Absinthe is a really, *really* strong drink, ranging between 45% and 74% alcohol by volume. It’s normally diluted with water, for hopefully obvious reasons. It’s also got some hallucinogenic properties—exaggerated, but still—, apparently, and it was even thought that it was fundamentally different from alcohol. It’s complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe#Health_effects
Legally, children in the UK are allowed to drink wine at home with parents’ permission as young as 5yo. As far as I know, it doesn’t extend to other forms of alcohol though. And I don’t know any parent who’d let their kid get drunk like that.
THAT being said though, when I was in the Scouts about half the kids in the troop used to sneak off and get themselves regularly pissed whenever we went away on camps or day trips. On one day trip to Calais, 33 Scouts went and 30 of them went off on a pub crawl around the city. They arrived back hours later, completely off their faces and several were vomiting. And they were all 12 and 13 years old. (I was one of the oldest and biggest at 14 and I had refused to go with them to buy them their booze. Like that stopped them at all… :P)
It’s the thujone in wormwood that can cause hallucinations and convulsions and death. For absinthe to be allowed into the states, it has to be thujone-free (or close to such). Think of it like decaf coffee, except instead of removing tasty flavor, you remove toxicity 😛
As such, if it was absinthe [and as note by others, there are more likely options] it was thujone-free, and thus non-toxic.
The thujone level has to be under 10 parts per million, which, ironically, most absinthe manufactured falls well under. So in essence, the ban wasn’t really a ban so much as a misunderstanding, as that law hasn’t changed recently.
Its Spirits with a high alcohol content and in some cases i belive it could be counted as agalucigen which is why full stregth is not available in the US and is illegal in most of europe
Absinthe — real absinthe — is pretty damned pricey and awfully hard to get one’s hands on. If Walky is detecting an anise smell on the breath, it could be something as simple as ouzo, or a more expensive but more readily available liqueur like Sambuca or Pernod.
Last I checked, even the cheap imports run about the same price as a halfway decent bottle of single malt scotch. And let’s be honest- if you can go for single malt, why bother with anything else? ^.^
Wally might not know what absinthe smells like. It’s possible that Walky just smells the alcohol and said the name of the first spirit that popped into his head.
It does taste vaguely of it, but not normal nasty licorice (I find most licorice to be a horrible taste. Even thinking about it: Yuck!) It’s a little hard to explain. I’ve only had it once, outside the US, I think it’s no longer banned here. I tried a little straight, and it was far more licoricish, but once diluted/sugared it’s not very licorice tasting.
From looking at the history, it was rather villified, when a lot of the problem was the issue of other alcohols (which somehow escaped bans.) You should try it sometimes, recent research has shown that any harmful parts (aside from the alcohol) is only present in trace (harmless) amounts. (I think I saw a internet napkin back calculation which suggested that it would take many gallons to have sufficient amount of harmful portions or even the supposed hallucinogenic properties, but that you’d have already gotten most of it out of your system. Granted, that’s the internet so if you really want to consume lots of it… do your own calculation, before you get drunk!)
Originally, absinthe was made with something called “wormwood” which contained a chemical that could cause convulsions, kidney failure, and death if consumed in large amounts; and there was no regulatory agencies or food and drug standards back in the late 1800s, when absinthe first rose to popularity.
Although my own research shows much of the vilification of Absinthe was more a way to vilify the culture of the people who drank it: Bohemians, Romantics, Deviants, Writers, Artists, Frenchmen, Women Who Didn’t Know Their Place, etc.
It was the “Reefer Madness” of the nineteenth century.
If by ‘fond’, you mean the French cooking term, meaning the semi-burnt bits of meat left on the bottom of the pan after cooking meat, then yes, absinthe can make the heart more like ‘fond’.
Walking is making the mistake of trying to cheer up depressed people. Which is like telling someone who is bedridden they should go for a run and they’ll feel better.
His main method of dealing with anxiety is humor, so it follows that he’s going to use this method even though it invalidates their emotions (something that they might be open to honestly, but it isn’t healthy.
A “rough semester” could be anything. Let’s try not to invalidate anyone’s experience just because of the words they use, eh? I think we can take for granted that Leafirebender knows their own mind better than you know their mind, and they’ve brought up their experience because they feel it’s relevant to a discussion about depression.
I know how much I hate being told that I “don’t sound depressed” or being implicitly asked to prove my condition. Few people have the knowledge and experience to try to disprove depression face-to-face, and no-one should be doing it over the internet.
This. So much this.
So many people think unless you actually have a gun in your mouth you’re not depressed or suicidal enough to warrant help or concern.
I think the point is that Walky’s experience would be with the rough semester end and that is the approach he’s using…because he’s never dealt with suicide level.
My roughest semester in college was the one where I realized I couldn’t kill myself without Jen’s permission and couldn’t ask her permission because we didn’t have enough of a relationship to justify putting her in that position. No suicide watch, because the only people who knew didn’t care.
When I was in school, I had a lot of anxiety about what I would do for work for the rest of my life, whether I would become a machine or get to be creative. Following the advice of “Just do it,” and “put on a smile and it will be easy.” Might get me through a semester but the next one would be worse. I made it out with my degrees but it took me a year to find a job I had so much anxiety about my life any time I tried to look for one.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to be on suicide watch to have depression screw up your life one semester at a time. Not to say I never thought about suicide mind you, just that most of the time I could think of better things to do with myself than die.
Ugh, not for me. When I go through it I basically need someone to cuddle me and validate my experience (if not my perceptions) and say “It’s okay that things suck and everything is hard right now. It will get better and you are not a bad person.” It just infuriates me and leaves me lonelier than before when people try to be funny or “cheer me up.”
Even if people succeed in cheering me up with their jokes that doesn’t change the fact that the next time I’m alone, be it days or months, unless I’ve dealt with the shit that was making me depressed it’s still there and meaner than ever.
I hope you have people in your life who are regularly available to cuddle you and tell you it’s real and you can beat it. I’m still looking.
I don’t know…I think as a firend it does not realy matter what you say as long as you show you care thats his job as a friend. he is not their psychologist ther is no need for him to say all the right things.
He doesn’t have to say ‘all the right things’, but it would be preferable if he didn’t say all the insensitive things in an attempt to diffuse a serious situation because *he* feels awkward about it. Sticking his foot that far in his mouth is going to suffocate him one day.
Perhaps it will be revealed that he’s dealt with a severe depressive episode with Billy in the past (given how he freaked out about it), but this is likely the first time he’s dealt with someone else’s severe depressive episode… and given that Ruth is about 1/10th of a step away from being full on catatonic, probably a completely new experience for him, and a scary one at that considering Billy was trotting along closely after her.
Maybe his acting like a dumbass has perked Billy up (either with a laugh or getting angry) and out of her “I want to die” mode in the past, so he’s defaulting to that. Maybe tomorrow he’ll realize what he’s doing isn’t working and be scared out of continuing… or what he’s doing will work and he’ll have a “perked up” (aka: enraged) Ruth snarling at and lunging at him.
Perhaps you should let Willis finish his stories before making judgments on the character’s actions and the consequences you have yet to know they’ll have.
Billie still thinks Sal is a nutty vigilante. If I’m in the hospital, I don’t want Batman coming to bring me grapes. I want Batman out chasing down whoever put me in the hospital.
Yeah, but Sal has been absent from Billie’s life for awhile. Walky really is the closest thing to family she’s got based on what hints she’s dropped of how little her own family regards her.
Not particularly? They hadn’t interacted for the past 5 years (assuming they didn’t drift apart like Sal did with Walky, which, given that the Walkertons apparently favoured Billie over Sal just like they did Walky, is likely), until becoming roommates, and even then, not much. Whereas Walky’s been a constant (albeit, embarrassing) part of Billie’s life.
He’s a person who is geographically close, has her best interests at heart, and knows her well. How many people have even one person like that when they leave home for the first time?
I’m confused anyway. Ruth is the one here to see the doctors. Billie is just along with her. So why is the emergency contact of the patient’s “friend” allowed in.
And where’s Dorothy. She got in before when Joyce was hurt using press credentials. We need her to tell Walky to shut up!
Honestly, I think Walky bullshat his way in. “I’m the emergency contact for the asian girl”, and the intern at the desk not really differentiating between the patient and the support.
Don’t think so. Remember that Billie and Walky were best friends as children; so it’s quite possible that Billie put him down as ’emergency contact’ because
1) he was as close geographically as anyone else
2) while he might not have been able to do much of anything himself, he could get word back to his parents (or Billie’s parents) so that they could then take charge.
Or rather, presumed as such. But even if they don’t follow that rumor, she’s still clearly in a troubled relationship, which means they need to do a psych eval on her as well.
In other words, both are currently being viewed as “patients”. Though given that this is the campus health center, and not a hospital, it’s likely all pretty lax in certain interpretations.
Billie made it clear that she wanted Ruth to “take her with her.”
She wasn’t nearly as receptive to the suicide pact as Ruth was, but it was still there. For all we know she’s still planning on following after Ruth right now.
Noone knows what happened between the two when they were out of sight of the others [and apparently, with the door locked].
The main reason people think Billie is suicidal is because Sal used an ambigious pronoun when referring to Ruth being suicidal (here: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/diddlin-2/ ).
I can’t actually find any reference to what you’re saying, and to the contrary, everything Billie has said has been supportive and indicative of her expectations of things eventually getting better.
It’s the literal reason for why Billie and Ruth started dating/entered their suicide pact. Ruth revealed that she was suicidally depressed and thought she was doomed to eventually kill herself, and Billie decided that the both of them were already broken so she was going to go with her.
I’m with HeySo. The RM is the one that sent them to the health center and Walky had told her that Billie was likely suicidal as well. In that case, the RM probably one with a “better safe than sorry” approach and checked ’em both in for help.
Though I do question the idea of keeping two people alone in a room together when at least one of them are in a valley. Granted they’re in a hospital, of sorts at least, but still.
When you live interstate, having a local friend as your emergency contact makes a lot of sense. Especially of you are a heavy drinker, with a history of car accidents, and they aren’t.
She’s 18. Technically the parent’s aren’t needed (other than possibly to pay the bills.)
We know they’re not close. According to Billie, her dad’s always away on business trips and her mom ignores her in favor of chasing men. Not sure I’d put them as emergency contacts either.
Curious who’s Ruth’s contact. And whether they’ve been called.
My parents are eight hours away, not good emergency contacts. Granted, I’m not their dependent or enrolled in college anymore, but for adult-like emergencies, still not good.
I’m 3 hours away from my parents, but I still have them listed with their phone number because they know the most about my medical history, can answer if I have allergies, and know enough about my preferences to make informed decisions. They’re still the best call (pun unintended). …. but if I had close local friends who knew that stuff, I’d probably list them instead.
Parents who know enough about someone’s preferences to make informed decisions are a rarity, in my experience, though many think they do. The medical stuff is more than enough reason to log their contact data, though.
Well, she and Walky are siblings in all but blood.
Besides which, this is at most a drop of water into the bucket of Billingsworth parental horribleness.
I went to school an hour and a half away from home; my parents were my emergency contacts throughout college. I did recently learn, however, that I was the emergency contact for a friend of mine for a couple of years– same college, same home town, worse relationship with her parents. So, it could have to do with distance, but I could definitely say it speaking to that relationship.
Proof is not done on a percentage system. 100% would be 200 proof, and that’s practically impossible as alcohol at high concentrations is a moisture magnet.
180 proof, or 90%, maybe.
I guess maybe I COULD- but that’s everclear I could be using for jello shots, so I guess I’ll never find out if it’s possible or not. 🙂
(Really, try them, they’re tasty. Fruityness with a good kick. Just keep in mind that the higher the alcohol content, the harder it is to get jello to set, so use a bit less water in total and be careful not to substitute too much everclear for water.)
“Hey Ruth, how about we get your sister in here. You know, Dorothy?”
Fun story, when I was being born my Dad was at a work trip like three hours away so one of our family friends went in, pretending to be my mum’s brother. The doctors bought it and thankfully my Dad showed up in time.
I think HeySo means that “the doctors bought it and thankfully my dad showed up in time” sounds a little bit like “the doctors bought it, BUT thankfully my dad showed up in time”, which would make it sound like the family friend’s presence was unwanted. I’m not actually sure why he had to pretend to be anyone’s brother, but yeah, I think this is what HeySo means. p7
1) My Dad was off committing adultery, rather than at work.
2) The part of my mother’s sibling was played by my mother’s actual sibling, so…
3) Family friend snitched some scrubs and pretended to be a doctor in order to give me the once-over in my incubator in the NICU.
4) Surprisingly, the nurses actually did buy it, and left him alone to count my toes or whatever before striding off to tell my post-C-section mom that I was fine, but she didn’t look too good.
Everyone has things they’re not good at.
What matters is sentiment, effort, and commitment, and Walky is pretty reliable on those fronts. Then again, he also risked lives before he started taking things seriously [or rather, before Joyce made him do such] in core universe, so his immaturity definitely does lead to things that he has cause to be censured for.
In other words:
Good heart, great friend, very immature person.
good in the fact he isn’t dead but bad in the fact that she hasn’t reacted at all meaning she hasn’t had any change, but if i am thinking right its been a couple/few hours tops.
Walky is just noise to Ruth right now. Billie, on the other hand, may be about to demonstrate the cheerleader kick she’s used on doors and trash shoots.
Nah, Walky and Ruth are more than close enough together for her to slug him with a closed fist without releasing Ruth, and kicks have way more range and power.
I fear I am in the early stages of butts disease. I read that last line originally as “Self defecation is how we got here.” Then I took another look. Can butts disease even affect poetry?
You’re using pedant(ic) entirely incorrectly. I’m not sure why you’re being rude for the sake of being rude, but using the wrong word in your insult certainly isn’t helping you come across any less gauche.
Also, it’s Captain Fondant- really, an easy confusion to make.
Ah, yes, that moment when you realize your mistake in talking, but continue talking anyway because stopping would be at least as awkward. I have about five of those every time I talk.
I find that sometimes makes it worse. It’s almost like the sarcasm builds up.
The conversation goes a little like:
“Greetings and sarcasm to you!”
“Serious thoughts and emotions…”
“Barely appropriate sarcasm.
“Doubt as to whether or not I care…”
“All the sarcasms!”
“WTF?! I hate you!”
“Oh, sorry. Sarcasm aimed at self. No, seriously I just… maybe I should go.”
Yeah, I have the same impulse. Its really hard to reign in something blurts its way out, but I’ve managed to (usually) just accept the awkwardness and deal with it rather than risk making a crappy situation worse.
I can’t turn off the quipping or bad puns when a choice setup happens, but I can avoid what Walky’s doing at least. I wish I could say for sure that at his age, and in that situation I would have had the sense to shut up, but it would only have been slightly better.
I twitch when that happens. And I don’t know if I could have avoided what Walky did today. Honestly, aside from dialect, I can’t tell if I’m channeling him or he channels me. Well, when talking.
My sister in law’s younger brother died of an overdose, and when she called my mom and I to let us know, my first reaction was to call him an idiot. Which my mom immediately relayed to my SIL. Hadn’t occurred to me at the time that it might have been an intentional overdose, but either way that was a shitty thing to say.
Sal and Walky are the closest things she has to family, and Sal is notoriously unreliable to get a hold of, nevermind somewhat estranged from her brother and Billie due to being put in boarding school for years.
