![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
december_solstice
Before I forget, or get too tried, or do something else, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about what happened today. An old friend, I shall call him Q, got into contact with me yesterday. Things got unfortunately creepy very fast.
A little background. I met Q thru my husband, approximately 13 years ago. I was 15 years old at the time, and he was 25-26. We clicked from the get-go. I wrote letters to him, he sometimes wrote back. It was weird then, but I didn't realize it. These letters were often personal. I discovered music and other arts-related interests through him. My interest in government and politics also began with him. I guess you could say, at a very young age, he got me thinking about the world and about myself in a different light.
Q and I go way back. I spent so much time with him, and his GF at the time, as well as his entire family. He was also a best friend to my husband. Yet, in a VERY subtle way, I feel he has tried to get close to me, and/or get between my husband and I - a silent threat, I guess you could say. Over the years, I feel that, because of the history we have, I've always tried to humanize him in difficult situations - basically, find ways to make excuses for unusual or otherwise unacceptable behavior. He has been emotionally and mentally manipulative and abusive, as well as physical, to all of his partners. He tends to find young women, young insecure women, and take advantage of them. He did this to my 15 year then best friend. He was more than 10 years older than her (us). We were YOUNG minors, and he was way beyond his mid-20's at the time. He, in a way, destroyed lives.
I found out a while back that he had/has topless (bra?) photos of me in his email. I don't know how or where he got those photos/if they're actual photos of me. (It seems very unlikely, unless he took them without me knowing many many years ago while I was underage which would in fact be the worse case.) Ect. I have a few hunches of who may be involved.
He and his family had been homeless for over a decade. My husband also became homeless for a brief time when his father passed away (he was young then). At that time, he, as well as his entire family, were much needed support to my husband during an impossibly difficult time in his life. There has always been love for this family, even though, for years, I feel something is not right about them. In 2012, my husband flew Q's brother, his then best friend, to NYC. Basically to give him a better life, a chance. He was also homeless at the time. We got taken advantage of. He claimed is was simply "a vacation". It really broke my heart to hear that. We forgave and moved on. And, even up until now, I had be open to the idea of putting it behind us and reconnecting. But now, I'm not too sure.
When I was 18, I had an almost 3-sum with their youngest sibling, a girl, who was a minor at the time. (I know I kind of went out of left field on that one, but it's also sort of an important piece to the puzzle.) I really made some regrettable choices involving every single person in this family.
Back to Q. So, he shows back up out of nowhere and starts creeping through all my old profile and timeline photos on FB. He flips through all of them - liking and commenting - all in which are related to nudity, sex, sexuality, or how he finds me attractive or sexy. Mind you, he is completely aware, I am married, and have been with his ex-best friend for nearly 13 years. How do I respond to something like that? In a way, I think this entire situation reaffirms how much I need to move on from these people. My husband is no longer really communicating with this family, why should I?
Why do we hold on or cling to people that are obviously very bad for us? Is it a longing to reconnect and revisit a place in time that no longer exists? It's a yearn for a memory.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-07-01 12:42 am (UTC)WTF? i know it's real difficult to get out of homelessness once you get there but - seriously? the whole family? more than a decade?! SEEERIOUS problems going on there, from all sides...
at this point just try to treat them as you would a total stranger, i think. sure hope you blocked and reported them on facebook.
yeah i think you're right. human are naturally hopeful creatures, and we're made to forget the bad things and focus on the good...
no subject
Date: 2016-07-01 08:38 am (UTC)Yeah, when I met them, I believe they became recently homeless. I am really unsure how or when it happened. I think their mom lost her job. Their dad is a disabled vet with some serious ptsd.
They're all sort of outcast-types. Goth. Like gore and violence. Knives. Whestling. Rave culture. Insane clown posse. Ect. Not to say that has anything to do with their behavior but I think personality-wise, certain types of people like certain types of things.
you can kind of get the idea that the chronic homelessness and over-all family / home life plays a huge role in why they are this way. I mean tons of people live in poverty and go through really rough stuff - it effects us all differently. May be some...history of mental illness going on there too. Again, not really an indication, but it SURE HELPS!
Homelessness is def a bigggg issue in HI. Like, just to put it in perspective, the public school buses stop in "tent towns" where families live along the beach due to chronic homelessness. It's very unlikely for you to see a household that doesn't have at least 3 generations living in the same home, with the possiblity of many extended family also living there and/or seeing many small kids from extended family (grandmas and grandpas are daycare service).
