This is a thread for ILXORS IN THEIR 50's

Not there yet myself dude. You might have to wait a while, wait for the return of Martin Skeedmore, who can out-[Controversial Moderator Edit] them all, whatever his age.

"ilxors in the '50s" would be a fun photoshop thread

ned at the sockhop

abbott being a sexy cold war scientist

huh

I got it, it wasn't hard to follow it was a simple piece of business.

i just want to see abbott as a sexy cold war scientist is all

I am a 53 year old ILXor in the Naughties. Does that count? My only time in the 50's occured when I was aged 0-5, from November, 1954 until Dec. 31, 1959.

did you see ned at the sockhop

NO

The sockhop ended some time before I entered high school in Sept. 1968. I was not inconsolable over this happenstance. I was a rotten dancer.

sept 1968 was like the gayest time to enter high school

everyone cool in those days were entering college

u cursed by the stars aimless

everyone cool in those days were entering college WAS GETTING DRAFTED TO 'NAM

yep -- that's where my pops was in '68 -- sent there two weeks after i got borned! booh hooh.

--a sometime ilxor in his 40s

everyone cool in those days were entering college WAS GETTING DRAFTED TO 'NAM WAS NOT ME, BY ANY STRETCH OF IMAGINATION! Skinny, geeky 13 year old, I'm just sayin'.

nED AT THE SOCKHOP OH MY GOD

aimless serious q did you at least smoke a lot of pot? and at least know a kid like trip fontaine?

if not you have destroyed any reason i have to respect actual early 70s HS kids

I am 10 years shy of 50 but this thread is making me feel old.

momus is almost 50

There's a Guided By Voices song about this.

nED AT THE SOCKHOP OH MY GOD

I really, really don't know how to react to this.

weve all reacted by blotting it out

Well I know that you're in love with him,
Because I saw you dancing in the gym
You both kicked off your Keds.
Oh, I dig that rhythm and Ned!

(I thought JBR's suggestion at first was an age progression of ILXors into their fifties and was thinking "oh it won't take much to imagine some of that.")

Ned, all you have to do is put on the socks. That's all. And we need a hardwood floor, and XTC's "Life Begins At The Hop". Now who will film this????

did you at least smoke a lot of pot?

I think the first time I smoked pot was roughly summer of 1970. Didn't do much for me. My friends included several 'heads', but I was just a dabbler. My older brother was into it pretty far by 1971. He still tokes up now.

I didn't really get launched as a pot smoker until college, where I spent most of 1974 stoned. Made my own bong from a glass lab beaker. I quit entirely around 1977 or so. I can't say I miss it.

and at least know a kid like trip fontaine?

Hard to say, because I don't have a clue who trip fontaine is. I did know a lot of druggies and hippies in the 70s. They were as common as daisies back then.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3Pgo2kaznFU/RqsBjrRCKMI/AAAAAAAAARs/7wAJzhaYC3A/s1600/964.jpg

that link 404'ed me

(xxpost) Trip Fontaine is a character from the book/film "The Virgin Suicides"

Start at about 3:30 here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_smJP8oRnE

Btw, Frank Kogan, who posts to a couple of the rolling genre threads on ILM, is 54.

Also:
Most of the time I dwell in a state of unreality, where I have amazing superpowers. And I am 50 years old.

-- Beth Parker (Beth Parker), Monday, February 5, 2007 12:29 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

Our cohort is few, but mighty.

abbott being a sexy cold war scientist

OH MY GOD WHY WAS I NEVER THAT

I remember Howdy Doody.

and i thought i was old for remembering leaded gasoline!

madonna, michael jackson, prince and ME -- i am now 50 and 1/2.

sept 1968 was like the gayest time to enter high school

everyone cool in those days were entering college

there is truth lurking here -- people in our sub-generation have a complicated relationship w/our older sibs, the 60s baby boomers. this usage of "gay" is uhm, anachronisitic, or something. (I entered HS in 72 FWIW.)

anachronistic! edgy, you mean!!1!

so is bimble part of this exclusive club?

