I was having a rough day today, so I lay down for a nap, and before I could fall asleep, Steve jumped up on the bed, got close, and insisted I pet him instead of sleep. Every time I would stop, he would paw me or stick his paw in my hand. He did that for about fifteen minutes, then decided I had enough therapy, climbed into the nook between my arm and torso, and fell asleep purring with his head on my shoulder.
Steve is normally outside during these hours.
Quaker in a Basement
Yes, they know.
craigie
What do they know and when do they know it?
Steeplejack
Good cat!
MissWimsey
Yes they know. If I have a headache, my Hannah will lie in bed nestled against me For however long it takes for it to go away.
Amir Khalid
When Steve fixes you in an unblinking stare, he’s not doing it to intimidate you. (Well, unless he’s also flattened his ears and is growling at you.) He’s just drinking in the sight of the human he loves.
Right now, I have my girl Bianca snuggling with me. A cat’s love is a blessing.
Mike in Oly
Such a good boy.
AJ
Go Steve ??
I had some hard depression over the last week but getting better
Work and structure are my best medicine, but music and talking to friends and some family (not others) helped me turn a hard day around yesterday and I think I’m getting better at salvaging those days
Steeplejack
@Amir Khalid:
Amen.
different-church-lady
Love you Jackals. E.O.M.
HumboldtBlue
They know.
hoosierspud
Steve has you well-trained. Now that the nights are getting colder, Bruce Wayne, cat of mystery, crawls under the covers. I have to lay on my left side with my left arm stretched out so that he can drape his arms and head over it. He then starts purring like a motorboat.
Aleta
@HumboldtBlue: Thanks (beautiful)
guachi
My four cats don’t know anything. They want neck scritchies and food.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
@AJ: I’ve been struggling with my depression lately too. If it wasn’t for my fur babies I don’t know where I’d be. Lottie lays on my legs, Mouse near my head and Baby Frankie right on top of me. They know.
patrick II
I had my six-month check-up with my doctor today. He was nearly as depressed as I was. I asked him to add a couple of prescriptions for me that a specialist had originally written. I told him that I had mentioned COVID during a visit and that doctor told me not to worry — it’s no worse than the flu. I told my regular doctor that I preferred doctors who listened to the CDC and not FOX news for their medical analysis. He told me that there were more doctors of like-mind around there than I would think. He also said if Trump wins the election he is leaving the country. He was serious.
HumboldtBlue
@guachi:
Yeah, my homie, Salad, has spent a glorious summer outside free and easy and now that it’s getting on to fall he’s suddenly Mr-push-forehead-on-my-arm-while-I’m-typing-and-please-get-off-the-desk-no-don’t-lay-down-and-snuggle-on-the-mouse-pad.
Dick.
Felanius Kootea
I’m full of nervous energy and for once it has nothing to do with national politics. My literary agent started sending my manuscript to publishers today, so naturally I googled every horror story about writers whose first books took 4 years to sell or whose agents dropped them because they couldn’t sell their books and now I’m a basket case.
patrick II
@Felanius Kootea:
Good luck Felanius.
HumboldtBlue
@Felanius Kootea:
At least you have a good book to read in the basket.
Felanius Kootea
@patrick II: Thank you!
Cckids
@Felanius Kootea: Read about how many publishers turned down JK Rowling for Harry Potter, and know hope.
And congratulations!!
Felanius Kootea
@HumboldtBlue: More than one good book.
TaMara (HFG)
Well, that’s a sweet story to end my day.
TaMara (HFG)
@Felanius Kootea: Never google where the term basket case comes from.
Felanius Kootea
@Cckids: 12 publishers rejected it. Bet they’re all kicking themselves now.
Felanius Kootea
@TaMara (HFG): You know better than to tell someone not to google something. World War One soldiers – I had no idea!
Amir Khalid
deleted.
Cckids
@Felanius Kootea: They will/should be kicking themselves for infinity.
AJ
@Ms. Deranged in AZ:
Sorry to hear that you’ve been struggling and I’m so happy that you have them and they have you!!
Wishing you clearer skies ahead.
germy
Chris Johnson
I’m reading the Thursday evening thread and have an interesting data point on that.
I’m GenX, born 1968, have been one of the noisier and more alienated Balloon Juicers for like ten years or something, and I’m finishing up a bout of therapy… stuff called memory reconsolidation therapy… that has been a real bolt of lightning for me. Specifically, my life has really sucked over a lot of pain and damage that’s just stuck with me forever, and I’ve made better sense of it.
Here’s the relevant part. I have a weird and sharp perspective on some of this.
I went to a school, Maria Hastings elementary school, in Lexington MA. Had a teacher, a Mr Popp, who threw over a kid’s desk in class. We had Metco students: read that as BUSING, black kids bussed in from Boston into our posh little suburb. I knew nothing about this except one thing: My Mom grew up with HER mom being racist and just refused to carry that on, so I grew up in a school with busing, in the 70s, with a Mom who absolutely refused to let me be racist. I have autism, so when she told me those kids were just like me and I was just like them (along with Sesame Street etc), I took her literally and never questioned it.