Genuine serious feels -> high pressure -> awkward foot in mouth disease.
I think it’s because Walky views his true feelings as a shameful weakness… or at least something that “cool” people don’t have… so he avoids them at all cost, even during (rare) moments of self-examination. He dare not take other people’s feelings seriously because that would lead him back to his own.
He’s nervous and scared, so he’s covering that up with jokes to hide it. He wants to talk with Billie about what’s going on because he’s concerned (but again, too uncomfortable with his feelings to just express them directly), so the jokes end up being about that.
And that’s a great recipe for putting your foot in your mouth while simultaneously getting your head stuck up your ass.
It’s not uncommon for young men, especially young men with a lot of anxiety about their masculinity to view emotions and their true expression as a weakness or a character flaw.
It’s one of many ways in which sexism harms men by disallowing them to express any emotions outside rage or ironic detachment.
… but yeah, it’s a short list within very limited themes.
That kind of toxicity is part of why I’m so closed up IRL. When I was a lot younger, any display of emotion became a weapon for my peers to use against me, and I took that lesson to heart. Only the people I trust absolutely… plus a bunch of people online to whom I’m anonymous… get to know what I’m feeling. I’m fairly honest with myself about feelings, but letting others know exposes me to a backlash and gives them power over me. That probably wouldn’t be a problem with my peers at my age, but we never truly forget the lessons of middle school.
I actually miss that allowance for righteous fury. Since coming out, I’ve been heavily discouraged from expressing righteous anger at fucked up injustices in a lot of my daily life.
But yeah, do not miss the narrow policing of what emotions I was allowed to feel for everything else.
The difference is that Walky is headed through actual character development that might result in him being a better person in the end. Whereas Willis is convinced that Becky is perfect as she is, so her shittiness won’t go away ever.
I dunno, Becky’s been kind of a jerk when she wants to be, like straight up bi-erasing Billie or calling Jocelyne a Nazi. Walky and Becky do the exact same thing by trying to deflect any kind of stress with humour.
Becky’s just willing to learn. I’m not sure where the idea that Becky’s negative traits don’t go away is coming from because we have actively seen her screw up and try to make amends instead of going “lol im sassy and have a rad haircut.” Like, she accidentally triggered Joyce’s PTSD and then spent the rest of the day organizing a party for her to give her experiences she was missing out on in a safe environment.
1. She literally didn’t know bisexuality was a thing. Yes, it wasn’t her best moment, but Billie was also assuring her she was straight and not queer at all. NEITHER of them knew what the fuck they were talking about.
2. Making a Nazi joke out loud in a public space was insensitive, yes… to Jewish and Roma people potentially present. Jocelyne can take a little “you are whiter than white” joke. Especially given that Becky has no idea, nor any reason to suspect she’s LGBT at that point.
(Later in the day, after her support, yes, but initially? Yeah, probably not.)
I mean, yeah, you are 100% right that those weren’t her best moments, but EVERY character (except maybe Dina who is actual literal perfection) has had those. Becky isn’t somehow ESPECIALLY tactless.
(And I’m 100% behind your second half of the message. Becky’s problem is that she’s never been taught stuff, not that she can’t learn. She absorbs new stuff like a sponge, and I betcha if confronted with Billie’s claim of bisexuality now, aka a week later, she wouldn’t say the same thing at all.)
I dunno, I figure Nazi jokes can easily be offensive to anyone who is not, in fact, a Nazi. One doesn’t need to have been a victim of the Holocaust to get mad about being compared to the perpetrators, y’know? It was not Becky’s finest hour.
It also 100% is counterproof of the idea that “Willis thinks Becky is perfect”, so this whole sidebar is silly.
Billie made it abundantly clear that she “liked girls sometime”, and Becky dismissed it because there’s not a word for liking both.
(I am actually a little bummed out that Becky overcoming her bi-erasure was handled so briskly. I think that could have made for some great character beats)
Anyway, she called Jocelyne a Nazi. I can’t actually think of any other ways to describe that it’s kinda sorta fucked up other than just saying so. Jocelyne’s a trans lady being compared to an actual genocidal regime because Becky’s assuming she’s part of the homogeneous sludge she came from.
Remember how she was introduced with a poll about how wonderful she is and Willis spent like a month talking about her being the best on Twitter? I haven’t seen anything to convince me he’s changed his mind about that. Considering I was not a fan of her within about 2 weeks of her showing up, it started to grate.
Being the best is different than being perfect. Being awesome as-is does not mean she’s not flawed or that she’s never going to screw anything up or be in a situation where she’s in the wrong. She’d get boring if she didn’t have room to grow as a character.
Obviously, you’re entitled to your opinion, and simply disliking Becky isn’t something I’d hold against you, even though she’s one of my favorite characters. I just don’t understand it, or why you seem so vitriolic about it
That poll? “Is Becky a great DoA character or the GREATEST DoA character?” That’s a Stephen “The Colbert Report” Colbert gag, where he’d ask guests the same question of George W Bush. The connotation being, of course, that the answer was neither, and the guest was being railroaded into a response.
And TWO YEARS LATER you’re still mad about that, and have in the meantime created a fiction about me because you didn’t understand a stupid basic cable joke reference in a website poll.
Becky isn’t perfect, and has never been portrayed as such. It’s just that some people like to jump on stuff where she’s been fine and act like she’s some horrible person.
If you harbor this much resentment towards the author, Viktoria, why do you still read the comic? Becky would have better sense than to say what you said. Walky might not.
Becky has been raised in an environment that was more restrictive than Joyce’s was. She was likely expected to stay quiet and never make her presence known unless her father wanted her to be known. Upon entering her teens, she ‘rebelled’ by being obnoxious, and that obnoxiousness likely leaked over as a means to hide her insecurities and protect herself, because you know… how are people going to attack and/or punish you if you put on the facade of LA LA LA LA LA I DON’T CARE LA LA LA LA LAAA!
When you’ve been told all your life to shut up and mind your place, how are you to know when to actually shut up and what to look for in regards to boundaries that you should respect in order to not be offputting to other people? Especially in high stress situations with people you don’t know where you stand with them?
Becky is obnoxious and clueless, not terrible. She hasn’t had a lot of worldly experience out of her short time of being homeless and getting kidnapped by her psycho religious father. She has really only had Joyce trying to put the brakes on her behavior, of whom she is currently thinking it is hilarious to defy and poke at, and her current significant other is socially awkward in the complete opposite way that she is (quiet and practically invisible).
Also, consider that since Becky has been in the comic, only about 1 week has passed in the comic’s timeline. Maybe a few days more, but expecting Becky to change into the perfect character you expect her to be is highly unreasonable.
Me too. Becky and Walky both try to cover up “the feels” by wackiness.
Becky has been through several traumatising events lately, and she still tries to present a happy face to the world; small wonder that her jokes sometimes go terribly wrong.
I just hope she starts to talk to someone soon, or we’ll have another Amber on our hands.
Becky and Walky do have at least two traits in common — impulsiveness, and a lack of awareness of how other people experience the world.
In Becky’s case, the latter trait seems to come from growing up in a sheltered/isolated environment. Walky is just unaware and mostly oblivious.
Both of them tend to say whatever is on the top of their head, and sometimes it turns out to be insensitive. Becky seems to be learning as she goes. Walky? He avoids even thinking about his own feels, much less anyone else’s.
Guys, despite Walky’s personality, he still goes out of his way to help someone who spent years treating him like shit, and who crawls back when she can’t pull the same crap she did in high school. He has every right to stop giving a shit about her. I like him, because he hasn’t.
He tries to talk to Sal after five years of near total silence between the two and just gives up when Sal isn’t receptive, he and Dorothy broke up over pajama means and she still has to crowbar an emotional response out of him, but Billie’s been there his entire life.
Oh, Walky, if only a Communications Degree was actually about teaching you how to communicate with other humans with some measure of tact.
Billie’s parents are not even seen as worth putting down as an emergency contact. Yikes. She’s really accepted that she essentially doesn’t have parents in the worst way, hasn’t she?
Also, I find it the sweetest thing that Billie’s just right there sitting next to her, holding her hand the entire time. It’s just such a fragile but important connection and such a passively powerful way of showing emotional support. It’s incredibly heart-warming.
See, if I ran the world, we’d find time to teach basic skills in jr high and high school. Like being able to cook and clean for yourself and make a budget, or recognize suicidal depression in a friend and not make things worse, or recognize pyramid schemes and other scams before you get drawn into them.
I’m confused; there IS a class in Jr. High which teaches basic skills, cooking, cleaning, making a household budget. It used to be called ‘home economics’, and it was a mandatory class for everybody. Some of it has spread into other courses, and ‘home management’, but it appears to still be part of the curriculum.
Recognizing suicidal depression in my friends was high school. Not…like a class, it was just high school. All of high school. :-/ You can’t teach it, though. It’s all theoretical until you miss the signs once. I can only hope my kids won’t have quite the practical studies in that field.
Recognizing pyramid schemes and ‘get-rich-quick’ scams would be a much more interesting class these days, than when I was in school. Back then it was chain letters and folks selling books on how to sell books about how to sell books. Or betting strategies. O_o¡ The world of scams has exploded in the variety since then, so it’d be a much more fun course.
I took home ec in middle school, but it wasn’t mandatory. It was an elective that was mostly taken by kids who weren’t in band or orchestra. It was fairly popular, since you could show up to your next class with warm muffins or whatever you had made, but there were still plenty of people who didn’t take it.
Health class was mandatory, both in middle and high school, but I don’t remember it getting into anything mental health related.
It’s been a few years since I graduated, and Home Ec… isn’t really a thing anymore. The closest my school had was choosing to take a chunk of cooking classes as your ‘focus’ and thus being able to take cooking classes. The next-closest thing were the shop electives, wherein Small Engines basically amounted to cleaning up after the hicks in Welding.
Bless Walky’s pointed little head, he is there and he is trying, but he really would be better off he could just be quiet and hug them. (I have no idea what I would say in his situation, so I do applaud him for trying.)
Yeah I agree, Billie is there, and just holding her hand in a very moving way, and that is a very touching picture. There is hope for both of them maybe. I hope.
Its a strategy I’ve found effective. If you don’t open your mouth (or make a point of not leaving it open too long or to frequently), stupid things are less likely to escape from it.
I’ve found that in all the times where I’ve blurted out something tactless, it’s usually because I put a lot of pressure on myself to say not just something but The Right Thing. The mythical correct thing that an adult who Knew How to Handle Adult Situations would say to fix everything, and make everything better. Since that’s rarely possible, especially not in situations where someone is crying or freaking out, when the impulse to want to fix everything is strongest, this leads to panicking and blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.
It’s okay not to say a lot, and its okay not to know The Right Thing To Say, and its okay to not say anything at all. I’ve found that remembering that keeps from rushing words out.
I’ve found that, through some cruel twist of circumstance, a majority of people I’m inclined to comfort and in physical proximity to are uncomfortable with physical contact like hugs when they’re feeling vulnerable.
He and Sal established that their family has never really been huggers. If you haven’t been raised with it, a hug won’t be your go-to to comfort someone woes.
To be honest, this comment makes it sound like you wouldn’t know how to handle it, either. You’d call the suicidal person a “major fuckup.” What a nasty thing to say.
What Disloyal Subject said. A LOT of people are uncomfortable with unprompted hugs when they are feeling like shit. Walky isn’t exactly Billie’s boyfriend – and it’s not uncommon to be uncomfortable with hugs even from a significant other in such a situation.
Now, what Amber taught Dina – “sympathy via light physical contact” – is a better start, especially with Dina’s intuition for when it’s appropriate to go from it to “sympathy via heavy physical contact” (AFTER necessarily ascertaining that the person is comfortable with any physical contact from you period).
(Seriously, Dina is the best)
Walky’s trying to handle this best he can with absolutely no idea how. I appreciate that he means well but I hope a nurse or doctor comes in asap to save him from himself.
Can we all take a moment to realize that when Billie was filling out an emergency contact form, she realized how terrible her parents were, decided not to put them, thought about writing in the Walkertons, but it’d be weird, and decided, after at least five minutes of debate, to write down Walky’s information.
Haha man if that were Becky in there people’d be tearing into her. Even if we adjusted the billie/Ruth factor. Or perhaps the comments section has gotten over its dislike of Becky. But srsly. Y’all cooing over walky fucking things up when you were condemning becks for the same things. :/
It’s a running theme in the comments and in life. One Carla lampshaded like crazy when she was talking with Ruth.
The more marginalized you are, the less slack you get given. The less, the more slack. And that’s especially true of men and characters who are men, because there’s a lot of social norms based around overlooking character flaws or bad behavior because “boys will be boys”.
And I tend to get some stick for pointing stuff like that out, so I’ll note that the “free pass” treatment was one of those things that infuriated me when I used to think I was a dude, because it felt unbelievably gross and unacceptable that bare minimum social behavior was treated as something praise-worthy just because I thought and others thought I was a dude. Like, the low standards were just not fun and somewhat insulting.
Walky gets remarkably little guff – remember, he’s not a /white/ dude (And has admitted he’d bang Jacob at least). Though he does id as straight, and he’s the closest thing to a male lead, so.
Though I think the most agonizing was about how walky must have been right at every step of the way, b/c he was a male nerd. Nerds were prepared to tear down their biases temporarily before admitting Walky was wrong. (And were totally ignoring two seperate girls about it)
Wasn’t this the subplot in a movie? A reverse racism thing? A person afraid of being called racist/bigot/what-have-you so when presented with a mixture of, cultures?, they overly favor those that have been marginalized, and treat those that havn’t like shit, or just ignore them at best. All done to try to ‘prove’ they’re not what they’re afraid might be said about them?
I should be surprised but I’m not. Though thank you DSL for making the comment more general.
For the record, in case it needs to be stated. I see Walky, in this particular strip, as a lovable fuckup. He’s out of his depth and he’s floundering as best as he can, but his heart is in the right place. He just has no tact whatsoever and has a problem with saying whatever the first thing into his head is.
That all said, there is a notable pattern that I’m stating with no value judgments to the characters or the commentariat and which is reflected in life. When you look at what Carla and Becky are given shit for and how badly folks need to stretch to make them into villains. And when you look at what the male characters in particular are given free passes for (Joe and Mike tend to be the most dramatic examples, though Mike finally may have passed some of his free passes by going after Ethan and Danny who are cuties no one wants to see broken), it is noticeable. And it occurs enough in life as well that Carla’s comment about having to be perfect to be given respect and humanity resonates rather strongly.
And again, this is something I’ve noticed from how my same actions were interpreted when I was seen as a cis white man rather than a trans white woman. No, liberal guilt needed.
That is my only point with my statements and why I tried to follow up my statement with my second statement.
Comparing them doesn’t seem fair. Joe and Mike are minor, non-serious side characters with no character arcs. Carla and Becky are central to the plot and have a huge amount of focus placed on their serious and very real decisions and situations. Carla and Becky are far more “real” as characters than Joe and Mike, and are thus judged by a more exacting standard.
Now, comparing Walky to how other central characters are treated is definitely fair. His childlike personality is taken seriously and to its logical conclusions by the story itself.
And Mike may be getting one now, or at least I’m hopeful for. Carla seemed to take the positives Mike had in the other `verse, and I’d like to like him here, just keeps getting harder to do so. Jerk with a heart of gold just seems now to be a jerk with a heart of jerk.