I didn't expect to get shoulder and back hair this late in the game.

ha was wondering what you meant in the 40s thread

what's up y'all

had a cardiologist call me at 7am to cancel my appointment (snow)

this morning the dentist said that my teeth with metal fillings will all eventually need crowns; seems legit, the youngest of those fillings is 40+ years old

i went to the dentist for lots of work this past year, first time since forever, and it was all space aged nano whatever shit and i think the dentist and his assistant were legit smirking at my one old iron ore filling from when i was a teenager, fifty years ago, in an eastern bloc nation

oh hi, I'm 54 now

peeing takes a long time

backache is a thing

(knocks on wood)

As hinted above, I have a cardiologist now! My primary doctor, who has pretty amazing raw skills -- like hearing -- apparently, thought he heard a murmur in my heartbeat last month. GREAT!

It turns out I have an "unconcerning" prolapse which is a "2" (not a 3 or a 4), so it just has to be checked every year from now on.

Aging is a motherfucker.

I’ve always taken comfort that my parents couldn’t gaslight me out of my memories

Although I’m sure they would love to try

I remember seeing my first person passed out on a sidewalk, when I was I guess 4. Not to be stereotypical, but that's also my first memory of San Francisco. It made an impression. ("Why is he sleeping on the sidewalk?")

pretty sure I remember asking my mom what year it was and she answering “1976”

Nobody’s memory is flawless, obviously, but I’ve always been the rememberer in my family (I think each family has a rememberer and because I am the only writer in mine, it me).

I remember seeing my first person passed out on a sidewalk, when I was I guess 4.

This was about how old my wife (who moved to the US from Colombia when she was 10 or 11) was when she saw a guy get shot in the street. She also remembers having to get off a city bus, along with her mom and all the other passengers, so the men who had taken it over could blow it up.

Damn.

Exactly 50 ywars ago, my family had just fallen to pieces and moved halfway across the country in a UHaul truck. Five children, a dog, some damaged adults, and no money.

We got to DC in the spring, with the flowers blooming and the Bicentennial celebration on.

I have a distinct memory of hope. The Metro was shiny and new; the mailboxes were painted to look like continental soldiers. We heard about a guy named Jimmy Carter. I got a Liberty Bell pencil sharpener from a museum gift shop.

Flash forward: I'd been looking forward to the 250th anniversary stuff, because I am a dork. But the way things feel now - Trumpy, Musky, anxious - just makes me sad by contrast with my red-white-and-blue 1976 memories.

I was at the DC Mall w/my family for the July 4th celebration

I do remember that feeling of "wow history"

yeah I didn't mean to do a nostalgia thread derail, just wondering how our young brains might've developed differently than 'kids today!' who can watch a movie over and over again on an iPad

― Andy the Grasshopper, Thursday, April 30, 2026 11:49 AM (one hour ago)

not to be all "old lady yells at cloud" but i used to read books. before my parents got divorced (when i was about 11) i was privileged in ways i wasn't after the divorce. my mom was a stay-at-home mom and would take us to the library and i just fucking _devoured_ books, i had an insatiable desire for learning. i still have it, honestly, but nowadays i just go on wikipedia trawls. i mean it's not just kids today, my brain has changed and developed differently as an adult. i don't have the focus or attention span to read books anymore, haven't for years now. hell, i can't even listen to _music_.

that said, we did get cable tv in '84, which was pretty early on, and we got a VCR for christmas of '86. one of the things i love about archival recordings is that they're the only reliable way i can date my childhood. all of my actual memories are this repressed haze of trauma. i can tell we had cable in '84 because nickelodeon was still in the "silverball" era and was showing stuff like "the third eye", "reggie jackson's world of sports", "powerhouse", and "the tomorrow people". i can tell we got a vcr in christmas '86 because the giants played in super bowl 21, which was in january of '87.

ok this turned into a vent so i'm gonna post it but put it behind a cut:

i don't talk about my childhood memories outside of TV because people get really uncomfortable when i talk about stuff that was, to me, perfectly normal. nobody has ever pulled the "you're not queer, just traumatized" bit on me, but one of my brothers _did_ pull the "i'm not queer, just traumatized" card. that was the last time we talked. he's bad enough at pretending he's straight - i can't talk to him as a queer person and pretend he's straight as well.

there's this series of books called "scarred for life" - they're british books about children's entertainment of the '70s and '80s, the stuff that was traumatizing. i'm extremely american, but i grew up with an unfortunate tendency to grow up kind of fetishizing british culture and entertainment (fortunately i'm over it now). i have the greatest respect for the intro by Johnny Mains:

"PS: A message for the next generation. I _don't_ want to see a _Scarred For Life:_ 2020s edition when/if I hit my eighties. Please. I'm _begging_ you. Nothing the 70s or 80s ever threw at us could be as bad as this, and for anyone to do a book, it'll be an act of national gaslighting."

