“Scrapbooking, high stakes poker, the Santa Fe lifestyle — sooner or later, everyone meets their Homer. Just pick a dead end and chill out till ya die.”
Honestly, writing-related fields is something that a lot of gifted kids do end up in.
Its just not always pure fiction.
I was an honor student in school, I flamed out in college, and right now, most of my work involves writing. Buuuuut, its not fiction, its writing marketing copy (or related stuff), and often involves a fair bit of technical writing work, something that is greatly improved by a computer science degree, but doesn’t require absolute mastery of the field.
The truth is that just about every industry needs someone that both understands the basics of the field and also knows how to write shit. But the super-geniuses that don’t burn out also tend to avoid the humanities, so they need someone that does know how to write and also broadly understands the technical crap to translate for the normies and execs.
Same, only mine was training documentation and related junk. Nothing like explaining to a 6 sigma obsessed management why creating the stuff required time and was actually a creative endeavor
Yeah, when I was young my parents told me an English degree would open doors, because “businesses need someone who can write readable copy.”
Just wish they’d told me the main door opened would be one to the unemployment office.
Also, I think a lot of people tend to forget that gifted kids aren’t all gifted in STEM. I myself was considered ‘gifted’, and while I did do well in science class, I was actually considered gifted because of my English and literature skills (being college-level since 5th grade), because I was homeschooled by an English professor. So I actually do have dreams of becoming a fiction writer, but often find myself burnt out and recognize that I probably won’t be successful unless I have a backup plan.
man, I hate to move from lurker to chirper on the strength of one comment alone, but “ALL JOURNALISM IS COVER FOR BILLIONAIRES” ignores community journalists that don’t give a damn about rich folks, as well as the people who DON’T work for wealthy legacy outlets seeking to knock the rich folks down a peg.
It’s healthy to not trust everything that you read, but blind cynicism is silly.
I think you’re misunderstanding what burnout means. You can still love and adore your craft, but the passion that drives you to do it just isn’t there either because of general disillusionment with adulthood and the grind, or, you have spent so long being a big fish in a small pond and thriving on “you’re so smart!”s from adults in your life that once you’re an actual adult in the real world you hit the difficulty curve of learning to pursue your passion without those aids
This. This right here. Going to public university for a field I wasn’t naturally good at fucking RUINED me psychologically for a good long while, to the point that it took me a little short of a decade to start feeling more like ME again, and that came with a lot of growing pains as I learned to cast off the weight of unreasonable expectations and come to terms with not being as impressive as I felt sort of tricked into thinking I was and becoming disillusioned by that fact.
On the upside, in addition to feeling like the person I used to be before that, I like to think that I’m at least a much less insufferable version of my idealized self now, so it’s not like it was all bad, I guess. Slamming yourself face first into the metaphorical grindstone for eight or nine solid years of your life and damn near throwing away your sense of self in the process by accident has a way of humbling you, I think–at least, that was my experience.
Most of us “gifted kids” burned out early. There is a gag meme on Halloween that shows a “gifted kid” Halloween costume from Spirit Halloween. Lists as (Contains nothing). When asked what you are supposed to be you reply “I was supposed to be a lot of things.
I reached a new level of gifted kid burnout in the job hunting stage. Nothing like doing well in biology and environmental sciences in college only to never get a job in the field for one reason or another. In the purgatory zone of too much experience for some jobs and not enough experience or connections for others, and to get the experience you have to have the job. I have had several jobs that are outside of my field that don’t want to hire me even though they like me because I have been a part of a published paper and will go places in science they say. I have other places that won’t hire me in my field even though I meet the desired qualifications because they literally have someone who has done the job before and want them, though they still say that I will go places. So far, none of these places they say I will go has resulted in a job, and it has left me very disillusioned by the field. Not that I seem to be able to get out of it at this point without going back to college for a different degree, such as accounting (the amount of dual accounting and environmental experience/degree jobs out there is surprisingly high).
It could just be that the job market is horrible as well. The amount of vet receptionist and other receptionist type jobs paying minimum wage and wanting at least 6 months of experience as an receptionist for that specific type of office (not to mention degree) is shocking.
Yeah, and publishing a paper isn’t writing a grant, which is most of what I see people wanting experience in. But how do you get experience writing a grant without getting a job that deals in grant writing, like getting experience in teaching without having a job teaching (being a TA didn’t count for some reason). There was also a job that wanted a master’s degree and 2-3 years of experience in a rural area (so very few places to rent and most were 55+) and paid just 2 dollars more per hour than a job in the major city 2 hours away that only required a bachelor’s degree and no experience. I am still shocked that they got any applicants for that job.
Nah, it’s more like how “gifted” kids have a tendency toward perfectionism and becoming burnt out as a result. Sometimes one winds up with the notion that you must Do All The Things — take the hardest classes, do all the extracurriculars—and outperform everyone else in everything because “you have so much potential.” This becomes unsustainable over time, and when you inevitably wind up in a situation where you’re just mediocre at something it can be hard to process. (Former “gifted kid” here.)
I know it’s there’s a sliding timeline but it’s hard to imagine that even when Jocelyne was a kid for a teen at school to be public about their transgender status, it just wasn’t a common thing about twenty years ago.
Not that it doesn’t happen, just very very rarely I imagine in early 2000s Indiana.
True, but the ‘preteen’ comment would suggest it would be around when she was around 12? So I guess 2012 or so. Probably more likely to happen, but I don’t think the movement had really taken off around then either? My memory of queer movement (especially in America) isn’t the best.
Funnily, I live in Northern Kentucky and we had a transgender student at our high school prom not long after I graduated circa 2004 or so and the school was very pro-LGTA.
It’s also a viciously homophobic town just nearby.
So I’m just saying it might have been a special case.
Just popping in as someone who graduated highschool in 2013- there was a small set of kids in my school’s “Gay Straight Alliance” who ended up coming out as trans/experimenting with the concept quite a bit through middle and high school. It was definitely met with opposition but even before the movement there were trans kids popping up on public schools’ radars for sure.
2012 was when Obama voiced his support for same-sex marriage. (Just one of my markers for the progress of things– at lot of my other ones for that time are hyper-specific.)
But of those hyper-specific things, I can also say that in 2012, in Michigan City, Indiana– not far from the town Joyce grew up in– there were at least a couple LGBT supportive churches. I know this because my family used to go on vacation there, and in 2012 specifically I brought along a couple friends, and one was religous (which her parents didn’t like), and so I wanted to finda church to go to, but I needed it to be inclusive, and I did find a place to go.
The rapid change of anything “center” turning “liberal” has been one shocking thing for me from my junior high years to now. I used to love Olympia Snowe when growing up in Maine. Remember when compromise in the House wasn’t a Republican taboo (or political taboo). Pepperidge Farm remembers.
