azurelunatic | Un-secret snark

God.

Maybe, someday, I will make a board/community that is for parents who can write only.

Have been in parenting community off LJ. Have just had brain go numb from all the "I can't spell and I don't give a shit" that has been displayed. Can't spell, can't write, probably can't think.

Am snarky. No longer give a fuck.

dh for dear hubby, dd for dear daughter, ds for dear son; FS for FUCKING STUPID.

-- my dh doesnt get along with my ds they fight all the time i dont kno what too do please give me some advise im desprit--

"Desprit", honey, I'm so sorry that DopeHead doesn't get along with DogShit. Were you looking for some advice, by chance? Advice is what people who aren't clueless morons seek from people. And then the other people advise those who aren't clueless morons. My advice: capital letters, apostrophes, and periods. archy you aren't, hon.

Why is it that boards devoted to the more "domestic" endeavors seem to be clogged with people who write like that? Perhaps because they were more focused on getting a husband than getting an "edjacashun"? Speaking of shun...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think, in this case, you need to reexamine your core user group. Computer users are, by and large, made up of cerebral loners lacking heavily in group social agendas. In other words, not a lot of parents in the bunch. This is not to say that there aren't a number of parents, but more to say that the percentage is very low.

Now, among that group of parents, most are older than the average computer-comfortable age, having grown up in a generation where computers were rare if not nonexistent. So when you talk about "other online parents," you're mostly talking about people who have computers but never learned how to type, have been out of school for so long that their English skills have atrophied, and who are generally not computer-savvy whatsoever but do not recognize this failing in themselves.

In other words, you're part of an idiot demographic, by no fault of your own.

At least they're not speaking 1337 or something equally inane. In this case it's just poor grammar and spelling, not intentional idiocy for the sake of k001n355.

No; I'm talking about a bunch of career mothers who are 15-35 or so, are vaguely familiar with computers but actually pretty keen on the web, that being the part of computers they know the best, are perhaps somewhat vague on e-mail, and have just been instructed to grasp the 'net social convention that all caps is considered shouting.

In other words, the target audience of Hotmail.

Scarily, I am someone who grew up when typing was taught in schools, and we are at least familiar with the shift key, the period key, and the apostrophe key, even if we haven't managed line breaks.

The general literacy rate on those boards that I am referring to is ... well ...

*shudder*

Let's just say that the mothers to which I am referring are mostly the sort who probably don't attend parent/teacher conferences, and then wonder why their kids are doing shittily in school.

wandered over from metaquotes....

I've always gotten the impression from those parenting boards, that those women were the moms who led the PTA. They did all the bakesales, drove their children where ever they wanted/needed to go, and then came home and cleaned up after them. Women who felt like their only accomplishment was to have children, who they then try and live through. They also seem to be the moms who try and get books banned from schools and think that their way of life is the only way of life and that the rest of us are going to hell in a handbasket. They also have no idea how to use spellcheck, because that's to technical for them and their husbands would have to come and explain how. I don't know, maybe we're frequenting different parenting boards.

They're both subsets of the same annoying breed: parents whose only accomplishment in life is going to be their children, and they're in danger of having that be not so much of an accomplishment, or an accomplishment in spite of their best efforts.

I think

boojum may be better at explaining said demographic than I am, actually. Dear?

Imagine a woman, about 25 to 30, who lives in what is effectively a full-time master/slave relationship with her husband. She is the slave. She devotes her time to taking care of the household and the children. She thinks that BDSM is awfully icky, or has never heard of it, and would be appalled if she did hear of it.

She does not like or (really) believe in much in the way of science, as she's never been able to understand anything she hasn't done herself hands-on. She does not tend to speak to males; she has any number of interchangeable female friends who she gossips with incessantly, backstabbing those who are not present at the session.

I almost became one of their number.

Oh dear. Hi, Marah.

Any form of 24/7 D&S relationship unnerves me. Nonconsensual ones are worse. (Although I still sometimes miss the friend who lost herself in the process of marrying someone I was later unsurprised to hear was a Promise Keeper, I actually do think she made a choice. A lot of these women don't seem to have.)

I'm also upset by the number of heterosexual women/men who seem to loathe men/women, particularly the one they're in a relationship with. Especially when they think all relationships work like that and try to include me in little "Don't husbands/girlfriends/boyfriends/wives suck?" huddles.

I have come up with a bit of a truism -- whenever you get one of those e-mail forwards saying how badly men suck, if you agree with most of it, especially based on your current relationship -- it is time to run FAST.

I came so close to that.

I'm going to go tell Darkside how thankful I am again.

In my mind the only proper answer to the people who say things like that is, "Then why did you marry him?" or "Then why are you still dating him?" There is such a thing as friendly venting/teasing/insulting, and there is a distinctly fuzzy line between the friendly and the unfriendly, but most of the group complaints read to me as solidly in the hate and resentment side of the field.

I mean, yes, it is occasionally annoying to live with another person. He likes different foods and music than I do, and since we've got an apathy toilet seat policy (why do people assume that the only proper policy is to have the seat down, even in an all-male household? It's not a slap in the face unless you've agreed that it gets left down or it's a women's bathroom.) I do have the bother of checking the seat each time. Sometimes he just gets on my nerves, for whatever reason. Really, it has very little to do with the fact that he's male. The clutter differences between us create far more friction than any gender differences. If I were to sigh and say "Men!" when he was head-down in a computer game, I'd have to account for the time when I missed seeing a movie with him and friends because I was playing Tetris Attack. (He'd asked, when they left, if anyone wanted to go with them. I just hadn't heard, because I was playing the game.) Furthermore, if I were to sigh and say "Men!" when he did something I didn't like, I'd lose the ability to know him as his own person, not just as some representative of the Penis Collective. I didn't marry a generic man, just like I didn't marry a generic person or a generic computer geek or a generic long-haired person or a generic tidy person. I married him.

Err, sorry. I have Views on marriage and relationships. (summation: gender and number can change the shape of things, but don't necessarily matter. Not being an idiot or a jerk does. If it's drudgework, you're doing something wrong.) Rant done now, at least temporarily.

The canned response, which I came so close, so fucking scarily close, to giving, is, "All men are like that, and I had to get married, didn't I?"

Which behaviour calls for a smack upside the head and the stern, "No, all men are not like that; when a man is uniformly like that, there is something going badly wrong."

My usual roll-eyes-and-sigh phrase is "Gamers!" which is usually accompanied by a grin.

Trying to determine which horrific assumption in the canned response should make my head explode first makes my head explode.

Not disagreeing.

I had a conversation with a young lady about a shirt of mine.

Shirt: "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
Chick: "But ... a woman needs a man!"
Me: "You're kidding, right...? .... oh my gods you're not." *runs*

"If you don't want one, why do you have one?" should be the question. Really.

Un-secret snark

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