I ran into this when a kid, Willie, bullied me when I was littler. In therapy I got more of a sense of this. I didn’t realize that violence AROUND me was just as damaging: I didn’t take direct damage from this kid, but in the expanded memory was the reason why. I’m being preyed on, then suddenly yank! Kid disappears out of frame. A teacher, possibly this Mr Popp himself, had pounced and yanked the black kid away from the littler white kid. I didn’t understand why a bigger kid (and there were some mumblings about how that kid had a troubled home, to ‘explain’ it) would be mean. But he got attacked, real quick, for taking out his feelings on me.
The teacher flipping over the desk didn’t happen to me, it was right in front of me. In the therapy, working on bringing out the rest of the memory, I got the teacher going “Why don’t you go to the office”. That’s what happened to you when you were in trouble. What I didn’t expect was the kid, I guess a more streety Metco kid, retorting ‘Why don’t you suck my dick?’ and BOOM, sudden violence. Goodbye black kid, he sure as hell went to the office. Sixth grade might be too little to really connect with sass like that, but he would have heard it at home.
Here’s the thing. That’s busing, that’s inner-city kids from much tougher lives plunked down into a much tamer white school… with teachers, some racist, determined NOT to lose control. They were not gonna let those kids dominate the weaker, more sheltered white kids from privileged families. It’s a consistent picture that I never knew I was soaking in.
But, my Mom was adamant that we were not going to be racist, and I was autistic and literally believed the things she told me.
So I believed that I, too, was JUST AS subject to bursts of savage violence as the black kids I saw and knew. And this was a lie. I was white. I was not subject to that. And I spent my life, emotionally feeling at risk of sanctioned physical violence and upheaval, because I have autism and had made up my mind that my Mom wasn’t lying to me.
And my life SUCKED, traumatic to the point that I couldn’t finish college because I was acting like I was in the jungles of Vietnam or something. I was experiencing a worldview that we know is accurate for young black men around white authority figures, and I had naively applied that to myself and run with it. And it broke me. I followed a life of failure and being just broken, even though in some ways I had assets and privileges still.
How would I have thought about racism if I had not had a Mom who was damn sure not to let her kids be racist, regardless of the cost? I grew up facing a world that looked extremely violent and brutal… from, and to, black kids. I visited a black kid’s home once (another suppressed memory, painfully reconstructed). I even took the T into his area (not really the nastiest part of Boston, at all) and got served soul food mac and cheese. And since I assumed the world was so violent and scary, I had no chance, just the T journey and walking to his apartment and the buzzer etc. terrified me. And I insulted the folks by being in such terror, got torn apart with stomach pains that were not the fault of the Mom’s cooking, and got taken home in disgrace by my Mom who drove out to Brighton or wherever, not really anything like the projects, and that was it.
All this would have hurt me so much less if I’d had the luxury of deciding those OTHER people, those black people, were really violent ugly creatures who needed to be rounded up like animals, deserving whatever nastiness they suffered. It would have been so much easier to assume that I was okay and good, and instead I looked upon 1970s racial politics and culture clash, got taught that I was NOT different from them (and that lesson stuck) and it turned into a nightmare world where I then spent all my life utterly traumatized.
How specific is this time period, around busing and forced integration in the complete absence of doing anything about material conditions for black Americans? I was there and even being around it was traumatic as hell. Just forcibly applying ‘opportunity’ without reparations, without really addressing anything, produced a situation where I grew up with a picture of blacks as deeply bad, and it was just my fiercely determined Mom who forced me to assume that in fact I too was equally bad, equally subject to violence, outbursts and so on. Without that, I would have been a lot happier but horrifyingly racist from childhood, even if I’d ended up rebelling and taking a GenX path where I got heavy into ‘gangsta rap’ and identifying with another image of the racism. And if I did that, and then got older, wouldn’t I just fall back into the original total racism?
Sorry for the huge tangent but I only just worked on this stuff and I feel it’s important as far as answering ‘what happened to the boomer/X cohort to make them so freaking racist’. I feel like I literally watched some of that. Wonder what my classmates took away from these incidents.
lee
This is absolutely true.
My oldest had some pretty severe depression and anxiety in high school. Enough that she was hospitalized twice.
If she was having a particularly bad day our dog would ‘sneak’ upstairs behind her when she was heading to her room. He would not leave her room. He’d hang out in her bed next to her. If she kicked him out of bed he would just curl up in her clothes on her floor until he could sneak back into her bed.
StringOnAStick
@Chris Johnson: My husband is 10 years older than you, and his junior high was a “busing school” in suburban Detroit. We’ve talked about it; he says that mostly the black kids were scared and acting out because of it. He had one larger black kid constantly harassing him in shop until my husband finally snapped and went nuts on that kid, had to be dragged off, go see the principal and have his parents called but that kid never bothered him again. My husband is Jewish and definitely not racist. His insights into racism have been instructive to me since I grew up in tiny western, all white towns.