We’re far separated from the days when they’d argue on the floor until they were red in the face, then go out for a beer together afterward. That was just how you do business, you see.
Now all those people have either retired or passed on, and the current generation are all true believers who think the kayfabe is legit.
You know, I really don’t want the Democrats in the house compromising with the Republicans who literally want me, my family, and my friends dead. I don’t see anything good coming from political compromise on the Democrats part.
Not a lot but somethings will likely be necessary. Government does have to do somethings, just to keep the whole place from burning down and if supplying some Dem votes gets us, for example, a bad budget rather than an awful one, I’ll take it.
It’s also awkward because the country changes with time. Even when Obama ran in 2008, being openly for same-sex marriage would have cost him the election.
Republicans were still staging referendums banning it in various states to turn out their voters. Even California banned it that year.
By 2012, it was at least possible to support it nationally, even if it didn’t help.
If you’re interested in what went into Prop 8 passing in particular, this is a pretty good article, but suffice to say:
1. California only barely passed Prop 8, after a sustained attack ad campaign, for which the Mormon church got into some hot water due to the large amount of undisclosed donations to the campaign.
2. I don’t think Obama would have lost in 2008 by being “openly” for same-sex marriage, because he largely was and didn’t. (He walked a careful line, saying he supported civil unions (legally indistinguishable), but he called Prop 8 and similar efforts “divisive and discriminatory”.) Biden, of course, also condemned Prop 8, and so did a number of other “centrist” democrats like Nancy Pelosi.
3. In fact, far from it being political suicide for a Democrat, Schwarzenegger also opposed Prop 8. This being in spite of having vetoed two previous legislative efforts in California to officially recognize same-gender marriage.
4. Which was a thing that was happening! Massachusetts and Vermont were not the only states trying to recognize same-gender marriages.
TL;DR: Prop 8 IS a great example of the cultural temperature in 2008, but it’s absolutely not an “even California was super homophobic back then” example. More of a “SOME people in California were homophobic, but the majority was tentatively pro-gay marriage until a small group of conservatives successfully weaponized ‘they’re coming for your kids’, and even then, they barely got their bullshit passed (by about 4% of the votes), and then it immediately got embroiled in legal battles (Prop 8 was signed into law in October of 2009, and less than a year later ruled unconstitutional, which was then appealed and not settled fully until 2013, when the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal).
Point not being so much that California was super-homophobic, but that if a ban could even squeak through in the most liberal state, it would be poison in swing states. And we see that clearly in the referendums that were held elsewhere.
Obama didn’t have to support Prop 8, but he had to walk that line. Essentially leave it to the states rather than call for National same sex marriage.
The larger point though is how drastically public opinion changed over those years. Several states legalized marriage through court action, but it wasn’t until 2012 that any state did so through legislation or a popular referendum. Meanwhile, up until then bans would generally pass when put on the ballot.
Obviously trans kids have always been around, but I think it was after 2015 that the right really started ramping up the public backlash. After the Dobbs decision, they needed another scapegoat.
It’s harder to say how that corresponded to there actually being out trans kids in Indiana schools when Jocelyne was there. Jocelyne’s at least 22, because she was out of college before Joyce started, so soon after 2015 kind of fits. At least for Carol getting radicalized about it.
First medical Transition in the US was 1965. Minneapolis passed its first “positive” restroom laws in 1975″ I did it in 2001. Its not as new as so many people seem to think.
I have a trans nephew who was in high school in the 2010s – he wasn’t out yet (even to himself) but he described a very accepting culture. This was Seattle, probably about as blue as it gets.
I worked at a Big Silicon Valley Software Company in 2017 and people were already coming out as trans at work and keeping their jobs, at least in some parts of the company.
In the filk circuit in the Bay Area in the late 1990s at least one person transitioned and stayed in his position as con organizer and well-known performer. I don’t even remember hearing or overhearing any discussion or gossip about it.
I knew a bunch of trans kids who were out in Seattle around that time– some felt they had to go to an alternative public high school for a decent experience, but I would say most were in the traditional public schools.
It was kind of a shock going back to my Midwestern high school after learning about theirs, but it helped with motivation for things like getting a GSA going.
Well, might have graduated around then or a year earlier. And then went to secondary school starting several years before that. So not early 2000s, for sure.
I was going to talk about kids who transition while attending one school district vs those who might move to a new school where they can pass, but then I’m not sure if Nono meant it in a way that the distinction would matter.
I will say, I knew people who were out in high school in rural areas who were in high school around the same time I was — graduated 2012. It wasn’t common, but… it only takes one for the school to respond in some way.
One of my sister’s friends was openly trans when she (my sister) was in high school, and that would have been about 2010-2014. Not impossible, just more uncommon.
Linear progress fallacy. As has been pointed out by many others by now, the current level of rabid transphobia does not extend indefinitely into the past. Puberty blockers have been prescribed for trans kids for literally a decade, in this country; the current level of hysteria just requires pretending otherwise.
It’s complicated. The level of hysteria is new, but that level of hysteria is also a response to a new level of openness and exposure. To attempts to let trans kids go to school as themselves, for example.
It’s also, more cynically, right wing groups needing a new target for hate after gay marriage stopped being threatening and picking a smaller, weaker minority.
Also, “literally a decade” probably just about takes us back to Carol’s turn to full paranoia – Jocelyne’s at least 22. So that’s when we’re talking about.
Sorry, left off critical context: they have been prescribed for kids in southern states for literally a decade now.
There weren’t a lot of clinics doing it but it was being done, legally, without issue, and we knew it was safe, because we were also prescribing puberty blockers to cis kids who were starting puberty too early (which has always been a thing that just happens sometimes).
Anyway, I know the idea that conservatives have switched from gay to trans people as their target because open homophobia isn’t as popular as it once was is… well, a popular idea. But I don’t think it’s all that accurate. Conservatives have never really distinguished between any of us alphabet people very well; at its root, it’s all the same fear of a group of people who are Doing Gender (and therefore sexuality) Wrong. We are all dirty queers to them, and the dirty queers are always coming for their kids. 🙄 The narrative has barely changed at all since, like…….. World War II. If you scratch the surface, you’ll find there’s even plenty of antisemitism in there, too, with their conspiracy theories about who’s behind the “powerful trans lobby”.
Like… yeah, some of them have started trying to put a Pro Gay TM spin on their transphobia in PUBLIC, but claiming trans people are the “new” targets implies they weren’t also targeted by the previous waves of this, and… obviously they are. It’s just that right now, SOME conservatives think they can weaponize the assimilationist cis gays (and, even more depressingly, assimilationist trans people). The very second those useful fools stop being useful, they’re going to find their own faces getting eaten too.
There’s definitely truth in that and I’m not saying they’ve changed deep down. Or that they’re not trying to spin their successes in painting trans people as dangerous into attacks on all LGBTQ.
