struggling with emotional regulation and poor coping mechanisms that aggravate it.” or “I am presently realizing that I am not sufficiently functional to make the sort of life that I would like for myself. It only worked with the cushy delivery gig and easy financial situation.”). There was another roommate (I wasn’t looking, but it fell into my lap and I was sufficiently stupid/intoxicated at the time to agree without any vetting. 11PM on Friday night at the bar isn’t the best place to go roommate shopping, who would’ve guessed?). The good news is that I realized that she was insane (The worst alcoholic I’ve ever lived with and the most blindingly obvious case of Borderline Personality Disorder or something along those lines I’ve seen in almost a decade, one of three that I’ve met in my adult life that gave me the vibe of “RUN, NOW!”.), told her that she had to go, and after a few weeks of temper-tantrums and pleading left in peace.
The bad news is that between that, the job transition, and a rough Thanksgiving visit with my father I am a shaken-up mess in dire need of a hug/some serious reassurance. This is far from the first bad visit with my father but it just gets worse every time. He’s in his mid/late 50s and it’s now plainly apparent that if he makes it to retirement he’s going to drink himself to death within a few years or doing so, and that’s the optimistic timeline in which my stepmother’s codependence exceeds her self-respect (This is likely to remain the case.) such that she doesn’t leave him (If that happens, my sister will regret being his favorite child. I was our mother’s and she was/is awful, but is mostly the VA’s problem now.). There’s nothing I can do to stop it. The cool and adventurous if neglectful and a stereotypical bad divorcee (exceeded by my mother’s “monstrous divorcee” conduct such that I feared getting the Medea treatment long before I’d ever heard of the play) father that I grew up with is mostly gone, replaced with a rapidly deteriorating drunk whose only desires are to enrich Miller-Coors’ shareholders while chain-smoking and blasting Fox News in his garage or to go to the one bar in the godawful desert town he lives in where he is only tolerated because he throws tons of money at the bartenders. At least I didn’t have to defend him in a bar fight this time (Like fishing stories, that one grows more exaggerated with time; the latest version I’ve been told is that I brandished a barstool in his defense. I did nothing of the sort, just very loudly made it clear that we’re leaving and the fight was over, and if it had come to that I’d have gone for something less unwieldy as a weapon than a barstool.). Oh, and he’s hooked on crypto speculation now (and has made more on Dogecoin since the election than my entire debt burden. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a touch jealous.). Yay.
I’m going to have a bunch of free time sitting in a hotel room during the workweeks for the rest of this month, feel desperately compelled to vent (That’s the polite term for emotionally vomiting on people/exploiting anyone willing to lend an ear as an unpaid therapist.), and need to stay away from the bars around here so it’s likely that /r/raisedbyborderlines is going to get the story about my mother burning down our house for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and that the fine people are going to get my take on Hillbilly Elegy and Borderer honor culture as someone whose background was “Hillbilly Elegy, but in rural north Alabama and with more domestic violence and dead pets”.
Last thing: I feel a lot better having finished typing this out than I did as I was starting and doing it, like the storm has passed. I just feel tired now and am phoning this paragraph in. I am frustrated by the fact that I am not “over it”. This stuff comes and goes and sometimes I go long periods of being okay before getting smacked in the face with it all over again. I think it happens less as time passes or when my life is more in order. I’m going to make it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
It's been a few years since I read it, but my impression of Hillbilly Elegy was that it was mediocre as a political polemic (mostly because the book was IMO too short to develop the many points it was trying to stab at, be it his political arguments or his personal story), but that Vance's personal story was very compelling. As someone who voted for the Trump/Vance ticket I was far more impressed with Senator Vance's growth through the 2024 campaign trail than the book, movie, or his Senate campaign.
With that, as someone whose background was "Hillbilly Elegy with the details shuffled and maybe a bit worse" I was not prepared for how much reading Vance's story would me down an emotionally ugly trip down memory lane that left me in tears asking God why we had to be like that.
My big reservation with the book is that I came away from it wondering if he was telling a story about Borderer honor culture or multiple generations of Borderline Personality Disorder in a family in a Borderer context. He mentioned having an ACE score of 7/10, and that is sufficiently severe/rare that I would strongly caution against generalizing about a cultural group (even/maybe especially your own) based on living through that.
I will say that I have a fairly critical view of "Borderer honor culture" because I experienced too much of its extreme, aka. the use of firearms in domestic arguments. That's just not okay. There is no circumstance in which it is acceptable to kill your daughter in a murder-suicide because your wife presented you with divorce papers. Shooting yourself dead in an argument with your girlfriend may well be the most dramatic way to make your point short of murder, but doing so makes you a piece of shit for what that does to her. Both of those things happened to close relatives of mine, and it's not okay. I blanched when the book mentioned his Mamaw (I had a chain-smoking Mamaw named Bonnie too.) lighting his grandfather on fire because that was something Mom would've done to us if it had occurred to her and it was fucking terrifying growing up under the thumb of a screaming, constantly threatening banshee. He captured the toxic push-pull dynamic of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw perfectly.
