Millenial liberals falling over themselves to pin the blame for class inequality on “boomers” or “gen x” while themselves aspiring towards upper middle classhood. Like there isn’t a massive underclass of 45-60yos living in abject poverty, or a generation of post-war working class who died too early. People say “destroy capitalism” and talk about how hard it is to talk to their upper middle class parents about the job market… when we are all going to be the beneficiaries of capitalism in 20 years when our parents pass and we inherit their property… being a broke Bohemian in our 20s doesn’t make us the True Victims of capitalism… and if we really want to see this system abolished or transformed we have to be willing to disinherit ourselves from generational wealth
….give up the homes we’re inheriting? I’m confused, can someone run this over with me? I’m trying to understand…I’m just not sure what I should do if I can’t afford to ever buy a home in the near future and need a place to live.
Ah yes let me give away the home my Capitalist Scum immigrant mother gave up everything for, that’ll show the oligarchs
Hi, I’m sorry if this post lacked clarity. It is specifically about middle class millennials positioning difficulties of the contemporary tertiary-educated job market as a class struggle against their parents’ generation (either boomers or gen x depending on which end of millennial they fall under) and the inaccuracy of imagining class as a generational conflict – boomers aren’t rich by default, and people usually arrive at this conclusion because they are using their own upper middle class parents as a point of reference while ignoring the implications of their parents’ assets on their own class mobility. I’m not calling for the abolition of personal property/land rights, but asking that people be honest in understanding that our parents’ assets are our future assets. So to have upper middle class parents is to be upper middle class, despite how hard it may be to get a job as a liberal arts graduate or whatever, and that to call for the abolition of capitalism is to accept that we don’t have a right to be wealthy. Again, I apologize that this did not come through clearly.
Thank fucking god for plumbers who are willing to go behind their corporate bosses’ backs and be like “yeah don’t pay the 150 dollar emergency fee just gimme 40 bucks under the table, also, don’t buy a water heater from us, my boss will charge u like 800 bucks. go to Lowe’s and ask for a Scratch n’ Dent, they’ll give you for like 200 bucks. Call me tomorrow and I can install it for you in like an hour” wow… solidarity
PSA: If a workman tells you that something needs to be replaced, get an itemized quote for the work and do your research. My AC unit went out in the middle of a Texas July, and the guy we had come to try and repair it said we needed to replace a capacitor, I believe it was. Quoted $980 for the job. Said the part was specialized and hard to fine and would be something like $700, and would take four hours of labor to replace. I thanked him for his time and told him I’d be in touch. My decision to not further engage his services was cemented in his parting comments that his competition would attempt to, and I quote, “Jew me out of my money.”
I found the part for $60 bucks and swapped it out in 20 minutes.
Anyway, it’s not that you have to (or should) do it yourself, but be careful. Find the people that will help you out, and learn the costs of things.
Also, if you’re intimidated by replacing anything yourself, I GUARANTEE you someone has either made an ehow or a youtube tutorial on how to do the thing.
Seriously, I once got a part at work that I had no clue how to attach, so I took a pic, image searched using the picture, found the part name and then was able to use that to get a tutorial on how to attach it.
In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.
There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.
I realized what happened after about two seconds.
The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.
For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.
I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.
This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.
So, a thing that’s particularly important here: The trigger here is not the bad experience itself.
after my super funtime medical adventure, i had to change all my bath products, because my brain had associated the scent of them with being terrified and in extreme pain.
these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.
but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.
triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:
– if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.
– if you don’t have triggers, don’t assume you can judge what a ‘real’ trigger is, and if someone asks you to accomodate them, don’t be a dick about it. even if you don’t want to make that accomodation, decline politely and apologize, don’t disparage their request.
Triggers are a case of classical conditioning, where association between a stimulus (In these cases, forms of trauma) and a neutral stimuli (such as the garage door or scent of bath products) becomes so interlinked that you associate them as one. This happens a lot to those going through chemotherapy, where the nausea they feel from chemo medication becomes linked with everything they interact with while feeling nauseous (it doesn’t help that this sort of conditioning is super strong when linked with nausea) so even after all chemo treatment is done, they can’t stand to eat what they ate at the time, can’t look at the doctor, or a white room, or smell cleaning products without feeling extreme nausea.
Triggers are subconscious, and we haven’t really got control of them. Even if you go through therapy for them, because they’ve now become learnt, they will still be there and mess with people. Don’t make assumptions about triggers, and try to be accommodating.
For those who are interested, EMDR has been shown to be able to lessen the effects of triggers.
Please be cautious with EMDR and be aware that it is not risk free. I have tried it twice, both times nearly ended up with me hospitalized after a dramatic resurgence of suicidal impulses. My shrink kept pushing for a third attempt, I fired him and haven’t been back to therapy since because everyone wants to do EMDR on PTSD these days.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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