Mistakes I’ve made a few!

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So, on the way to this pinnacle of understanding and wisdom (ah!) on which I stand, poised at the turn of the half century, I’ve made a few mistakes. They started – probably, or at least, it’s as far back as I can remember – with letting the neighbor kid play with my expensive doll while I went indoor to get something or other. When I came back, she’d broken the doll and taken off.

I think I was three. If I knew then what I know now…

Since then there has been a long accumulation of errors. Had there been none of that, I’d be as wealthy as Bill Gates. Okay, maybe not, but good enough for my simple purposes.

Let me see, only the more clear, obvious errors, just as relates to my career: I spent three years learning to write and submitting short stories, because I thought I should do it to become a published writer; I never attempted to get to the Baen Bar before I sold to Baen. (And I should have, but I was afraid of online forums.) I spent years first writing things that there was no market for, then trying to write to the market. I believed what they told me when they said there was no market for the type of science fiction I wanted to write. More stuff? Four agents. Enough said.

I’m not going to detail them, but rest assured there were the same sort of errors in the realm of investment, choosing where to live, choosing where to shop and what to buy (particularly cars – though this one is doing pretty well and, knock on wood, will continue to do so, because it’s 17 years old and we do not have the money to replace it.) Improvements done to houses we then had to sell so we could move. Buying this house. Not that there is anything wrong with this house – now. After we fixed everything – but you know we’ve known for 12 years that it wasn’t right for us. Okay, 11 years. After one year, it became clear that we were moving furniture around ever six months because the house did not fit the way we live. But we didn’t want to move again, and I’d become so busy that we didn’t have the time to unpack boxes, much less to move… which has led to us living for 11 years in a place that just didn’t fit… Never mind, we’re doing something about it.

But what I mean is that we’ve made mistakes. All of us who are adults have. Not some of us. All of us. We’ve dropped the ball, been duped, got fooled by a clever con artist, had a bizarre concatenation of circumstances clean us out of savings (what is investing the company whose CEO then died on 9/11?) but more importantly all of us have done things that can only be explained by a sudden and total death of the brain. Usually temporary, but you know what I mean as well as I do. This is how I came to go driving without my glasses one morning, which given my level of astigmatism resulted in my neatly bisecting the car with a telephone pole.

And sometimes you do stupid things – the most appalling mistakes as any sane person would consider them – and they turn out all right, by a miracle. You turn a blind corner without looking. You run across the street, and it’s only when you hear the car behind you that you realize you were fortunate. You jump, land on your feet, and then realize the jump was much higher than you thought, and you could have hurt yourself badly. You buy bum stock and it turns out to make a recover. You buy an old piece of furniture, and, when you strip the 15 layers of paint (two metallic) you realize you’re in possession of a colonial-era bookcase. … you marry in haste and are very lucky that not only don’t you have to repent at leisure, but that you found the one you were meant to be with.

But those things, the good and the bad, adults take with a shrug. It happens. Oh, I’m not saying that, like the rest of you, I haven’t wasted a whole day – or two – in heartburnings. Usually of the kind of “What on Earth made me do that?” and “How could I be so incredibly stupid?”

That I know at least none of my mistakes have cost someone his/her life, yet. Though a couple of the near misses could have. Like the time Dan and I handed the baby off to each other, late at night in front of the house, and the other didn’t have the hold, as it were, and… let’s say I grabbed the kid by his ankle, stopping his head a cartoonish half inch from the sidewalk. (No, he didn’t wake. #2 son takes after me, and I once slept through an earthquake that sent the entire village to the middle of the street. And me too, in my brother’s arms. I woke up, eventually, out on the street, because I was cold. Go figure.)

I imagine that’s the hardest of all. I’ve made mistakes that resulted in the irretrievable breaking of a cherished possession and I imagine the process is the same, writ smaller. You sit there and replay what you did. If you’d just moved your hand a little faster. If—

But here’s the thing: adults, normal, well-adjusted adults, or as well adjusted as most adults are, get over it. I don’t know if you’d get over causing someone’s death, but anything short of that, right? You get over it. You shrug it off, with greater or lesser difficulty. You pick yourself up. You dust yourself off. You remember people who were more broke than you are now at greater ages than yours and who ended up millionaires. You sigh and call yourself five kinds of dumb ass and you vow not to make THAT mistake again, at the very least.

Because you are human, in the world of humans, and because none of you are perfect and because even brilliant people (I live with three of them. TRUST me) make dumb mistakes, you know that stupid stuff that shouldn’t happen will in fact happen, and the best you can do is learn to recover and roll with the punches. No one has it perfect, and to demand perfection would be stupid.

It gets harder to recover as you get older. And it might be impossible to fully recover if your health fails.

BUT we try. We move on. We say “okay, that was spectacularly stupid, but—“

I know, at this point you’re all wondering why I’m saying this stuff. It’s obvious, right?

Oh, sure. It’s obvious to us. We were raised on stories of people who failed and failed and failed, and finally succeeded. We were raised to pick ourselves up and move on.

But this is not true of a lot of people. More and more, even if people are raised this way, the popular culture brings home the idea that if you fail, or you’re discriminated again, or, G-d forbid, if something truly awful happens to you, this makes you a victim. And as a victim, you’re owed something “by society.” (Note that it’s never explained to these people that they too are part of society and therefore expected to make it up to everyone worse off than themselves in real or imaginary ways.)

Some of what you’re owed is being walked around on tenterhooks, even if your terrible injury is that you were once frightened by a spider, or failed to get the pony you really wanted for Christmas.

If it’s anything more serious, people should go out of their way to tell you how brave you are or to make good your financial losses, or make up for the fact that you slept around and got an std or an illegitimate child. And not only are you never supposed to blame yourself for anything, other people can’t point out to you that you made a mistake which led to this situation. That’s victim-blaming and slut-shaming and … who knows? What next thing won’t we be allowed to do? Stupid-shaming?

This both fosters the notion that mistakes are never, ever your fault – and therefore allows you to make them over and over again – and that somehow, if you made a mistake, you’re now sanctified by victimhood, so there’s no need to try again.

And thereby these people do end up victims. They’re victims of a failed culture.

We owe it to them – and to ourselves – to explain that victimhood isn’t sacred; that failing doesn’t make you special.

