Life

[namman siggins]

Parents are in town and we're having a blast just chilling, watching movies, cooking and doing almost nothing. I took two weeks off work and plan on relaxing for my Christmas break.

 

And helped me buy a new laptop, holy fuck! 
 

Pictures abound

[Badfinger]

My girlfriend's had to move back in with her parents and it's making her miserable. They're passive aggressive, manipulative, and controlling. She feels trapped, and I'm beside myself. She says just going along with what they say doesn't change how they act towards her, but when I suggested breaking out of that loop and saying no once in a while she reacted really violently against it. I know saying "Well just don't do that. Change your behavior" is almost less than useless, but the alternatives are either ignoring it and letting things stay the way they are out of inaction, or agreeing that it's ok this is the way things are which is just disgusting. We're meeting them at their house for brunch in an hour or so. I say "we" and "meeting" except she got a vague text message saying she should be there "earlyish" to help with undefined tasks. Rather than saying "we'll see you at noon!" we both got upset and she's already there. This is a meal that they're hosting for about a dozen people, but we're providing a cured salmon, dessert, and all the alcohol. Literally asked them to provide one 12 pack of beer and they declined.

 

I'm so frustrated, and when I say I'm upset she keeps thinking it's being upset with her for introducing stress. I just want to yell at them to not be fucking petulant children about their daughter.

[Ben X]

I've been in a very similar situation, BF. I found in the end that it was futile trying to change things and just ended in frustrated arguments. Better to highlight the negative patterns and suggest ways to break out but ultimately support her even if she decides to do nothing and just soldier through it.

[mikemariano]

Happy Birthday Nick Breckon!

[namman siggins]

I gotta say, life's pretty good right now.

I've found the right combination of medication to help level me out. I'm no longer feeling depressed, manic and suicidal. This leveling out has made me more confident in myself and what I have to bring to the table. I no longer feel a burden to mankind or my parents or my friends. I actually had to learn to fight those thoughts and know how to get out of it when they invade my thoughts.

 

Got some new gear so I can start podcasting. I'm going to get a portable recorder and starting recording random people I come across. I want to do a Voice of Sacramento and have their unique life and voice shared across the world.

 

I also want to start a venue for live podcasting and storytelling.

[twmac]

That all sounds awesome namman.

 

I quit my job of 4 years a few days ago.

 

Planning to go sit on a beach somewhere in Asia and drink beer until I figure out what to do with my life next.

 

I've been in the games industry for over 11 years and it is starting to look like the only thing I can do so I need to sort out exactly what that is.

[Bjorn]

Dude, enjoy the beaches, beer and freedom. 

[pabosher]

Planning to go sit on a beach somewhere in Asia and drink beer until I figure out what to do with my life next.

 

 

GOOD CHOICE. Need any SE Asia ideas? Hit me up!

[mikemariano]

That all sounds awesome namman.

 

I quit my job of 4 years a few days ago.

 

Planning to go sit on a beach somewhere in Asia and drink beer until I figure out what to do with my life next.

 

You're in good company.  I quit my job of 8 1/2 years a few weeks ago.  In a few hours, I will be in Vancouver, BC for two months.  I will be working on a few personal writing projects but when March rolls around I will also need a new direction in life.

 

If any of you at all are in Vancouver or the greater Pacific Northwest, look me up!  Message me on twitter @mikemariano!  Enlist me in your pen-and-paper-and/or-card game!  Get me out of the house every once in a while!

[miffy495]

I'm a good 12 hour drive away, but I visit family around there pretty regularly. I'll grab a beer with you if you're still around the next time I'm down.

[Apple Cider]

Grats to you Namman! Podcasting is awesome.

 

Things are good here - can't complain. Blowing my unused vacation on traveling out to the LA area at the end of January and I'm excited about taking more trips this year. I love travelling. 

[mikemariano]

I'm a good 12 hour drive away, but I visit family around there pretty regularly. I'll grab a beer with you if you're still around the next time I'm down.

 

Thanks, Miffy!  Contact me anytime.

 

I just got to Vancouver.  It's cold!

[Gormongous]

Argh! This one research project that I did over four years ago with a local professor just won't stop coming back to haunt me.

 

At first, I felt bad that I brought back to him an unequivocal negative to his hypothesis, especially since he paid me reasonably well for the anemic state of our field, so I agreed to keep meeting with him to develop his research into something more publishable. Mostly, the meetings have been a nice way to get a free meal every four or six months and to keep my ear to the ground with what's happening at UMSL, but this past year he started pushing hard for my help in getting the work that we did together published. That's right, he wants to publish the fact that he was wrong about something — namely, his process for finding this out! I didn't really understand (and still don't) but he promised that I would just need to provide a final draft of the work that I'd already done for him and he'd handle the rest, with a co-author credit to my name. He's got a book out with Harvard University Press, so I thought it was a safe bet and an easy bump on my CV.

