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Mother sea otter with rare twin baby pups, she is floating on her back while the pups snuggle on her belly

Open Thread with Twin Otter Pups

tigtog

These rare twin sea otter pups feature for this week’s Open Thread. Please natter/chatter/vent/rant on anything* you like over this weekend and throughout the week.

Mother sea otter with rare twin baby pups (9137187459)

So, what have you been up to? What would you rather be up to? What’s been awesome/awful?
Reading? Watching? Making? Meeting?
What has [insert awesome inspiration/fave fansquee/guilty pleasure/dastardly ne’er-do-well/threat to all civilised life on the planet du jour] been up to?

* Netiquette footnotes:
* There is no off-topic on the Weekly Open Thread, but consider whether your comment would be on-topic on any recent thread and thus better belongs there.
* If your comment touches on topics known to generally result in thread-jacking, you will be expected to take the discussion to #spillover instead of overshadowing the social/circuit-breaking aspects of this thread.

3 thoughts on Open Thread with Twin Otter Pups

  1. Sorry, I need to vent.

    I just read (at raisingmyrainbow.com) about Ronin Shimizu, a boy who committed suicide at age 12 on Dec. 3 after years of harrassment and bullying, apparently for not being sufficiently gender-conforming.

    This story really hit me in the gut, mainly because it was so reminiscent of my own experiences in mid-20th century Virginia (USA.) I wasn’t anywhere near as gender non-conforming as Ronin, but in my place and time, any deviation from the masculine ideal got you labeled “queer” and seen by both children and adults as deserving of contempt and harrassment. I spent years constantly thinking of killing myself and then thinking of myself as a coward for not following through.

    Reading between the lines, it sounds like his parents repeatedly complained to the schools he was in, but the teachers, administrators, district, and the State didn’t really do anything. (That was also my experience when my own kids were in school here — plenty of BS about how they’d do something, but each time, they did nothing until we made a credible threat to sue.) Supposedly California has all kinds of anti-bullying stuff in place, and the school district claims they did, too, but when push came to shove, nobody did anything (except his parents.) Rather like my own experience, except that in my day, the assumption that being bullied was the fault of the person being bullied was openly acknowledged, rather than buried in phoney “anti-bullying” rhetoric.

    When I read how the district released a statement of sympathy and concern, all I could think of was: you hypocritical jerks, you obviously didn’t give a rat’s behind about him when he was alive, we’re supposed to take your supposed sympathy seriously, seeing as it only comes now that he’s dead? How many kids have to die before you actually do something?

    (And what about the parents of the kids who harrassed him? That’s a whole story that hasn’t been explored.)

    I can imagine all too well the despair Ronin must have felt, spending something like half his life being constantly attacked and harrassed for just existing as himself, with no end in sight. And, as a parent, I can imagine how much it hurt his parents, seeing their child abused before their eyes and trying one thing after another to protect him and seeing that none of it worked.

  2. Around this time a year ago, I was in the middle of trying to gain the courage to run away from my dad. I frequently wanted to kill myself, believing that my desire to escape from abuse was proof I was a horrible, worthless kid who deserved to die. At one point I even had a psychotic episode in which I told myself my decision would somehow end up hurting everyone I cared about and destroying everything I loved in life.

    Sometimes I still feel vulnerable, thinking about all of the times he did things to me. I can always hear the echo of his angry yell and feel his hands on me even as I am completely isolated from him.

    But never before have I felt this safe from him – I’m miles away from him, in my own room, and with the door locked. The day I ran away was the day that 6 years of constant abuse had come to a sudden end. Every other night, I go to sleep, proud of myself for having made that decision. I’m glad that it’s all behind me and that I have survived.

  3. So, it’s a farewell to NY, Not am not only am i gettig rid of the loft in DUMBO! Those who haven’t followed my sagas we’ve been residents of one of the few races that was empty despite crime ridden or an upper.,

    If anyone would lie to renta 2800 sq ft industrial loft for z$45oo (could easily sleep 4-6...7 nor 8 if the residehnts are newlyweds.

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