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Friday Fun Thread for January 13, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I wish Twain's comment was the case for all of us. As I've grown older, and I'm 35 now, I respect my parents much less. It was only after going out and getting more experience in the world that I was able to understand how selfish they were. That was a tough pill to swallow.

How do you mean selfish? Or actually, could you just expand on all of this if it's not too personal? I went the same route as FiveHourMarathon, so your experience is very alien to me.

My father was a police officer in a very dangerous city, and he wanted a "take home" car that he could park outside our house, to show people he was a police officer and so that he wouldn't have to drive to the station each morning to pick up a car. The police department that he worked at required police to live within the city limits to have this privilege, and so we bought a house in this city, and I went to school there. This meant that the public middle and high schools I went to were simply atrocious. Gangs, metal detectors, weekly fights, shootings, underage pregnancies, drugs, etc. Before moving into this area, I was a relatively sheltered child who had lived on military bases, so as you can imagine this was quite a shock for me.

My mother didn't work (and still doesn't), and really wanted to live the American dream of having a house with a picket fence and play housewife even if that house was only affordable to them due to the bad schools around it. Instead of getting into a lot of trouble as a kid, I simply shelled up and was very depressed and scared. Regardless of anything I was going through - we couldn't move since my parents loved having a house and I couldn't go to a different school because we didn't have enough money for a private school.

And I developed deep life long depression and still sometimes panic in large crowds due to the fights and riots I experienced while in school. After high school I often wondered why I was so emotionally immature and I think some of it had to do with growing up in this sort of environment. Regardless, I have taken responsibility for my life now and have my own family and children. As I look back upon this situation, I can't help but respect my own parents less and less as I age. It pains me to be around them, as they seemingly were very happy to sacrifice my happiness and childhood for their way of life.

You, a cop's kid, had to pay protection to bullies in school ?

US is kind of weird. I don't think this would've happend to a cop's kid in eastern Europe. Not that I've ever heard of anyone paying protection at school. People do get bullied. I went to a non-selective state middle school and got into a lot of fights over insults before I learnd to tune them out.

Was bullied a bit at the end of it but fortunately it was only one semester and it wasn't that bad. Maybe because I had a reputation for psychotic fighting if provoked, the guys who bullied me were cca 15 and 200 lbs each, I weighed maybe 140 at the time.

I think you're muddling "shelled up" with shelled out.

Yeah.. that's a phrase I haven't seen used yet, and "shelled out" looked like it'd fit there, so..

(also shift work makes me lose sleep, so..)

I probably didn't articulate it well enough. I didn't have to pay anything, and I didn't get bullied. The reason I didn't get bullied was that I basically shelled up and treated school like jail.

Every non-selective school is jail to people who aren't complete normies or social geniuses.

You just got a particularly harsh type of jail. I had the somewhat comfy German one where it's kinda shabby but overall not that bad.

You got the American one with race gangs and all that shit.