He's completely right. I did not have an idyllic childhood, but the shit kids today are going through... I don't think any of us are capable of comprehending the hell their childhoods have been. How fucked up they're going to be by it. I know what my childhood did to me, and I know what these kids are being exposed to on the regular. They're _not_ just watching the Minions over and over again, they're being, well, brainwashed by this hellish infernal series of tubes that we all pretend is "reality", when in fact it's nothing of the sort. Being on the Internet since I was 17, it's fucked me up. I didn't learn to socialize in the "real world", for... various reasons, and the Internet is _not_ an adequate substitute. Never was. Kids who grew up with COVID? I at least have been around long enough to _know_ that this anti-human panopticon hellscape isn't the ultimate nature of reality, isn't _normal_. We learn what we're taught, and kids today are being taught that the shit we're going through these days _is_ reality. I see older people complaining that kids can't make a phone call, fuck, I can't make a fucking phone call either. Just think about the times when you need to make a phone call. Think about the experience you have, and compare it to what making a phone call was like when we were young. Yes, there were infurating annoyances - there was a whole newspaper comic called "They'll Do It Every Time" which drew the infuriating bureaucratic complaints readers had. It was NOTHING compared to today.

The worst thing about these systems we're subject to, the oppression we're all subject to, is that it is VERY HARD to just fucking be HUMAN on the Internet. And I sound like an idiot to myself when I say that it didn't used to be like that, that I have friends, dear friends, who I've known for 30 years and never had the opportunity to meet - and many more, honestly, that I first knew on the Internet and then did meet in person. Even though we hardly see each other, we were able to meaningfully communicate, and corporate social media... it stopped being possible when everybody got on Facebook. It's a fucking Harrison Bergeron machine. Nobody can talk, nobody can _think_, just argue. I know I post these novels and it's the only chance I fucking get to THINK anymore. And I have to take drugs to do it! Yeah I have to take Adderall to focus enough to do _anything_, like, you know, eat food, let alone communicate with other people.

I’ve always taken comfort that my parents couldn’t gaslight me out of my memories

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Thursday, April 30, 2026 1:33 PM (forty-two minutes ago)

part of my problem is that my parents kind of _did_? i genuinely thought i had a perfectly normal childhood, that my memory was unreliable (which it is!), that the stuff i remembered happening didn't happen, until i actually started talking to my sibs and found out that we all remembered stuff happening that my mom insisted didn't happen.

anyway. much love to everyone out there who had a fucked up childhood for whatever reason. it's hard, hearing other people talk about their childhoods. it's not anybody else's fault for talking about their childhoods or anything, but i do still, idk, kind of blame myself for the stuff i went through as a kid. logically i know that's bullshit, but we learn what we're taught, yeah?

"can you remember in precise, minute detail what she did", i absolutely fucking cannot, all i know is that i panic every time i hear a woman with a smoker's cough

it sure wasn't for lack of trying, i just wasn't hearing it. i had no one to compare notes with so i have to trust myself.

an friend's older brother a few years ago accosted me about a childhood event that was deeply traumatic for him that he blames on me (he was getting chased by bullies and asked me to let him into my house and I wouldn't, he was subsequently beat up) and I just have zero recollection of it at all. not a whit. don't feel too sorry for him, I got plenty of beatings from him and his friends which was probably why I wouldn't let him in, I suspected trickery of some sort. but I honestly can't remember it happening.

a friend's

I seriously remember very little about my childhood that isn’t a memory of documentation of a memory, like the annual 1st day of school photos. It was not particularly good or horrible. I think my brain has just emptied or archived in some compressed folder almost every experiential memory in my life before the age of 13?

I was screamin let me outta here before I was even born, it's such a gamble when you get a face

this is less of an early memory thing and more of a generational observation: my after school babysitter's husband was a World War One vet, probably the only one I've even met... I would watch him tinker in his shop all the time, fixing fishing reels and things. He showed me a small chest that had his service revolver and some medals and bric-a-brac from the Great War

Oh one of my few memories was afterschool daycare when I was in kindergarten … there were forced naps. I was never tired. The room I was confined to had limited reading material: back issues of Good Housekeeping and an illustrated bible for kids … I wasn’t raised Christian so it was basically a storybook with corny pictures like Hanna Barbera cartoons.

it sure wasn't for lack of trying, i just wasn't hearing it. i had no one to compare notes with so i have to trust myself.