Non-conformity will be dealt with, swiftly. I’m used to it, just not to the extent that one of a non-white race or non-standard gender/sexuality deal with. Mental Health issues can be easier to hide.
The commentariat has fallen all over itself, as a whole, to give him that slack, though. It’s almost hilarious at this point. The reverse does not hold true of Becky. Are you sure you can’t find a more plausible reason for why some tiny fraction does not give him that slack?
There are more than a few people tearing into him too.
There might be a few more if it were Becky doing this, sadly, but since she’s on her way we may be able to test that soon enough. She and Walky are… pretty alike, in some respects.
Yeah, but from what I’ve seen about people tearing into Becky, this is nothing.
I mean, people got mad about her flipping off Toedad. After he kidnapped her at gunpoint to force her into conversion therapy and she gave him another chance to accept her.
I went back and paid more attention to the comments after noticing someone reference it. It was …enlightening for me. I knew that kind of bias existed, but I clearly had no idea how prevalent or unforgiving it could be
I’m not feeling any big love for the little arsehole currently if that’s what you mean.
I’m not sure what Willis is trying to do with this strip. Light relief on a suicide watch with a goon whose job appears to be trying to make Ruth worse?
It’s pretty hard to make Ruth worse when her current state is ‘not feeling up to feeling any emotions at all’.
If she were upset, regretful, ashamed, anything – then you would be somewhat right.
But she is not feeling up to feeling at all. Dragging her out of THAT deep within her own head is a mission that Walky is pretty correct to embark on.
He’s too absurd to actually hit the weak spots (ex. naming absinthe and not beer as her ’emergency contact’), and just making her angry at him is not an undesirable result in THIS kind of situation.
> But she is not feeling up to feeling at all. Dragging her out of THAT deep within her own head is a mission that Walky is pretty correct to embark on.
He must have an ego the size of a planet if he thinks he can do that.
Honestly, at this point your comments are just weird to look at.
Literally the only thing ‘dragging her out of that deep within her head’ requires is Walky attracting her attention and getting her to react if not outwardly then at least innerly emotionally to his presence.
That… doesn’t really take the ego the size of the planet to assume you can do, and in fact it’s exactly what Walky is doing there.
If Walky is acting like this on purpose, I’ll be even more upset with him. If it was just Billie, maybe, she knows him well enough that she’s barely even mad at him. Ruth is a total stranger to him and he has no business thinking he has any clue whatsoever how she’d react.
I dunno. Walky’s kind of taking a pounding in the comments here. He usually does when he does something particularly Walky. Not so much the nerd-rage cartoon argument, but the joking after Toedad’s happy-fun gun times.
People disliked Becky because she was being loud and obnoxious or actually attacking and insulting people, especially Dorothy who was trying to help her. She also came from nowhere and basically took over the comic for multiple arcs.
Walky is being dumb but he’s trying to help and is freaking out with worry for Billie.
Several people have pointed out that Billie put Walky down as an emergency contact rather than her parents, but I’m not so sure it’s that drastic. I know I had to put down three of the things, and the third was always a hassle. It seems more likely to me that Billie simply wrote down Walky as an emergency contact, which he’s leveraging to get to see her and try in his own way to be there for her.
We don’t know much about Marcie. She’s a skateboarder, she’s mute (and wasn’t all her life, but we don’t know the details), she’s good at calling bullshit, and she has the (probably doomed) hots for Malaya. She came to Bloomington with Sal but NOT for school and has a (hopefully hyperbolic) dozen roommates in a studio apartment.
All in all, she seems a loyal and strong friend with strong interpersonal connections, athletic hobbies, and the forwardness to say (via her hands) what she means. And (with the POSSIBLE exception of a degree of loyalty that doesn’t extend to backing up friends when they’re in the wrong) none of that describes me at all.
Her glasses aren’t Billie Jean King’s. Marcie would never be anywhere without those (b/c charles schultz was a close personal friend of her’s. Marcy probaby was not straight.)
After a very thorough and exhaustive 5 minutes of googling, I found several different signs. The answer I found that seems to fit best is that the forms of address “sir” and “ma’am” are more concepts of “hearing” culture than “deaf” culture. (The quotes are in place because I don’t know which culture Marcie counts as being in.) It seems — and again, this is what I “learned” with 5 minutes of google — that several people have invented different signs for personal use, but there’s nothing in widespread use, and the only universally-accepted sign for “Sir” would be spelling out the word by hand.
No, but from the context of Ruth and Billie it WOULD be SELF-deprecating.
In other words, Walky is stating that they’re not to the point of finding jokes at their expense humorous. The grammar is correct.
Walky and Billie’s surrogate sibling relationship, I find, is one of my favourite set ups in the entire series. Walky can hang out with Sal and be rejected and that’s enough for him because he tried, he can box his feelings over and over with Dorothy and she can bend to accommodate, but the minute Billie’s in pain that’s what throws him into Defcon 5. He has to push through her wall of snark and insults because the idea of letting go of Billie is the one line Walky can’t cross.
There’s a small part of me who would ship them without that lifelong friendship, but then without them being quasi-besty childhood friends we’d lose the dynamic that made them so great in the first place.
That’s a really good point and you’re right. Billie matters to him as kin and the times he lets himself lose his shit is times he’s genuinely worried for her or her mental state.
Wow, okay, you are just resorting to personal attacks in your comments now. Maybe don’t?
(I mean, for all you know, this person is a psychiatrist / has been clinically depressed / has had a lot of clinically depressed friends / all of the above. You are being a major prick here)
You are seriously one of the most toxic commentators I’ve ever seen here.
Just what the hell is it with this comic that is making you so riled up that you have to attack a fictional character in a fictional universe that is only, insofar, maybe 2 months old? Do you resemble some remark? Was your honor besmirched in some way?
Maybe Woobie isn’t a trained and certified psychologist, but I highly doubt you are either, considering you’re so highly offended by comic characters that are 1) Teenagers ranging from late 17 to maybe early 19 years old, 2) Teenagers starting their first (or in Ruth’s case, second) year of college, and 3) have only started their likely first journey away from home for more than a solid weekend around 2 months ago.
Whatever perfection you are expecting out of a highly immature character that is having to learn that REAL success is not effortless and blurting out the first thing that comes to mind is not a good idea all of the time is highly unreasonable on its own. The fact that you’re upset enough about it to attack other people though? Petty and you should be highly ashamed of yourself.
Maybe WC has had experience with something like this and is reading this differently than we are.
I’m no expert, but I have had Not Fun in my life (most of us likely have encountered similer). For me; when a bad thing happened to me, it meant the world that friends came to see me. There are holes in my memory from then, but there was nothing “wrong” anyone could say.
Others’ mileage may vary.
Poor Walky! He doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body and he is trying his best here. However, he’s about as tactless as a landslide. I think that only the fact that Ruth is still in a pretty badly withdrawn mental and emotional condition is stopping her from getting angry at him. Fortunately, I think Billie is able to do that for her!
Please, please, PLEASE Ruth, say something. Get angry. Freak out, something! You are making me extremely worried over here.
(Me and Walky both).
Yet again I think his strategy actually is pretty good. He makes an annoying ass of himself to place Billie in familiar ground (“walky is being an idiot”) and show that he is there for her.
I actually agree with Bagge. In the mental state that Billie and Ruth are in, leaving them to stew in their own thoughts is the WORST thing you could do. Giving them someone to be angry at is a semi-reliable way of tugging out their emotions.
“Leave me to angst and fantasize about suicide / consider everything I have ever done wrong alone!” just doesn’t quite have the prohibitive punch, does it?
I mean, Ruth actually had getting angry at everyone as her coping strategy at the beginning of a semester. It wasn’t a terribly good one, but better than none in this situation >_<
Unfortunately, I think Ruth has lost sight of her emotions and everything just makes her tired. Been there. Even things that were upsetting just became, yep, that’s happening, sure glad I’m killing myself soon.*
*I’ve got pills to make sure I’m never back in that headspace again. So all is good there.
For y’all what ain’t ever touched a drop of ethanol: Absinthe tastes like double-licorice and is half alcohol with some possibly-hallucinogenic flavoring agents. And is the color of Dina’s hat.
The doctors would probably be better at it than Walky… assuming they aren’t the kind of mental health professional who views depression as your own fault and something to judge you over.
I have met this kind of mental health professional.
My point is that Walky is not even remotely the worst thing to happen right now.
(And leaving them alone in a room with presumably easy access to medication… yeah, that’s one of the worst ideas there is.)
Nah..Doctors and friends do two totally different jobs. Its the doctors job to do and say the right things to judge thier mental state corectly.
Walkys job (as some on who is like a brother to Billie) is to show he cares. Yes he acts clumsy and a little stupid but the important message gets across non the less : “I’m here and I care”. It does not realy matter what he says because Billie knows him well enough to guess is intentions and he means well.
Yep! There’s a reason part of the standard advice on what to do in such situations is literally just “be there for them” – as in, literally just be physically present if possible. Not hiding away because you aren’t an expert already (how do you think people BECOME experts?…)
And if you stopped for a moment, you’d how shitty you keep sounding, making yourself sound more and more callous and incapable of empathy.
I’ll just be honest. Walky comes off as a better person than you right now. Walky shows that he cares. You show hatred and a lack of willingness to care.
The only reason I’m not just sticking you on my ignore list script and moving on is that I think you must’ve had personal experience with depression and are lashing out because of it.
How is he being narcissistic? The only reason he’s there at all is because he cares about his friend, Billie. I don’t think you understand what the word “narcissistic” means.
He’s literally just trying to lighten the mood? Trying to cheer them up a little? Sure it’s not working but they don’t seem too particularly upset that he’s there. He IS being a goddamn decent human being because lord knows I wish SOMEONE fucking came to me with jokes and some goddamn humor when I feel like shoving a knife down my throat.
Yeah, he’s such a horrible person, coming along trying to help his friend and her girlfriend. How dare he try to help people he cares about, that’s such an asshole thing to do. Because decent human beings ignore the people they care about when they’re suicidal and depressed, instead of trying to help them.
If he cast his ego aside, he’d see that doing this isn’t helping. Not in the fucking slightest. In fact, he has the potential for screwing the situation even further. That’s the assholery in this situation.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” as the old saw goes.
Being a friend can mean leaving well enough alone. It may be frustrating, it may cause yourself to feel bad.
But that’s the price of being a friend if he is actually a friend. Currently I’m not seeing the old Walky friendship bit. It looks more like a wrecking ball.
Yeah, cause the best thing you can do when worrying about a friend/close relative is not interacting with them at all and hoping for the best, right?
You assume that every person Walky’s age (and he’s what, 18, 19 here, or smth?) has had enough experience with and/or knowledge about depression and depressed people to know what works, and what doesn’t, which is bullshit. Plus, knowing that that someone’s there & cares might at the very least be helpful to Billie. I’m not arguing that Walky is completely right, but he’s not completely wrong, given the circumstances, either.
I don’t know what your problem is, man, but dashing around the comment, aggressively reprimanding everyone for their opinion, and constantly swearing doesn’t add productively to the discussion. If you want to educate people, you might wanna reconsider your wording. If you’re here to let off steam – stop it, aggravating people because of your bad mood isn’t fair to the other commenters.
I’ll make a final point by saying that he knows Billie has been “suicidal” before, so he should have some knowledge of depressive behavior.
We don’t know if he tried this before, whether he aggravated it then or whether she was in a clinical depression before.
> but he’s not completely wrong, given the circumstances, either.
He and the attendant who let him in are completely wrong. He may have good intentions, but his ego has blinded him to what in my view is the correct course of action.
Maybe he has some knowledge, but if you recall, he had the whole epiphany a few pages back, with the whole “She was hurtin’ the whole time, an’ i wouldn’t trust myself that I could see it…”
I mean, the story in the comic has only progressed a few weeks, I think? So if with “suicidal before” you mean the events of the comic, and not some backstory I’m forgetting, I’d treat the whole situation as an ongoing thing he’s still very much in the process of learning to deal with.
And to reply to one of your comments above, as of this strip, he just entered. The strips are kinda to short for him to enter, babble, realize it’s not helping (if that’s the case), and leave, all during one page. So we’ll have to wait and see how this will develop.
I’ve seen more people in the comments section going “guys, come on, don’t be hard on Walky, he’s TRYING” than people actually criticising Walky. Which is either everyone pre-emptively anticipating more criticism to come, or some sort of skewed perception of how much criticism of Walky counts as a drastic amount. Or maybe (because a lot of people in the comments have opened up about their past experiences with depression) people are reading the comic and thinking “oh god, this would have made me feel AWFUL if he’d said that to me” and defending him to their past selves? Who knows. Just interesting.
Or maybe some people going “I wish I had someone at least like this around when I was in a similar situation”.
Walky is at least working as a good distraction, and a good distraction is… important, when your head feels like a dark swirling cesspool of self hatred and replaying everything you have ever done wrong note by note the moment you stop concentrating on something else.
Ah yes, the person who’s looking after Ruth, who entered into a lesbian suicide pact with her because she thought herself worthless, has herself been drinking a lot and is barely less depressively suicidal than her.
Walky is BILLIE’s emergency contact, and Billie’s the one who looks much more alive in the last panel than she did when Chloe entered Ruth’s room, you know.
Eh, he is trying. A lot of people far older than eighteen really do not know how to deal with depressed friends. I expect to see a learning curve. This does not mean he isn’t messing up right now. That being said he would have pissed me off.
I should clarify I do think he is messing up. I do want to see him be a good bro, for Billie–she really needs one. And I do also expect him to mess up more in the future. I am saving my annoyance up.
Not really. Becky’s wackiness is a conditioned trauma response, while Walky comes from just about the opposite problem: never being taught not to be that.
Their tactics are superficially similar, but you should pay attention to how often Walky puts his foot in his mouth vs how often Becky is
(there is a ~100% difference)
To be fair if I was in such depressive state and someone like Walky came in and started saying the things he did it would actually move me enough to want to punch him in the face.
And that in a way would be a positive action, Walky is quite an annoying piece of something, but at least he tries thinking he is important enough for Billie as her friend or maybe even family to do so. It’s not his fault that he is what he is. Granted I would dislike him for doing that but then Billie and even Ruth know what Walky is and how he acts.
If you think Walky is annoying then replace him here with Becky with her outgoing attitude cracking up some LGBT jokes and outs while having Dina roaring behind her. That is a recipe for disaster. But granted Becky in a way could understand them better having a father who wanted to kill her and a mother who died than someone like Walky, but then for that Becky would have to power off her outgoing attitude and try to talk normally.
I’d think Becky would be much less annoying than Walky, because she’d have the tact to joke about other things than the suicidal ideation itself, nor require ‘self-deprecating’ humor of them. LGBT jokes might just ACTUALLY lighten up the mood.
There isn’t a lot of ‘talking normally’ to be done in this kind of situation unless you are a trained therapist.
Contrary to many, I think Walkys doing a good job here.
He is shifting attention to him, making the mood a lot more “walkys being a idiot” and more “normal”.
A more traditional form of comforting might only draw attention to their self-woes more, however unintentionally.
Remember if someone is really depressed they can get “meta depressed” about the depression too. Thinking they are a bother to people because of it.
Sometimes a idiotic distraction might be a good thing.