Failing and doing stupid things makes you human. Picking yourself up, learning from your mistakes and going on to try again and in different ways? That makes you special. A member of the rare fraternity of human beings who have achieved unapologetic adulthood.

 

234 thoughts on “Mistakes I’ve made a few!”

  2. re: ” They’re victims of a failed culture.”

    Sarah, a lady from my exercise group is 55 and looks 70. She and her last husband drugged and drank away their bank accounts. Recently, she told a group of us how happy she was with her new $20 a month (subsidized) medical insurance policy. Someone asked her if she thought it was fair that so many people lost their old plans and she said: “Well, to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs”.

    That’s it Sara. We live in cost-shit universe, a moral-shift culture. The “egg breaking” this lady is talking about is our culture. I party. You cleanup. I reproduce. You pay my bills.

    Our earnest middle class now subsidizes the bad actors of the middle class. Huh? Did I wake up in 1950s Moscow?

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    2. I don’t know – I think you got it right the first time. We pay the cost, and they give us shit.

      When I was a kid, I thought it’d be great to grow up. The adults seemed so wise, they put together a world of amazing things like the Apollo Program.

      And then as I got older, the adults seemed to… go away. (I suppose I could blame disco…) Instead – we got a lot of people who were just faking it, and faking it badly. They’re not in it for the country, they’re in for playing the game and they’ll do what they have to for a ‘win’, no matter how badly it hurts the rest of us.

      It could just be shifting from a child’s viewpoint to an adult’s – but I’m still looking around too many years later and going ‘I’m not seeing many adults around any more…’, and most of the few who actually DO get into politics above a local level are almost immediately hounded out. (Bush was a decided anomaly, as was Reagan.)

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  4. Great. Now I’ll have “We Are The Champions” playing in my head all day. I feel so victimized. ;-)

    We’ve trained a whole generation (maybe two) that they are special snowflakes. When you think the world revolves around you, you can’t help but feel victimized by reality. Thankfully, some of them (us) are able to mature and grow out of that mentality.

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    1. Freddie Mercury quashes your victimhood! Freddie Mercury dances (in odd outfits) all over your victimhood! Freddie Mercury’s mustache mocks your victimhood!

      :D

      I don’t know why, I just felt it ought be said.

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    2. Great. Now I’ll have “We Are The Champions” playing in my head all day. I feel so victimized

      Is that so bad? :-D

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      1. When the kids were making fun of me in school, and beating me up, I had “We are the Champions” running through my head. Yes, it made everything better. I wasn’t as aware of how much it helped until later. Then I forgot when I became a teenager. That snowflake stuff is addictive. Fortunately, addictions can be broken with hard work, determination, and a healthy injection of cold fury. The thing is, they *teach you* to misapply the anger, and denature it’s healing process. You are supposed to use it to fight the good fight, not render yourself atrophied and brittle.

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  5. A few days ago I hit a low because of a development on a (non-paying) project. So I sang a few bars of “nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going to the garden to eat worms,” wrote some lousy ode-to-dead-trees poetry, and then started trying to sort out what I need to do and how to get the $$ budgeted to do it.

    *shrug* Ain’t the first time life’s kicked me in the rump and it won’t be the last. I made some decisions and comments over the course of my days that have come back to bite me in the -ss more firmly than I’d care to remember. This project will probably get added to the “self, remember what happened last time? Yeah, don’t do that” file.

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    1. “then started trying to sort out what I need to do and how to get the $$ budgeted to do it.”

      That’s where we are with this move. We can’t afford to keep living here — that inflation that doesn’t exist, you know? — and it’s not a tragedy because as I said the house never “fit” and it’s impossible to keep clean given how we use it and that it’s mostly just me cleaning. (It would be fine for a family that lived LESS in the house. It’s keeping five offices — Dan has two, for different purposes — and an art studio in a house that really isn’t designed for it (our last house we had the attic, which ran the whole length of the house where all those activities went, and the back (enclosed/heated) porch where the art room could go).
      Anyway — we’ve come to the conclusion it’s got to go, but we have to find the money to move. So, we’re doing that. On the good side, though, the writing has come back — maybe it was just all the sickness of last year — so hopefully writing can contribute majorly to “finding the money.”

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      1. I don’t know what your finances and driveway look like, but the PODS moving and storage service was wonderful for our move– you could pack up anything you don’t think you’ll need in the next X time and get it out of the way.

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  6. Saw a news video recently of a woman in St. Pete with 13 kids (or was it 15). She gestured at all the kids and said that someone needed to pay for all this and her as well. Not one word of responsibility for having all those kids, that she couldn’t afford, with many fathers who couldn’t care less. Just another example of what you’re talking about.

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    1. And a poor example she’s showing as a mother to those children. Help, yes. We help those in need. Willfully allow the abandonment of responsibility, no. That way leads from “this is why we can’t have nice things” to “this is why nobody has any-thing.”

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    2. We should take such women at their word: since they are incapable of looking after themselves, we should have nice secure institutions where they can live.

      If the children aren’t too damaged to be unadoptable, place them for adoption. It’s not like a woman who can’t look after herself can look after them.

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          1. What they do to their children is abhorrent, and my own (dark) inclinations run along the same lines of take them away and give them to families that will love and cherish them, as you said. Dangerous path, that.

            Other than crushing the cult of victimhood, I don’t know the safe path.

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        2. Well, yes, it would have to be CAREFULLY watched — as in the children have to be in material danger/deprivation. And it has to be watched not to be made partisan. Like, you know, in England, you can now go to jail for failing to provide your children with “love and comfort” or something.
          BUT in my case I’m talking about kids taken from stable fosters and adopters, where they’re thriving, to be given back to drug using/perpetual welfare case parents.

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          1. No argument that we have a broken system with skewed incentives and miserably wrong-headed assumptions doing grievous harm to children.

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          2. Until we break the funding/caseload link, all of that is going to continue. It’s in the best interest of “child welfare” to keep the caseload high, so placing children in adoptive families is not in their best interest. That’s ugly, but that’s the truth. There are good people working for child welfare services, but they burn out and leave after awhile, while the rotten core continues on.

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            1. Except for healthy, happy children of good families that refuse to comply with the social workers’ demands to let them visit. Those adoptions go well and make their numbers look good.