It is VERY hard to break out of that, and/or break away and become independant. I think there is a huge importance in "leaving the nest", you learn INSANE life skills living on your own. INSANE LIFE SKILLS. You grow as a person. You learn a lot about yourself. Allowing yourself to care for yourself is an insane act of self love and discipline, imo. Especially for me, tbh. Motivating myself takes work but I feel like it is making me stronger. However, for so many, it just isn't economically a very intelligent decision (assuming it's even viable or possible). We are missing important milestones, imo. Because the economy is shit. Because we're in debt. Because wages and housing is a joke.
As for Q, yeah I mean, I plan to completely cut ties with the whole bloodline at this point. I think it's time for me to just move on. I am not even a fraction of that 15 year old girl, you know? I am an entirely different person today. I need to force myself to shed my old skin (and the people attached to it).
no subject
Date: 2016-07-01 01:55 pm (UTC)my family wasn't so bad, i mean i knew how to do the dishes, clean the house, take the bus, follow a map etc. so when i moved out, the life skills i learned were all based on cultural stuff that differs from country to country anyway, or instead of "life skills" it was actually just "facts" (like the nutrition) that i just learned on the internet.... i've never had to do something like complicated taxes or complicated university forms for example since everything is simple here and i don't make enough money to have to report to the US...
no subject
Date: 2016-07-03 11:09 am (UTC)Yeah, for the most part, you can't really get away with more than a tent-type structure. I think realistically, it's more common to see homeless people/families who actually just live out of cars in public parks.
Same. I had chores and all that. Was fairly independent growing up. I took public transportation from age...13 or so. Even though, I find that it's still really a challenge to keep things orderly...in comparison to my home back home. Like, it's also different, you know? I had family members who were "homemakers" where their entire life was cleaning...laundry...cooking...like my grandma for example is a total clean freak. She washes laundry every day. LOL. I don't even know where she finds things to wash!
no subject
Date: 2016-07-05 04:19 pm (UTC)i did have a crazy great-great aunt or something, she died when i was like 4 so i don't remember her at all, but she apparently had WHITE CARPET in her kitchen and never spilled a drop onto it, also (as she lived through the great depression) you could only use one square of toilet paper at her house and when eating chicken she would suck out all the marrow and suck on the bones until they were white...
no subject
Date: 2016-07-09 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-01 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-03 11:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-05 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-09 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-10 02:19 am (UTC)you also can't do stuff like eat out of garbage cans as all the garbage cans are locked and it's illegal to dig through them, and there's no events (that i've ever heard of so far) where you get free food. all thte clothes drives and money donations and stuff go to starving kids in africa, or hungarians, or romanians - nothing's for swedes. while you could actually survive in the winter if you just built yourself a proper shelter, the laws regarding camping in the forest don't really allow that (you can basically camp anywhere you want for free, doesn't matter if it's someone's property or not, as long as you don't destroy their stuff or nature and as long as you don't stay too long in one spot).
so no, there's no homeless people, except for drug addicts who are only homeless in the summertime and beggars from romania who aren't homeless exactly, they just live in camping trailers (but that IS homeless to a swede). on top of that i'm not sure if my wife has ever even been to a warm beach... the last beach we went to (in iceland) had mini icebergs in the water....
no subject
Date: 2016-07-11 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-11 04:35 pm (UTC)nordic people are both really sheltered and really not sheltered compared to americans. they have no real discomfort in everyday life and most of them are rich compared to the average american, at the same time as death and real-world nature and "just figuring things out" (no watered-down activities or instructions) has been part of their culture and education system for thousands of years. kids start woodcarving in elementary school daycare, you swim naked in the lake, if you want to make something you just go out and try doing it (often without any instructions), and there are no real taboo topics of conversation except for "immigration".
but at the same time they have absolutely no idea what it's like to be poor in the american way. fast food is like four times as expensive as cook-at-home food here, so they can't comprehend that americans can live off mcdonald's and frozen pizzas. they can't comprehend that the basic, cheapest clothing that they buy at their grocery store, is like good-quality clothing to americans.
