Articles from July 2015

One simple reason why screaming at children is not effective

I can still remember well what I thought as a child.  My parents didn’t scream at me, but they did yell, and I can remember how I felt when they did.  And that very easily translates to how a child would respond to screaming.

It was quite simple: The more they yelled, the less I complied.

I’d already be trying to hurry up and get ready, but with NVLD, executive functioning and time management are huge challenges.  I rushed around and tried and tried, but still ran late.  My parents would yell.

Did their yelling make me hurry up?  Heck, no: I moved SLOWER out of resentment.  After all, I was already doing my best to be on time, but treated like I was being deliberately slow.  So might as well be slow, if you’re going to be treated that way anyway.

If my husband comes to me respectfully with a problem, we can resolve it peacefully.  But if he yells at me instead?  Heck, no!  All yelling does is make me resentful.  It does NOT make me comply.

When Richard and Tracy criticized and punished me for being quiet and shy, I did not turn into the life of the party.  When they decided to use yelling, cussing and screaming to get me to comply, I slammed the door on their friendship.

When people yell at me or criticize me for being quiet and shy, I become EVEN QUIETER and more reserved.  I noted this way back in 1998.

This is how I respond to not being treated with respect.

And you can be sure children are responding the same way.  THIS is why yelling/screaming is counterproductive.

Defending my Thesis; Graduating with Honors–College Memoirs: Life At Roanoke–May 1995, Part 2

Possibly on May 13 or a later date, Cugan and I took our new favorite movie, Much Ado About Nothing with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, to Laura’s house and showed it to the boarders there.

I had never been to Laura’s house before.  She lived outside of V–, a small town in M– County.  Her boarders were her boyfriend Bob, Shannon, Dan, Helena, and Helena’s two-year-old daughter, Ellie.  All of them were in the SCA.

Laura tended to pick up strays, both human and animal.

She lived in a moderate-sized, unfinished, red house on a moderate-sized farm.  The living room had no carpet, and it and the bathroom still seemed to be only half-done.  The living room was packed with stuff.

I don’t think Laura raised crops, but she did have a horse or two, and rabbits in the barn.  Cats and a large black puppy named Nala wandered around.

Soon, two cute, tiny puppies joined the group, Shannon’s puppies.  When he got older, the male tried to hump Nala, even though he was a toy breed and Nala was one of the largest breeds.  Eventually, unfortunately, Nala ate the female.  🙁

Ellie was as curious and mischievous as a two-year-old usually is, but the others didn’t childproof the house.  When she found the flour and covered the house with it before everyone woke up, they probably shouldn’t have been surprised, since the cupboard wasn’t locked.

Bob had a bad temper, which Laura didn’t put up with for long.  After all, she’d already been in a bad marriage, and left when the guy pointed a gun at her.  I sensed she was going to break up with him when I saw how annoyed she acted with Bob.  Cugan saw nothing.

Dan must have been lazy or a bad boyfriend, because one day he was thrown out of the house, and Shannon ended up marrying another guy.

****

The defense of my thesis was actually the last of my finals, since seniors took finals earlier than the other classes did.

On Monday, May 15, I defended my thesis in front of the panel of teachers I selected.  I forget who was in the panel.  I know Dr. Nelson and his wife were, and I suspect Thea, Todd and Christina also were.

The defense was set for ten a.m.; it lasted twenty minutes, and the teachers asked me questions.  Then I went outside the room, one of the conference rooms in Jubilee, and waited in the hall as they talked about my thesis behind the closed door.

Then Nelson came out and said they were impressed with my extensive reading (more than some of the teachers on the panel had done) and the quality of the work, and would give me an A-.  

Not only that, but Nelson put my thesis in the Roanoke library, along with past theses which were so honored, as an example for future students of a good thesis paper.  

Such an end to all the anxieties I held about this paper for three and a half years!  And at first I wasn’t even going to write one: I was going to drop out of the Honors Core program and take Senior Studies instead!