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          3. Saw a news story the other day that a “father” had “won back” his son.

            The guy broke up with the kid’s mother when she came and showed him she was pregnant, then told her that if “it” was his he’d take the kid– note, still not doing anything to support the child, much less his mother– and then got a lawyer when he found out that (in accordance with state law) the kid he’d abandoned was adopted out instead of being delivered as demanded.

            Three years later, the boy has been taking from the couple that adopted him at birth and “returned” to the guy who abandoned himself and his mother.

            Oh, and this was supposed to be a great story about how wonderful the guy was– you see, he wasn’t looking for anything serious, that’s why he dumped his girlfriend and accused her of mindgames when she came in with a closed set of pregnancy tests, went into his bathroom, and came out with a positive test.
            Totally a hero.

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            1. On the flip side, Utah has had to pass new legislation to keep women from traveling here to give birth and put the child up for adoption without their husbands’ consent (not just babydaddies, legal spouses). Some of the cases make me ill, putting myself in the place of the father. In the case I can think of, the child is six years old now and the father is only trying for visitation rights rather than custody, so as to be part of his child’s life without totally upending her world.

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              1. Ugh!

                I am a supporter of father’s rights– but mostly because I think the kid has a right to his parents.

                Adopting out your kid, removing him from your husband… ugh!

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              2. This was what I was going to ask about in Foxfier’s example. Also the comment, “if it was his, he would take it,” makes one assume there was some doubt, as in his ‘girlfriend’ was either cheating on him or more of a one night stand than a real girlfriend. I need a little more info before I judge one way or the other. If there is legitimate doubt that it was his child I could totally see him saying he would only take care of it, if the child was his, and I see NO reason for him to support the mother if either a) they are not together, b) she isn’t supporting his child or c) the child is some other guys.

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                1. Unfortunately, the courts don’t always see it that way. Men are open wallets, and sometimes they won’t even take the results of paternity tests into consideration when it comes to garnishing a man’s wages.

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                  1. I grew up in Washington*, I’ve seen all sorts of examples of what the courts deem appropriate.

                    *If you are a man and even entertain the possibility of getting a divorce someday, don’t ever get married in Washington, and most certainly don’t ever get divorced there.

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                    1. And for F*sake stay away from Seattle– a good friend is trying, and failing, to get custody from his wife because she just finished defending her new husband over serious abuse of the friend’s kids. A girl and a boy, tween and teen. Yes, what your mind is filling in there is probably quite accurate.

                      Oregon is bad, too– if you’re abused and leave before going to the hospital or the cops, it didn’t happen. Even if there are witnesses. Even if you have video from the now-ex-husband walking around the house after saying “leave or I will kill you” in a drunken stupor, monologing about how the “b-tch” will never get all of this stuff, if he has to burn the house down around him. (Left it in the video camera, which was in the boxes he eventually dumped on her doorstep after not being able to pay rent without a housewife.)

                      With their year old son crawling around in the video.

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                  2. The kid does have a right to the support of those adults who conceived him.

                    In those cases of “not the father” that I know of, they’re going off of the law that the kids from a marriage are presumed to be of the husband.

                    Given that we know of at least one case where genetic testing proved the mother wasn’t the mother of the kids she gave birth to, we should be a little careful about assuming paternity tests are 100%. (Or even the 95% they usually state– it’s 95% sure based on the samples given/taken.)

                    Even the “boy who was raped by a teacher is hit with child support” thing has me asking– why did they leave the kid in the custody of a known child rapist? Most states have systems to remove parental rights to children of rape from rapists.

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                    1. “Even the “boy who was raped by a teacher is hit with child support” thing has me asking– why did they leave the kid in the custody of a known child rapist? Most states have systems to remove parental rights to children of rape from rapists.”

                      But, but, she’s the mother, just because she raped/molested the father doesn’t mean she will be a bad influence on the child. I’m sure she’ll be all motherly and stuff, and be a great role model for the child.

                      /sarc/

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                    2. *shudder* And the dark side is, if you get folks talking, before long they’ll assure you that the 12 year old boy liked it.

                      One of those “it’s not rape-rape” things.

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                    3. Even the “boy who was raped by a teacher is hit with child support” thing has me asking– why did they leave the kid in the custody of a known child rapist? Most states have systems to remove parental rights to children of rape from rapists.

                      In civilized states, there are laws saying parental rights can be terminated on grounds of conception by rape — and the parents should pursue that.

                      In those that don’t, the parents should sue for financial damages — she committed a tort, and he’s on the hook for 18 years as a consequence, and he should be made whole.

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                2. He accused her of cheating, but no support was offered other than that he wasn’t “serious”– and he didn’t even believe she was pregnant, supposedly, when he dumped her. Oh, sorry, they “broke up” after he accused her of trying to manipulate him by faking pregnancy.

                  It was only when he was called by the state and told the kid was being adopted out that he suddenly decided that if the kid was his, he wanted it. (The stories are a little unclear on this, with some claiming he told her that he’d “take” the kid if “it” was “his,” positioned so that it implies he said that while dumping her for faking that she was pregnant to play head games with him.)

                  Abandoned is abandoned.

                  The kid didn’t stop needing care because the male involved was suspicious that he may not be genetically related, or because he didn’t want to believe the gal was pregnant in the first place.

                  If your genetic relationship is that important to you, don’t sleep with women you’re not “serious” about, don’t be psycho about a positive pregnancy test being manipulation on her part, and don’t abandon the kid.

                  Instead, everything is about what the supposed adult wants– with even supporting his kid or letting him stay in the only home he’s known coming in second.

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                  1. I agree with everything you said. However it assumes that the man in question is capable of rational behavior and that reports of his irrational behavior are true.

                    I’m of the opinion that people shouldn’t have sex without realizing that having sex (protected or not) will most likely result in pregnancy. IOW, if you don’t want/aren’t ready for kids don’t have sex.

                    Yes men are regarded as nothing more than sperm donors and animate wallets, often different men in the roles. Some men are sperm donors and others permanent money donors.

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                    1. Since it was an article supportive of him, I’m guessing that it was a lot nastier than they’re reporting.

                      I’m also guessing that the “doctor” he wanted wasn’t the sort that provides birth care.