they don't know what a real big city is like (even stockholm has no buildings more than around 4 storeys tall. even in stockholm there's no open-24-hours stores). they have zero concept of what a dangerous place is or what crime really is, as crime is only committed by literally crazy people here (and also, more recently, by immigrants). so compared to american standards, they think "a crime happened there once in the past 2 years, that place is dangerous!"
all of this is wrapped up into the much huger cultural difference in that, in the nordic countries and very many countries in the world, you're not any different from anyone else. if you're the president or if you're some 5-year-old immigrant kid, or i you're a dog, you're supposed to be treated the same and (in large part) you're supposed to act the same as everyone else. even the biggest companies here are run by single people who actually act human. even the king acts totally human (he's dyslexic and has released cookbooks and visits tons of random people as they work their totally ordinary jobs like construction work, by the way). in fact, in the not-very-distant past the king was ELECTED, it had nothing to do with heritage. of course there are still corrupt and uppity people but it's like a single thread in a sock, compared to america that's a whole sweater.
a small part of it is just, the US is way too big. look at every huge country - china, russia, how the EU is run - they're totally shit. you can't control such a huge land-mass and population the way we do, it's impossible. you live in new york and have to think about someone in seatttle? might as well be you living in england thinking about someone in korea....
no subject
Date: 2016-07-16 09:21 am (UTC)I really do think poverty, how intricate it is here, how systematically created and sustained, affects all other aspects of society. In a way, I believe poverty is just so well hidden that the rest of the country just does not see it, and what they do see, they're desensitized too (like I mentioned before). Think about things like...public housing you know? They are often these big brick communities that are basically cut off from the rest of the community... and a lot of the time you don't see how bad the conditions are in there. It's completely hidden. You don\t see how clearly poverty/lack of money/lack of food/desperation = violence/theft/ etc.
But like you mention about fast food and consumer goods. The quality is not good, yet the price is low. People will generally buy what is cheap. I mean leading cause of death in the US, I believe, is STILL heart disease (bad nutrition and diet). Could you even IMAGINE letting your toddler drink soda? Because that's common as hell.
And, when you're not living it, for a typical suburban middle-class (often white) American - these stereotypes, prejudices, racism, classism, all of that, are perpetuated...a lot of the time just through culture and media. Media, politics, the elections, they're all funded by corporations. Our future is bought out by businesses that have no interest in the health and wellness of the American people. Just think of Donald Trump! LOL Ect.
And because you're not seeing what's actually happening, you automatically label poor and black and brown people to be...violent, stupid, uncontrollable and not sensible. Of course, the tension is you know...very deeply rooted in history...and we often forget that...you know, when my parents were alive, interracial marriages were not even legal in all 50 states. Grandparents are immigrants. And this is not uncommon, you know? America was built on the backs of immigrants....and it really was not that long ago either!
Immigration is def a tough subject. I mean, for me, I think encouraging people to immigrate legally IS important, but at the same time, I don't think it's useful to deport productive members of society. A lot of people who come over from Mexico and Latin America especially, they are important members of society, they build families here, and if they're not causing any trouble, why give them a hard time? They are only trying to give their family a better life and often can not afford to do things the "legal" way because they just don't have the resources or knowledge until they get here.
I agree that size doesn't help. It's rough - in a lot of ways, the individual states have the most power over it's residents. It's often up to the local leaders to improve the lives of the people who live in the state. For example, in NY, we have free childcare, however other public services are known for being corrupt. Not necessary the case elsewhere!
no subject
Date: 2016-07-17 10:54 pm (UTC)Yeah, when I was a kid, I didn't know any black people. None. Except for my cousin (his dad was black but ran away as soon as his mom got pregnant, so I never knew him), and I didn't exactly think about his skin colour much (apparently my aunt's parents didn't talk to her for a few years because they were against interracial marriages).
There weren't any at my school, I didn't see any in town, etc - despite that we had tons of Asians, Mexicans, and a growing amount of middle-easterners. Then one year a black family moved to my neighbourhood - they were perfectly normal, didn't speak or dress weird or anything, but still it was weird /because of what the US teaches you/.
You sit there in school and get it drilled into your head over and over that black people are different from you because white people enslaved them. You should feel bad for them and regret what your ancestors did (whether or not your ancestors actually did anything). Same exact thing with the native Americans. I even had native Americans in my family and yet it's beaten into my brain that "no, we're different from them" from all angles. (Conveniently they leave out most about how we mistreated Irishmen, Scandinavians, Asians of every ethnicity etc.)