Now, I needed to re-type the thesis, and give it to Nelson.

Not only that, but the school informed me I would graduate cum laude and with honors.  Though I can’t find my final grades, my total GPA was between 3.5 and 3.59.

I got to wear a gold, braided cord for the ceremony, exactly the same as and worn exactly the same as the one given to NHS members in my high school graduation.

As I wrote in the Journal,

One more page of my thesis to type!! That’s the last of my homework. Wow. I can’t believe it. It still hasn’t hit me.

Last Wednesday as I sat in Chaucer, I thought, this is my last class. And I won’t be going to Chaucer or any other class, except for Brit Lit final.

–Such a thought! It made me sad, especially since I’ll miss Chaucer. That was a fun class. I’d recommend it, but Christina wouldn’t be teaching it next year. I’ll also miss Pearl’s CD’s. 🙂

I’m so happy to say I got an A- on that thesis!

****

On a Wednesday just before graduation, a guy came up to me at the information desk in the library.  He was pleasant-looking, and chatted with me for a bit, finding out my name and such.

I wasn’t deliberately flirting with him, but suspected he was interested.  Apparently my instincts on these things improved greatly over the years, because while I was on a date with Cugan, this guy called the apartment and asked for me.

Tara or Pearl answered, and told him I was away.  Somehow she ended up telling him I was at SCA dance practice with my boyfriend and dressed in medieval clothes, which he said sounded “so cool.”  Afterwards, Tara or Pearl chatted and one said to the other, “How does she do it?”

How do I do it?  They once asked this same question about Cindy, who despite having only one sort-of boyfriend before college, kept attracting guys at college.

I had such bad luck with men that I often felt like an ugly duckling–until the second half of senior year.  And now my friends were asking of me, “How does she do it?”  What a difference!

Later on, this guy called me and talked for a bit.  He asked me to dinner, but I said I wasn’t comfortable with that.  I didn’t know him all that well, and I had an exclusive boyfriend.

He seemed okay with that, and asked if he could get to know me as a friend, because he recently divorced and was looking for friends.  I said okay, but I didn’t see him in the library or hear from him again.

Index 
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?

April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign

May 1992:

Sophomore Year 

Summer 1992:

September 1992:

October 1992–Shawn’s Exasperating Ambivalence:

November 1992:

December 1992:

January 1993:

February 1993:

March 1993:

April 1993:

May 1993:

Summer 1993: Music, Storm and Prophetic Dreams

September 1993:

October 1993:

November 1993:

December 1993:

January 1994:

February 1994:

March 1994:

April 1994:

Senior Year 

June 1994–Bits of Abuse Here and There:

July & August 1994:

January 1995:

February 1995:

March 1995:

April 1995:

May 1995:

 

Northerners defending the Confederate flag in my Facebook newsfeed?

Has this country gone MAD?  Since when do Northerners defend the Confederate flag?  That’s treason in my book.

That symbol of a rebellion based on defending slavery, certainly has no place on government buildings.  We’re supposed to be one country.  That flag symbolizes both a racist evil fight by many states to hold onto the slavery of thousands of suffering people, AND treason.

It’s the same as the swastika, only it’s against blacks instead of Jews.

And it ALWAYS HAS BEEN.  This is nothing new.

So take it off the state government buildings.  Individuals can still have their Confederate flags if they want: That’s free expression.

But if you display one, it also tells me to stay away from you because you’re probably in the KKK or Aryan Brotherhood or one of the other variants.

Unless you’re the Duke boys.  They’re allowed, but then, they’re fictional characters.

IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY.  This is nothing new.

I felt this way in 1980.  I felt this way in 1990.  And 2000.  And 2010.  And in 2015.  No change based on “turning liberal.”

I was shocked to discover in the past few weeks that Southern states would even display that flag on government buildings.  I thought they stopped doing that in 1865.