                      I’m first in line to decry the actual abuse guys get– but he abandoned his child, and then dragged the kid from his home.

                      “Guys frequently get done wrong” is no justification for a specific case of child abandonment and then objectification.

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                    2. Children shouldn’t be uprooted from their without good and sufficient reason. They aren’t things. My kid =/= my stereo.

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                    3. Amen.

                      This is another big blow against in-country adoption, too– abandoned children can be “reclaimed”?

                      Betting he did nothing to defray the costs, either.

                      This is especially terrifying because I’ve got a cousin whose bio-father nearly killed her mom, and when the wife remarried he tried to claim that cousin. The only reason my cousin wasn’t given to the abuser is because that wife pulled out a big box of receipts and cheerily asked if he was going to settle up. (He later sold his paternal rights for a thousand dollars and that cousin was adopted by the new husband.)

                      This kind of “even abandoning the kid doesn’t make you have less of a property right to them” ruling would put that cousin at risk, if they weren’t already an adult. The abusive ex (shocker!) always has money problems, and would’ve gladly extorted the cousin’s parents.

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                    5. I get called names because I’ll ask both sexes where exactly they thought babies came from when they talk about their child as an “accident” and thus not their responsibility.

                      Planned parenthood and its allies have a LOT to answer for.

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                    6. And the man is always in the wrong. [Sarcasm]

                      Sorry, without knowing more about this case, I’m only willing to say that he was in the wrong for attempting to take the child from the only home the child knew.

                      For what it is worth, I know of one situation where the woman got pregnant to marry the man before he was ready to marry her.

                      The woman was my sister and she admitted it without me asking.

                      Oh, funny foot-note. My youngest niece recently got married and my sister told me (without my asking) that my youngest niece wasn’t pregnant. [Wink]

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                    7. I read some truly scarey stories about the children kidnapped by the Nazis for “re-Germanization.”

                      If the kid was fourteen or so when abducted, there really was no problem, they remembered being Polish (or whatever, though usually it was Polish). Even ten or so could be worked with. the Nazis had often managed to eradicate their memories of being Polish, but playing nursery rhymes or other familiar Polish traditional things would often jar their memory loose.

                      It’s the ones who were two or so that were tragic. Six-year-olds in loving homes, raised by parents who had been carefully kept in the dark about the programs, speaking only German, being yanked away to be sent to Polish parents who couldn’t even talk to them. . . and at least some of the children were abused by other children when they returned, because they were in post-World War II Poland and they sounded like Germans. (I’ve read of two little girls who tried to run away back to the adoptive mother of one of them.)

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                3. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592834/Young-Oklahoma-father-successfully-wins-son-adoptive-parents-granted-time-custody-following-three-year-battle.html

                  ‘I wasn’t looking to settle down or anything like that,’ he said.
                  ‘We both understood it wasn’t serious.’
                  In December 2009, after not seeing him for a few weeks, the girlfriend came to his house with an opened box of pregnancy tests and disappeared into the bathroom to take one, Sampson said.
                  When she came out, she showed him the positive result.
                  Sampson said they needed to go to a doctor but she refused, causing him to doubt her pregnancy.
                  ‘I really thought it was trickery,’ he said.
                  ‘I thought it was all mind games.’
                  The relationship ended and he heard nothing else about the pregnancy, Sampson said, until March 2010.

                  One to two months pregnant in December; that’s four or five months pregnant when he finally believes he might have some sort of obligation besides dumping her.
                  (Five to seven weeks is when you find out you’re pregnant, unless you’re checking religiously or have a by-the-clock biology. Add a week or two while she freaks out, then goes to his house. Where… he calls her a liar and “the relationship ends.”)

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                  1. “In December 2009, after not seeing him for a few weeks, the girlfriend came to his house with an opened box of pregnancy tests”

                    The relationship ended after she showed him the pregnancy test? Sounds to me like the relationship was already over, they hadn’t seen each other for “a few weeks.”

                    The article was a little vague, if I was to just read what you quoted I would have thought the “doctor” he said they needed to see was to get a pregnancy test administered, since he didn’t believe her that she was pregnant. Note that she came with an “opened” box, not the closed box you stated above.

                    That being said I’m not necessarily defending the guy, he should have followed up and made sure that she wasn’t having his kid, even if he didn’t believe she was pregnant. Regardless of when the relationship ended, he should still be responsible for the results (the kid) of that relationship, as should she.

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                    2. None of which changes that he provided no support for his child and dumped the kid’s mother.

                      Even the pieces that are on his side agree on that.

                      (By the way– pregnancy tests that have already been taken fade after a short time, and an open box is not the same as an open test.)

                      Idiot girl sleeps with football player from nearby college. Idiot girl finds out she’s pregnant, goes to the father’s house.

                      Idiot girl is accused of lying and boyfriend demands she go to a doctor with him.

                      Relationship ends.

                      Girl starts trying to find someone to adopt her kid, doesn’t lie about who the father is, agency contacts him. He demands a 1% chance of killing the kid that can’t be done until later in the pregnancy and then he’ll take the kid, if they can prove it’s his.

                      The whole time, the kid is getting no support.

                      That’s abandonment.

                      Lesson of the story: lie when your football player ex abandons you as soon as he finds out you’re pregnant, or your kid will be pulled from his home and placed with a stranger who thinks sharing their DNA is a property right.

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                    3. We are getting totally different takes on this story. Both the parents were worthless culls, but the father did take responsibility, unlike the mother. I feel bad for the adoptive parents, but really there is no way the kid should have been put up for adoption in the first place.

                      Now I’m necessarily going off the story you linked and reading things into that may or may not be true, because we all know how reliable media reporting is, but we are both going off the same story and coming up with totally different results. He was a football player who had fling with some slutty groupy, so yeah they were both acting like scum. After having a fling they haven’t talked to each other in weeks, until she shows up, claims she is pregnant, and claims the child is his. Yes if I was some hotshot football player who was dumb enough to sleep with anything willing to spread its legs for me after a winning game I would assume that the woman in question had slept with others also, very likely teammates of mine, or anybody else that was willing to buy her a few beers. Showing up out of the blue and claiming she was having my child, then refusing to go to the doctor and get a pregnancy test, or a checkup would make me assume that she either a) was playing mind games, b)was simply looking for a meal ticket or c)didn’t really think it was mine, but was very likely doing both a & b. In my definition of a relationship, when they hadn’t talked to each other in weeks until she shows up to apparently try and blackmail him, they didn’t have a relationship, there was nothing to end, so there was no way he could ‘dump her.’