I agree. It is Walky’s standard response and it is a bit hit and miss. But this time I think Billie took comfort in the familiarity of Walky being an idiot, and I think Ruth welcome the distraction.
Why exactly are they at a doctor’s office? Physically there is nothing wrong with Billie or Ruth outside of maybe a little dehydration and malnutrition. It’s their emotional state that’s currently the biggest risk factor here.
I’m gonna guess it’s to check to make sure she didn’t swallow anything and that her vitals are okay as she’s been non-responsive for awhile now.*
*Either that or they’ve got health workers trained to be both like at the clinic I go to, so that the person who diagnoses and prescribes mental health medication is the same person as the care physician that checks over physical wellbeing.
They’ve probably got people trained in both – and they’re probably checking vitals, checking for drugs and alcohol poisoning*.
But even more, they’ve taken her to the campus health center, because it’s right there and it’s the obvious first stop. If they can’t handle it there, they can refer her to someone who can.
*If there’s anything campus health facilities are good at dealing with, it’s alcohol poisoning.
The US doesn’t really have a good mental healthcare system. The two groups that take up that slack are the (physical) healthcare system and the police. If you have a mental health emergency, your first stop is going to be with one of those two. Depending on how things go, you may then be able to make your way to an actual mental health facility.
Yeah, and especially since they’re currently in a situation where one’s suicidally depressed and catatonic, the other has Seriously Unhealthy Warning Signs (which Chloe probably recognized,) and it’s a dorm setting so what they need most is to have someone watching them (I’ve been placed on the Not Allowed To Be Left Alone watch for less than Ruth’s showing now) and to be out of the murdercave? Health center’s their best option, plus dollars to donuts they’re calling in a psychiatrist now if someone wasn’t already there and equipped to start having The Medication Talk.
With my experience, if you are a threat to yourself or others, your first stop is going to be a hospital or something similar. If they can’t be certain you won’t hurt someone (including yourself), you may be placed on a psych hold. There’s usually people trained in mental health emergency. Given that this is a student clinic, it may be the first stop so they can keep an eye on her until they have a next step. But they can’t let her be alone knowing she’s suicidal and it’s not like counseling is an instant fix. She’ll likely be referred to counseling for long term help, but right now their biggest concern is making sure she doesn’t hurt herself, and the best way they can do that is keeping her somewhere people can watch her and are trained to handle it if she does try anything or has a psychotic break or something.
Because when you’re found suicidal by a member of staff at a university, they take you to the student health center (i.e., the doctor’s office) to see a doctor. The doctor then decides if you need to be institutionalized or if you need medication and therapy.
This is kind of a weird question to me. Being suicidal or catatonic with depression (or both) is the most acute form of depression, which is treated in doctor’s offices to begin with. Why *wouldn’t* you be there?
I don’t agree with some of the comments about how Walky’s doing a bad job. He’s providing pretty much the only ‘first aid’ care there is for major depression, which is to get the patient to stop thinking about how depressed they are. A mental health emergency isn’t like a physical health emergency, where you have to do everything exactly right in the first few minutes or the patient will die.
There are really only a few wrong ways to talk to someone who’s depressed. You don’t try to convince them that their condition isn’t real, or isn’t a problem. You don’t blame them for their condition. You don’t try to shock them out of their condition with anger or derision.
Aside from that, it’s mainly just about getting them talking and responding and helping them to have something other than their depression running their thought processes. You try stuff and see what works. Walky’s attempt at observational humor is as good a place to start as any.
Though he’s also really really bad at this. But then again, I don’t think we’ve seen anyone yet who’s really good at handling this outside of maybe Chloe off-screen, but it’s too early to tell.
Hell, when Carla, who ran out the door nopeing and stumbled over her words like an idiot is a contender for student handling this the best, that’s saying some shit.
Yeah, at the moment he’s definitely not SUCCEEDING at helping them, but at the very least he’s a distraction from being in the health center on suicide watch and while the jokes are an abject failure at all things helping, the reassurance that someone does care about Billie enough to show up here and promptly fuck up the situation is useful.
The fact that Walky was let in because he was _Billie_’s emergency contact indicates something important. Many commenters are assuming that Ruth is being treated as a patient here, with Billie as a friend and comforter. I think they are BOTH being treated as patients. Both are depressed, and abusing alcohol. Even if only one is suicidal, both clearly need help.
When you’re depressed, even what are considered ‘negative’ emotions are a positive. Now, who’s the best person at getting an emotional response out of Billie? Well, besides the obvious.
Which is good, because this whole arc of their “lesbian suicide pact” has often allowed Billie especially to try and pretend that it’s only Ruth who’s been deep in the hole. But Billie suffers from depression too. And she’s got terrible self-esteem and often wants to die herself. Hence not actually checking Ruth when she called it a suicide pact and viewing herself as poison.
So it’s very good that Billie is also getting the care she needs rather than it all falling to Ruth.
That is a great point. This whole time Billie’s been focusing on being Ruth’s support that she’s completely ignored dealing with the fact that she’s also depressed, possibly to the point of suicidal ideation like Ruth.
I don’t think that’s the kind of thing she was ever going to be able to deal with while she was trying to save Ruth.
David, is Ruth’s character based on a real person? She should be the poster girl for Bipolar disorder . . . not kidding here! They took her to a medical facility, now she needs the right kind of doctor!
I’ve been there, I am there. So were my grandmother, mother, and two uncles.
It can’t be cured, only managed.
WALKY IS AN ASS! A stand up comic at a funeral . . .
Sorry if this has already been pointed out, but a while back I think a number of us were confused (at least, I was) by Becky’s description of the browns as “Aryan” when they’re fairly clearly brunette/whatever the male equivalent is. I happened to be going back through the archives and found this, too. Is it possible they’re canonically supposed to be blond(e)? and if so, what’s up with the color? Am I just color blind? I seem to be able to see yellow in most cases. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/piece/
Does the story of the past few days make anyone wanna see a slipshine of Mary stealing one of Roz’s toys to use then trying to hide her ridiculous shame at normal human behaviour afterword?
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“Ha, I kill me!” would be a bad thing to quote now, wouldn’t it
absinthe makes the barf go wander
i actually don’t know what absinthe is. I’m guessing some form or booze or maybe drugs.
You pretty much nailed it.
Absinthe is a really, *really* strong drink, ranging between 45% and 74% alcohol by volume. It’s normally diluted with water, for hopefully obvious reasons. It’s also got some hallucinogenic properties—exaggerated, but still—, apparently, and it was even thought that it was fundamentally different from alcohol. It’s complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe#Health_effects
it used to contain wormwood, which is toxic
well live and learn. i mean im in my early 30s and have never been buzzed much less drunk so my booze knowledge is really limited
In europe you can pretty much start drinking at five, everyone i know has been getting drunk since forever
Eastern Europe? Sure. Western Europe? Please, we have some decency.
… We start “tasting wine” at twelve.
Legally, children in the UK are allowed to drink wine at home with parents’ permission as young as 5yo. As far as I know, it doesn’t extend to other forms of alcohol though. And I don’t know any parent who’d let their kid get drunk like that.
THAT being said though, when I was in the Scouts about half the kids in the troop used to sneak off and get themselves regularly pissed whenever we went away on camps or day trips. On one day trip to Calais, 33 Scouts went and 30 of them went off on a pub crawl around the city. They arrived back hours later, completely off their faces and several were vomiting. And they were all 12 and 13 years old. (I was one of the oldest and biggest at 14 and I had refused to go with them to buy them their booze. Like that stopped them at all… :P)
In the U.S. parents can give kids alcohol at home and it is perfectly legal…it’s just frowned upon.
/raises eyebrow
Are you sure of that Raza, or just being sarcastic?
5 PM or at age 5 (years)?
And now it does again. For a while, they made it without wormwood because they legally had to, but now the high-end brands all have it in them again.
Ironically, it first got popular by being cheap – wormwood was a way of denaturing industrial alcohol, so les bohèmes were basically meths drinkers.
It’s the thujone in wormwood that can cause hallucinations and convulsions and death. For absinthe to be allowed into the states, it has to be thujone-free (or close to such). Think of it like decaf coffee, except instead of removing tasty flavor, you remove toxicity 😛
As such, if it was absinthe [and as note by others, there are more likely options] it was thujone-free, and thus non-toxic.
The thujone level has to be under 10 parts per million, which, ironically, most absinthe manufactured falls well under. So in essence, the ban wasn’t really a ban so much as a misunderstanding, as that law hasn’t changed recently.
That was the law up until 2003. It isn’t anymore.
Wasn’t that the stuff Picasso and other modernists drank?
A bit further back in (art) history, Impressionists. Van Gogh was a well known Absinthe drinker, mainly because it was cheap, very, very cheap.
Its Spirits with a high alcohol content and in some cases i belive it could be counted as agalucigen which is why full stregth is not available in the US and is illegal in most of europe
It was the alcoholic LSD of the 1890s. ( see also “green fairy” )
The original recipe was lost after it was prohibited.
250 sorts of …>
The task is to test all of them!
Absinthe — real absinthe — is pretty damned pricey and awfully hard to get one’s hands on. If Walky is detecting an anise smell on the breath, it could be something as simple as ouzo, or a more expensive but more readily available liqueur like Sambuca or Pernod.
At a college in the US? That smell means only one thing. Jagermeister.
I only ever drank vodka and very occasionally rum at college. I always got really cheap vile vodka, too. Luckily I can afford nicer stuff now.
Last I checked, even the cheap imports run about the same price as a halfway decent bottle of single malt scotch. And let’s be honest- if you can go for single malt, why bother with anything else? ^.^
Wally might not know what absinthe smells like. It’s possible that Walky just smells the alcohol and said the name of the first spirit that popped into his head.
Who knew Walky’s mental list of alcohol types was stored alphabetically? (So Zima is the last thing he’ll think of, which is probably for the best.)
Oh wait – Zinfandel is slightly later…
Pernod was first making absinthe, then after it was prohibited, turned its business to anisette (pastis like).
Ricard or Pastis?
Absinthe makes the breath grow stronger?
I’ve never tried, it, but I hear it’s supposed to taste like licorice. So I guess it might not make your breath too bad.
Walky opens his mouth, and it stinks. Perhaps Walky should make himself absinthe.
With his (lack of) tolerance?
It does taste vaguely of it, but not normal nasty licorice (I find most licorice to be a horrible taste. Even thinking about it: Yuck!) It’s a little hard to explain. I’ve only had it once, outside the US, I think it’s no longer banned here. I tried a little straight, and it was far more licoricish, but once diluted/sugared it’s not very licorice tasting.
From looking at the history, it was rather villified, when a lot of the problem was the issue of other alcohols (which somehow escaped bans.) You should try it sometimes, recent research has shown that any harmful parts (aside from the alcohol) is only present in trace (harmless) amounts. (I think I saw a internet napkin back calculation which suggested that it would take many gallons to have sufficient amount of harmful portions or even the supposed hallucinogenic properties, but that you’d have already gotten most of it out of your system. Granted, that’s the internet so if you really want to consume lots of it… do your own calculation, before you get drunk!)
Originally, absinthe was made with something called “wormwood” which contained a chemical that could cause convulsions, kidney failure, and death if consumed in large amounts; and there was no regulatory agencies or food and drug standards back in the late 1800s, when absinthe first rose to popularity.
Although my own research shows much of the vilification of Absinthe was more a way to vilify the culture of the people who drank it: Bohemians, Romantics, Deviants, Writers, Artists, Frenchmen, Women Who Didn’t Know Their Place, etc.
It was the “Reefer Madness” of the nineteenth century.
I remember trying a shot of absinthe on my 20th birthday. I felt like I had poured acid on my tongue XP
Like a cross between licorice and licking a recently sterilized hospital floor.
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.
But with Walky, how can we tell unless he goes away?
If by ‘fond’, you mean the French cooking term, meaning the semi-burnt bits of meat left on the bottom of the pan after cooking meat, then yes, absinthe can make the heart more like ‘fond’.
Walky needs to learn how to talk to the depressed, like how is he this bad?
He’s just not used to it. Most people are depressed AFTER a conversation with him.
lol
lack of a psychology degree?
this is the point where jason walks in and gives him an f.
and he still doesn’t get it and asserts that he is awesome at cheering up suicidally-depressed lesbians
No, from previous evidence, he probably knows he’s bad at it.
He’s using humor as much to deal with his own freaking out about the situation as to try to help them.
Geocentricism?
or, encapsulated narcissism
I forget words
Walky’s epicycles are out of joint.
…Egocentrism?
At least you got all the right letters!
Yup, the problem here is that Walky believes the sun orbits the earth
Technically close. He believes the Sun orbits the Walky.
Walking is making the mistake of trying to cheer up depressed people. Which is like telling someone who is bedridden they should go for a run and they’ll feel better.
His main method of dealing with anxiety is humor, so it follows that he’s going to use this method even though it invalidates their emotions (something that they might be open to honestly, but it isn’t healthy.
It worked for me. The only way some friends got me out of a severe depressive episode was by cheering me up with stupid jokes.
Not saying it always works, but it’s an option for -some-, ya know?
Same. Some of my best moments when j was having a rough semester were my friends cheering me up.
A rough semester isn’t a suicide watch.
Glad to see people taking depression seriously though.
A “rough semester” could be anything. Let’s try not to invalidate anyone’s experience just because of the words they use, eh? I think we can take for granted that Leafirebender knows their own mind better than you know their mind, and they’ve brought up their experience because they feel it’s relevant to a discussion about depression.
I know how much I hate being told that I “don’t sound depressed” or being implicitly asked to prove my condition. Few people have the knowledge and experience to try to disprove depression face-to-face, and no-one should be doing it over the internet.
This. So much this.
So many people think unless you actually have a gun in your mouth you’re not depressed or suicidal enough to warrant help or concern.
I think the point is that Walky’s experience would be with the rough semester end and that is the approach he’s using…because he’s never dealt with suicide level.
My roughest semester in college was the one where I realized I couldn’t kill myself without Jen’s permission and couldn’t ask her permission because we didn’t have enough of a relationship to justify putting her in that position. No suicide watch, because the only people who knew didn’t care.
When I was in school, I had a lot of anxiety about what I would do for work for the rest of my life, whether I would become a machine or get to be creative. Following the advice of “Just do it,” and “put on a smile and it will be easy.” Might get me through a semester but the next one would be worse. I made it out with my degrees but it took me a year to find a job I had so much anxiety about my life any time I tried to look for one.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to be on suicide watch to have depression screw up your life one semester at a time. Not to say I never thought about suicide mind you, just that most of the time I could think of better things to do with myself than die.
Ugh, not for me. When I go through it I basically need someone to cuddle me and validate my experience (if not my perceptions) and say “It’s okay that things suck and everything is hard right now. It will get better and you are not a bad person.” It just infuriates me and leaves me lonelier than before when people try to be funny or “cheer me up.”
Even if people succeed in cheering me up with their jokes that doesn’t change the fact that the next time I’m alone, be it days or months, unless I’ve dealt with the shit that was making me depressed it’s still there and meaner than ever.
I hope you have people in your life who are regularly available to cuddle you and tell you it’s real and you can beat it. I’m still looking.
I don’t know…I think as a firend it does not realy matter what you say as long as you show you care thats his job as a friend. he is not their psychologist ther is no need for him to say all the right things.