Nowadays all you hear about is the people who ARE different from you - you hear a ton about the "African-American sociolect" and "black culture" and all that, which only serves to separate you more.
In fact we're all the same. We're separated by how and where we were raised, and that's it. If I were born in the USA, except in the 1400's, I'd be a native. If I moved from England to the USA in the 1400's by myself, I'd have to /become/ a native, learn their language and assimilate to their culture, or I'd die. There wouldn't be any difference between us. It's pure random chance that I wasn't born and raised where you were, y'know?
And today, we use "we're different!" as an excuse to push out other people and let their cultures and languages die. Say there's only 10 natives left. If everyone says "they're different from us, we can't be like them, we can't copy them and try to be them because it's disrespectful, let's leave them alone" - everything about them will die, 10 people can't keep things going. Veeery convenient, isn't it...
no subject
Date: 2016-07-17 11:05 pm (UTC)I mean from here, it looks totally bonkers. I imagine from there, it looks extra bonkers.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-17 11:51 pm (UTC)Her relatives who visited there described it as "like being stuck in the 40's". A nurse I talked to (who happened to be obese) said "I couldn't BELIEVE how insanely huge their food portions are - no one can eat that much!". A radio announcer described Obama as "a 1950's nationalist". Another radio announcer pointed out how the US's political tactics are exactly the same as those in the middle east and China.
My friend who visited for a few months said his mind was blown at how poor and fat everyone was. A Swedish girl who had American parents literally wanted to move to America because "if I live there I don't have to learn anything or do anything, I can be lazy and stupid". And of course, everyone in the world sees the US as incredibly dangerous, to the point where some people's parents will tell them not to visit there (as happened to my friend).
About the circus bit - for example, American news and gameshows and contests are all sensationalistic. In (many) other countries, at least some of those are pure fact-based. So for example, in a Swedish televised contest there's no screaming and flipping out. Even in Japanese gameshows, a whole lot of them are centered on stuff like "everyone works together and still loses" or "there is no real winner anyway, this is all just like a big joke" for example. But the US is all about like, making -that one person- rich or famous and making everyone else depressed.
And everything is extremely obviously scripted in American stuff, and the acting is terrible and the plots are recycled constantly. People can't believe how Americans just swallow so many lies (in ex. the news), and they know Americans are dumb and fat but I don't think they piece any of this together into the big picture.
People watch American movies when they want a stupid mindless movie, and they watch something else when they want to watch a "real movie" (this is based off comments I've seen on movie streaming sites). Doesn't matter what movie you think is great, if it's American it has an incredible amount of plotholes etc. unless perhaps it's an OLD movie.
Some people, as in those who are older or who are brainwashed by American TV, still think the US is great because they only ever see good stuff. THOSE guys only know that, for example, there's far less tax in the US - at the same time as they don't know that school and healthcare isn't free, and even if they do, they don't know that it's as expensive as it is. Same thing for ex. buying land, they may know that land is cheap there but they don't know that loans have a much higher interest rate and that the government won't absolve your student loans after a given time period etc.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-26 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-27 01:24 am (UTC)"I love freedom and think that freedom is something all living creatures should get to live in, so I love the USA because among other things, the USA has made the furry culture something big and here in Sweden I have lived through battles many times against school, bosses, teachers, commune-people, the church etc. for my right to be a furry. I'd never need to do that if I were American."
no subject
Date: 2016-07-27 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-27 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-27 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-27 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-17 11:45 pm (UTC)I totally can relate. Though I grew up in Hawaii, which is considered a "melting pot" - tons of immigrants from all over Latin America and Asia came to work the sugarcane plantations around the time my grandparents were teens, along with the growing military presence of people from all over the US, racial tension is there and has always been there. When I was young, I was often teased with the word "haole", which means foreigner, generally used to describe a white person, but can apply to anyone not from the islands. Even though I spend my entire life there (up until 6 years ago), I was always 100% an outsider, and I did not belong there because of how I looked. It means "without breath" in Hawaiian, loosely meaning not human/subhuman. The context and how it's used, not necessarily the word itself, determines whether or not it is meant to be hostile. I used to hate it so much. Not as much today. Makes you wonder what influenced all of this racial tension. Is it racial tension created by a history of colonization, or is it something more current, not as deeply rooted, like media perpetuating culture over recent years? How does a white person react to this?