                      In March he gets a call from the adoption agency, the girl has already contacted six months before giving birth (props to her for actually thinking ahead this time, unlike when she decided to sleep with him) at that time he requests a paternity test (logical when dealing with a slut) states he wants the child, if it is his. That he wants TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR HIS CHILD SIX MONTHS BEFORE IT IS BORN, asks for it not to be put up for adoption.

                      He is in contact with the mother waiting for the child to be born, and when she claims to be having contractions he goes up to be there when the child is born, only to find out that she has been lying to him (big surprise) and has already had the child and gave it up for adoption weeks ago. This makes one assume that he thought he had an agreement worked out, until the woman lied to him and gave his child away without him having any choice in the matter. Yep, sounds like it’s all his fault.

                      I’m happy to here that he is sueing the adoption agency that also adopted out the baby without notifying him, after he had already notified them that he wanted the baby and intended to raise it if it was his own. Not only because they took the baby from him, but also because they effectively lied to the adoptive parents and then ripped the baby away from them after they had started raising it. Basically everybody in the story is a loser here, except for the worthless cull loser ‘mother’. She got just what she wanted, a lot of drama and no responsibility.

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                    4. It is not “taking responsibility” to expect your child to live on air until it can be proven, conclusively, to be yours.

                      He was notified; even though he said he’d take care of the kid if it turned out to be his, he did not fulfill the legal requirement to support the child. He just said he was interested…and you can’t live on “possible interest.” Six months of known non-support of your child’s mother in that state allow a child to be put up for adoption– because it’s abandonment.

                      They both slept around. He dumped her– obviously falsely accusing her given that the boy is his relation– and she then took care of the child, including finding someone better suited than herself to adopt the kid.

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                    5. You keep claiming he dumped her, when they weren’t even seeing each other, that I find really hard to support. (In fact you don’t even try to support it, just state it like it is a fact)

                      I find it very hard to swallow that he was “Making his child live on air” *until it could be conclusively proven to be his. According to the article (you either have some other sources or are drawing a LOT of conclusions with no evidence based on that article) he headed to the hospital as soon as the mother claimed to be having contractions, only to find out she had given birth and given the child up for adoption THREE WEEKS BEFORE, while continueing to lie to him. And the adoption agency that he had previous been in contact with and stated that he wanted to raise the child if it was his, failed to contact him. Wonder how much they are getting paid per adopted child?

                      Like I said before, I feel bad for the adoptive parents (assuming they didn’t know they were basically buying a wanted child), but the mother and the people from the adoption agency IMO need lined up against a pockmarked wall. The father is NOT a stellar role model, but he dropped out of school and took a job to pay for the expenses not only raising his child, but having to legally fight to get the child back. He had an easy out if he wanted to be a deadbeat dad, but he chose to put his career path on hold, and very likely derailed it forever, in order to try to be a dad. Yeah I would call that taking responsibility.

                      *I see you state he was failing to support the mother of his child. As we have both agreed, it is likely that she slept around and neither knew if the child was his, and they weren’t together. Yes he should pay for the birth and everything, particularly if he wanted to keep the child. Know way to know if he was going to or not, since she pretty conclusively proved she was a lying, manipulative @$!# when she had the child and gave it up for adoption while still claiming to be pregnant. I feel like he made the right decision in not giving her the money ahead of time, what do you think the chances of him ever seeing that money again were if the child turned out to be his buddies and not his? And no he shouldn’t be responsible for paying for the pregnancy of some slut he slept with unless the child is his.

                      Moral of the story: If he would have had enough brains to keep his pants zipped we wouldn’t be arguing about this, and he would have saved himself three years of nightmare headaches and likely lawyer bills he will still be paying on when his kid graduates.

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                    6. And no he shouldn’t be responsible for paying for the pregnancy of some slut he slept with unless the child is his.

                      Given that she had the legal authority to kill the child without the alleged father’s knowledge or consent (let alone the child’s), why should he have had any responsibility for it? Women aren’t held responsible for men’s decisions, but men should be held responsible for women’s? That doesn’t sound like “equal treatment” to me.

                      When women are not allowed to unilaterally decide whether a child gets to be born or not, *then* an argument that the sperm donor should have some responsibility can be raised. Until then, as long as birth is 100% her decision, then the consequences should be 100% her responsibility. And if that harms the child, then she’s proven herself unfit as a mother.

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      2. Institutionalizing them is too expensive. Put the kids up for adoption, schedule her for sterilization, and after an appropriate period to fully recover from the procedure (say a month or so), kick her off the dole. No more government assistance period, dot, end of story.

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        1. Leaving aside that having children is not the only harm they can do, the other advantage is that it provides a stick as well as a carrot for behaving yourself. An amazing number of men and women can look after their children with proper incentive.

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            1. There is a linked article there talking about sending children to school as young as two. That’s weird, because there was a guy on the radio this morning talking about wanting to start a program to allow parents to send their children to pre-school. As young as two. The man was not listening to the concerns that the host was raising, even though he was responding to each one with, ‘yes’, then he would go on and show that he had not understood what the host said*.

              This was, of course, to be a government program, and he said the cost would be offset by lower costs of things like crime when they are older, and by freeing up the parents to get jobs (you know, the ones that don’t exist), so they can pay more taxes.

              *People who do that make me want to smash them in the face with a shovel until they understand.

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              1. I think it’s a progressive thing — warehousing the kids at an earlier age gets them away from evil conservative parents, and stuff…. And I think it’s worldwide like their lockstep talking points tend to be.

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                1. It’s a step on the road toward gov’t raising children. Completely break the family, so you all these atomised people without relatives who look to the state as their family. You don’t marry your lover or live with them. Your child is raised by the state. Everything in the State, Nothing outside the State.

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                2. And I think it’s worldwide like their lockstep talking points tend to be.

                  One of the guy’s arguments for it was that a lot of other countries are doing it already”.

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                  2. Communist Romania: Ever the vanguard of progress.