He doesn’t have to say ‘all the right things’, but it would be preferable if he didn’t say all the insensitive things in an attempt to diffuse a serious situation because *he* feels awkward about it. Sticking his foot that far in his mouth is going to suffocate him one day.
Yeah, if only he was a trained psychologist and not a socially awkward teenage nerd.
Could be worse, he might be trying kinetic toy therapy.
What, you mean that’s not working out for Amber?
What about him suggests that he’d be good at talking to depressed people? I don’t find this at all surprising.
Perhaps it will be revealed that he’s dealt with a severe depressive episode with Billy in the past (given how he freaked out about it), but this is likely the first time he’s dealt with someone else’s severe depressive episode… and given that Ruth is about 1/10th of a step away from being full on catatonic, probably a completely new experience for him, and a scary one at that considering Billy was trotting along closely after her.
Maybe his acting like a dumbass has perked Billy up (either with a laugh or getting angry) and out of her “I want to die” mode in the past, so he’s defaulting to that. Maybe tomorrow he’ll realize what he’s doing isn’t working and be scared out of continuing… or what he’s doing will work and he’ll have a “perked up” (aka: enraged) Ruth snarling at and lunging at him.
Perhaps you should let Willis finish his stories before making judgments on the character’s actions and the consequences you have yet to know they’ll have.
GhostWriterL: I was replying to Wheelpath’s “Walky needs to learn how to talk to the depressed, like how is he this bad?”.
You’re also very judgmental, with very little reason and over very low stakes, so I’m not interested in communicating with you any further.
When Walky is your emergency contact that says something about your life I think.
Actually… yeah, wouldn’t Sal make more sense as Billie’s roommate?
Billie still thinks Sal is a nutty vigilante. If I’m in the hospital, I don’t want Batman coming to bring me grapes. I want Batman out chasing down whoever put me in the hospital.
Yeah, but Sal has been absent from Billie’s life for awhile. Walky really is the closest thing to family she’s got based on what hints she’s dropped of how little her own family regards her.
Not particularly? They hadn’t interacted for the past 5 years (assuming they didn’t drift apart like Sal did with Walky, which, given that the Walkertons apparently favoured Billie over Sal just like they did Walky, is likely), until becoming roommates, and even then, not much. Whereas Walky’s been a constant (albeit, embarrassing) part of Billie’s life.
Billie couldn’t get ahold of Sal to even make her sign the roommate agreement, in the first week.
I think it says more about how little thought some people put into naming their emergency contacts.
… though Billie should probably have taken that as an early warning sign that her social circle was doomed.
He’s a person who is geographically close, has her best interests at heart, and knows her well. How many people have even one person like that when they leave home for the first time?
I’m confused anyway. Ruth is the one here to see the doctors. Billie is just along with her. So why is the emergency contact of the patient’s “friend” allowed in.
And where’s Dorothy. She got in before when Joyce was hurt using press credentials. We need her to tell Walky to shut up!
Honestly, I think Walky bullshat his way in. “I’m the emergency contact for the asian girl”, and the intern at the desk not really differentiating between the patient and the support.
Don’t think so. Remember that Billie and Walky were best friends as children; so it’s quite possible that Billie put him down as ’emergency contact’ because
1) he was as close geographically as anyone else
2) while he might not have been able to do much of anything himself, he could get word back to his parents (or Billie’s parents) so that they could then take charge.
Billie is also suicidal.
Or rather, presumed as such. But even if they don’t follow that rumor, she’s still clearly in a troubled relationship, which means they need to do a psych eval on her as well.
In other words, both are currently being viewed as “patients”. Though given that this is the campus health center, and not a hospital, it’s likely all pretty lax in certain interpretations.
Billie made it clear that she wanted Ruth to “take her with her.”
She wasn’t nearly as receptive to the suicide pact as Ruth was, but it was still there. For all we know she’s still planning on following after Ruth right now.
Noone knows what happened between the two when they were out of sight of the others [and apparently, with the door locked].
The main reason people think Billie is suicidal is because Sal used an ambigious pronoun when referring to Ruth being suicidal (here: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/diddlin-2/ ).
I can’t actually find any reference to what you’re saying, and to the contrary, everything Billie has said has been supportive and indicative of her expectations of things eventually getting better.
Billie may be making it sound like wanting to die is normal here: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/brucewayne/
Also, Sal and Walkie have been worried about Billie for a while.
It’s the literal reason for why Billie and Ruth started dating/entered their suicide pact. Ruth revealed that she was suicidally depressed and thought she was doomed to eventually kill herself, and Billie decided that the both of them were already broken so she was going to go with her.
I’m with HeySo. The RM is the one that sent them to the health center and Walky had told her that Billie was likely suicidal as well. In that case, the RM probably one with a “better safe than sorry” approach and checked ’em both in for help.
Though I do question the idea of keeping two people alone in a room together when at least one of them are in a valley. Granted they’re in a hospital, of sorts at least, but still.
Pointing out that Billie didn’t even put down her own parents as her emergency contact.
In fairness, Walky lives in the same building, so he’s a bit easier to get a hold of.
When you live interstate, having a local friend as your emergency contact makes a lot of sense. Especially of you are a heavy drinker, with a history of car accidents, and they aren’t.
Actually it makes sense, considering he’s the closest to the campus. Though if the parents don’t show up… yeah, that’ll be a problem.
Yes, because parents not showing up is what tends to go wrong in this comic.
She’s 18. Technically the parent’s aren’t needed (other than possibly to pay the bills.)
We know they’re not close. According to Billie, her dad’s always away on business trips and her mom ignores her in favor of chasing men. Not sure I’d put them as emergency contacts either.
Curious who’s Ruth’s contact. And whether they’ve been called.
My parents are eight hours away, not good emergency contacts. Granted, I’m not their dependent or enrolled in college anymore, but for adult-like emergencies, still not good.
I’m 3 hours away from my parents, but I still have them listed with their phone number because they know the most about my medical history, can answer if I have allergies, and know enough about my preferences to make informed decisions. They’re still the best call (pun unintended). …. but if I had close local friends who knew that stuff, I’d probably list them instead.
I have my sister listed BECAUSE she vowed pull the plug on me the first chance she gets!
Parents who know enough about someone’s preferences to make informed decisions are a rarity, in my experience, though many think they do. The medical stuff is more than enough reason to log their contact data, though.
Yup, that’s super telling to just how little of a relationship they have.
Well, she and Walky are siblings in all but blood.
Besides which, this is at most a drop of water into the bucket of Billingsworth parental horribleness.
I went to school an hour and a half away from home; my parents were my emergency contacts throughout college. I did recently learn, however, that I was the emergency contact for a friend of mine for a couple of years– same college, same home town, worse relationship with her parents. So, it could have to do with distance, but I could definitely say it speaking to that relationship.
Questing of Age
Dorothy and Walky run and jump through alleyways as fast as they can, with John hot on their heels.
Dorothy pulls out her cellphone, and dials Joyce.
Dorothy: C’mon, c’mon…dammit! I can’t get a hold of her.
Walky: He’s gaining fast!
Dorothy: We need a plan…wait!
Dorothy pulls out her phone again and calls Amber.
Amber: Yes?
Dorothy: John, John, John, John…
Amber: Where are you!?
Dorothy: We just passed the church!
Amber: Catholic or…
Dorothy: JOYCE’S!
Amber: We’ll be right there.
Dorothy: Walky, we can’t move far.
Walky: So we have to stay in one general area then?
Dorothy: Which means…
Walky: We have to fight!
They both skid to a halt and John lands in front of them.
Dorothy: We strike together!
Walky: RIGHT!
Dorothy and Walky run at John, who blocks both of their attacks effortlessly.
John grins and pushes on Dorothy and Walky, sending them flying.
Walky and Dorothy: Aaah!
Dorothy gets back on her feet.
John: Maybe, if my sister was here, you would have a chance…
John knees Dorothy in the stomach.
Dorothy: Gah!
John: But, alone…
John kicks Dorothy into a lamp post.
John: Your both just worthless.
Badass who everyone will be excited for: Oh I don’t know about that Brother!
John: You again!
Jocelyn lands between Dorothy/Walky and John.
Dorothy: Your…
Jocelyn: I’ll deal with him.
Kick his ass Jocelyne!
OH YES
JOCELYNE!!!!!!!!!!
I think everything’s gonna be alright
*plays Ringo Starr’s “Oh My My” on the hacked Muzak*
“Self deprecation is how we’re here” should totally be a book title.
It’s my autobiography. (But yes, it’d be a good one.)
that would be a good title actually. I could picture the first chapter being something like
And now lets see where we can go from here.
I think Ruth/Billie have raised enough spirits. To their mouths.
and we have 100% proof that this is true.
Proof is not done on a percentage system. 100% would be 200 proof, and that’s practically impossible as alcohol at high concentrations is a moisture magnet.
180 proof, or 90%, maybe.
Everclear ranges up to 95%, actually. It’s pretty caustic if you drink it straight, but it mixes surprisingly smooth.
Bet you could wash off RUST with that.
I guess maybe I COULD- but that’s everclear I could be using for jello shots, so I guess I’ll never find out if it’s possible or not. 🙂
(Really, try them, they’re tasty. Fruityness with a good kick. Just keep in mind that the higher the alcohol content, the harder it is to get jello to set, so use a bit less water in total and be careful not to substitute too much everclear for water.)
Works well mixed with concentrated apple cider too.
I reread Roomies! somewhat recently, so seeing a Danny grav on a comment about alcohol feels kind of ironic
Want stranger? Despite knowing that factoid, I don’t drink, and never have.
I’m glad someone made this joke so I didn’t have to do so.
“Hey Ruth, how about we get your sister in here. You know, Dorothy?”
Fun story, when I was being born my Dad was at a work trip like three hours away so one of our family friends went in, pretending to be my mum’s brother. The doctors bought it and thankfully my Dad showed up in time.
I assume you didn’t mean to relate those sentences?
Because you’re making your family friend sound pretty darn creepy there 😛
You’re seeing something I’m not.
I think HeySo means that “the doctors bought it and thankfully my dad showed up in time” sounds a little bit like “the doctors bought it, BUT thankfully my dad showed up in time”, which would make it sound like the family friend’s presence was unwanted. I’m not actually sure why he had to pretend to be anyone’s brother, but yeah, I think this is what HeySo means. p7
My birth was similar except that:
1) My Dad was off committing adultery, rather than at work.
2) The part of my mother’s sibling was played by my mother’s actual sibling, so…
3) Family friend snitched some scrubs and pretended to be a doctor in order to give me the once-over in my incubator in the NICU.
4) Surprisingly, the nurses actually did buy it, and left him alone to count my toes or whatever before striding off to tell my post-C-section mom that I was fine, but she didn’t look too good.
Little green fairies can only improve this situation here.
The Great Gazoo sounds like a bad idea.
Specially when he doesn’t know how feels work.
Sounds like you’re talking about The Great Galasso. 😛
No, just la fée verte.
The joke being that Galasso has trouble understanding the emotions [or genders] of others. :/
Also, I like to jump in fully and go after la fée arc, myself. ^.^
That would be la fée arc-en-ciel, wouldn’t it?
I don’t think that worked out too well for Elgie.
I presume you’re talking either Tinkerbell or absinthe (a/k/a “the green fairy”) here.
YES!
I was assuming absinthe. I forgot about its nickname and jumped straight to missing Chimneyspeak.
Nothing wrong with that. Well, nearly everything was wrong in that universe.
walky is a piece of shit, doo dah, doo dahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Hey I’m hardly his biggest fan but give the kid a break. He’s completely out of his depth here and he’s making an effort.
Everyone has things they’re not good at.
What matters is sentiment, effort, and commitment, and Walky is pretty reliable on those fronts. Then again, he also risked lives before he started taking things seriously [or rather, before Joyce made him do such] in core universe, so his immaturity definitely does lead to things that he has cause to be censured for.
In other words:
Good heart, great friend, very immature person.
i like how billie is holding ruths hand.
Billie already had Becky’s superglue idea. No regrets so far.
Though I’m not sure whether its a good or bad sign that Ruth is not murdering Walky right now
good in the fact he isn’t dead but bad in the fact that she hasn’t reacted at all meaning she hasn’t had any change, but if i am thinking right its been a couple/few hours tops.
Walky is just noise to Ruth right now. Billie, on the other hand, may be about to demonstrate the cheerleader kick she’s used on doors and trash shoots.
but to keep holding ruths hand she will have to trick him closer.
Nah, Walky and Ruth are more than close enough together for her to slug him with a closed fist without releasing Ruth, and kicks have way more range and power.
Well, Dorothy is bound to show up eventually, so she can just explain this to her and she’ll probably help.
Billie used Cheerleader Kick!
Walky Dodged!
She looks like she was copy/pasted. Dead to the world around you isn’t a good thing.
Murderin’ one-handed is hard.
Not impossible, but hard.
Trust me on this.
Walky, NOW IS NOT THE TIME!
I fear I am in the early stages of butts disease. I read that last line originally as “Self defecation is how we got here.” Then I took another look. Can butts disease even affect poetry?
Well, Ruth’s will to live certainly shat the bed.
Well, at least he’s making them feel better by comparison.
Walky! No! Bad Walky!
That’s not how self-depreciation works, Walky. That’s just depreciation.
If you can find a joke that mocks your situation funny, you’re up to the point of accepting self-deprecating humor.
His grammar is correct. 😛
Okay Captain Pedant.
You’re using pedant(ic) entirely incorrectly. I’m not sure why you’re being rude for the sake of being rude, but using the wrong word in your insult certainly isn’t helping you come across any less gauche.
Also, it’s Captain Fondant- really, an easy confusion to make.
Yeugh, I hate fondant. Why anyone would cover perfectly good cake in that waxy shite is beyond me.
Fond, OTOH, is quite tasty. Little brown bits o’ meat…
Self-depreciation is an excellent way to keep from over-taxing your resources.
Ah, yes, that moment when you realize your mistake in talking, but continue talking anyway because stopping would be at least as awkward. I have about five of those every time I talk.
I’ve had those before, especially when I was younger. I’ve started to grow out of it. Mostly by not talking as much.
I find that sometimes makes it worse. It’s almost like the sarcasm builds up.
The conversation goes a little like:
“Greetings and sarcasm to you!”
“Serious thoughts and emotions…”
“Barely appropriate sarcasm.
“Doubt as to whether or not I care…”
“All the sarcasms!”
“WTF?! I hate you!”
“Oh, sorry. Sarcasm aimed at self. No, seriously I just… maybe I should go.”
Or in other words: this comic.
Yeah, I have the same impulse. Its really hard to reign in something blurts its way out, but I’ve managed to (usually) just accept the awkwardness and deal with it rather than risk making a crappy situation worse.
I can’t turn off the quipping or bad puns when a choice setup happens, but I can avoid what Walky’s doing at least. I wish I could say for sure that at his age, and in that situation I would have had the sense to shut up, but it would only have been slightly better.
I twitch when that happens. And I don’t know if I could have avoided what Walky did today. Honestly, aside from dialect, I can’t tell if I’m channeling him or he channels me. Well, when talking.
Yeah.. same. Especially awkward when I call someone to offer condolences.
My sister in law’s younger brother died of an overdose, and when she called my mom and I to let us know, my first reaction was to call him an idiot. Which my mom immediately relayed to my SIL. Hadn’t occurred to me at the time that it might have been an intentional overdose, but either way that was a shitty thing to say.