I’m talking about the public spin and even then it’s not so much a Pro Gay spin, but a “we’ll stop talking about gays because that’s not working and focus on the evil transes instead. For now.” After 2015, the propaganda effort shifted. And that brought a lot more attention to trans people. Along with more public efforts by trans people to fight back, come out publicly and demand rights.
Like. This crop of Supreme Court justices have all but directly said they’re going to overturn marriage equality as soon as they get a chance, the homophobia is really not out of style with this group. There is barely a pretense of acceptance of cis gay people and it’s often coupled with a similar pretense of acceptance for “”””real”””” trans people.
You know, I’d wonder if it was Carla, but maybe that’d be a bit too convenient, and I am also unsure if the Ruttens would have Carla in a pleb school, anyway. Then again, I don’t really know *when* their fortunes blew up, like one can become very wealthy very quickly in tech if you bet on the right horse.
She said Carol didn’t go full blown til Jocelyne was a preteen, so probably about 12? Carla would have been around like 8 or 9 I guess, probably not at the age for school dances.
Her family company’s products are pretty well-ingrained in the public’s lives, since they seem to make motorcycle and search engines, plus (maybe) the most popular smartphone platform.
If Ruttech isn’t a multi-generational company founded by her grandparents (or further back), I’d guess it was part of the 90s tech boom and survived the dot-com bubble burst.
Oh, come on, she’s making a reasonable leap based on what she knows of Joyce, and saying it in a relatively friendly way. If Jocelyne isn’t taking the comment as a swipe, maybe you shouldn’t either.
I’m not saying it’s a deliberate swipe, just an accidental stumble. Dorothy does have a history of them, especially with her well-meaning overreach with Joyce’s potential autism.
The closest we have is he’s younger than Jocelyne and older than Joyce, but I’m not entirely sure by how many years. I’m still not entirely sure how much older Jocelyne is than Joyce.
Jocelyne blames cable news for Carol’s attitude change, at least for Halloween. https://www.dumbingofage.com/trickortreating/ (and the next strip)
A bonus strip shows that halloween, and Jocelyne is pre-teen-ish in it.
those two strips can be read as Jordan older than Jocelyne, but elsewhere Jordan is stated and shown to be in between Jocelyne and Joyce. https://www.dumbingofage.com/undeclared
FWIW, we probably have a real-life example of that – I suspect Elon Musk got really right-wing after his daughter came out as trans and he lost her. (She was the second kid he’d lost – the first one wasn’t his fault, the second one almost certainly was – he probably couldn’t deal with that and had to bend his psychology to make the second one not be his fault either.)
I think Musk’s fall into right-winginess was more influenced by connecting his growing wealth with politics. More billionaires suddenly find themselves going right-wing-ish than left-wing-ish.
Yeah, Elon Musk made a lot of money courting the Left wing environmentalists types but he is a South African jewel baron. You can’t really get more Right Wing in your upbringing.
I just never went to any school dances because I considered myself a weirdo outsider who also didn’t like partyesque environments. Must be fun to have that as an external restriction.
QBait bicurious? You do know that just because Danny is dating a woman now that that doesn’t mean he isn’t bisexual, right? He’s more than bicurious, he was full on into Ethan and having sex dreams with him in them. Just because they didn’t work out doesn’t make it Qbait.
i think it’s fine for characters to be annoying if they’re annoying in a way consistent with the rest of the cast. the annoying queer characters aren’t annoying because they’re queer – booster is a pretentious asshole in a way completely unrelated to their gender, for example.
I dunno, I’m more annoyed at Carla than at Danny. Danny’s just Danny. Carla is Carla turned up to 11, which makes her more arrogant than she’s earned.
But I think most of these characters are annoying in one way or another. As the title of the strip implies. I still like the strip a lot. (I also like Between Failures, perhaps for similar reasons – well-intentioned people stumbling through life.)
Shortly after I came out as bi, I wound up in a relationship that would have been percieved as straight (despite both of us being bisexual). Nice to know I would have been considered ‘qbait bicurious’. This is a really gross and biphobic statement, please do better.
You’re aware that by your logic, bi people don’t exist unless they’re poly and always maintain a perfect gender balance of partners, right?
This is the oldest biphobic cliché in the book.
What “New LGBTQ charcters intros into the main cast”?
Jocelyne’s not new and she’s not going to be main cast. It’s good to see more of her, but she’s not moving into the dorms or anything.
Has Jordan been disowned? I always interpreted that situation the other way, where Jordan chose to get out, but I would not be surprised to have missed something along the line.
I don’t remember any openly trans students when I was in school, though I graduated high school in 2007, so maybe it just wasn’t very common for people to be open about being trans back then? Or at least where I live growing up in the 90s and 2000s.
No, I think you’re right, people were way less likely to be openly queer in general. I’m about 5 years older than Jocelyne is now, but when I was in school, my year of 100 people had like one out gay dude and even that was kind of a big deal at first. (He came out in year 8. We graduated in 2010 and he was still the only openly queer person in our year, but it had stopped being a big deal.)
Of course trans people existed back then just like today, it was just pretty uncommon to be out at school, I think. All my trans friends of my age realised they were trans and transitioned in their 20ies.
Hank has been neck-deep in a conservative culture, sure, but he (just like Joyce) has some deeply ingrained liberal principles that won’t go away. When faced with conflicts he cannot avoid, he will stick to his pro-social instincts. He’s slowly adjusting his views, now that he’s less influenced by his (ex-)wife. Jocelyne and Joyce have been much quicker to resist and adjust.
Yes, but that’s a matter of what they will tell Joyce. If Carol has issues and this church had a hand in it, and that’s where Hank eventually put his foot down and said this church’s not it, they’re not going to tell Joyce “see, your mum hates trans kids and this church supported that too much for your dad to be really okay with it but he doesn’t want to rock the boat.” They’re going to say “we can’t go to this church any more because they banned dancing. It’s a bit complicated, your [sister, mutatis mutandis] isn’t dancing at school because of that but we’re going with another church now.”
Now, yes, it relies on a few assumptions, but we can suppose something like that might have happened.
Of course, southern baptists are known for both actually banning dance sometimes, and also having some of the wildest bigots around in some groups. So it could go either way. Now to be fair, the SBC condemned Westboro, so it’s not like they have THE worst, and it’s just… a huge group so there’s bound to be variation.
That’s what they told Joyce, but it was more complicated.
Might be a callback (retconned, but a callback). Might not.
There’s a long tradition of some extreme Baptist churches banning dancing, so it works on its own. I kind of prefer it that way, because that implies they were still not at “full 700 club-fueled paranoia”.
I thought that was just a southern baptist thing. No dancing allowed.