                    Because we will never get a sufficiently uniformly dysfunctional cohort unless families do not raise children.

                    Families have been around for a long long time. Yes, high trust high functioning societies have managed to replace some of what they used to do by out-competing. One can’t just deem those sorts of more competitive institutions into existence.

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                    1. That is the country I look to first when looking for a country to emulate. They are so successful that they never make any waves and most people don’t even realize they still exist.

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                3. It’s spelled out in the Communist Manifesto — the destruction of the traditional family. A fundamental part of the religion.

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            2. Well, this is not too bad, though some are problems. Unfortunately the question is what else they would put on it:
              • To sit still and listen
              • To be aware of other children
              • To understand the word no and the borders it sets for behaviour
              • To understand the word stop and that such a phrase might be used to prevent danger
              • To be potty trained and go to the loo
              • To recognise their own name
              • To speak to an adult and ask for needs
              • To be able to take off their coat and put on shoes
              • To talk in sentences
              • To open and enjoy a book

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            3. You know… it’s funny. I looked at the article, and found myself boggled that the skills he listed… well, they’re expected for the requirements of preschool here where I live.

              Every parent should be issued with a simple checklist of skills children should master by the age of five, he said, including toilet training, behaviour boundaries, recognising their own name, putting on a coat and shoes and talking in sentences.

              If they didn’t have that, they were considered too immature to be in preschool, perhaps the next year? They were also warned that if those skills didn’t exist they’d have a disadvantage in first grade.

              But they also expected that parents are supposed to teach those things to the kids. I’m quite boggled at the thought of anyone not doing that.

              I don’t agree with the ‘give priority to the disadvantaged’ kids – that’s just another form of affirmative action. And if all the kids in the school are the same disadvantaged types they don’t learn anything new from their peers. The whole idea strikes me as ridiculous, but I realize that a lot of the people this is aimed at don’t know what parenting even is.

              I’m still gobsmacked.

              I think the teenager’s class should include basic life skills – things like cooking, housekeeping, budgeting, … you know, ‘home economics.’ I don’t know if that’s still taught in the oh so progressive schools of today. In the meantime though, I’m teaching my kids by giving them chores to do.

              About the only positive smidgen of a thought I can see in this is actually trying to instill the concept of ‘good parent’ to teenagers.

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              2. As of 2002 (when I graduated) my high school taught cooking, sewing, basic car repairs and maintenance, and typing as required quarter semester courses in 8th? 9th? grade. I really wish they had taught housekeeping and budgeting. I learned most housekeeping from my parents, but doing anything beyond balancing my check book and paying bills first I was lost on until I took classes after college on my own. My (now husband) boyfriend of the time insisted I take a class and that I didn’t know enough about money, and he was the wiser of us.

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                1. My kids’ schools — two — only taught checkbook balancing.
                  To be fair, I didn’t learn to clean by American methods (Portuguese are way harsher) and I NEVER cooked a meal till I was married (In Portugal, someone with my degree would have had a maid or at least a daily. No, this isn’t a brag. it’s a grumble. Damn it. I want that maid.) I managed. Could we have done better? Sure. But what happened is I developed a passion for cooking I might not otherwise have developed. I still hate cleaning and the only way to do it is to listen to audio books while doing it.

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                  1. When you say harsher, how do you mean? White glove test standards? I know in Brasil we often swept the floor barefoot (walking around barefoot is usually contraindicated. Nightmare-inducing parasites want to share your skin…), because even with callused feet you can feel dust and such that you’d never see. On the other hand, Americans seem to have a much higher standard for sanitary than Brasileiros.

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                  2. Most of my cleaning is clutter control rather than actual cleaning. Oh, and sweeping mounds of dog fur. He’s a malamute and is blowing his coat again… at least that means spring is here! An audiobook is a good idea. I’ll have to be trying it.

                    I’m just now learning to cook, and I’m really enjoying it. Currently I’m trying to puzzle out what to do with dried Pinto beans. (They are extremely cheap here in the Mexican food section of the stores. Jaw droppingly cheap. But that does us no good if I don’t know what to do with them.) Not having much luck yet, but I’m happy trying. :)

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                    1. Probably the easiest thing to do is make bean soup. After you soak them overnight, rinse them and dump them in a crock pot, then add a ham bone, or a half pound to a pound of hamhock, a diced onion or two, maybe some diced carrot and celery, then cover it with chicken broth, add some spices like pepper, (no salt needed), garlic, a little clove, maybe some oregano and/or basil, or whatever turns you on. Turn the crock pot on low and cook for 8-10 hours.

                      You can do the same thing in a pot on the stove: add all the ingredients, bring to a boil, turn down the heat, cover, and simmer for about 3 hours.

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                    4. I soak them overnight (one half bag, plus or minus). Then I brown 1-2T flour in an equal amount of fat (butter usually), and add the beans, cooking for a few minutes. Next comes garlic to taste ( I like a heaping cereal spoon full) Then I add 4 cups of beef broth, a little oregano, and water to cover the beans. Oh, and some chipotle chili (two, maybe three shakes). Bring to boil, then cook on low for 6-8 hours, stirring occasionally, until beans are soft. Serve with appropriate condiments, on huevos rancheros, with fresh tortillas, with carne con chile colorado, or other stuff.

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                    8. If this is your evil side, Wayne — my friend, let me encourage your evil genius. Bombard me with those dastardly cooking recipes. Indulge the laugh, give in to the dark side…

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                    9. Well, off the top of my head, here’s another. Not for beans, but another crock pot recipe:

                      Take a 2-3lb beef roast, and put it in the crock pot, then add a can of diced tomatoes (or salsa for a twist), and cover with beef broth. Cook on low for 6-8 hours (always remember that you can cut 2-3 hours by starting on high, then turning it down after an hour). Then, take out the meat and slice it as thin as you can with a knife. Put meat back in pot, and add sliced onion and bell pepper, maybe some jalapenos if you like it spicier. Add some Italian spices, too. Cook another hour or so, then put it in hoagie rolls for sandwiches.

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                    13. Many thanks! I like new recipes to try.

                      However, I get names and icons, but can’t open anything…

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                    16. Ah-HAH! Success! (Knew I was missing something.)

                      Thanks for the assist, sir.