Vance was right to say that his experience of interpersonal/familial relationships was so different from his wife Usha's that they might as well have been from a different planet. In my experience an ACE score of 7 comes with a bunch of fucked up stories that I now hesitate to tell because they're nuclear-level buzzkills in the typical "Millennial complain about your family" session and because I'm at a place in life where I'd rather not dwell on the shit I'm trying to move on from. If I were to write my own Hillbilly Elegy the cover would feature me sitting in a local reporter's car watching my house burn down and all my belongings with it two weeks before Christmas when it turns out that the fire was set by my mother for the insurance money.
On a side note, I wound up befriending a bunch of second-gen immigrants in high school/undergrad and for whatever reasons their first gen parents, be they Russian/Ukrainian or Indian, tended to instantly like me and trust me as a friend for their children who was capable of handling plebian tasks for them like changing a tire, putting out a fire, or teaching them basics like "how to fry an egg" or "how to do laundry". Likewise, as an undergrad I had certain professors who gave me a lot more leniency than I deserved or asked for (concerning turning in assignments late; writing apologetic emails for late assignments was something I developed into an art form as a student) because they perceived me as "not privileged" because I worked a full-time job as a student.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
I may be falling prey to Google being a fairly lousy search engine these days, but that was my experience when researching it as a teenager/younger adult. In fact, the first time I read about BPD was when reading about high-conflict divorces (because I was still a teenager stuck in the middle of one). Search for "son of borderline mother" versus "daughter of borderline mother" and you'll get more results for the latter. Search for "borderline ex-wife" and you'll get more material than either of the first two. That may just reflect there being more stuff out there about abusive/crazy spouses than parents.
It kind of makes sense. BPD is more common in women (to roughly the same extent that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is more common in men), so it's unlikely that women are going to wind up in a closer relationship with someone suffering from that condition than that with their mother, while adult men are more likely to encounter BPD in the setting of a romantic relationship (which at that point will be a far more acute crisis than past mommy issues).
As for the disorder itself, This and in particular this are about the two best blog-length posts I've seen on the subject.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
Yep. I live in an SEC college town and we had to import our Trump supporting female bartender from California. There are few species of liberal more obnoxious than the first-gen college educated late Xer/Millennial liberal with high-school educated Trump supporting late boomer/Gen X parents, especially if they come from a place where the Moral Majority actually mattered. The middle-aged Yankee liberal English professor might be easy to offend, but was more tolerant in the long run. It's a shame I never got to meet her daughter, who is reportedly very high on the "hot, but crazy" scale (The professor is also this, according to the boomer regular who dated her.). My Gen X mom from George Wallace Democratic stock has been waging a Clintonian holy war on Facebook for far longer than my Gen X father's acquired Trumptardism and addiction to the dumb parts of right-wing Twitter.
Interestingly, the Southern liberals I know from more upper-class backgrounds have been vastly more relaxed about it. One of favorite drinking buddies (He is a hilariously obnoxious womanizer with a country lawyer's drawl and Yellow Fever when drunk.) is a lawyer's son turned Democratic campaign operative. Another is a 40-something professor who never got a steady gig, a hilarious, hopeless dandy who even his liberal female counterparts write off as gay (This does, in fact, cripple his dating life.).
My favorites to drunkenly talk history/politics with are female law students, by a mile. They're well informed and while tough in an argument, they won't take disagreement personally.
I just finished Metro 2033. I'd liked the game some time ago, was bereft of things to do (not terribly sick, but just enough to deter me from my usual weekend plan of socializing at the bar) and figured I'd brush back up on it before deciding whether or not to go for purchasing Metro: Exodus because I wasn't really feeling another replay of Far Cry 4, 5, or New Dawn (FC6 was just too bad to play through IMO).
It was a slog for most of it, the (translated into English) prose not entertaining enough in its own right to carry the slow pace before the plot got into gear. The last third of it was good enough to make me consider Metro 2034 and Metro 2035. If nothing else, reading Metro 2034 will be a shorter time investment than replaying the first two games.
For more fun junk food, I recently polished off the latest of Blaine Pardoe's Blue Dawn series. Basically, imagine a Tom Clancy novel set in a contemporary American civil war-like scenario and see also: Kurt Schlicter's People's Republic* series. Both are fun if cheesy, the perfect sort of book to kill a long day of flying with, but IMO Blue Dawn was just a bit better/more compelling even if the editing could've used some work.
More options
Context Copy link