My mom was removed from the choir at one SBC cult we went to because she raised her hands while singing. Same one would send pamphlets home with a list of politicians the members were allowed to vote for. The SBC cult school I went to didn’t allow dances, as they were “unchristian behavior”.
The other SBC cults I went to back then were so small they didn’t even have a choir, and the youth group was me and my brother, so dances were out of the question, but I expect they were equally insane.
I’ve kinda been in this situation—being the older sib whose parents started out relatively “normal” and then had a big religious switch when I was older. It was like my younger sibs ended up with a completely different set of parents than I did. It can be a bit of a mindfuck.
Some years back, i read a scifi book called Fitzpatrick’s War which involves a christian fundamentalist sect essentially taking over the world. I always thought it was weird that one of their things was a ban on dancing, and in public especially.
The more I read Dumbing of Age as a Willis semi-autobiography, the more I see where it’s coming from.
It is kind of sad. I also have seen my parents move from moderate views to much more conservative views over a few decades. Just because of the culture they moved into.
Trust me Dorothy, as someone who was home-schooled from 4th grade to 12th grade (with 2 semesters of dual enrollment at the local community college in 11th grade, and that after finishing 9th and 10th grade in the same year just because I could, lol), I can assure you that we can absolutely get Gifted Kid Burnout. Add all that on to the fact that I had (at the time) undiagnosed autism/ADHD/OCD, diagnosed depression/anxiety and not quite diagnosed but sort of acknowledged PTSD, and the fact that I was also in a Christian cult run by my grandfather, and you have a recipe for a truly epic explosion of a flame-out, but in the end I couldn’t even manage that, and instead I just sort of gradually fizzled out into nothingness.
I probably could have held it off a little while longer and/or burned out harder, faster and more spectacularly if my physical health hadn’t started to take a big downturn in my early 20s. It ended up taking me over a decade to get just 4 credits shy from graduating with a Creative Writing degree before having to drop out of college entirely because of the delightful combination of the gradual mental/emotional burnout and the worsening chronic illness/pain finally won out. *sad trombone*
Ah, ain’t it funny how life turns out sometimes? It may not be anything like I’d hoped it would be, but on the bright side, there’s a cat in my lap right now, so that’s a plus.
Anyway, sorry for the just-barely-on-topic trauma-dumping; it’s been a really tough year and next year ain’t looking too great either, but eh, whatcha gonna do, y’know? At least there are cats.
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Ah, a No Homers situation.
“Scrapbooking, high stakes poker, the Santa Fe lifestyle — sooner or later, everyone meets their Homer. Just pick a dead end and chill out till ya die.”
I always wondered if the Santa Fe life style was referring to the Santa Fe we have here in Argentina.
It does in the LatAm dub (?)
Which as we all know is the superior version.
Santa Fe is where you go to open up a restaurant.
You know, tumbleweeds… prairie dogs…
Prairie dogs smoking tumbleweed.
Adobe buildings…art collectives…museums with gorgeous floral pictures resembling vulva…
There can only be one.
Plot Twist: It was Carla.
Joyce: My sister went to school with my other sister?
Jocelyn: What?
Did Sarah go there too?
Eventually the whole cast is gonna wind up as Joyce’s sister. It’ll be most awkward for Joe.
Jocelyne: You suddenly have a LOT of sisters.
Joyce: I know, right? Isn’t it GREAT?
Eventually we’ve got an entire “all the characters knew each other as kids” reboot going, just like Hanna-Barbera in the 80s.
They all grew up in the same orphanage, but forgot about it because of their magical summoning monsters.
Dumbing Babies, they make their dreams come true…
I wonder what Jocelyn means by the Gifted Kid burnout.
Did she discover that she doesn’t like writing or isn’t very good at it?
Was she planning on switching to journalism, only to discover all journalism is propaganda for billionaires now?
Writing is not typically a career most ‘gifted kids’ go into, considering it’s notoriously stressful and low income for the majority.
So Jocelyne probably ended up where she is now after the burnout.
I mean lots of geniuses dream of being a writer and then discover they are the 99% who don’t make a fortune from it.
We can’t all be Willis and discover the fortunes of porn!
🙂
Hey don’t trample my dreams of being a globe traveling artist and author just like Mr. Willis!
Honestly, writing-related fields is something that a lot of gifted kids do end up in.
Its just not always pure fiction.
I was an honor student in school, I flamed out in college, and right now, most of my work involves writing. Buuuuut, its not fiction, its writing marketing copy (or related stuff), and often involves a fair bit of technical writing work, something that is greatly improved by a computer science degree, but doesn’t require absolute mastery of the field.
The truth is that just about every industry needs someone that both understands the basics of the field and also knows how to write shit. But the super-geniuses that don’t burn out also tend to avoid the humanities, so they need someone that does know how to write and also broadly understands the technical crap to translate for the normies and execs.
Same, only mine was training documentation and related junk. Nothing like explaining to a 6 sigma obsessed management why creating the stuff required time and was actually a creative endeavor
Introduce them to Paul Graham.
*raises hand*
Legal assistant. Wills and trusts, motions and orders, affidavits and subpoenas, and so many letters and emails.
But you get to walk in halls really fast and be sarcastic about each others sex lives, right?
Right?
oh yeah. and everyone always gets up to crazy stuff but never get fired or disbarred. totally.
Unfortunately, SO much of professional writing is currently, or very soon to be, getting turned completely over by LLMs.
unless it *needs* to be correct. Like, if a lot of money is riding on it.
But I guess most things aren’t that.
Yeah, when I was young my parents told me an English degree would open doors, because “businesses need someone who can write readable copy.”
Just wish they’d told me the main door opened would be one to the unemployment office.
Also, I think a lot of people tend to forget that gifted kids aren’t all gifted in STEM. I myself was considered ‘gifted’, and while I did do well in science class, I was actually considered gifted because of my English and literature skills (being college-level since 5th grade), because I was homeschooled by an English professor. So I actually do have dreams of becoming a fiction writer, but often find myself burnt out and recognize that I probably won’t be successful unless I have a backup plan.
man, I hate to move from lurker to chirper on the strength of one comment alone, but “ALL JOURNALISM IS COVER FOR BILLIONAIRES” ignores community journalists that don’t give a damn about rich folks, as well as the people who DON’T work for wealthy legacy outlets seeking to knock the rich folks down a peg.
It’s healthy to not trust everything that you read, but blind cynicism is silly.
+1
I think you’re misunderstanding what burnout means. You can still love and adore your craft, but the passion that drives you to do it just isn’t there either because of general disillusionment with adulthood and the grind, or, you have spent so long being a big fish in a small pond and thriving on “you’re so smart!”s from adults in your life that once you’re an actual adult in the real world you hit the difficulty curve of learning to pursue your passion without those aids
This. This right here. Going to public university for a field I wasn’t naturally good at fucking RUINED me psychologically for a good long while, to the point that it took me a little short of a decade to start feeling more like ME again, and that came with a lot of growing pains as I learned to cast off the weight of unreasonable expectations and come to terms with not being as impressive as I felt sort of tricked into thinking I was and becoming disillusioned by that fact.