Germans have ancestors who died under the Nazi flag, just as the Southern soldiers died under the Confederate flag.  But you don’t see modern Germany putting Nazi flags on their government buildings, or the people celebrating the Nazi flag.  On the contrary, it’s banned.

And seeing my newsfeed fill with NORTHERNERS on the warpath against the treasonous flag being removed from state buildings–It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Speaking of cultural appropriation by a conquering people…. LOL

It makes me wonder if extremist pundits are stirring people up to fight the bad fight yet again.  I don’t listen to extremist pundits, you see.

It makes me wonder if I have people on my Facebook who are actually racists, but I never knew.  If people on my Facebook are okay with the enslavement of so many in the early centuries of our nation.

But then, we DO have white supremacists even around Fond du Lac, which is about as Northern as you can get.  I’ve seen their letters to the newspaper and ripped their posters off telephone poles.

Next you’ll see Northerners wearing white hoods and goose-stepping just to spite the libruls.

Peace with My Abuser, Phil–College Memoirs: Life At Roanoke–May 1995, Part 1

In the beginning of May, Cugan finally found a job (having been out of one for a few months), which would start at the end of May, and needed to move to Fond du Lac.

Near the end of the school year, the forums were fun because The Elite Lamer had his own forum.  It was about conspiracies in government and everywhere else.

I had fun reading it and then debunking and disagreeing with what he posted.  But did this annoy him?  Did this upset him?  No.

To my amusement, he loved to talk to me in tele and Farwest Trivia, and said he liked my style.  I had fun talking with him, and whenever he came into tele or Trivia I greeted him with, “Hey, The!”

This was how the Owl’s Nest BBS used to greet me each day, as I mentioned here.  Now, I gave The Elite Lamer, or TEL, the same treatment.

He was sad when it was time for me to graduate and give up TCB until AOL finally put in the promised Telnet (which it was supposed to have installed months before and never did until after I needed it.)

TEL and others told me I could Telnet in because TCB was going on the Internet.  I’d never heard of Telnet, so they explained it.  I could log in to out-of-state BBS’s without paying long-distance charges!

For a few weeks, someone with the handle “Jesus Christ” and someone with the handle “Satan” (Nobody, I believe) began coming on TCB.  It was endless amusement for Sharon and me when they both came into teleconference.  They even had a mock war.

Whenever “Jesus Christ” came into tele, I typed, “Hello, Lord!” and sometimes cyber-bowed to him.  Others did similar things.

Then there was Aahz, who read many of the same books I did but was into outdoor activities.  We probably got to talking when I recognized his handle from a character in the MythAdventures fantasy-comedy series.

He loved having intellectual conversations with me.  Though only about twenty, he considered himself grown-up because he already had to wonder where all the money for his bills was coming from.

I became a huge flirt online, flirting with Ish and others and even using the adult action words at times.  I loved double entendre and innuendo.  Sharon called me a cyberslut, but I just laughed.  This online flirt still, to this day, comes out now and then.

****

After having been called “negative” by Shawn, I finally had poetic justice: First, James called Persephone, not me, the most negative person he’d ever meant.  As far as I could tell, he didn’t hate me, so he must not have thought I was so very negative.  Second, I met Cugan and became “the happy cell” in the couple.

I was the bright one, the light one, Cugan the dark one.  He’d be pessimistic and I’d be optimistic; he was dark-colored and I was light-colored.  It was like we were two of the same person, with certain differences that made me “light” and him “dark.”  It amused me.

What Shawn called negativity proved to be not disposition, but circumstances.  Who wouldn’t be negative while being depressed?  Did he expect me to get up and smile and dance around when my life seemed to crumble around me?

Sure, Cugan was difficult at times, but the difference was, he knew it.  If he did something that may have hurt someone’s feelings, he felt bad about it.  He knew he had a temper, and admitted it got him into trouble.