 

Nope! Right at the height of writing my biggest grant, he sent me ten pages of largely unstructured thoughts, with a small collection of footnotes absent any primary sources beyond the ones I found for him, telling me that he was satisfied with his work and that it was up to me to add anything I felt was missing. Five drafts and four additional pages later, we were up to something that might fill out the back end of a mid-tier journal like Comitatus, but he wants to start at the top and asks me to research a list of the top journals in early modern history and their submission guidelines. Again, the timing was terrible, but he was reasonably flexible, and eventually we settled on Viator. Our article is not Viator material at all, but he repeated the whole "start at the top" thing and went through with the submission. Maybe things are different outside of medieval history, I thought?

 

Well, we just got back an absolutely scathing rejection, mostly focused on it being "under-researched and under-argued" but also touching on some errors in my work that I wouldn't have missed if the article hadn't been my third or fourth priority at the time, and now he wants me to take the lead on edits! Ugh. I've made it clear several times over the last couple years that I have no time to workshop an article over and over, especially not when it's outside my research interests, and I know that he's not ignoring that on purpose, just trying to involve me in his process... but I'm beginning to feel like his process sucks, this article shouldn't exist, and I don't need the distraction from my grant-writing, which is already a distraction from my dissertation-writing!

[syntheticgerbil]

Christ that's tough... He sounds like a nice dude otherwise so I'm guessing that's partly why it's so hard to walk away?

[Gormongous]

Christ that's tough... He sounds like a nice dude otherwise so I'm guessing that's partly why it's so hard to walk away?

 

Yeah, he's extremely nice and enthusiastic about everything. He's put me in touch with a couple of short-term employment opportunities (none of which panned out, not really his fault, see "enthusiasm") and is really bullish on getting me a first-round interview when the next professor in his department retires, too. It's just tough when I don't believe in this article at all and when he keeps dumping things on my plate out of a naive desire to share the wealth? I feel terrible for writing this post, but the last thing I needed today was that rejection letter, even if I'm not invested in the work itself.

[Dewar]

The "this isn't my job anymore" discussion is never a great thing, Do you have anyone in your field that you'd feel all right with handing off to? Maybe finding the right student who needs any writing credit they can get who'd be willing to spend more time on it so you can gracefully exit without burning bridges?

[Gormongous]

The "this isn't my job anymore" discussion is never a great thing, Do you have anyone in your field that you'd feel all right with handing off to? Maybe finding the right student who needs any writing credit they can get who'd be willing to spend more time on it so you can gracefully exit without burning bridges?

 

I wish, but my main contribution to the project is a series of Latin translations from an extremely difficult fourteenth-century text with no published editions. There's no one with my level of Latin skills in my department who isn't at least as snowed under as me. I just need to be more assertive about boundaries and remind him in every email that I'm working on two grants due at the end of the month...

[Griddlelol]

Learning to say "no" is the hardest thing about working in academia. My experience has been that saying no inevitably leads to ideas you want to follow up falling behind, or someone else working on them, who isn't anywhere near as invested as you, meaning it turns out shit. So I still say yes to everything that I like. 

 

 

However, I have learned to flat out say no when someone comes to me with a) something not worth my time (as with your mid-tier-at-best article) or b ) is a bad idea (my bosses like high throughput sequencing even when it's not a good idea. That shit costs a lot of time, which means more chance of being scooped by the infinite money Americans, and a lot of money, which could be better spent elsewhere.)

The thing I struggle with the most, is getting people to do work for me that they've promised. They all seem extremely enthusiastic when I meet with them, hand over samples and discuss the project and potential collaboration, but then take months to do even the smallest thing. If you don't have time, don't offer, it's not like I need to use your state of the art machine that needs publications to justify its existence. Basic lab work is more than fine in most cases, as you don't get questioned on why you're deviating from the norm, and asked to back up your results with...basic lab work.

 

End of rant. Tl;dr, I can sympathise, just say no. It's a valuable skill.

[Henroid]

That awkward moment when a United States Senator addresses you directly through Twitter to trade blows over the North Korea situation and his hard-on to take their word for it.

[Bidiot Bales]

I am an unorganized, disheveled mess. I'm fine mentally/emotionally, I'm just a lazy idiot as usual.

And yet I join ANOTHER forum. I'm truly the bidiot of the week.

[Ozzie]

I think I'm falling out of love with a friend of mine. Which is the second-best scenario I can think of regarding our relation to each other (the best of course would have been if he started to fall in love with me).

Our friendship has been a difficult but very worthwhile ride so far. And I'm happy that it won't take an emotional toll on me anymore from time to time. I got a lot out of the emotions, too, though.