                      And many thanks, once again, to Wayne. Feel free to indulge the evil laugh.

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                    17. Weird, it was supposed to be publ- wait. I forgot to set permissions on the files, because I copied them from other folders. Hmm…

                      No, it’s Google’s mistake. the files say anyone who has the link can view, with no sign-in required. Guess they fubar’d that.

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                    19. You can simply use them as beans in any crockpot chili recipe you like. Or you can can them, then when you wish to use them later to make soup, chili, refried beans, whatever you desire to make with beans you simply grab a jar out of the cupboard and start cooking. Since I have a habit of thinking of what I want for dinner about the time I get hungry this is a feature I like. Canned beans of most varieties can be made into a decent refried bean substitute, take out the jar, mash them up thoroughly with a fork, mix in some tabasco and viola. You can do this while frying up some taco meat and defrosting taco shells, by the time you have cheese grated and beans mashed you are ready to have tacos.

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                    20. Sauerbraten

                      2 lbs red meat of choice, chunked
                      1 can beef broth (or 1 bullion cube and 10 oz. water)
                      1/3 cup packed brown sugar
                      1/3 cup cider vinegar
                      1/2 cup finely chopped onion
                      3/4 cup water
                      10-12 ginger snaps, crushed

                      Place everything but ginger snaps in crockpot. Cook on high for around 6 hours (putting it on when you leave for work is what I usually do, I just add a little extra water so it doesn’t dry out too much). Add crushed ginger snaps and stir until thickened.

                      This is normally served as a soup and is very good, but something I really like to do is put it in a pie crust and bake it, making a meat pie that is delicious. Serve with sour cream like you would serve a dessert pie with whipped or ice cream.

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                    21. I should probably add that the bean cooking time is for elevations of 3500-7000 feet above sea level. You might need less time at a lower elevation. And the same recipe works for a whole 1 lb bag of beans, just up the water and spices to taste. (The browned flour is a replacement for the original salt pork – still has good flavor.) I’ll post the recipe, plus my black bean recipe, on my blog tomorrow (www.almaTCBoykin.wordpress.com) . And Bearcat, I can’t believe you don’t marinate your sauerbraten for at least three days. That’s just . . . uncivilized. :)

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                    22. Well if I make a double batch just for myself, it will be three days before I finish off the leftovers. Does that count? :) Honestly the reason I don’t eat it more often is because I have to decide on what I’m going to have for dinner tomorrow night, tonight, so I can take out the meat, and get up early in the morning and fix everything in the crockpot before I leave. If I had to decide on dinner three DAYS ahead of time, do you realize how rarely I would eat it?

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                    23. Awesome! Thank you for the recipes. :)

                      We live in a rural area, and if you don’t lock your car doors in the fall it’s ‘Surprise!’ and you’ll find your car filled with zucchini and squash. Mailboxes fall prey to this too, especially if they’re large.

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            4. By the way, I get letters from the state for each developmental stage of each of my kids, addressed to “the parent(s) of CHILD’S NAME HERE” that have similar things, though not in checklist form.

              Also tells me how to feed them, how to interact with them, and the last one told me that all female parents under 30 or 35, can’t remember, should be vaccinated for HPV. (But not males over 21, because it could negatively effect their health, lifestyle or job.)

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            1. Judging by the public washrooms at my workplace, some adults aren’t potty-trained.

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              1. And how much of this is “can’t slap your children, at all”? Sorry, but middle class parents might have the resources to work around it. Many parents won’t though.

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            3. A lot of kids in daycare aren’t potty-trained. Heck, a lot of kids in daycare don’t know a lot of things, and aren’t sent to daycare with underwear because the parents don’t remember. As long as they don’t make any really big messes or get into fights, in a professional daycare that’s full of kids, often nobody really notices what’s slipped between the cracks. Things are busy.

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            4. Unable to speak could be either autism or the Einstein Syndrome. My own father didn’t talk at all until he was four. (Unsurprisingly he became an engineer.)

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      3. You are correct. The whole romantic idea of “children are better with their natural parents” has NEVER been proven right in cases like this. NOT ONCE. And yet it persists.

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  7. Whoo! Mistakes, I could make a long list! (My canted brain insists on remembering them all, in great detail. Gonna need to have a talk, soon.) Some doozies on that list, too. I get to look back on some of them as fantastic moments in an interesting life, odd little detours to nowhere that were nevertheless interesting. Others — well, we don’t talk about those in polite company. I’ve had the devastating mistakes that turned out to be sweaty brow wiping “whew!” moments. (Like being on track to be married in my (very) early twenties, counseling patience and preparedness only to get the call from my bride to be that not only was she breaking up with me, but oh yeah; “I’m f@*$ing Jason now.” Her words. Sucked? Yep. Relieved? You cannot imagine…)

    I think, on balance, my life has gone a good way. The best way? Hmph. By whose reckoning?

    I cannot fathom the mindset of people who look at these things as a badge of victimhood, or worse a thing to be achieved. I cannot understand the notion that victim is a high-status position. You get knocked down/fall off the horse/belly flop/drop the bike you get your @ss back up and go again. It’s just fundamental.

    And in truth, I’ve seen some signs in the sub-cultures that it’s still that way. I’ve seen a fair amount of push-back in alternative venues to the whole victimhood game. Those who wanna be in the spot-light are going to get attention for their little attention-whore ways, but I’m not so sure the majority of any generation in our society is stuck down there with them.

    There’s a strong current of American rebellion running through a number of sub-sets. The problem I see is that they don’t entirely recognize this as an American thing. They’re rejecting what’s being shown as the dominant culture without realizing that it’s neither truly dominant, nor particularly American. Think the Insta-prof’s burly men in oil and natural gas. Prosperity to be had with a little dirty, hard work and folks are flocking to it. And going to school for certificates and short degrees to service it. Because they’d rather grab it and make it happen than whine.

    The upside of the victimhood game, the folks who aren’t inclined to be victims can look around and see how sad the whole thing is, and choose to do something else. Many are, I think.

    Oops, this thing got long in a hurry. Wonder if any doom-fetishists will wander by…

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    1. It may be that something’s broken in how they learn from their mistakes.