Yeah. Walk already established he’s crappy at post traumatic experience conversation.
Billie must have been inebriated when she filled out her emergency contact. There can be no other good reason.
Sal and Walky are the closest things she has to family, and Sal is notoriously unreliable to get a hold of, nevermind somewhat estranged from her brother and Billie due to being put in boarding school for years.
Walky is the obvious choice. 🙂
I didn’t think Walky could top himself in idiocy when he said “Gun to my head-” after Toedad, but I think he just.
Walky is really bad at this.
Genuine serious feels -> high pressure -> awkward foot in mouth disease.
I think it’s because Walky views his true feelings as a shameful weakness… or at least something that “cool” people don’t have… so he avoids them at all cost, even during (rare) moments of self-examination. He dare not take other people’s feelings seriously because that would lead him back to his own.
He’s nervous and scared, so he’s covering that up with jokes to hide it. He wants to talk with Billie about what’s going on because he’s concerned (but again, too uncomfortable with his feelings to just express them directly), so the jokes end up being about that.
And that’s a great recipe for putting your foot in your mouth while simultaneously getting your head stuck up your ass.
It’s not uncommon for young men, especially young men with a lot of anxiety about their masculinity to view emotions and their true expression as a weakness or a character flaw.
It’s one of many ways in which sexism harms men by disallowing them to express any emotions outside rage or ironic detachment.
And triumph… and lust… and excitement…
… but yeah, it’s a short list within very limited themes.
That kind of toxicity is part of why I’m so closed up IRL. When I was a lot younger, any display of emotion became a weapon for my peers to use against me, and I took that lesson to heart. Only the people I trust absolutely… plus a bunch of people online to whom I’m anonymous… get to know what I’m feeling. I’m fairly honest with myself about feelings, but letting others know exposes me to a backlash and gives them power over me. That probably wouldn’t be a problem with my peers at my age, but we never truly forget the lessons of middle school.
Hey, men have the /full set/ of anger emotions, not just rage. Especially righteous fury and anger about your country.
I actually miss that allowance for righteous fury. Since coming out, I’ve been heavily discouraged from expressing righteous anger at fucked up injustices in a lot of my daily life.
But yeah, do not miss the narrow policing of what emotions I was allowed to feel for everything else.
He reminds me a fair bit of Becky, actually.
The difference is that Walky is headed through actual character development that might result in him being a better person in the end. Whereas Willis is convinced that Becky is perfect as she is, so her shittiness won’t go away ever.
Becky’s not perfect, but this is far more insensitive than anything she’s ever done.
Yeah. WOW
I dunno, Becky’s been kind of a jerk when she wants to be, like straight up bi-erasing Billie or calling Jocelyne a Nazi. Walky and Becky do the exact same thing by trying to deflect any kind of stress with humour.
Becky’s just willing to learn. I’m not sure where the idea that Becky’s negative traits don’t go away is coming from because we have actively seen her screw up and try to make amends instead of going “lol im sassy and have a rad haircut.” Like, she accidentally triggered Joyce’s PTSD and then spent the rest of the day organizing a party for her to give her experiences she was missing out on in a safe environment.
1. She literally didn’t know bisexuality was a thing. Yes, it wasn’t her best moment, but Billie was also assuring her she was straight and not queer at all. NEITHER of them knew what the fuck they were talking about.
2. Making a Nazi joke out loud in a public space was insensitive, yes… to Jewish and Roma people potentially present. Jocelyne can take a little “you are whiter than white” joke. Especially given that Becky has no idea, nor any reason to suspect she’s LGBT at that point.
(Later in the day, after her support, yes, but initially? Yeah, probably not.)
I mean, yeah, you are 100% right that those weren’t her best moments, but EVERY character (except maybe Dina who is actual literal perfection) has had those. Becky isn’t somehow ESPECIALLY tactless.
(And I’m 100% behind your second half of the message. Becky’s problem is that she’s never been taught stuff, not that she can’t learn. She absorbs new stuff like a sponge, and I betcha if confronted with Billie’s claim of bisexuality now, aka a week later, she wouldn’t say the same thing at all.)
I dunno, I figure Nazi jokes can easily be offensive to anyone who is not, in fact, a Nazi. One doesn’t need to have been a victim of the Holocaust to get mad about being compared to the perpetrators, y’know? It was not Becky’s finest hour.
It also 100% is counterproof of the idea that “Willis thinks Becky is perfect”, so this whole sidebar is silly.
Billie made it abundantly clear that she “liked girls sometime”, and Becky dismissed it because there’s not a word for liking both.
(I am actually a little bummed out that Becky overcoming her bi-erasure was handled so briskly. I think that could have made for some great character beats)
Anyway, she called Jocelyne a Nazi. I can’t actually think of any other ways to describe that it’s kinda sorta fucked up other than just saying so. Jocelyne’s a trans lady being compared to an actual genocidal regime because Becky’s assuming she’s part of the homogeneous sludge she came from.
> Whereas Willis is convinced that Becky is perfect as she is
Siiiigh.
Yeah right.
Sure.
-_-
Remember how she was introduced with a poll about how wonderful she is and Willis spent like a month talking about her being the best on Twitter? I haven’t seen anything to convince me he’s changed his mind about that. Considering I was not a fan of her within about 2 weeks of her showing up, it started to grate.
Being the best is different than being perfect. Being awesome as-is does not mean she’s not flawed or that she’s never going to screw anything up or be in a situation where she’s in the wrong. She’d get boring if she didn’t have room to grow as a character.
Obviously, you’re entitled to your opinion, and simply disliking Becky isn’t something I’d hold against you, even though she’s one of my favorite characters. I just don’t understand it, or why you seem so vitriolic about it
ha ha ha ha ha ha
That poll? “Is Becky a great DoA character or the GREATEST DoA character?” That’s a Stephen “The Colbert Report” Colbert gag, where he’d ask guests the same question of George W Bush. The connotation being, of course, that the answer was neither, and the guest was being railroaded into a response.
And TWO YEARS LATER you’re still mad about that, and have in the meantime created a fiction about me because you didn’t understand a stupid basic cable joke reference in a website poll.
Becky isn’t perfect, and has never been portrayed as such. It’s just that some people like to jump on stuff where she’s been fine and act like she’s some horrible person.
If you harbor this much resentment towards the author, Viktoria, why do you still read the comic? Becky would have better sense than to say what you said. Walky might not.
Becky has been raised in an environment that was more restrictive than Joyce’s was. She was likely expected to stay quiet and never make her presence known unless her father wanted her to be known. Upon entering her teens, she ‘rebelled’ by being obnoxious, and that obnoxiousness likely leaked over as a means to hide her insecurities and protect herself, because you know… how are people going to attack and/or punish you if you put on the facade of LA LA LA LA LA I DON’T CARE LA LA LA LA LAAA!
When you’ve been told all your life to shut up and mind your place, how are you to know when to actually shut up and what to look for in regards to boundaries that you should respect in order to not be offputting to other people? Especially in high stress situations with people you don’t know where you stand with them?
Becky is obnoxious and clueless, not terrible. She hasn’t had a lot of worldly experience out of her short time of being homeless and getting kidnapped by her psycho religious father. She has really only had Joyce trying to put the brakes on her behavior, of whom she is currently thinking it is hilarious to defy and poke at, and her current significant other is socially awkward in the complete opposite way that she is (quiet and practically invisible).
Also, consider that since Becky has been in the comic, only about 1 week has passed in the comic’s timeline. Maybe a few days more, but expecting Becky to change into the perfect character you expect her to be is highly unreasonable.
Me too. Becky and Walky both try to cover up “the feels” by wackiness.
Becky has been through several traumatising events lately, and she still tries to present a happy face to the world; small wonder that her jokes sometimes go terribly wrong.
I just hope she starts to talk to someone soon, or we’ll have another Amber on our hands.
Becky and Walky do have at least two traits in common — impulsiveness, and a lack of awareness of how other people experience the world.
In Becky’s case, the latter trait seems to come from growing up in a sheltered/isolated environment. Walky is just unaware and mostly oblivious.
Both of them tend to say whatever is on the top of their head, and sometimes it turns out to be insensitive. Becky seems to be learning as she goes. Walky? He avoids even thinking about his own feels, much less anyone else’s.
Arguable, really good at making inappropriate jokes accidentally?
Eh, he’s still doing better then I would.
Walky talkie. Walkie talkie far too much.
Guys, despite Walky’s personality, he still goes out of his way to help someone who spent years treating him like shit, and who crawls back when she can’t pull the same crap she did in high school. He has every right to stop giving a shit about her. I like him, because he hasn’t.
I give him +2 for intention and -2 for execution.
Eh, your sister will often give you shit. And they are brother and sister.
Because he doesn’t want to let go of Billie.
He tries to talk to Sal after five years of near total silence between the two and just gives up when Sal isn’t receptive, he and Dorothy broke up over pajama means and she still has to crowbar an emotional response out of him, but Billie’s been there his entire life.
He did specifically tell Sal that he recognized he hadn’t been the best brother to her and wanted to try to be that for Billie.
Comic Reactions:
Oh, Walky, if only a Communications Degree was actually about teaching you how to communicate with other humans with some measure of tact.
Billie’s parents are not even seen as worth putting down as an emergency contact. Yikes. She’s really accepted that she essentially doesn’t have parents in the worst way, hasn’t she?
Also, I find it the sweetest thing that Billie’s just right there sitting next to her, holding her hand the entire time. It’s just such a fragile but important connection and such a passively powerful way of showing emotional support. It’s incredibly heart-warming.
See, if I ran the world, we’d find time to teach basic skills in jr high and high school. Like being able to cook and clean for yourself and make a budget, or recognize suicidal depression in a friend and not make things worse, or recognize pyramid schemes and other scams before you get drawn into them.
i feel like i learned that last one in consumer ed.
which is a miracle because that class is the reason why i’m a zombie to this day
I’m confused; there IS a class in Jr. High which teaches basic skills, cooking, cleaning, making a household budget. It used to be called ‘home economics’, and it was a mandatory class for everybody. Some of it has spread into other courses, and ‘home management’, but it appears to still be part of the curriculum.
Recognizing suicidal depression in my friends was high school. Not…like a class, it was just high school. All of high school. :-/ You can’t teach it, though. It’s all theoretical until you miss the signs once. I can only hope my kids won’t have quite the practical studies in that field.
Recognizing pyramid schemes and ‘get-rich-quick’ scams would be a much more interesting class these days, than when I was in school. Back then it was chain letters and folks selling books on how to sell books about how to sell books. Or betting strategies. O_o¡ The world of scams has exploded in the variety since then, so it’d be a much more fun course.
I took home ec in middle school, but it wasn’t mandatory. It was an elective that was mostly taken by kids who weren’t in band or orchestra. It was fairly popular, since you could show up to your next class with warm muffins or whatever you had made, but there were still plenty of people who didn’t take it.
Health class was mandatory, both in middle and high school, but I don’t remember it getting into anything mental health related.
It’s been a few years since I graduated, and Home Ec… isn’t really a thing anymore. The closest my school had was choosing to take a chunk of cooking classes as your ‘focus’ and thus being able to take cooking classes. The next-closest thing were the shop electives, wherein Small Engines basically amounted to cleaning up after the hicks in Welding.
Home Ec was an elective at my high school and I didn’t take it because it sounded like a dumb class for girls.
….
*I* was dumb and …. for girls? Dammit, this joke isn’t working right.
Eh, I think you saved it. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Joe took those classes.
Joe still bakes a mean muffin.
I’m not even sure what that’s a euphemism for.
It’s not. But then again, you haven’t had his berry delight muffins.
That hand holding is BEAUTIFUL! Whatever goes down, Billie will be there for her.
Oh, she finds her parents pretty practical. For their unlimited supply of money, anyway.
At least he TRIES to help her, he could’ve just left them alone and die, but I think living with a few jokes is better than… not living
Her eyes are green again! HER EYES ARE GREEN AGAIN!
…. okay, they’re still tiny, but they’re green! …. maybe they always were but we couldn’t see because murder cave?
I checked, and there definitely was not any color the last time we saw her
She secretly wears black contact lenses when she’s not wearing glasses.
Billie looked into her depressant goffick eyes that were red from the red contact lenses and cried tears of blood
if it’s Romeo and Juliet, does the make Walky Mercutio?
Walky is not cool enough to be Mercutio. At best he could be Riff from West Side Story.
Bless Walky’s pointed little head, he is there and he is trying, but he really would be better off he could just be quiet and hug them. (I have no idea what I would say in his situation, so I do applaud him for trying.)
Yeah I agree, Billie is there, and just holding her hand in a very moving way, and that is a very touching picture. There is hope for both of them maybe. I hope.
“Just be quiet and hug them”. Excellent advice that I’m going to try to remember.
I fear that my words have made and will make things worse, but there are few times when a hug or just holding a hand will make it worse.
Its a strategy I’ve found effective. If you don’t open your mouth (or make a point of not leaving it open too long or to frequently), stupid things are less likely to escape from it.
I’ve found that in all the times where I’ve blurted out something tactless, it’s usually because I put a lot of pressure on myself to say not just something but The Right Thing. The mythical correct thing that an adult who Knew How to Handle Adult Situations would say to fix everything, and make everything better. Since that’s rarely possible, especially not in situations where someone is crying or freaking out, when the impulse to want to fix everything is strongest, this leads to panicking and blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.
It’s okay not to say a lot, and its okay not to know The Right Thing To Say, and its okay to not say anything at all. I’ve found that remembering that keeps from rushing words out.
I’ve found that, through some cruel twist of circumstance, a majority of people I’m inclined to comfort and in physical proximity to are uncomfortable with physical contact like hugs when they’re feeling vulnerable.
I get that. No touching, you’re not on the approved list.
Some people have no approved list when they’re feeling vulnerable.
He and Sal established that their family has never really been huggers. If you haven’t been raised with it, a hug won’t be your go-to to comfort someone woes.
He’s a major fuckup who shouldn’t even be there.
Out, Walky. And take your stupidity with you!!
No. He’s someone who cares who should be there.
To be honest, this comment makes it sound like you wouldn’t know how to handle it, either. You’d call the suicidal person a “major fuckup.” What a nasty thing to say.
And he clearly has a made-up name.
“major fuckup”
Drama Queen!
What Disloyal Subject said. A LOT of people are uncomfortable with unprompted hugs when they are feeling like shit. Walky isn’t exactly Billie’s boyfriend – and it’s not uncommon to be uncomfortable with hugs even from a significant other in such a situation.
Now, what Amber taught Dina – “sympathy via light physical contact” – is a better start, especially with Dina’s intuition for when it’s appropriate to go from it to “sympathy via heavy physical contact” (AFTER necessarily ascertaining that the person is comfortable with any physical contact from you period).
(Seriously, Dina is the best)
Tough crowd
Walky’s trying to handle this best he can with absolutely no idea how. I appreciate that he means well but I hope a nurse or doctor comes in asap to save him from himself.
And far far more importantly to save Ruth from his “help”
Can we all take a moment to realize that when Billie was filling out an emergency contact form, she realized how terrible her parents were, decided not to put them, thought about writing in the Walkertons, but it’d be weird, and decided, after at least five minutes of debate, to write down Walky’s information.