On the upside, in addition to feeling like the person I used to be before that, I like to think that I’m at least a much less insufferable version of my idealized self now, so it’s not like it was all bad, I guess. Slamming yourself face first into the metaphorical grindstone for eight or nine solid years of your life and damn near throwing away your sense of self in the process by accident has a way of humbling you, I think–at least, that was my experience.
Huh. A Dorothy avatar. How oddly appropriate, given the subject.
Most of us “gifted kids” burned out early. There is a gag meme on Halloween that shows a “gifted kid” Halloween costume from Spirit Halloween. Lists as (Contains nothing). When asked what you are supposed to be you reply “I was supposed to be a lot of things.
She’s calling Dorothy out.
In what way?? She is literally just relating to her about a shared experience.
I reached a new level of gifted kid burnout in the job hunting stage. Nothing like doing well in biology and environmental sciences in college only to never get a job in the field for one reason or another. In the purgatory zone of too much experience for some jobs and not enough experience or connections for others, and to get the experience you have to have the job. I have had several jobs that are outside of my field that don’t want to hire me even though they like me because I have been a part of a published paper and will go places in science they say. I have other places that won’t hire me in my field even though I meet the desired qualifications because they literally have someone who has done the job before and want them, though they still say that I will go places. So far, none of these places they say I will go has resulted in a job, and it has left me very disillusioned by the field. Not that I seem to be able to get out of it at this point without going back to college for a different degree, such as accounting (the amount of dual accounting and environmental experience/degree jobs out there is surprisingly high).
It could just be that the job market is horrible as well. The amount of vet receptionist and other receptionist type jobs paying minimum wage and wanting at least 6 months of experience as an receptionist for that specific type of office (not to mention degree) is shocking.
Morons! Nobody gets a job out of one published paper.
Even GFAJ-1 didn’t work out.
Yeah, and publishing a paper isn’t writing a grant, which is most of what I see people wanting experience in. But how do you get experience writing a grant without getting a job that deals in grant writing, like getting experience in teaching without having a job teaching (being a TA didn’t count for some reason). There was also a job that wanted a master’s degree and 2-3 years of experience in a rural area (so very few places to rent and most were 55+) and paid just 2 dollars more per hour than a job in the major city 2 hours away that only required a bachelor’s degree and no experience. I am still shocked that they got any applicants for that job.
I’ve heard of computer related jobs that had listed requirements of more years of experience with specific software than the software had existed for.
Got similar as a veteran. “You’re a veteran, companies will be falling over themselves to hire you!”
Yeah, if you want to work security, have a TS clearance, or whose job code was something niche with a civilian equivalent (e.g. cybersecurity).
Nah, it’s more like how “gifted” kids have a tendency toward perfectionism and becoming burnt out as a result. Sometimes one winds up with the notion that you must Do All The Things — take the hardest classes, do all the extracurriculars—and outperform everyone else in everything because “you have so much potential.” This becomes unsustainable over time, and when you inevitably wind up in a situation where you’re just mediocre at something it can be hard to process. (Former “gifted kid” here.)
All these comments!
I know it’s there’s a sliding timeline but it’s hard to imagine that even when Jocelyne was a kid for a teen at school to be public about their transgender status, it just wasn’t a common thing about twenty years ago.
Not that it doesn’t happen, just very very rarely I imagine in early 2000s Indiana.
I mean, this takes place in 2024, presumably, so literally it would be 2019 or so when Joceylyn attended high school.
True, but the ‘preteen’ comment would suggest it would be around when she was around 12? So I guess 2012 or so. Probably more likely to happen, but I don’t think the movement had really taken off around then either? My memory of queer movement (especially in America) isn’t the best.
It’s regional too.
One place may be openly accepting and another viciously dangerous and the difference could be miles or blocks.
It’s Indiana so… not sure about that one. Especially since the Browns are from a pretty small town.
Funnily, I live in Northern Kentucky and we had a transgender student at our high school prom not long after I graduated circa 2004 or so and the school was very pro-LGTA.
It’s also a viciously homophobic town just nearby.
So I’m just saying it might have been a special case.
Just popping in as someone who graduated highschool in 2013- there was a small set of kids in my school’s “Gay Straight Alliance” who ended up coming out as trans/experimenting with the concept quite a bit through middle and high school. It was definitely met with opposition but even before the movement there were trans kids popping up on public schools’ radars for sure.
2012 was when Obama voiced his support for same-sex marriage. (Just one of my markers for the progress of things– at lot of my other ones for that time are hyper-specific.)
But of those hyper-specific things, I can also say that in 2012, in Michigan City, Indiana– not far from the town Joyce grew up in– there were at least a couple LGBT supportive churches. I know this because my family used to go on vacation there, and in 2012 specifically I brought along a couple friends, and one was religous (which her parents didn’t like), and so I wanted to finda church to go to, but I needed it to be inclusive, and I did find a place to go.
Well if a radical liberal like Obama supported it, OBVIOUSLY upright Christians have to oppose it!
…. what do you mean, he’s center-right? THAT’S SATAN-TALK!
The rapid change of anything “center” turning “liberal” has been one shocking thing for me from my junior high years to now. I used to love Olympia Snowe when growing up in Maine. Remember when compromise in the House wasn’t a Republican taboo (or political taboo). Pepperidge Farm remembers.
We’re far separated from the days when they’d argue on the floor until they were red in the face, then go out for a beer together afterward. That was just how you do business, you see.
Now all those people have either retired or passed on, and the current generation are all true believers who think the kayfabe is legit.
But also voters, even on the left, think any such interactions are a sign of betrayal. At least the activist types who pay attention do.
You know, I really don’t want the Democrats in the house compromising with the Republicans who literally want me, my family, and my friends dead. I don’t see anything good coming from political compromise on the Democrats part.
Not a lot but somethings will likely be necessary. Government does have to do somethings, just to keep the whole place from burning down and if supplying some Dem votes gets us, for example, a bad budget rather than an awful one, I’ll take it.
It’s a real tricky road to walk though.
It’s also awkward because the country changes with time. Even when Obama ran in 2008, being openly for same-sex marriage would have cost him the election.
Republicans were still staging referendums banning it in various states to turn out their voters. Even California banned it that year.
By 2012, it was at least possible to support it nationally, even if it didn’t help.
…This is oversimplifying and Linear Progress Fallacy-ing, too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8
If you’re interested in what went into Prop 8 passing in particular, this is a pretty good article, but suffice to say:
1. California only barely passed Prop 8, after a sustained attack ad campaign, for which the Mormon church got into some hot water due to the large amount of undisclosed donations to the campaign.