My husband’s brother made tight friends with a black kid for almost a year in junior high, then suddenly the friend completely shunned him. He ran into him as an adult and his old friend told him he’d been bullied by his fellow bused kids, telling him to quit being friends with that white kid or they’d beat him to death, and how sorry he was about what happened. At his funeral 3 years ago we noticed that there was a contingent of black fellow corrections officers who came to the funeral but stayed in the back and away from the white CO’s who cluttered up the front of the hall. He got along with everyone, it was a true thing about him all his life and those black CO’s were there to honour that; they also knew how racist most of the white CO’s were and made sure not to push boundaries because of potential blowback from the racists.
My point is that racism does violence to everyone.
The Moar You Know
Following the death of my wife’s dog Hannah in 2013 (we’d gotten married three years before, so I got Hannah as an old dog) we were both devastated. Hannah was a remarkable dog.
So we had been wondering around in a fog of grief for days, but even then…dogs kept coming up to us. And then one day I’m sitting at a nephew’s soccer game and feel this little furry butt snug into my backside. It’s a Corgi. I say hi. He’s nice, just sits there. About fifteen minutes the owner comes looking for him. Tell the guy “here he is”. Dude looks stunned. Says “he doesn’t like people. How did you get him to do that? He won’t even snuggle with me!”
I didn’t know was the answer. But deeper down I did; every dog we’d run into for the last several weeks knew we’d lost our pack. Every damn one. And they universally treated us with kindness and solicitude. I will never forget that, and especially will never forget that Corgi, for as long as I live.
We have another now, a fine Golden who I have raised from a pup; pretty much my first dog, and he is very much my dog (he loves my wife dearly and is quite attached to her, but everyone knows…he’s my dog. Not sure how that happened.) And he has a boatload of issues, most primarily anxiety, but he knows if something isn’t right. When I got sick a few weeks back and they told me to self-quarantine until my COVID tests came back negative (they did, thankfully) he would not leave the door to my room save for a meal, a poop, and then right back at his station.
My wife and I are frankly both very concerned about what happens when we go off lockdown and have to go back to work full time. He’s gotten used to having us around 24/7. I’m not sure how we are going to “wean him off” but it’s going to take a good long time.
Ohio Mom
Chris Johnson:
As the mom of a 23 yo autistic young man, I found your story fascinating.
I also identified with the stresses and strains of attending a newly-integrated school , because that was my experience in junior high: I was one of the middle-class white, mostly Jewish kids, whose families had “moved on up” to a new co-op housing project built on the grounds of a defunct Queens horse racing track, right in the middle of a very working class Black neighborhood, their kids feeling their oats as the “Black Power Movement” took off. We were surrounded by riots after Martin Luther King’s assasination.
Somehow, I took it all in stride but maybe that was because my home life had already inoculated me against turmoil.
Anyway, I don’t doubt that the current events of the day, which were reflected in your teacher’s completely inappropriate behavior, shaped your psyche.
I want to also suggest that internalized ableism, along with the quirks autism brings, also shaped you. If you are not familiar with game Autism Self-Advocacy Network, youight find some kindred souls there: https://autisticadvocacy.org/
I’ll be looking out for your name on the rhreads.
Ohio Mom
String on a Stick: I also had the experience of having a Black-Asian BFF as a freshman in HIgh School who shunned me the following year. She’d spent the summer in Berkeley with her Black dad (we lived in NYC), and came back with a raised consciousness that excluded whites.
It was a tumultuous time, but in retrospect, a necessary time. Things moved ahead a smidgen, now we have to join the push to move them ahead even further.
MoxieM
@Chris Johnson: Oh Hey. Fellow survivor of Lexington schools. You have my hugs etc. I was bused to Franklin (I may be older than you are–they used to carve us up by “ability” and bus the smart kids–hahah–to a few schools. Anyway. Yeah, the teachers there were awful. I had one throw an eraser at me (I was reading because, hey, she was boring as hell). And more, so much more. Still, parents struggle hard to get their kids into Metco, and research show that those kids have better life outcomes (take that as you will) than kids who stayed in Boston Public Schools. Newer research from Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren show this nationally. See for example The Opportunity Atlas to further explore. But it doesn’t make our experiences better. Me, I am reliant on EMDR to cope with the traumas. ETA: plus of course my dogs, who have saved my life in every meaningful way. Rescue what?
J R in WV
Lately, over the past few months, Punkin, our formerly really fat cat (now just a big girl with extra furry skin) has started sneaking into bed with us, lying on my pillow above my head, purring like crazy. She’s always been affectionate and a loud purr, but this getting up onto the pillows is a new thing.
I think she’s aware of the tension wife and I both have right now. The puppies like to cuddle too. It really helps us to relax.
I did a ton of phone banking for Hillary, calling into Ohio, as you could pick a state and I knew nothing I could do would turn WV into electoral votes for Sec. Clinton. Of course, it didn’t help enough in Ohio either, did it!?