Telemarketing “double glazing” in England
When I lived in England, my parents were getting a divorce here in the U.S. and I needed money. I was on a student visa, not able to legally get a job there, so I had to sell double-paned windows on the phone. They call them “double glazing,” and apparently this job is one of the worst you can get. I learned something about England while calling their English homes unasked: English people are bursting with vile hatred. It pulses in their veins. They are miserable, and somehow cherish and nurture misery, so that if some unfortunate person happens in their path, they will unload all their hate and judgement in a tirade of condescension. This is what happened in the predominant number of phone calls I made. If you are a telemarketer here and you think people are rude when you call, just be glad you don’t live there. It opened my eyes to the hidden nature of the English, and it made clear to me the underlying motivation for all their actions. They are miserable. They value suffering and enjoy making others suffer.
I don’t believe animal testing is necessary and ever was necessary to further science.
Ideas to flesh out:
- Animal testing is “extreme science,” unwarranted dismissal of basic compassion
- Compassion is more important than science, particularly in our modern, very populated world. Compassion and science usually don’t conflict and don’t need to conflict.
- Observation and critical thought can replace most animal cruelty in science.
- We have to be patient, to think rationally and clearly and to allow ourselves to not know something we feel we need to learn by tormenting animals until another thinker discovers what we want to know without animal testing.
An elegant solution to the “gay marriage” debate
There are four issues with gay marriage: 1. people of various religions believe marriage is between a man and a woman. 2. Marriage comes with a ton of rights, legal advantages and financial advantages. 3. We are told marriage is based on love between a couple. 4. Homosexual couples can fall in love and be just as attached to each other as heterosexual couples, so denying them the rights in #2 is asinine and also beneath our American rhetoric.
This is a simplification, but bear with me.
What we have is the problem when Church gets all up in our State. Marriage is a religious definition. Marriage has been afforded a State status. We need to extricate marriage from State. How do we do this?
This will take 3 modifications to our current legal recognition of couples, and the use of civil unions - the non-religious form of legal marriage in the U.S.
First, a civilly united couple (via civil union) in the U.S. automatically gets all the advantages a married couple does. A civil union is recognized by Federal law. Couples in a civil union can visit each other in the E.R. as family, can inherit each other’s stuff, can adopt a child as a couple without getting crap from the adoption agency for their couple status, etc. This already pretty much happens when people get a civil union.
Second, everyone who has a legally recognized marriage gets a civil union. This is already basically true, as is the first necessary step. However, this will make things easier for married couples (who aren’t fundamentally bigoted) for step 3.
Thirdly, marriage is no longer recognized as a legal union by the Federal government in the U.S.
Homophobic churches can deny marriage to loving couples to their misguided hearts’ contents, and homophilic churches can marry all the gay couples they want, and nobody can say boo because it is religious and not legal. If someone wants legal protection with their mate, they can get a civil union. To make the change palatable, we can work it so people get their civil unions with paperwork or whatever when they get married. There’s already the name-changing for old school couples, and that requires administrative paperwork.
Done. Church out of our State with comparatively very little effort.
Another dream of me walking around my empty childhood home
while I look through cabinets and closets to see what is left. This time, I was looking through cabinets and I found some things written to me by my dead stepfather. I was indecisive about bringing them. I thought I could get them later. I felt the fear I could never move on.
My stepfather is the only person in my family I could trust, who gave good advice and wasn’t too overwhelmed with his own mental problems to help me. Mom and Dad divorced while I was in college, then she married Bill. He’s dead now. He died in 2006, and I wish I could ask him for advice and talk to him. I miss him a lot.
My mother and father (especially mother) both dumped their problems on me, and I am permanently fucked up now. I’m being vague, but that’s because I’ve been over and over it all in my head while trying to let it go. Suffice it to say my mother has BPD and my father has some sort of disorder that seems to get better with anti-depressants, but I wouldn’t call him depressed. They’re alive.
It bothers me: when I’m hormonally depressed or just overwhelmed, it all comes back - being raised by people who wanted too much from me, being stunted by them. I am an engineer now, but I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to get As and I am smart enough, but I was too traumatized by my mother’s personality-switching and screaming and hate and punishment to get my work in. Thanks to her fucking personality problem, she was able to make it look like I was the trouble, and she did everything she could. All the teachers and specialists thought I had an attitude problem, but I wanted more than anything to do well in school and sports, and everyone was punishing me for things I hadn’t done and personality flaws I didn’t have but no one was helping me. I can’t explain how painful it was, that my very existence was a waste, that my mother never passed up an opportunity to shame me, degrade me or humiliate me in public. She made me believe I was a drain on humanity, that I shouldn’t have been born, that I had to be twice as good as everyone else to be worth as much as they were. She’s still too fucking crazy to acknowledge what she did. She thinks I was a “willful” child and I needed her discipline or I would be much worse. She destroyed all my potential but won’t even admit it. If only I could show her what she made me feel for so many years.
I’m in charge of my life now. I’ve had therapy and read a zillion books on mental health. I can’t shake what she did. She ruined the rest of my life, not just my childhood. My relationships with men are terrible. I’m afraid of getting randomly punished. I’ve had to overcome my fear of women again and again, but I am a woman. It’s because she terrorized me and held me close at the same time. She ruined my whole life. I”m not trying to let her ruin it, and I’m trying to let go. I’m trying so hard to move on, but the damage she did sticks with me. It cuts across time, all my development, everything I did as a child and it casts a shadow on everything I do as an adult. Trying to unwarp my perception and rid myself of fear is taking all my time. Trying to enjoy life and be happy and do the things I always wanted to do is worthy, but it is so bitter.
Debt collectors
Are worthless, uneducated pieces of shit. You know, I don’t owe you trash anything, but you think it’s okay to call my home and pretend you are familiar with some random fuck who used my number to get some credit. You know what? You are poorly educated filler. You are the padding between me and other people who have made something of themselves. Make something of your life or fucking die.
I am so anxious. There is so much to be done but a single person can’t do it all.
If we could all be vegan. How wonderful, but the undercurrents of justice and respect that would emerge if we were would make the world so joyful.
Things were good and now I’ve crashed.
I wonder what did it. I was doing very well, and now I’m tired and I have to fend off depression. Do I only have a limited amount of joy on some sort of time-average?
I’m lucky I have good coworkers.
One good thing about my job is I’m working with people who mean well. There aren’t too many shits ranting or pulling immature stunts. It’s only a little high-school, and that’s good for a building with so many people.
I know you’re sitting at home, ranting
Don’t pretend there’s anything valuable in that overpunctuated email you sent me. You’re classic shut-in nuts, and self-absorbed to boot. I know little shits like you. You won’t apologize and you’ll think just letting the damage you did pass is good enough. Dumbass.