2. I don’t think Obama would have lost in 2008 by being “openly” for same-sex marriage, because he largely was and didn’t. (He walked a careful line, saying he supported civil unions (legally indistinguishable), but he called Prop 8 and similar efforts “divisive and discriminatory”.) Biden, of course, also condemned Prop 8, and so did a number of other “centrist” democrats like Nancy Pelosi.
3. In fact, far from it being political suicide for a Democrat, Schwarzenegger also opposed Prop 8. This being in spite of having vetoed two previous legislative efforts in California to officially recognize same-gender marriage.
4. Which was a thing that was happening! Massachusetts and Vermont were not the only states trying to recognize same-gender marriages.
TL;DR: Prop 8 IS a great example of the cultural temperature in 2008, but it’s absolutely not an “even California was super homophobic back then” example. More of a “SOME people in California were homophobic, but the majority was tentatively pro-gay marriage until a small group of conservatives successfully weaponized ‘they’re coming for your kids’, and even then, they barely got their bullshit passed (by about 4% of the votes), and then it immediately got embroiled in legal battles (Prop 8 was signed into law in October of 2009, and less than a year later ruled unconstitutional, which was then appealed and not settled fully until 2013, when the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal).
Point not being so much that California was super-homophobic, but that if a ban could even squeak through in the most liberal state, it would be poison in swing states. And we see that clearly in the referendums that were held elsewhere.
Obama didn’t have to support Prop 8, but he had to walk that line. Essentially leave it to the states rather than call for National same sex marriage.
The larger point though is how drastically public opinion changed over those years. Several states legalized marriage through court action, but it wasn’t until 2012 that any state did so through legislation or a popular referendum. Meanwhile, up until then bans would generally pass when put on the ballot.
Hm. It’s well after midnight lol. This is part of why I tried to stop commenting here! Interesting as reading the comments often is.
Hope something I said was of interest to someone, I’m outtie. o/
Obviously trans kids have always been around, but I think it was after 2015 that the right really started ramping up the public backlash. After the Dobbs decision, they needed another scapegoat.
It’s harder to say how that corresponded to there actually being out trans kids in Indiana schools when Jocelyne was there. Jocelyne’s at least 22, because she was out of college before Joyce started, so soon after 2015 kind of fits. At least for Carol getting radicalized about it.
Sliding timeline makes it weird though.
Preteen was when her mom went “Full 700 Club”. The Transgender kid thing could be at anytime after that
First medical Transition in the US was 1965. Minneapolis passed its first “positive” restroom laws in 1975″ I did it in 2001. Its not as new as so many people seem to think.
I have a trans nephew who was in high school in the 2010s – he wasn’t out yet (even to himself) but he described a very accepting culture. This was Seattle, probably about as blue as it gets.
I worked at a Big Silicon Valley Software Company in 2017 and people were already coming out as trans at work and keeping their jobs, at least in some parts of the company.
In the filk circuit in the Bay Area in the late 1990s at least one person transitioned and stayed in his position as con organizer and well-known performer. I don’t even remember hearing or overhearing any discussion or gossip about it.
I knew a bunch of trans kids who were out in Seattle around that time– some felt they had to go to an alternative public high school for a decent experience, but I would say most were in the traditional public schools.
It was kind of a shock going back to my Midwestern high school after learning about theirs, but it helped with motivation for things like getting a GSA going.
Well, might have graduated around then or a year earlier. And then went to secondary school starting several years before that. So not early 2000s, for sure.
I was going to talk about kids who transition while attending one school district vs those who might move to a new school where they can pass, but then I’m not sure if Nono meant it in a way that the distinction would matter.
I will say, I knew people who were out in high school in rural areas who were in high school around the same time I was — graduated 2012. It wasn’t common, but… it only takes one for the school to respond in some way.
Oh god, does the sliding timeline work backwards? Was Jordan in high school under Eisenhower?
I’m reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer and Marge are suddenly 90s Kids instead of 60s kids and it utterly did not work.
Jordan, no; John, perhaps…
Oh please don’t be so silly and dramatic.
It was clearly during Kennedy’s term.
One of my sister’s friends was openly trans when she (my sister) was in high school, and that would have been about 2010-2014. Not impossible, just more uncommon.
Yeah, I graduated high school I 2011 and there was an out trans kid. Only one, but still. They weren’t invented in 2019.
Linear progress fallacy. As has been pointed out by many others by now, the current level of rabid transphobia does not extend indefinitely into the past. Puberty blockers have been prescribed for trans kids for literally a decade, in this country; the current level of hysteria just requires pretending otherwise.
It’s complicated. The level of hysteria is new, but that level of hysteria is also a response to a new level of openness and exposure. To attempts to let trans kids go to school as themselves, for example.
It’s also, more cynically, right wing groups needing a new target for hate after gay marriage stopped being threatening and picking a smaller, weaker minority.
Also, “literally a decade” probably just about takes us back to Carol’s turn to full paranoia – Jocelyne’s at least 22. So that’s when we’re talking about.
Sorry, left off critical context: they have been prescribed for kids in southern states for literally a decade now.
There weren’t a lot of clinics doing it but it was being done, legally, without issue, and we knew it was safe, because we were also prescribing puberty blockers to cis kids who were starting puberty too early (which has always been a thing that just happens sometimes).
Anyway, I know the idea that conservatives have switched from gay to trans people as their target because open homophobia isn’t as popular as it once was is… well, a popular idea. But I don’t think it’s all that accurate. Conservatives have never really distinguished between any of us alphabet people very well; at its root, it’s all the same fear of a group of people who are Doing Gender (and therefore sexuality) Wrong. We are all dirty queers to them, and the dirty queers are always coming for their kids. 🙄 The narrative has barely changed at all since, like…….. World War II. If you scratch the surface, you’ll find there’s even plenty of antisemitism in there, too, with their conspiracy theories about who’s behind the “powerful trans lobby”.
Like… yeah, some of them have started trying to put a Pro Gay TM spin on their transphobia in PUBLIC, but claiming trans people are the “new” targets implies they weren’t also targeted by the previous waves of this, and… obviously they are. It’s just that right now, SOME conservatives think they can weaponize the assimilationist cis gays (and, even more depressingly, assimilationist trans people). The very second those useful fools stop being useful, they’re going to find their own faces getting eaten too.
There’s definitely truth in that and I’m not saying they’ve changed deep down. Or that they’re not trying to spin their successes in painting trans people as dangerous into attacks on all LGBTQ.
I’m talking about the public spin and even then it’s not so much a Pro Gay spin, but a “we’ll stop talking about gays because that’s not working and focus on the evil transes instead. For now.” After 2015, the propaganda effort shifted. And that brought a lot more attention to trans people. Along with more public efforts by trans people to fight back, come out publicly and demand rights.