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Thursday, April 30, 2026 2:21 PM (twenty minutes ago)

yeah unfortunately my trauma response manifested as bpd so i don't believe everything i think :)

an friend's older brother a few years ago accosted me about a childhood event that was deeply traumatic for him that he blames on me (he was getting chased by bullies and asked me to let him into my house and I wouldn't, he was subsequently beat up) and I just have zero recollection of it at all. not a whit. don't feel too sorry for him, I got plenty of beatings from him and his friends which was probably why I wouldn't let him in, I suspected trickery of some sort. but I honestly can't remember it happening.

― fluffy tufts university (f. hazel), Thursday, April 30, 2026 2:28 PM (thirteen minutes ago)

oh yeah that's pretty common. i mean that's another thing, all kinds of fucked up shit happened when i was a kid that i just didn't notice and don't remember. it didn't seem significant to me, because it wasn't happening to me. i think you're right to not feel bad about it, even if it went down like he said it did, feeling guilt and shame isn't gonna serve any positive purpose now imo. i know that it doesn't benefit me to have survivor's guilt.

this is less of an early memory thing and more of a generational observation: my after school babysitter's husband was a World War One vet, probably the only one I've even met... I would watch him tinker in his shop all the time, fixing fishing reels and things. He showed me a small chest that had his service revolver and some medals and bric-a-brac from the Great War

― Andy the Grasshopper, Thursday, April 30, 2026 2:35 PM (six minutes ago)

the janitor at my catholic primary school when i was a kid was a world war i vet. he slept in the boiler room and maintained the grounds. looking back on it i guess that was weird, most janitors don't literally sleep at the school, but it was fine probably.

he way things feel now - Trumpy, Musky, anxious - just makes me sad by contrast with my red-white-and-blue 1976 memories.

Yeah, 6-year-old me was very taken with the bicentennial. I was sort of obsessed with Paul Revere, I loved the Longfellow poem. I had a big puzzle I put together over and over with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy as colonial soldiers. A few years later I bought Johnny Tremain at a school book fair and devoured it.

I've also thought about how grim the 250th feels in comparison. And not ONLY because I'm 50 years older. Altho to a mature American of 1976, post Vietnam and Watergate, I'm sure the hoopla felt a bit dismal too.

This was the image on that puzzle.

https://abcdvdvideo.myshopify.com/cdn/shop/products/35m-12574_1024x1024.jpg

All of my earliest memories are of being afraid of something or witnessing violence (usually enacted by other kids). I'm having fun sitting here trying to conjure up the earliest good memory. So far the best I can do is around 3rd grade when my friend showed up with what seemed like an entire shopping cart full of Return of the Jedi action Hasbro action figures. Was prior to the very-anticipated movie coming out, so we didn't know who 3/4 of the characters were. In retrospect, I think this was around the time this kid's dad disappeared (insofar as I never knew where he went and never asked). I'm in a weird mood today.

xp in my memory, the Bicentennial shit felt more pure back then, we weren't really talking about Sally Hemmings and slavery and also we just peacefully traded wampum with the native tribes who welcomed us and helped us fight the bloody British

There's a photo of me, a month shy of my seventh birthday, on a bike on the Bicentennial, with flags and all that, back when flags and all that weren't Flags and All That.

i was born in '76, so mostly what i remember is the hangover - all the bicentennial crap that stuck around for years like a bad penny. i loved the 70s specifically _because_ it seemed like a hangover decade, where everything was brown and people wore awful polyester and cars got five miles to the gallon and exploded if you so much as looked at them the wrong way and television was crammed full of lousy variety shows and endless reports on the Iran Crisis. where i grew up everyone was reagan-pilled and thought that america was going to be great again or something, except for my parents, who hated reagan and hated each other and were generally miserable. that was kind of what i figured the seventies were like.

All of my earliest memories are of being afraid of something or witnessing violence (usually enacted by other kids). I'm having fun sitting here trying to conjure up the earliest good memory.

― beard papa, Thursday, April 30, 2026 3:24 PM (three hours ago)

yeah some of us just had shitty childhoods; sounds like you were one of them. if it helps at all, you're not the only one.

i think this is, under capitalism, inevitably what happens when experience of the actual horrors of fascism pass out of living memory

― mookieproof, Thursday, April 30, 2026

how so?

