“The homepage on my web browser is Yahoo, which I’m told it shouldn’t be, but I’ve just been too lazy to change it. From time to time I’ll read some of the comments under stories on it to get a sense of what it must be like at a Klan meeting.”

—

Aaron Sorkin’s media diet (via jamiemottram)

hha so true

(via marklisanti)

8:46 am  •  18 May 2011  •  38 notes

“Am I panicked? Fuck no. Why would I be panicked when I’m one of the few people that has faced and accepted the truth?”

—

molls…she wrote: so so so sorry none of us died last night

9:30 am  •  21 March 2011  •  83 notes

Matt is my friend and reading his blog makes my internet life better. Also: This essay is really, really, really good!

7:36 am  •  27 January 2011  •  1 note

miltnr:

Last fall, the very nice Mark Armstrong approached me about doing a piece for Bundle. The above link is what resulted.

The article goes into more detail, but in short, I accrued a LOT of debt in a short time and only just got out of it. Admitting (in a very public forum!) what used to be my Big Shame is part of my attempt to move past it and maybe (maybe?) provide a little bit of “you’re not alone” and “you can get out of debt too” to people who might be where I used to be.

Anyway, thanks to Mark for asking me to do it, Mike Dang for editing it, and you guys for reading it.

Kate Miltner’s essay reads like a page (or, a chapter, really) from my     L  I  F  E.

Many thanks to Kate for writing this.

10:57 am  •  25 January 2011  •  7 notes

Why I can’t stop reading Mormon housewife blogs - Internet Culture - Salon.com

I RELATE TO ALL OF THIS

3:17 pm  •  20 January 2011  •  1 note

I read a lot of articles about AIDS and picked out a few that you should read, too.

(Source: longreads)

9:38 am  •  13 January 2011  •  24 notes

spiers:

Reading the comments on this Gawker thread about Jared Loughner’s family, a few thoughts: 

It is far harder than you probably think to get an adult with paranoid schizophrenia help—professional treatment or otherwise. And I know this from painful direct experience. Paranoid schizophrenia runs in my family on my dad’s side and we’ve had to deal with it in the worst possible ways. (I was adopted, so I’m lucky to have dodged that  bullet, but it’s a concern for the rest of the family.) It’s not simply a matter of recognizing signs and getting someone into therapy. It’s also a matter of convincing that person to consent to treatment or legally compelling them to do so if they won’t. And if the person in question happens to be an adult when his or her psychotic break occurs and does not think he or she has a problem, it’s nearly impossible. (Not surprisingly, many schizophrenic people don’t believe they’re schizophrenic. And if they’re paranoid, too, they may in fact believe that they’re the only people whose perceptions are actually accurate. They’re not crazy; you are. And so is everyone else.)

Unless someone becomes violent, getting a reasonably high-functioning adult into treatment—or even into a clinic for a diagnosis—without their consent is exceedingly difficult. And not because it requires effort, though it does, and quite a lot of it, but because the threshold for compulsion is extremely high and most patients won’t meet it. (And reading about Loughner, he would fall into the high-functioning category. And I don’t see anything obvious—even the junior college expulsion—that would have resulted in compulsory institutionalization.)

Someone in the Gawker thread mentioned a 72-hour hold for people who present a danger to themselves or others. But what constitutes danger to self or others is, in most jurisdictions, predicated upon whether the person in question has actually attempted something violent. Verbal threats are almost never enough. At best, you can file a harassment charge—and that usually won’t get you a court-ordered hospital visit. In my family’s case, we were lucky enough to know and be in a position to figure all of this out via talking to law enforcement, consulting lawyers and so on. Not everyone is. And we were also (in a twisted way) fortunate that the family member in question had sent threatening letters to both of my parents (and when I say threatening, I mean threatening to kill them), which allowed for some documentation when he was brought before a judge on a completely unrelated charge—also a lucky coincidence. But all that got was 72 hours with a shrink to make a diagnosis. And just barely. If we didn’t have the death threats on physical paper, the outcome would have probably been different. There would have been no diagnosis at all, even though we all knew something was wrong.

And that was better than nothing—a lot of mental illness goes undiagnosed because you can’t get the patient in to see a shrink in the first place—but it’s almost useless when the patient refuses meds, refuses therapy, can’t be compelled to take meds by the court, can’t be forced to by family members to do so because he’s legally an adult (and a large physically fit one at that, which makes confrontation potentially dangerous). And there’s no reasoning with the patient because, well, when’s the last time you tried to reason with a paranoid schizophrenic? Logic and facts are no longer relevant.

It is nearly impossible to force a mentally ill person into institutionalized treatment in that scenario. And not without reason; No one wants a system that allows people to be institutionalized simply for behaving erratically or saying crazy things. We live in a country where those things are allowed, as long as they’re not hurting other people. But we also have a system where what constitutes hurting other people is very literal and physical in its criteria. (Ask anyone who’s had a stalker problem about how far someone has to go before law enforcement can really do anything about it.)

So I actually feel some sympathy for the Loughner family. When they say they don’t know how this happened, I don’t think they necessarily mean that literally. I think they mean it in the way that anyone who’s had a child with serious mental issues means it: as a genuine way of asking why. Because no one deserves to have to deal with something like this. And schizophrenia is not a matter of bad parenting—unless you consider having defective genes bad parenting, which I don’t. Breaks often occur in early adulthood, after the patient may have had a completely normal and happy childhood, in which case it’s even more difficult for the parents to process because they can’t believe that their child—who was totally fine just a few years ago—isn’t simply going through a phase.

And for those of you who have kids, ask yourself what you would do if your beautiful, angelic children—no doubt raised lovingly and perfectly by you—were happy and productive and loving people the entire time you raised them. And then one day they weren’t. Because it happens all the time. And if you think it couldn’t happen to you, you’re wrong.

4:40 pm  •  12 January 2011  •  88 notes

“but there is so much more going on in the mind of the man who’s sitting in front of you on the train who weighs 415 lbs and is eating a whopper with extra cheese and a large fries and a large coke and even if you want to slap that shit out of his hands and shake their shoulders and say “stop killing yourself!!!” you might be missing the point. and not even in a “society makes poor people fat by providing only cheap unhealthy food options” way (although that’s true too) because there’s more going on on a personal level, like literally i could not stop eating and all i wanted to do was stop eating since literally before i can remember and blaming fat people for “choosing” to be fat sort of misses the point and it’s a condition that deserves compassion, and i don’t mean that condescendingly because nobody wants to be pitied but there’s a difference between pity and understanding. like you know a heroin addict would probably stop using heroin if they could flip a switch to turn the heroin need off and it’s easy to vilify the heroin addict or fat person but food is as addictive as drugs. if you ask the 415 lb man on the train if he thinks his lunch is a ludicrous lunch he might tell you it would have felt like a ludicrous lunch ten years ago but today it feels like a rational lunch, just like the guy with the $50/day percocet addiction or coke addiction would feel like something was missing with only $35 of percocet or coke even though that would be enough to lay me or you out”

— Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, how downloading music has literally saved my life

3:38 pm  •  11 January 2011  •  2 notes

jaimealyse:

thisbodysfabric:

onusmemorandi:

[src]

this is also why i take vitamin supplements.

YES

True story.

(Source: amalockh)

3:07 pm  •  11 January 2011  •  80 notes

maybe some people are mean on the internet so they can be nice in their real lives

8:51 am  •  10 January 2011  •  4 notes