The guilt, the idea that white people must feel bad, is interesting to me. I don't think that is necessarily the intention, and I don't think a white person should naturally feel guilt UNLESS they are actually racist themselves...
However, in the same breath, guilt-tripping anyone is never the answer to creating allies. If that is what the overall goal is. Allying with people of all colors to overcome systematic oppression. I'd say it would be. Racism in the U.S. is not like everywhere else, I think. It may be rooted in slavery, which happens/happened to all kinds of people, and still happens today, but in so many ways are they still being held back. They're quick to jail for nonviolent crimes while others are more likely to get shorter sentences if no jail time at all. They're overtly racially profiled and killed by the police. Schools in predominately black neighborhoods don't receive nearly as much funding. They're often poorer, less educated, less likely to graduate, less likely to find a job, less likely to keep one. They're perpetuated on TV as dangerous, ghetto, thugs, gangsters, baby-daddies, drug dealers, wife-beaters, ect. and even in the music industry, they are often shunned if they don't produce that type of music. That's what I sort of mean by systematically created and maintained. And so all of this is happening right? And, you're more likely to avoid them in the street, you're more likely to clutch your purse in public, you're more likely to move to another seat at the movie theater due to fear. But of course, that's not who they are. They're not more likely to rob you or rape you. They're really not any different. Not sub-human. Not more violent. Not incapable of learning. And, really, I don't think the goal is to feel bad, as much as it is to recognize it isn't right and reform is needed, and reform cannot happen when the only people who support reform are black people.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-17 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-18 12:24 am (UTC)I just got back from a viking museum and mini viking town in Sweden, where everything was all about vikings.... except for the Indiana Jones hats they sold in the giftshop. (Btw they also sell dream-catchers at festival booths and there's a cowboy clothing shop in Stockholm etc.)
Now, by Tumblr's standards, that's cultural appropriation of the US. BUT - the US also forces its culture and media on everyone, and is certainly in no danger of its culture dying out.
Likewise, play any fantasy videogame from either the US or Japan and you're going to find messed-up Nordic names with butchered Nordic mythology and so on in them. I mean, Lord of the Rings is a fanfic of Norse mythology, he even took names straight out of the sagas - real Icelandic writings from like year 900 or something (dunno how old they are). That's also cultural appropriation.
Practically everyone in the US (where I grew up at least) has moccasins at home, which originate from the native Americans - but there was a good hundred years when every colonial American (and Canadian) wore moccasins as their everyday work shoes, because European shoes were too bad for the weather to possibly use (their feet would freeze etc. if they wore something else). That's cultural appropriation, but at what point does it pass into our own culture?
Same for those natives. We've forced our culture on most of them, but now we're not being so forceful anymore and yet they're still dressing, eating etc just like us. Is that appropriation nowadays?
If you take something just because you think it's cool and you have no thoughts or cares about where it came from etc, i think that's "bad appropriation". If you respect the people it came from, if you have use for it in your everyday life, if you don't butcher it to hell and back, then that's "good appropriation" I think. I mean, we all like sushi, pizza, pasta/rice, music genres and so on and these were all born from certain cultures... tons of social, music and fashion change arises from appropriation... English itself has so much French and Latin in it, it's really not a Germanic language anymore (instead it's like its own category, a creole of French and English).... that's language appropriation...
It's just kinda like, don't claim you're wearing an indian headdress when you've made the whole thing out of felt and hot glue and i think we should be fine : /
no subject
Date: 2016-07-18 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-26 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-16 09:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-17 08:49 pm (UTC)but they live in trailer homes, which are shacks on wheels. even their normal homes are flimsy "like cardboard" (according to nordic people). their schools teach nothing compared to other first-world countries, plenty of them still can't even spell in college. their food is like plastic and chemicals. they have to sell a kidney to afford basic necessities of life such as healthcare. as well as the tons of racism, sexism and religious craziness that don't belong in the first-world - christianity is a religion tthat's like, founded on sexism... oh and they're still constantly oppressing other people, their native people and anyone seen as a minority or "other person" in general.
: /
no subject
Date: 2016-07-17 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-10 02:20 am (UTC)