― boners for bombs (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 30, 2026

the united states is running out of people who actually experienced the great depression, or total war, or jim crow. remember how batshit everyone was for war in 1914? they thought it would be fantastic and rejuvenate the manly vigorousness of the polity.

it is in the interest of money to reassure everyone that everything is okay, no need to panic, until it becomes too late to resist (the nullification of the voting rights act). also that the nation pay trillions of dollars (to whom, exactly?) to engage in a ridiculous war at the behest of an idiot.

not that it would even matter, but there is no one today who can ask 'have you no decency' because a) few have the authority to do so, and b) no one in a position to even consider asking has experienced what the lack of decency entails

on the bright(?) side, a number of white americans have recently learned that maybe it's not just the coloreds who are at risk

mookieproof, i do think there is something to what you're saying, something about things being within living memory, that beyond a lifetime one can read the words without understanding the meaning behind them. for what it's worth, i also believe, based on what i've seen, that history doesn't repeat, it iterates. i was walking with a friend my age to get a burger and there was a white guy driving by on a bike playing some music on a speaker, and my friend said, you know, people complain about those things today, like it's some new thing that didn't exist before, and you know what it reminds me of? the boomboxes people used to walk around with when i was young. well, people complained about the "ghetto blasters" too. mostly when i think of boomboxes i think of star trek iv: the voyage home.

idk. my family has a lot of generational trauma, cycles of violence, cycles of abuse, and when i look at the world, i kinda look at it through a similar lens, right or wrong. i'm not really sure how to explain it, but there's this whole thing with, like, estranged parents, where they don't understand why their kids don't talk to them, and sometimes they'll say, god, i was a better parent to them than my folks were to me, they were way worse than i was, and i read somewhere once that yeah a lot of times that's _true_. that they're good enough parents that their kids have an opportunity to break away from the cycle of abuse and codependence that has come down through the family. cuz something else that's passed out of living memory, a lot of us don't remember just how fucking shitty and awful a lot of these boomers' parents _were_. because they're all dead now. absolutely a lot of that so-called "greatest generation", the once we think of as the ones who beat the nazis the _last_ time around, lots of them were terrible fucking people. and now our parents are the nazis, except my parents aren't and weren't. they're on the right side of history, my parents are, basically good people, and, i mean, they were fucking awful parents. and i _can_ hold both of those truths in my mind at the same time, without one cancelling out the other.

idk if that has anything to do with anything. i just kinda feel like, well, we got shared experiences, those of us in this thread, and fascism, well, fascism seems like more of a universal, these days.

i understand that you mean well and are a good person but what the fuck are you even talking about

my family has a lot of generational trauma, cycles of violence, cycles of abuse, and when i look at the world, i kinda look at it through a similar lens, right or wrong. i'm not really sure how to explain it, but there's this whole thing with, like, estranged parents, where they don't understand why their kids don't talk to them, and sometimes they'll say, god, i was a better parent to them than my folks were to me, they were way worse than i was, and i read somewhere once that yeah a lot of times that's _true_. that they're good enough parents that their kids have an opportunity to break away from the cycle of abuse and codependence that has come down through the family

i mean i shan't argue with this, but also that's no reason to post it to any random thread

(i am sorry for going ott tho)

lol mookieproof is this your first time encountering the poster rushomancy

remember how batshit everyone was for war in 1914? they thought it would be fantastic and rejuvenate the manly vigorousness of the polity.

“Everyone”? Uh, no, definitely not in the US…which is strongly backed up by the fact we didn’t enter the war for a few years after it had been going on? Anti-war sentiment was found on both the left and right of the political spectrum.

Yup. The Wilson administration spent millions ginning up interest with propaganda, censorship, and threats of arrest.

mostly when i think of boomboxes i think of star trek iv: the voyage home.

I read this week that the actor who played the guy with the boombox in that movie wrote and recorded his own song for that scene because he didn’t think the song the producers had picked was punk enough.

xxxxxp

THREAD COPS ARE COPS
ACAB

Happy May Day comrades!

a lot of us don't remember just how fucking shitty and awful a lot of these boomers' parents _were_.

