Sound Off: your chance to rant 12-7-11

And I’d also like to say FUCK YOU to the guy who completely down-played getting doused with a shit-tonne of pepper-spray by calling it a “lavender spritz”…LAVENDER SPRITZ, MY ASS!

Casey,

Needless to say, at that range, even if it WERE lavender spritz, it’d still hurt like fuck. Ever gotten perfume in your eye? That shit stings.

firebird: I know I was carefully taught that it was disgusting to sniff instead of blowing my nose.

I remember being taught that, too! But I didn’t get around to blowing my nose consistently until a year or so ago…guess I’m just slow on the uptake. Also, I’ve always been very phlegmy and hacked up loogies a lot, so I never noticed men in particular spitting everywhere (it’s usually my sister who does that). In spite of the fact that I’ve been hacking up loogies for as long as I can recall, seeing someone else spit makes me gag…very weird.

Jennifer Kesler,

Sniffing drives me almost as bonkers as the loogie spitters. It might be a public transportation thing, though. Some mornings, dude behind me sniffs on a ten second interval, lady across the way coughs dryly once a minute and the punk in the front sniffs and coughs in between.

And I’m all, “OMFG, serenity now, please.”

sbg,

Yeah, it drives me bonkers, to the point where I can’t sit still and have to either get out or block out the sound somehow because I feel like my skin is tightening around me and all my clothes feel uncomfortable and it brings out every little irritation. i get that kind of irritated from rhythmic/consistent sniffing (but not a one-off or once every now and again), as well as seeing someone bounce their leg or foot, or with tapping of toes or fingers. I don’t know why, and no matter how much I try to not be annoyed I can’t. I understand that some people HAVE to sniff or do SOMETHING, I just wish it was more feasible for people to carry around tissues if they have to. Or that humans didn’t need snotty lubricants for our airways.

Jennifer Kesler: eating noises, lip smacking noises, tiny bubble popping in saliva noises

SO MUCH THIS
SO MUCH THIS!
I really can’t stand eating noises/lip smacky noises/etc. (it didn’t help when my friend would purposely eat obnoxiously in front of me after I told him about this then hid behind the flimsy, xenophobic excuse of “I EAT LIKE A KOREAN!” LOLWAT
I’ve only just gotten over hating slurping noises (like slurping hot noodles). I also hate mouth-breathing noises.

Other things I hate are people treating the Bible like it’s historical fact (by which I mean, people who treat THE MIRACLES/LOL-LOGIC of the Bible as historical fact…like my mom. (I also recall asking her once when I was little why God was such a jerk in the Old Testament and she gave me this gem of an answer; “BECAUSE THE JEWS WERE FIVE HAIRS SHORT OF BEING APES AND NEEDED GOD TO PUNISH THEM AND TEACH THEM WHAT’S WHAT”
I’m atheist/agnostic now for a reason)

Some other things I hate are the words “yummy” and “tummy” (makes me wanna PUNCH someone in the tummy) and I hate it when people regress to a childlike state in moments of duress and use baby-talk because of it (like my mom…again *sigh*). Although I need to get over that.

Casey,

Impulse charity is a bad idea. Even if it’s not a scam you don’t know how efficiently they spend their money. And I mistrust any organization that tries to get donations using pity.

If you’re concerned about people in the developing world, a better solution is supporting things that will cause institutional or structural change that will benefit communities, not just one girl. Better yet, support initiatives by people in those countries rather than things Westerners think are a good idea FOR them–Kiva is a great place to do this, I’m sure there are others.

Casey,

I have no idea, I’d have to research the actual org. Again, Kiva Microloans (http://www.kiva.org/) are a great way to go because they’re all projects created by people who live in those countries and who have decided what it is they need. And, because it’s a loan, you get your money back 98.96% of the time (I have never met anyone who hasn’t) so you can re-invest it into others too.

There are also probably grassroots orgs in your local community that do really awesome things. ALSO, use Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) which can at least alert you to any red flags in their business practices.

So, there’s this comic artist on DeviantArt named Humon and she’s Danish and one of her series is about a blonde, white European man named Neils having a three-way relationship with a Black American couple and…IDK, it’s built upon kinda problematic stuff. Well she just wrote this journal discussing some readers concerns and it doesn’t sit right with me:

Ever since I started making the Niels comics I’ve been bombarded by Americans who told me that I, as a white person, couldn’t do this and that with black characters in my comics. It actually helped me because the comic is taking place in America, so it helped me understand how Duncan and Natalie would feel about white people, and how it would clash with Niels who loves black people but comes from Denmark so he wouldn’t be as sensitive about it as Americans would expect of a white and blond man.

Because us Nordic people have a history of enslaving EVERYBODY we could get our hands on. We loved French, English, and especially Irish slaves (The Irish probably being the single most abused people in our part of the world. They were like a “all you can enslave” table. Even the first slaves in America were Irish). Heck, we even enslaved our own people. So we really can’t be bothered with “old guilt”, especially because there’s a big chance that our own family were once slaves, it’s just that they were white so you can’t tell. So Nordic people tend to not feel white guilt because then we would have to feel guilty for all the people we pissed off in the past when we were vikings and there’s just far too many.
So I try hint at that in the comics. Duncan and Natalie have learned that they can’t use the white guilt card on Niels because he is immune to it, except for in bed were it’s makes for some weird but interesting roleplay. XD

It just sounds like slavery apologism and a re-tread of the “Arab trader” argument, only it’s changed into “THE IRISH WERE TOTES SYSTEMATICALLY ABUSED AND EXPLOITED TOOOO!” (I’m not denying they/we weren’t, I just hate that argument)
I’m sure other people could take this apart more articulately than I can.

That phrase always makes me think of that one movie by Sophia Coppola whose title I can’t remember right now. About the sisters who all commit suicide after being locked away by their teacher father. I never really liked that movie because it seemed too odd for it to be told from the outsider, creepy stalker boy’s perspective, because the actually interesting people were this family and these sisters. I get movies all the time about boys being creepy, or just “boys being boys” (because that’s what we’d call boys who spy through girl’s windows right? Just boys being boys? URGH.), but rare is it that we get a movie from the perspective of girls. So why make it all about the boys and their fantasies?

Anyway, it bothered me. And I always felt a strong anti-sympathy for the parents who did this to the sisters, and a strong dislike for the creepy boys, and a desire to have these sister characters be something more than just objects for the boys to fantasize about and wonder over the whole movie.

So that’s where my mind goes from your comment, and also to “I am very glad my dad was not of this opinion, that I had to somehow be saved by him from other men/boys who want to like, steal my honor or something antiquated like that.” My dad isn’t empty of problematic notions, but luckily this isn’t one of them (not for my mom, either). The idea that boys wear that sort of shirt to, what, advertise that they’re assholes? It’s very silly for them to do so. The guys who think they’re just THAT awesome very rarely are. And by rarely I mean never in my experience.