Like. This crop of Supreme Court justices have all but directly said they’re going to overturn marriage equality as soon as they get a chance, the homophobia is really not out of style with this group. There is barely a pretense of acceptance of cis gay people and it’s often coupled with a similar pretense of acceptance for “”””real”””” trans people.
Comic Book Time has moved the timeline up, so Jocelyne would’ve been in high school in the early-mid 2010s.
Can I just say the alt text is possibly the greatest punchline of Willis’s career?
You can say it, sure. But Willis has had some pretty great punch lines.
Technically not a punchline but a throwaway line. It has no bearing on the story and can be missed. Thankfully!
You can, but you would be utterly wrong…
*plays “The Innocent Abandoned” by Stephen Bennet on hacked muzak*
You know, I’d wonder if it was Carla, but maybe that’d be a bit too convenient, and I am also unsure if the Ruttens would have Carla in a pleb school, anyway. Then again, I don’t really know *when* their fortunes blew up, like one can become very wealthy very quickly in tech if you bet on the right horse.
She said Carol didn’t go full blown til Jocelyne was a preteen, so probably about 12? Carla would have been around like 8 or 9 I guess, probably not at the age for school dances.
It depends really on whether the Ruttens are the mythical “good” billionaires or not.
And whether private school would be any better for Carla’s mental health than public.
Her family company’s products are pretty well-ingrained in the public’s lives, since they seem to make motorcycle and search engines, plus (maybe) the most popular smartphone platform.
If Ruttech isn’t a multi-generational company founded by her grandparents (or further back), I’d guess it was part of the 90s tech boom and survived the dot-com bubble burst.
Normal is a relative word with the Browns.
well, jokes on her I guess
Jocelyn was still into dudes then as well versus their exploration of new bisexuality so it wouldn’t have gone over well then either.
Huh. If she was only ever attracted to men, I don’t know if that falls under… bisexual? It’s a weird fuzzy category.
Well, Jocelyn was a straight transwoman before, which killed any Ethan/Jocelyn vibes once Ethan found out.
Now she’s a bi one as she admits to now being attracted to girls.
At least that’s how I read it.
Oh yeah I forgot she was starting to discover her bisexuality recently.
If Jocelyne is only into men, then she’s straight.
It’s not the most conventional way to be a straight white girl, but fuck convention, everyone’s weird in their own way!
She did mention being bi curious about women earlier.
Yeah, it’s something she herself has suggested, that her orientation is continuing to develop.
Categorizing attraction as Default / Southpaw / Legacy will definitely shift at some point, just to be about who it’s about.
If you’re wondering what the taste is, Dorothy, it’s the taste of your foot in your mouth. Get used to it.
Oh, come on, she’s making a reasonable leap based on what she knows of Joyce, and saying it in a relatively friendly way. If Jocelyne isn’t taking the comment as a swipe, maybe you shouldn’t either.
I’m not saying it’s a deliberate swipe, just an accidental stumble. Dorothy does have a history of them, especially with her well-meaning overreach with Joyce’s potential autism.
Ahh yes, the fundamentalist Christian rule of no school dances. We had that in the denomination I grew up in. Good times.
Do we know where Jordan falls age wise in the brown siblings?
Is it possible him going no contact is what prompted Carol to go full blown fundie?
The closest we have is he’s younger than Jocelyne and older than Joyce, but I’m not entirely sure by how many years. I’m still not entirely sure how much older Jocelyne is than Joyce.
Jocelyne blames cable news for Carol’s attitude change, at least for Halloween.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/trickortreating/ (and the next strip)
A bonus strip shows that halloween, and Jocelyne is pre-teen-ish in it.
those two strips can be read as Jordan older than Jocelyne, but elsewhere Jordan is stated and shown to be in between Jocelyne and Joyce. https://www.dumbingofage.com/undeclared
*that bonus strip is also Jordan’s only appearance so far. May 2019 (in book 9)
FWIW, we probably have a real-life example of that – I suspect Elon Musk got really right-wing after his daughter came out as trans and he lost her. (She was the second kid he’d lost – the first one wasn’t his fault, the second one almost certainly was – he probably couldn’t deal with that and had to bend his psychology to make the second one not be his fault either.)
I think Musk’s fall into right-winginess was more influenced by connecting his growing wealth with politics. More billionaires suddenly find themselves going right-wing-ish than left-wing-ish.
Or of just not bothering to hide it as much, once he wasn’t trying so hard to get subsidies to get an electric car business off the ground.
Did I slide into a timeline where he wasn’t always a right-wing buffoon?
Yeah, Elon Musk made a lot of money courting the Left wing environmentalists types but he is a South African jewel baron. You can’t really get more Right Wing in your upbringing.
Oh I RON Y
I just never went to any school dances because I considered myself a weirdo outsider who also didn’t like partyesque environments. Must be fun to have that as an external restriction.
It’s transgender ALL THE WAY DOWN
Hey now, that’s inappropriate to ask.
Im just realizing this is one of the first New LGBTQ charcters intros into the main cast …. that are not super annoying.
Dont mess this up Willis … Like ( OH GOD the list is so long …)
* Not a Dig at Carla. We love her.
I’m not even gonna hope for Dorothy, after Dannys been downgraded to QBait bicurious; and poor Ethan has been Danned up all the wrong ways.
Willis should listen to Amber and do that danny 3way.
QBait bicurious? You do know that just because Danny is dating a woman now that that doesn’t mean he isn’t bisexual, right? He’s more than bicurious, he was full on into Ethan and having sex dreams with him in them. Just because they didn’t work out doesn’t make it Qbait.
It also applies to works, not characters. If a work has examples of those relationships than its not baiting.
i think it’s fine for characters to be annoying if they’re annoying in a way consistent with the rest of the cast. the annoying queer characters aren’t annoying because they’re queer – booster is a pretentious asshole in a way completely unrelated to their gender, for example.
I dunno, I’m more annoyed at Carla than at Danny. Danny’s just Danny. Carla is Carla turned up to 11, which makes her more arrogant than she’s earned.
But I think most of these characters are annoying in one way or another. As the title of the strip implies. I still like the strip a lot. (I also like Between Failures, perhaps for similar reasons – well-intentioned people stumbling through life.)
Shortly after I came out as bi, I wound up in a relationship that would have been percieved as straight (despite both of us being bisexual). Nice to know I would have been considered ‘qbait bicurious’. This is a really gross and biphobic statement, please do better.
You’re aware that by your logic, bi people don’t exist unless they’re poly and always maintain a perfect gender balance of partners, right?
This is the oldest biphobic cliché in the book.
this is so annoying, people who think like this are a step away from calling someone a “Sexuality Traitor”
Look, it’s getting expensive, buying this much lighter fluid.