Haha man if that were Becky in there people’d be tearing into her. Even if we adjusted the billie/Ruth factor. Or perhaps the comments section has gotten over its dislike of Becky. But srsly. Y’all cooing over walky fucking things up when you were condemning becks for the same things. :/
A few days ago, I made that Judgmental Prick comment, there’s a reason I put that one first.
It’s a running theme in the comments and in life. One Carla lampshaded like crazy when she was talking with Ruth.
The more marginalized you are, the less slack you get given. The less, the more slack. And that’s especially true of men and characters who are men, because there’s a lot of social norms based around overlooking character flaws or bad behavior because “boys will be boys”.
And I tend to get some stick for pointing stuff like that out, so I’ll note that the “free pass” treatment was one of those things that infuriated me when I used to think I was a dude, because it felt unbelievably gross and unacceptable that bare minimum social behavior was treated as something praise-worthy just because I thought and others thought I was a dude. Like, the low standards were just not fun and somewhat insulting.
Walky gets remarkably little guff – remember, he’s not a /white/ dude (And has admitted he’d bang Jacob at least). Though he does id as straight, and he’s the closest thing to a male lead, so.
Though I think the most agonizing was about how walky must have been right at every step of the way, b/c he was a male nerd. Nerds were prepared to tear down their biases temporarily before admitting Walky was wrong. (And were totally ignoring two seperate girls about it)
Do you feel the need to compensate for that by giving no slack whatsoever to a less-marginalized person who’s trying?
Perhaps the “you” is unfair. May I substitute “I’ve noted a need among some commenters to …”?
Wasn’t this the subplot in a movie? A reverse racism thing? A person afraid of being called racist/bigot/what-have-you so when presented with a mixture of, cultures?, they overly favor those that have been marginalized, and treat those that havn’t like shit, or just ignore them at best. All done to try to ‘prove’ they’re not what they’re afraid might be said about them?
People are people, gods.
I should be surprised but I’m not. Though thank you DSL for making the comment more general.
For the record, in case it needs to be stated. I see Walky, in this particular strip, as a lovable fuckup. He’s out of his depth and he’s floundering as best as he can, but his heart is in the right place. He just has no tact whatsoever and has a problem with saying whatever the first thing into his head is.
That all said, there is a notable pattern that I’m stating with no value judgments to the characters or the commentariat and which is reflected in life. When you look at what Carla and Becky are given shit for and how badly folks need to stretch to make them into villains. And when you look at what the male characters in particular are given free passes for (Joe and Mike tend to be the most dramatic examples, though Mike finally may have passed some of his free passes by going after Ethan and Danny who are cuties no one wants to see broken), it is noticeable. And it occurs enough in life as well that Carla’s comment about having to be perfect to be given respect and humanity resonates rather strongly.
And again, this is something I’ve noticed from how my same actions were interpreted when I was seen as a cis white man rather than a trans white woman. No, liberal guilt needed.
That is my only point with my statements and why I tried to follow up my statement with my second statement.
Comparing them doesn’t seem fair. Joe and Mike are minor, non-serious side characters with no character arcs. Carla and Becky are central to the plot and have a huge amount of focus placed on their serious and very real decisions and situations. Carla and Becky are far more “real” as characters than Joe and Mike, and are thus judged by a more exacting standard.
Now, comparing Walky to how other central characters are treated is definitely fair. His childlike personality is taken seriously and to its logical conclusions by the story itself.
Well, Joe has a character arc…it’s just taking place really slowly and in the background.
And Mike may be getting one now, or at least I’m hopeful for. Carla seemed to take the positives Mike had in the other `verse, and I’d like to like him here, just keeps getting harder to do so. Jerk with a heart of gold just seems now to be a jerk with a heart of jerk.
Non-conformity will be dealt with, swiftly. I’m used to it, just not to the extent that one of a non-white race or non-standard gender/sexuality deal with. Mental Health issues can be easier to hide.
The commentariat has fallen all over itself, as a whole, to give him that slack, though. It’s almost hilarious at this point. The reverse does not hold true of Becky. Are you sure you can’t find a more plausible reason for why some tiny fraction does not give him that slack?
There are more than a few people tearing into him too.
There might be a few more if it were Becky doing this, sadly, but since she’s on her way we may be able to test that soon enough. She and Walky are… pretty alike, in some respects.
Yeah, but from what I’ve seen about people tearing into Becky, this is nothing.
I mean, people got mad about her flipping off Toedad. After he kidnapped her at gunpoint to force her into conversion therapy and she gave him another chance to accept her.
Can we agree to call it conversion torture, BTW?
Because that shit ain’t therapy.
Absolutely.
You know, I miss most of that shit. I don’t think Willis likes playing Whack-a-Mole, but he does a good job of it.
I went back and paid more attention to the comments after noticing someone reference it. It was …enlightening for me. I knew that kind of bias existed, but I clearly had no idea how prevalent or unforgiving it could be
Or why people even think it’s ok to comment on it?
I’m not feeling any big love for the little arsehole currently if that’s what you mean.
I’m not sure what Willis is trying to do with this strip. Light relief on a suicide watch with a goon whose job appears to be trying to make Ruth worse?
It’s pretty hard to make Ruth worse when her current state is ‘not feeling up to feeling any emotions at all’.
If she were upset, regretful, ashamed, anything – then you would be somewhat right.
But she is not feeling up to feeling at all. Dragging her out of THAT deep within her own head is a mission that Walky is pretty correct to embark on.
He’s too absurd to actually hit the weak spots (ex. naming absinthe and not beer as her ’emergency contact’), and just making her angry at him is not an undesirable result in THIS kind of situation.
> But she is not feeling up to feeling at all. Dragging her out of THAT deep within her own head is a mission that Walky is pretty correct to embark on.
He must have an ego the size of a planet if he thinks he can do that.
???????
Honestly, at this point your comments are just weird to look at.
Literally the only thing ‘dragging her out of that deep within her head’ requires is Walky attracting her attention and getting her to react if not outwardly then at least innerly emotionally to his presence.
That… doesn’t really take the ego the size of the planet to assume you can do, and in fact it’s exactly what Walky is doing there.
If Walky is acting like this on purpose, I’ll be even more upset with him. If it was just Billie, maybe, she knows him well enough that she’s barely even mad at him. Ruth is a total stranger to him and he has no business thinking he has any clue whatsoever how she’d react.
eh. I’ve called him a manchild pretty much from day 1 of this continuity. “18 going on 8”, most commonly.
Walky, the male Becky.
I dunno. Walky’s kind of taking a pounding in the comments here. He usually does when he does something particularly Walky. Not so much the nerd-rage cartoon argument, but the joking after Toedad’s happy-fun gun times.
People disliked Becky because she was being loud and obnoxious or actually attacking and insulting people, especially Dorothy who was trying to help her. She also came from nowhere and basically took over the comic for multiple arcs.
Walky is being dumb but he’s trying to help and is freaking out with worry for Billie.
Several people have pointed out that Billie put Walky down as an emergency contact rather than her parents, but I’m not so sure it’s that drastic. I know I had to put down three of the things, and the third was always a hassle. It seems more likely to me that Billie simply wrote down Walky as an emergency contact, which he’s leveraging to get to see her and try in his own way to be there for her.
Tonight, Grav Roulette has made me Marcie.
We don’t know much about Marcie. She’s a skateboarder, she’s mute (and wasn’t all her life, but we don’t know the details), she’s good at calling bullshit, and she has the (probably doomed) hots for Malaya. She came to Bloomington with Sal but NOT for school and has a (hopefully hyperbolic) dozen roommates in a studio apartment.
All in all, she seems a loyal and strong friend with strong interpersonal connections, athletic hobbies, and the forwardness to say (via her hands) what she means. And (with the POSSIBLE exception of a degree of loyalty that doesn’t extend to backing up friends when they’re in the wrong) none of that describes me at all.
Oh, and also, given her glasses, body type, and hair, she makes me think that this is what a grown-up Marcie from Peanuts would look like.
Her glasses aren’t Billie Jean King’s. Marcie would never be anywhere without those (b/c charles schultz was a close personal friend of her’s. Marcy probaby was not straight.)
What is sign language for “sir”?
After a very thorough and exhaustive 5 minutes of googling, I found several different signs. The answer I found that seems to fit best is that the forms of address “sir” and “ma’am” are more concepts of “hearing” culture than “deaf” culture. (The quotes are in place because I don’t know which culture Marcie counts as being in.) It seems — and again, this is what I “learned” with 5 minutes of google — that several people have invented different signs for personal use, but there’s nothing in widespread use, and the only universally-accepted sign for “Sir” would be spelling out the word by hand.
Self-deprecating humour does not properly involve deprecating other people.
No, but from the context of Ruth and Billie it WOULD be SELF-deprecating.
In other words, Walky is stating that they’re not to the point of finding jokes at their expense humorous. The grammar is correct.
“But, seriously folks …” I can’t figure if Walky is channeling Rodney Dangerfield or Don Rickles. “Snap out of it, ya hockey puck!”
Walky and Billie’s surrogate sibling relationship, I find, is one of my favourite set ups in the entire series. Walky can hang out with Sal and be rejected and that’s enough for him because he tried, he can box his feelings over and over with Dorothy and she can bend to accommodate, but the minute Billie’s in pain that’s what throws him into Defcon 5. He has to push through her wall of snark and insults because the idea of letting go of Billie is the one line Walky can’t cross.
There’s a small part of me who would ship them without that lifelong friendship, but then without them being quasi-besty childhood friends we’d lose the dynamic that made them so great in the first place.
Yep, they are amazing siblings.
I just… have a thing for sibling relationships, and Walky has TWO. This dingus is one of my favorite characters to see on screen <3
That’s a really good point and you’re right. Billie matters to him as kin and the times he lets himself lose his shit is times he’s genuinely worried for her or her mental state.
So she smells like liquorice?
Walky /is/ trying the dear. Very trying maybe for the girls.
He was trying for some commenters above as well.
Oh, Walky…
Oh, Willoughby…
Ehh. Sitting around in silence isn’t ogten helpful.
Says the expert in clinical depression …
Wow, okay, you are just resorting to personal attacks in your comments now. Maybe don’t?
(I mean, for all you know, this person is a psychiatrist / has been clinically depressed / has had a lot of clinically depressed friends / all of the above. You are being a major prick here)
Perhaps deliberate (Gravatar noted).
You are seriously one of the most toxic commentators I’ve ever seen here.
Just what the hell is it with this comic that is making you so riled up that you have to attack a fictional character in a fictional universe that is only, insofar, maybe 2 months old? Do you resemble some remark? Was your honor besmirched in some way?
Maybe Woobie isn’t a trained and certified psychologist, but I highly doubt you are either, considering you’re so highly offended by comic characters that are 1) Teenagers ranging from late 17 to maybe early 19 years old, 2) Teenagers starting their first (or in Ruth’s case, second) year of college, and 3) have only started their likely first journey away from home for more than a solid weekend around 2 months ago.
Whatever perfection you are expecting out of a highly immature character that is having to learn that REAL success is not effortless and blurting out the first thing that comes to mind is not a good idea all of the time is highly unreasonable on its own. The fact that you’re upset enough about it to attack other people though? Petty and you should be highly ashamed of yourself.
Maybe WC has had experience with something like this and is reading this differently than we are.
I’m no expert, but I have had Not Fun in my life (most of us likely have encountered similer). For me; when a bad thing happened to me, it meant the world that friends came to see me. There are holes in my memory from then, but there was nothing “wrong” anyone could say.
Others’ mileage may vary.
Poor Walky! He doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body and he is trying his best here. However, he’s about as tactless as a landslide. I think that only the fact that Ruth is still in a pretty badly withdrawn mental and emotional condition is stopping her from getting angry at him. Fortunately, I think Billie is able to do that for her!
Please, please, PLEASE Ruth, say something. Get angry. Freak out, something! You are making me extremely worried over here.
(Me and Walky both).
Yet again I think his strategy actually is pretty good. He makes an annoying ass of himself to place Billie in familiar ground (“walky is being an idiot”) and show that he is there for her.
No, his “strategy” is complete bollocks.
If he wants to help, he can sod off and suffer in silence.
The whole cartoon is a misjudged piece of idiocy.
Well it it called ‘Dumbing’ and not ‘Coming’.
I actually agree with Bagge. In the mental state that Billie and Ruth are in, leaving them to stew in their own thoughts is the WORST thing you could do. Giving them someone to be angry at is a semi-reliable way of tugging out their emotions.
“Leave me to angst and fantasize about suicide / consider everything I have ever done wrong alone!” just doesn’t quite have the prohibitive punch, does it?
I mean, Ruth actually had getting angry at everyone as her coping strategy at the beginning of a semester. It wasn’t a terribly good one, but better than none in this situation >_<
Content Warning: Suicidal Ideation
Unfortunately, I think Ruth has lost sight of her emotions and everything just makes her tired. Been there. Even things that were upsetting just became, yep, that’s happening, sure glad I’m killing myself soon.*
*I’ve got pills to make sure I’m never back in that headspace again. So all is good there.
…well at least Billie’s kinda looking more alive now?
Sad that pills are needed. Happy that they’re working.
Hey, me too!
*does the secret handshake for our club*
“Self depreciations is how we’re here!” Next book title?
I’m starting to be worried about the sheer volume of “next book titles” to actual books there can be titles for.
The cover of the next book will be all of the different quotes that could be used for titles, with title “Choose Your Own…”
Walky or absinthe…? Not a hard choice at all, actually.
Worst game show ever
For y’all what ain’t ever touched a drop of ethanol: Absinthe tastes like double-licorice and is half alcohol with some possibly-hallucinogenic flavoring agents. And is the color of Dina’s hat.
It tastes gross, that’s what.
It is also heavily associated with depression because it was a favored drink of several depressed poets. Most famously Edgar Allen Poe.
Wait, what’s double licorice?
Damnit, Walky. You’re trying, but… damnit, can you keep your foot out of your mouth please? :O
Hopefully, the doctors will come in and boot him out pronto.
The best thing Walky can do is NOT be there.
The doctors would probably be better at it than Walky… assuming they aren’t the kind of mental health professional who views depression as your own fault and something to judge you over.
I have met this kind of mental health professional.
My point is that Walky is not even remotely the worst thing to happen right now.
(And leaving them alone in a room with presumably easy access to medication… yeah, that’s one of the worst ideas there is.)
The assumption is probably that Billie would stop Ruth from doing something stupid; I’m not so sure about how likely that would be.
Nah..Doctors and friends do two totally different jobs. Its the doctors job to do and say the right things to judge thier mental state corectly.
Walkys job (as some on who is like a brother to Billie) is to show he cares. Yes he acts clumsy and a little stupid but the important message gets across non the less : “I’m here and I care”. It does not realy matter what he says because Billie knows him well enough to guess is intentions and he means well.
Yep! There’s a reason part of the standard advice on what to do in such situations is literally just “be there for them” – as in, literally just be physically present if possible. Not hiding away because you aren’t an expert already (how do you think people BECOME experts?…)
(“you” beint adressed to Willoughby, not Quezzle, sorry)
It’s nice that Walky’s trying, but he’s so obviously out of his depth here.
No, it’s not “nice.”
It would be nice if he realised that his presence is the last thing that’s needed here.
It’d be nice if you’d stop ripping on Walky for being a decent human being and trying to help people.
He’s not being a “decent human being”. He’s doing the opposite of what a “decent human being” should be doing which is getting out of the way.