I already feel like I miss certain things, despite the fact that I haven't quite fallen out of love with him yet: the very pleasurable moments of silence with him, and the desperate need for close friendship (basically I had to know EVERYTHING for the friendship to work).

Weird how the dynamic of our friendship constantly changes. It's also very exciting, though!

[Ozzie]

I'm curious if anyone here had a similar experience: falling in unrequited love with a friend, yet trying to keep up the friendship nevertheless. I can't say that I haven't suffered a bit for it, which I'm ready to to a degree. The friendship is so strong that it is worthwhile to me. It's difficult, but it's working out (I'm not falling out of love with him after all).

Most of my friends and my sister assume that this can't work. I think it can if the friendship is strong enough, and maybe also if the feelings of love aren't overwhelmingly strong.

[Twig]

I've done something like that before, but not quite the same. Like I wanted to hold onto the friendship because he was my best friend in high school, and I worked hard to make sure we stayed in contact, and I could tell he still wanted to be friends, but he wasn't really putting in the same effort. It's hard when we were friends and would see each other quite frequently and then I move across the country and we never see each other. Long-distance relationships are hard, apparently, even when they're only at the friendship level. But I kept trying anyway.

 

Then he got married and introduced me to his wife, and I became friends with his wife, and SHE put more effort into talking to me than he ever did, and he became a jealous bag of shit and told her not to talk to me anymore but never once spoke to me, and he stopped responding to me like a year ago, and then this holiday season I tried to contact him to hang out like we do every time I go home to Ohio and he didn't respond, and she also stopped responding to me, and then I called them so they'd answer the phone and she said he would never talk to me again, and I was just like "oh I didn't know he hated me now...", oh and also she'll never talk to me again either BUT SHE STILL "CARES", and then he confirmed that by saying the same thing to a mutual friend, who relayed the information to me, and fuck him ugh.

 

Okay so maybe not the same thing... It's still a sore spot, though. I'm so angry at him. And maybe at her, too, but mostly at him, because I know he's the reason, it's not really her fault. I feel bad for her. But also I'm angry at both. She said and did things that sometimes felt manipulative to me, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt at the time. Now I'm not sure. It's all fucked. At least I'll never have to talk to either of them ever again. I just have to get it out of my mind...

 

Fuck people!

 

EDIT: Oops I was responding to the post re: "falling out of love with friend" as if the question re: "falling in unrequited love" was asked about that one. Well, nevermind, then. This is what happens when I read things fast. (it's not like it really was relevant either way anyway)

[SuperBiasedMan]

I've done a more similar lower key thing before. A crush on an Internet friend. I knew she wasn't interested even before we talked about it, but after we did we just stayed friends. It's harder to tell over the Internet, but I think when it was clear I wasn't going to be awkward about it she didn't seem to change her behaviour at all.

I suspect your sister and friends are concerned that ultimately you want to date your friend, and that friendship won't be satisfying even if you think it will or are trying to make yourself think it will. As long as you're not actually expecting your friend to develop feelings, and have honestly accepted the rejection of romantic interest then I personally think it can go fine. Hope it goes well!

[Bjorn]

I'm curious if anyone here had a similar experience: falling in unrequited love with a friend, yet trying to keep up the friendship nevertheless. I can't say that I haven't suffered a bit for it, which I'm ready to to a degree. The friendship is so strong that it is worthwhile to me. It's difficult, but it's working out (I'm not falling out of love with him after all).

Most of my friends and my sister assume that this can't work. I think it can if the friendship is strong enough, and maybe also if the feelings of love aren't overwhelmingly strong.

 

Do you find yourself routinely daydreaming about your friend the way you would about any crush?  I think if you're still in that kind of headspace, maintaining a healthy friendship could be difficult.  Regular contact is going to continue fanning the flames, even just inside your head, and being in that kind of mentality will naturally affect how you act around that friend.

 

That said, I think the friendship can be kept and survive just fine, but I'd suggest backing off a bit for a few weeks if this is someone you see on a regular basis.  Even a little bit of separation can do a lot to clear the head.  Keep in touch over texts or social media, but no alone time, dinners, Netflix, etc., for a few weeks.  I know if I'm crushing on someone pretty hard and it's not going to go anywhere, just some space really helps get things back to a better balance in my own head.

 

But, if you don't have that kind of crush mentality going on right now, then you're probably fine. 

 

 

*snip*

 

Fuck people!

 

Dude, that blows.  Fuck 'em.  I lost two of my closest friends from high school in a similar way (not exact, but close enough), combination of weird jealousy in their relationship plus all of us growing and maturing in different directions.  It still sucks though, they're people I'd enjoy catching up with once or twice a year if that was a possiblity.