What “New LGBTQ charcters intros into the main cast”?
Jocelyne’s not new and she’s not going to be main cast. It’s good to see more of her, but she’s not moving into the dorms or anything.
Obviously, the new main character is The Other Transgender Student At Jocelyne’s School.
Must be one of the recent walk-on extras.
Wow, you found a new exciting way to suck. Congratulations.
And after all this time too! What an accomplishment.
Anyone else sing the title to the tune of Beauty School Dropout?
Is it wrong that I can’t wait to see her mom’s fundie head explode when she finds out about this?
No.
Not at all.
But I assume it’ll be a very hard arc.
I assume she’ll just disown her like Jordan.
At first I misread that as “I assume she’ll just dissolve” and I imagined Joyce’s mom melting down like the Wicked Witch of the West
Carol breaking down into her individual polygons, gradually drifting away into nothingness one triangle at a time
Has Jordan been disowned? I always interpreted that situation the other way, where Jordan chose to get out, but I would not be surprised to have missed something along the line.
Yeah I doubt it’ll be played for comedy
…oh boy
huh.
so jordan might not actually be jordan.
I don’t remember any openly trans students when I was in school, though I graduated high school in 2007, so maybe it just wasn’t very common for people to be open about being trans back then? Or at least where I live growing up in the 90s and 2000s.
No, I think you’re right, people were way less likely to be openly queer in general. I’m about 5 years older than Jocelyne is now, but when I was in school, my year of 100 people had like one out gay dude and even that was kind of a big deal at first. (He came out in year 8. We graduated in 2010 and he was still the only openly queer person in our year, but it had stopped being a big deal.)
Of course trans people existed back then just like today, it was just pretty uncommon to be out at school, I think. All my trans friends of my age realised they were trans and transitioned in their 20ies.
… wait. Didn’t they switch churches because one of them “banned dancing”? ê.é https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/quarters/
I assume even Fundies have standards for what insanity they will accept and Hank was always the more sensible one.
Hank has been neck-deep in a conservative culture, sure, but he (just like Joyce) has some deeply ingrained liberal principles that won’t go away. When faced with conflicts he cannot avoid, he will stick to his pro-social instincts. He’s slowly adjusting his views, now that he’s less influenced by his (ex-)wife. Jocelyne and Joyce have been much quicker to resist and adjust.
It sounds like the mom’s problem was a trans kid being present, not the dancing.
Yes, but that’s a matter of what they will tell Joyce. If Carol has issues and this church had a hand in it, and that’s where Hank eventually put his foot down and said this church’s not it, they’re not going to tell Joyce “see, your mum hates trans kids and this church supported that too much for your dad to be really okay with it but he doesn’t want to rock the boat.” They’re going to say “we can’t go to this church any more because they banned dancing. It’s a bit complicated, your [sister, mutatis mutandis] isn’t dancing at school because of that but we’re going with another church now.”
Now, yes, it relies on a few assumptions, but we can suppose something like that might have happened.
Of course, southern baptists are known for both actually banning dance sometimes, and also having some of the wildest bigots around in some groups. So it could go either way. Now to be fair, the SBC condemned Westboro, so it’s not like they have THE worst, and it’s just… a huge group so there’s bound to be variation.
That’s what they told Joyce, but it was more complicated.
Might be a callback (retconned, but a callback). Might not.
There’s a long tradition of some extreme Baptist churches banning dancing, so it works on its own. I kind of prefer it that way, because that implies they were still not at “full 700 club-fueled paranoia”.
I thought that was just a southern baptist thing. No dancing allowed.
My mom was removed from the choir at one SBC cult we went to because she raised her hands while singing. Same one would send pamphlets home with a list of politicians the members were allowed to vote for. The SBC cult school I went to didn’t allow dances, as they were “unchristian behavior”.
The other SBC cults I went to back then were so small they didn’t even have a choir, and the youth group was me and my brother, so dances were out of the question, but I expect they were equally insane.
It’s one of the things that happened to Willis. His parents left a church because of no dancing.
I’ve kinda been in this situation—being the older sib whose parents started out relatively “normal” and then had a big religious switch when I was older. It was like my younger sibs ended up with a completely different set of parents than I did. It can be a bit of a mindfuck.
welp, dodged that bullet I guess.
Some years back, i read a scifi book called Fitzpatrick’s War which involves a christian fundamentalist sect essentially taking over the world. I always thought it was weird that one of their things was a ban on dancing, and in public especially.
The more I read Dumbing of Age as a Willis semi-autobiography, the more I see where it’s coming from.
So damn much puritan practices and reactions in this country. 🙁
Old, old joke about Baptists being against sex standing up because it might lead to dancing.
Sounds a bit like the Scudderites in the pre-Covenant era of Heinlein’s “future history” arc.
Every now and then, when a sermon veers into culture-war-ish territory, I find myself recalling that and thinking, “I know where this ends.”
Yeah, I’m also the big sibling that lived enough to watch my parents went full christian fanatics thorught years…
It is kind of sad. I also have seen my parents move from moderate views to much more conservative views over a few decades. Just because of the culture they moved into.
If I may ask, what culture would that be?
A rural area outside a small town in NE Texas (USA). Over the years, they adopted the aesthetics, dialect, and politics that are typical of the area.
Dorothy’s “different kitchen table” remark is funny.
Agreed
Trust me Dorothy, as someone who was home-schooled from 4th grade to 12th grade (with 2 semesters of dual enrollment at the local community college in 11th grade, and that after finishing 9th and 10th grade in the same year just because I could, lol), I can assure you that we can absolutely get Gifted Kid Burnout. Add all that on to the fact that I had (at the time) undiagnosed autism/ADHD/OCD, diagnosed depression/anxiety and not quite diagnosed but sort of acknowledged PTSD, and the fact that I was also in a Christian cult run by my grandfather, and you have a recipe for a truly epic explosion of a flame-out, but in the end I couldn’t even manage that, and instead I just sort of gradually fizzled out into nothingness.
I probably could have held it off a little while longer and/or burned out harder, faster and more spectacularly if my physical health hadn’t started to take a big downturn in my early 20s. It ended up taking me over a decade to get just 4 credits shy from graduating with a Creative Writing degree before having to drop out of college entirely because of the delightful combination of the gradual mental/emotional burnout and the worsening chronic illness/pain finally won out. *sad trombone*
Ah, ain’t it funny how life turns out sometimes? It may not be anything like I’d hoped it would be, but on the bright side, there’s a cat in my lap right now, so that’s a plus.
Anyway, sorry for the just-barely-on-topic trauma-dumping; it’s been a really tough year and next year ain’t looking too great either, but eh, whatcha gonna do, y’know? At least there are cats.