Currently, he’s being a narcissistic little arsehole.
Yes because visiting your friend after hearing they are suicidal in order to try and lift their spirits a little is soooo narcisistic
god how dare he come to support his friend what an asshole
If he had stopped a moment to consider, then he would have seen that an intervention like this wouldn’t help. But no …
Instead, he’s more into satisfying his own needs at helping. The only person making themselves feel good is Walky.
And he ain’t helping.
And if you stopped for a moment, you’d how shitty you keep sounding, making yourself sound more and more callous and incapable of empathy.
I’ll just be honest. Walky comes off as a better person than you right now. Walky shows that he cares. You show hatred and a lack of willingness to care.
The only reason I’m not just sticking you on my ignore list script and moving on is that I think you must’ve had personal experience with depression and are lashing out because of it.
Ooh, how do you do an ignore list?
Not that most don’t get the Boot of God eventually, anyway.
How is he being narcissistic? The only reason he’s there at all is because he cares about his friend, Billie. I don’t think you understand what the word “narcissistic” means.
Right, and he’s there with the comedy routine. The old Walky! Wonderful, beaming his humour all over the place, not caring how it affects anyone.
Glad to see he doesn’t care about Ruth, who’s the real problem here.
Bugger off Walky. Be a decent human being and leave well enough alone.
He’s literally just trying to lighten the mood? Trying to cheer them up a little? Sure it’s not working but they don’t seem too particularly upset that he’s there. He IS being a goddamn decent human being because lord knows I wish SOMEONE fucking came to me with jokes and some goddamn humor when I feel like shoving a knife down my throat.
Yeah, he’s such a horrible person, coming along trying to help his friend and her girlfriend. How dare he try to help people he cares about, that’s such an asshole thing to do. Because decent human beings ignore the people they care about when they’re suicidal and depressed, instead of trying to help them.
If he cast his ego aside, he’d see that doing this isn’t helping. Not in the fucking slightest. In fact, he has the potential for screwing the situation even further. That’s the assholery in this situation.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” as the old saw goes.
Being a friend can mean leaving well enough alone. It may be frustrating, it may cause yourself to feel bad.
But that’s the price of being a friend if he is actually a friend. Currently I’m not seeing the old Walky friendship bit. It looks more like a wrecking ball.
Dude.
It’s helping. It, factually, is.
I fail to see how ignoring a friend when they’re suicidal and depressed is better for them than actually being there for them.
Yeah, cause the best thing you can do when worrying about a friend/close relative is not interacting with them at all and hoping for the best, right?
You assume that every person Walky’s age (and he’s what, 18, 19 here, or smth?) has had enough experience with and/or knowledge about depression and depressed people to know what works, and what doesn’t, which is bullshit. Plus, knowing that that someone’s there & cares might at the very least be helpful to Billie. I’m not arguing that Walky is completely right, but he’s not completely wrong, given the circumstances, either.
I don’t know what your problem is, man, but dashing around the comment, aggressively reprimanding everyone for their opinion, and constantly swearing doesn’t add productively to the discussion. If you want to educate people, you might wanna reconsider your wording. If you’re here to let off steam – stop it, aggravating people because of your bad mood isn’t fair to the other commenters.
Fair point about the swearing.
I’ll make a final point by saying that he knows Billie has been “suicidal” before, so he should have some knowledge of depressive behavior.
We don’t know if he tried this before, whether he aggravated it then or whether she was in a clinical depression before.
> but he’s not completely wrong, given the circumstances, either.
He and the attendant who let him in are completely wrong. He may have good intentions, but his ego has blinded him to what in my view is the correct course of action.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Maybe he has some knowledge, but if you recall, he had the whole epiphany a few pages back, with the whole “She was hurtin’ the whole time, an’ i wouldn’t trust myself that I could see it…”
I mean, the story in the comic has only progressed a few weeks, I think? So if with “suicidal before” you mean the events of the comic, and not some backstory I’m forgetting, I’d treat the whole situation as an ongoing thing he’s still very much in the process of learning to deal with.
And to reply to one of your comments above, as of this strip, he just entered. The strips are kinda to short for him to enter, babble, realize it’s not helping (if that’s the case), and leave, all during one page. So we’ll have to wait and see how this will develop.
I’ve seen more people in the comments section going “guys, come on, don’t be hard on Walky, he’s TRYING” than people actually criticising Walky. Which is either everyone pre-emptively anticipating more criticism to come, or some sort of skewed perception of how much criticism of Walky counts as a drastic amount. Or maybe (because a lot of people in the comments have opened up about their past experiences with depression) people are reading the comic and thinking “oh god, this would have made me feel AWFUL if he’d said that to me” and defending him to their past selves? Who knows. Just interesting.
Or maybe some people going “I wish I had someone at least like this around when I was in a similar situation”.
Walky is at least working as a good distraction, and a good distraction is… important, when your head feels like a dark swirling cesspool of self hatred and replaying everything you have ever done wrong note by note the moment you stop concentrating on something else.
Ruth isn’t being distracted.
The person who’s looking after Ruth, is.
Ah yes, the person who’s looking after Ruth, who entered into a lesbian suicide pact with her because she thought herself worthless, has herself been drinking a lot and is barely less depressively suicidal than her.
Walky is BILLIE’s emergency contact, and Billie’s the one who looks much more alive in the last panel than she did when Chloe entered Ruth’s room, you know.
Eh, he is trying. A lot of people far older than eighteen really do not know how to deal with depressed friends. I expect to see a learning curve. This does not mean he isn’t messing up right now. That being said he would have pissed me off.
I should clarify I do think he is messing up. I do want to see him be a good bro, for Billie–she really needs one. And I do also expect him to mess up more in the future. I am saving my annoyance up.
Also what helps a depressed person is individual.
Essence of Walkywood?
And sod the collateral damage!
Ruth is currently out of batteries, please recharge.
That’s what Walky is currently trying to do.
We’ll know he’s succeeded the moment femurs start flying.
Walky is such a Becky when it comes to handling that stuff
Not really. Becky’s wackiness is a conditioned trauma response, while Walky comes from just about the opposite problem: never being taught not to be that.
Their tactics are superficially similar, but you should pay attention to how often Walky puts his foot in his mouth vs how often Becky is
(there is a ~100% difference)
*vs how often becky DOES jfc
Knew what you meant, but it’s far more entertaining to parse that as “vs how often Becky is in his mouth”.
To be fair if I was in such depressive state and someone like Walky came in and started saying the things he did it would actually move me enough to want to punch him in the face.
And that in a way would be a positive action, Walky is quite an annoying piece of something, but at least he tries thinking he is important enough for Billie as her friend or maybe even family to do so. It’s not his fault that he is what he is. Granted I would dislike him for doing that but then Billie and even Ruth know what Walky is and how he acts.
If you think Walky is annoying then replace him here with Becky with her outgoing attitude cracking up some LGBT jokes and outs while having Dina roaring behind her. That is a recipe for disaster. But granted Becky in a way could understand them better having a father who wanted to kill her and a mother who died than someone like Walky, but then for that Becky would have to power off her outgoing attitude and try to talk normally.
I’d think Becky would be much less annoying than Walky, because she’d have the tact to joke about other things than the suicidal ideation itself, nor require ‘self-deprecating’ humor of them. LGBT jokes might just ACTUALLY lighten up the mood.
There isn’t a lot of ‘talking normally’ to be done in this kind of situation unless you are a trained therapist.
Fuck I’m just happy these kids are in a doctor’s office.
Why no Penny in the poll? =(
Contrary to many, I think Walkys doing a good job here.
He is shifting attention to him, making the mood a lot more “walkys being a idiot” and more “normal”.
A more traditional form of comforting might only draw attention to their self-woes more, however unintentionally.
Remember if someone is really depressed they can get “meta depressed” about the depression too. Thinking they are a bother to people because of it.
Sometimes a idiotic distraction might be a good thing.
I agree. It is Walky’s standard response and it is a bit hit and miss. But this time I think Billie took comfort in the familiarity of Walky being an idiot, and I think Ruth welcome the distraction.
In contrast, here is a clear miss.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/hero-2/
Yep! Walky’s trying. He has no experience, and he is not always going to succeed. But this one time? He’s actually doing some good.
And Walky makes this joke to Ruth, with the absinthe-colored eyes. That probably doesn’t mean anything, but it’s a fun little coincidence
And to me they just looked black. I had to blow up the comic and get my face right to the screen to see it was a shade of green.
Walky, how can you simultaneously be such a good friend and so BAD at this??!!
Yea, the only emergency you would need Walky for is “HELP, I need a dumbass who puts his foot in his mount all the time”.
He means well but his mouth has not filter.
Walky, it’s not self depricating if you’re doing it to someone else. It’s just being a dick.
Yes, but Walky is talking about Ruth not being up for it, and for her, it’s self-
But he asks that after he makes fun of her. It was a response, not an invitation.
Why exactly are they at a doctor’s office? Physically there is nothing wrong with Billie or Ruth outside of maybe a little dehydration and malnutrition. It’s their emotional state that’s currently the biggest risk factor here.
I’m gonna guess it’s to check to make sure she didn’t swallow anything and that her vitals are okay as she’s been non-responsive for awhile now.*
*Either that or they’ve got health workers trained to be both like at the clinic I go to, so that the person who diagnoses and prescribes mental health medication is the same person as the care physician that checks over physical wellbeing.
They’ve probably got people trained in both – and they’re probably checking vitals, checking for drugs and alcohol poisoning*.
But even more, they’ve taken her to the campus health center, because it’s right there and it’s the obvious first stop. If they can’t handle it there, they can refer her to someone who can.
*If there’s anything campus health facilities are good at dealing with, it’s alcohol poisoning.
The US doesn’t really have a good mental healthcare system. The two groups that take up that slack are the (physical) healthcare system and the police. If you have a mental health emergency, your first stop is going to be with one of those two. Depending on how things go, you may then be able to make your way to an actual mental health facility.
Yeah, and especially since they’re currently in a situation where one’s suicidally depressed and catatonic, the other has Seriously Unhealthy Warning Signs (which Chloe probably recognized,) and it’s a dorm setting so what they need most is to have someone watching them (I’ve been placed on the Not Allowed To Be Left Alone watch for less than Ruth’s showing now) and to be out of the murdercave? Health center’s their best option, plus dollars to donuts they’re calling in a psychiatrist now if someone wasn’t already there and equipped to start having The Medication Talk.
With my experience, if you are a threat to yourself or others, your first stop is going to be a hospital or something similar. If they can’t be certain you won’t hurt someone (including yourself), you may be placed on a psych hold. There’s usually people trained in mental health emergency. Given that this is a student clinic, it may be the first stop so they can keep an eye on her until they have a next step. But they can’t let her be alone knowing she’s suicidal and it’s not like counseling is an instant fix. She’ll likely be referred to counseling for long term help, but right now their biggest concern is making sure she doesn’t hurt herself, and the best way they can do that is keeping her somewhere people can watch her and are trained to handle it if she does try anything or has a psychotic break or something.
Because when you’re found suicidal by a member of staff at a university, they take you to the student health center (i.e., the doctor’s office) to see a doctor. The doctor then decides if you need to be institutionalized or if you need medication and therapy.
This is kind of a weird question to me. Being suicidal or catatonic with depression (or both) is the most acute form of depression, which is treated in doctor’s offices to begin with. Why *wouldn’t* you be there?
I don’t agree with some of the comments about how Walky’s doing a bad job. He’s providing pretty much the only ‘first aid’ care there is for major depression, which is to get the patient to stop thinking about how depressed they are. A mental health emergency isn’t like a physical health emergency, where you have to do everything exactly right in the first few minutes or the patient will die.
There are really only a few wrong ways to talk to someone who’s depressed. You don’t try to convince them that their condition isn’t real, or isn’t a problem. You don’t blame them for their condition. You don’t try to shock them out of their condition with anger or derision.
Aside from that, it’s mainly just about getting them talking and responding and helping them to have something other than their depression running their thought processes. You try stuff and see what works. Walky’s attempt at observational humor is as good a place to start as any.
THANK YOU
He’s trying. That matters.
Though he’s also really really bad at this. But then again, I don’t think we’ve seen anyone yet who’s really good at handling this outside of maybe Chloe off-screen, but it’s too early to tell.
Hell, when Carla, who ran out the door nopeing and stumbled over her words like an idiot is a contender for student handling this the best, that’s saying some shit.
Yeah, at the moment he’s definitely not SUCCEEDING at helping them, but at the very least he’s a distraction from being in the health center on suicide watch and while the jokes are an abject failure at all things helping, the reassurance that someone does care about Billie enough to show up here and promptly fuck up the situation is useful.
The fact that Walky was let in because he was _Billie_’s emergency contact indicates something important. Many commenters are assuming that Ruth is being treated as a patient here, with Billie as a friend and comforter. I think they are BOTH being treated as patients. Both are depressed, and abusing alcohol. Even if only one is suicidal, both clearly need help.
When you’re depressed, even what are considered ‘negative’ emotions are a positive. Now, who’s the best person at getting an emotional response out of Billie? Well, besides the obvious.
Which is good, because this whole arc of their “lesbian suicide pact” has often allowed Billie especially to try and pretend that it’s only Ruth who’s been deep in the hole. But Billie suffers from depression too. And she’s got terrible self-esteem and often wants to die herself. Hence not actually checking Ruth when she called it a suicide pact and viewing herself as poison.
So it’s very good that Billie is also getting the care she needs rather than it all falling to Ruth.
That is a great point. This whole time Billie’s been focusing on being Ruth’s support that she’s completely ignored dealing with the fact that she’s also depressed, possibly to the point of suicidal ideation like Ruth.
I don’t think that’s the kind of thing she was ever going to be able to deal with while she was trying to save Ruth.
Walky: Full of tact. The most tact of all. The tact-iest.
The tactmaster. He tacts to the extreme. Maximum tact.
Someday he’ll learn to enjoy that New Tact Flavor. Someday…
He’s a tactical nuke.
Over 300 comments, and noones comment on Billie’s ‘boyfriend’? Or am I just channeling Walky again?
David, is Ruth’s character based on a real person? She should be the poster girl for Bipolar disorder . . . not kidding here! They took her to a medical facility, now she needs the right kind of doctor!
I’ve been there, I am there. So were my grandmother, mother, and two uncles.
It can’t be cured, only managed.
WALKY IS AN ASS! A stand up comic at a funeral . . .
Will some slug this neckbeard already?
Can he even grow stubble?
Sorry if this has already been pointed out, but a while back I think a number of us were confused (at least, I was) by Becky’s description of the browns as “Aryan” when they’re fairly clearly brunette/whatever the male equivalent is. I happened to be going back through the archives and found this, too. Is it possible they’re canonically supposed to be blond(e)? and if so, what’s up with the color? Am I just color blind? I seem to be able to see yellow in most cases. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/piece/
Oh, that wacky Becky! “Aryan” is now a loaded term. (Google is your friend.)
I think it’s ash-blond. If you google that, you get some images of similar color.
If Ruth leans forward, she can easily get her hands around Walky’s neck.
Who needs tact, anyway?
Does the story of the past few days make anyone wanna see a slipshine of Mary stealing one of Roz’s toys to use then trying to hide her ridiculous shame at normal human behaviour afterword?
Comment made appropriate by your avatar.
For me? No. But I’m not the target demographic for Slipshines.