My paternal grandmother once chopped through her daughter's bedroom door with a fire axe; eventually my dad went no-contact with her to protect us, his family. So in our case I think there is more concrete memory of how horrible the previous generation was, but I still take your point. :)

(i am sorry for going ott tho)

― mookieproof, Friday, May 1, 2026 12:49 AM (six hours ago)

lol no worries you're not the first person to get frustrated with me, i try really hard to communicate "normal" but it just don't seem to take sometimes. there's only so much i can do with this weird brain of mine haha. some people dig it and some people don't and i post here because there are some people who really dig it. i may be a good person but it's still totally fine to get frustrated or irritated with me when i say shit that don't seem to make any sense, when y'all are having a conversation and i keep interrupting with "i am the walrus". i don't take it personal.

I read this week that the actor who played the guy with the boombox in that movie wrote and recorded his own song for that scene because he didn’t think the song the producers had picked was punk enough.

― wipes chooser (unperson), Friday, May 1, 2026 5:09 AM (two hours ago)

brando-level method acting tbh, that is punk as fuck

Happy May Day comrades!

― sarahell, Friday, May 1, 2026 7:06 AM (thirty-seven minutes ago)

everyone here is like "let's have a rally" and we do those every day anyway! which i think is cool, every day should be may day.

i try really hard to communicate "normal" but it just don't seem to take sometimes.

and to be fair to me, my normal social group are a bunch of autistic puppygirls, most of my social time is me trying to exist in community with people who often literally don't speak human. so i get where you're coming from mookieproof because i _do_ find myself in your position pretty often.

...when y'all are having a conversation and i keep interrupting with "i am the walrus". i don't take it personal.

I laughed out loud at this.

Kate, you are being unnecessarily apologetic, mookie & tracer were being dicks.

I read this week that the actor who played the guy with the boombox in that movie wrote and recorded his own song for that scene because he didn’t think the song the producers had picked was punk enough.

at least “played the guy with the boombox” is correct

A begrudging Happy May Day from this merry band of sullen teens.

https://www.ncpedia.org/sites/default/files/Flora_macdonald.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/Walter_Crane_-_A_Garland_for_May_Day_1895%2C_original_relief_print.jpg/500px-Walter_Crane_-_A_Garland_for_May_Day_1895%2C_original_relief_print.jpg?_=20250504195009

people i bumped not one but two may day threads
what is happening

#onethread

people i bumped not one but two may day threads
what is happening

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Friday, May 1, 2026 9:36 AM (nine minutes ago)

the dictatorship of the proletariat, hopefully

Kate, you are being unnecessarily apologetic, mookie & tracer were being dicks.

― sarahell, Friday, May 1, 2026 9:14 AM (thirty-one minutes ago)

i mean it's fuckin' ilx, one of the things a treasure about our generation is that we _can_ be dicks sometimes.

in fact, i'll, honestly, take mookie's post as a license to go off

i'm fifty years old, i can't get a job, i've had thirty years of damn near every sort of mental health treatment and i still can't focus enough to watch movies or read books or listen to music or even _think_ most of the time, i've been through insane amounts of shit that i've learned to not talk about because when i do people start acting like there's something wrong with _me_, my friend group consists mostly of people who never leave their homes and who center their lives around robot anime and furry cannibal porn and i can't talk about _that_ either because people will be like "i thought trans people were normal just like the rest of us", every time i read the news some powerful organization has issued an official ruling that we're subhuman or, possibly, for a change, that we're _human_, and i'm supposed to take this as "good news". i'm chronically depressed, i want to cry all the time but i know if i do that nobody will talk to me because i'm a "downer", never mind that i have _good fucking reason_ to cry, never mind that there's no way i can cry all the tears i'd need to if i want to truly grieve and heal from all the suffering i've experienced. i haven't slept a full night's sleep in three years. i'd complain about the nightmares except that waking life is actually _worse_, in fact. i just want to be able to talk about my life, which is _not_ a normal life, and not have everything fucking center around _me_. i want to _feel_ like a fucking adult human female, which is what i am.

remember how batshit everyone was for war in 1914? they thought it would be fantastic and rejuvenate the manly vigorousness of the polity.

“Everyone”? Uh, no, definitely not in the US…which is strongly backed up by the fact we didn’t enter the war for a few years after it had been going on? Anti-war sentiment was found on both the left and right of the political spectrum.

this was clearly an exaggeration based on responses in europe; i was not claiming that costa ricans were itching for war in 1914. come on