He wasn’t like Phil, who didn’t recognize that what he did wasn’t right.  You could actually talk to Cugan.  Things could actually get better with him, not worse.  We learned how to communicate.

****

One evening, I came online and found Crash Helmet, my ex Phil.

Somehow, we began paging each other.  Maybe “Crash” figured out who I was and paged me.  I don’t remember how or why our conversation started.

But I wanted to show him I’d moved on–and make sure he had not slept with anyone else in the two weeks before we got back together last September.  You know, because of possible STDs.  He said he had not.

I told him about all my men since Charles: Stimpy, Cugan, Speaker (I accidentally told him I met Speaker, which was supposed to be a secret, then told him to forget that), Brad, maybe even the Vampire.

Yes, I was boasting, but after the way he treated me, I didn’t want him to think I was sitting around lonely, waiting for his return.  I told him that Cugan left, but came back three days later.

I wrote, “I heard your minivan died.  How do you get around?”  Persephone had told me this.

I believe Dave now had to cart him around, just as he once had to cart Dave around.  I remembered how much he hated having to drive Dave around when Dave lost his license over a DUI.

He wrote, “It’s so good to talk to you again.”

I don’t think I said much to that.

He must have also mentioned that he still had some of my character sheets, because after this I found him in the Pub one day to ask him about them.  I think Dave was nearby.  Did his eyes bulge out of his sockets to see me talking to Phil?

Phil sat by the pool tables.  I walked up to him, a confident, dignified, businesslike air about me.  I was so over him that I had been with another man the night before.  His claws were finally out of me.

He smiled and called me N.M., an old nickname, probably taken from the signature to one of the letters I sent him in the fall.  He didn’t have the sheets with him, but said he’d get them to me.  I took my leave and walked away.

He didn’t get them to me until just before Christmas: He showed up unannounced in the parking lot of my apartment building just as Cugan and I packed the car to visit Cugan’s parents.  I was startled, Cugan was annoyed, and Phil left soon after.

****

On Thursday, May 4 at 6:30 p.m., I went to the annual Honors Convocation.  I got a ticket for Cugan before we broke up, wondered what to do with it after we broke up, and now he went.  In fact, I asked him once, after the breakup, what to do about the ticket, and he said he would still go.

This was semi-formal.  We sat across from Anna, so she met my man.

As far as I know, Phil was still in the Core program and Persephone probably was as well, but I don’t remember seeing either of them.  If I did, it must have been insignificant for me to not remember it at all.

Index 
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?
April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign
May 1992:

Sophomore Year 

Summer 1992:

September 1992:

October 1992–Shawn’s Exasperating Ambivalence:

November 1992:

December 1992:

January 1993:

February 1993:

March 1993:

April 1993:

May 1993:

Summer 1993: Music, Storm and Prophetic Dreams

September 1993:

October 1993:

November 1993:

December 1993:

January 1994:

February 1994:

March 1994:

April 1994:

Senior Year 

June 1994–Bits of Abuse Here and There:

July & August 1994:

January 1995:

February 1995:

March 1995:

April 1995:

May 1995:

 

More evidence of Scott Walker’s corruption, and the brain drain of teachers caused by Act 10

From this morning’s Fond du Lac Reporter:

Was Walker behind open records proposal?: This proposal, which caused bipartisan uproar after it was revealed over the 4th of July weekend, may have come from Walker himself.  The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel also came to the same conclusion.

Update 8:24pm: Scott Walker’s office helped draft changes to open records law

Update 7/23/15: Assembly Speaker Robin Vos asked for the change, while Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald and Governor Scott Walker were also involved in drafting the language.

Update 7/30/15: Email links Scott Walker to open records changes

As for Act 10:
Fond du Lac educator says staff fleeing district, school officials say otherwise

Teachers on the move

Just remember these things before voting for this guy for President.  His changes in Wisconsin are NOT as wonderful as he tries to make you think on the campaign trail.

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