      We’ve all learned right from wrong somewhere, somehow along the way. Something simple as assigning blame “That rock tripped me!” rather than “I need to watch where I’m going.” Granted I’m as like to say the former as any fool, but I know where the truth lies. There are those who act as if it is always and in truth the former. I see it often enough.

      Mistakes are an essential part of the learning process. So are the consequences of failure. Without those, success is meaningless. Worse than meaningless, success without the possibility of failure is *useless.* When we fail despite all our skill and art, we can choose to learn, to grow. Or make the choice to accept a lesser existence.

      Practical skills, like scratch cooking and tuning up an engine, have real and immediate consequences. They are inextricably connected to your actions in doing them. Done right, you get cake. Or another three months of a humming vehicle. Math is either done correctly or incorrectly, it’s not generally open to interpretation. When wiring a house, either you get current or you don’t depending on how you’ve dotted your I’s and crossed your t’s.

      There’s a lesser degree of precision in dealing with human beings rather than milled steel or cake batter. Someone else pays for the broken window, or their recreational lifestyle. Lord knows I’ve escaped what by rights should have happened to me a time or ten (and I’m thankful to be alive, nonetheless). But I try to learn from my errors. I know how to change a tire, my oil, build a computer, dig a ditch… because I’ve made just about every mistake possible it seems like along the way. And paid for it, too.

      There is a consequence in sheltering folks too much from the consequences of their own actions. Often enough, that is they learn not to respect the cost of failure, and are utterly unprepared when it finally comes to them. It does a man no good and much ill to continually tell him his own failures are no fault of his. Some manage to escape into death never having to face down that responsibility. Many others bear the price of that in daily life (taxes, regulations, and so on down the line).

      It may be unkind of me, but I believe those who’ve got two good legs and yet refuse to use them to stand on their own have no business claiming “need” for themselves. *shakes head* I wouldn’t want to be in charge of deciding who is doing less than they can, though- my conscience doesn’t need that weight.

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      1. I know a middle-aged woman who will cuss out inanimate objects when she collides with them.

        Bungled her life in a number of ways.

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            1. Does talking to vehicles count? You know, “come on, start, please,” and “fly baby, fly baby, fly baby, please, please, YES!” (Heavy plane, short runway, very hot day. G-d bless Pratt and Whitney engines.)

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                2. I was a lab tech in the Army, assigned to a hospital in Germany. One day, after the (German) civilian in charge of the chemistry section got back from vacation, I was telling him about some problems with one of the instruments.

                  Him: Did you talk to it?
                  Me: Yes, I talked to it.
                  Him: Did you talk to it in German?
                  Me: Yes, I talked to it in German,
                  Him: Did you talk nicely to it?
                  Me: I don’t know any nice words in German.

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                    3. I’m sorry. I thought that someone else had written the word. I wouldn’t criticize your comments. You don’t have the time or energy to proof your free work.

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              2. I wouldn’t say I’ve taken to laying out the wrenches like one of those movie-torturers, lovingly examining each one, while whispering dire things…

                And nobody can prove it.

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            4. Yes it is normal, I find people who never tell objects they have balanced in place to “stay” while they run off to grab the bolts to hold them their not only abnormal but hopelessly optimistic.

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        2. Oh dear.

          I’ve been known to lecture dogs for barking at me.

          I used to have, and maybe still have, a phobia of dogs.

          Sometimes when I am walking a public right of way, the dogs barking at me distresses me enough to do so. Whatever they may get from tone, they aren’t going to get anything of the nuances of a civil explanation of matters.

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      2. I think you’re right in your first sentence. Except — I think they’ve deleted “learn” and “their” from the concept.

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    2. I’ve got the same problem with remembering my mistakes – even 30-40 years later I beat myself over the head with them. Got to the point where I basically started telling myself at the start of the sessions “That was 20-30 years ago. WHY are you beating yourself about them? You didn’t repeat them, stop doing this!”

      Re the marital mistake – oh, hell yeah. Dodged a bullet in the ’80s when I went TDY and the woman ‘borrowed’ my car, and moved halfway across the country. (She’d talked me into putting her name on the title, so it technically wasn’t ‘theft’. See, she ‘WANTED’ to get married, but I wasn’t sure, and she wanted some sort of ‘assurance’ I wouldn’t just bail on the relationship.) She called me a few months later, wanting me to bring her cats (which she left behind) in exchange for the car. (She was a real piece of work before she left – it would have been worth losing the car to get rid of her. Those who say there aren’t any ‘abused husbands’ are just denying reality. Thankfully, we never got married.)

      When I got there (with her nasty-ass cats) she wanted me to desert from the AF and stay with her there. I would have much rather committed seppuku at that point.

      It took a while, but I got back on my feet again and married my lovely bride about 9 years later.

      You can be a victim and wallow in your ‘Oh, poor me!’ misery and live off the sympathy of others – or you can go “I ain’t gonna let the bastards (or bitches) win!” and stagger back on your feet and regain your self-respect one step at a time… like the folks flocking to the Dirty Jobs available in Texas and ND.

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        1. I was mentioning to a friend the other day that it isn’t the women you chase that are the problem, it is the ones you catch.

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  8. Recently released:
    The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle

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    1. Failing well is important, but I *really* dislike that title.

      It’s easy to support that it’s key to success, but pointlessly silly to call it “the” key to success. (Hard work? Luck? “Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?”)

      And there’s a related trait that’s rather helpful to success that is important to distinguish from enthusiastically failing and learning from it. According to http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2013/10/a-producer-of-misery/ this is from Charlie Munger’s 1986 Harvard commencement (and my websearch for a more authoritative quote source is not giving me instant gratification): “If you want to fail in life, learn everything you possibly can from your own personal experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead.”

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    2. There is an engineer’s term of art: designing for “graceful failure”. That is: knowing that there is a small but nonzero chance that components/devices/buildings/… will fail/break down, build them such that they cause zero (or the minimum possible) collateral damage when they do.

      A little bit of that in our daily lives would go a long way… We all have done stupid stuff (or “tried and failed”) — “by damage and shame we become wise” (Dutch idiom, “met schade en schande worden we wijs”). Learning to minimize the impacts of our stupidity on others is another aspect of that wisdom, perhaps…

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      1. Setting the conditions for graceful failure is easily 50% of everything I bring to a group. :D If something goes wrong, I’ve probably got something to keep it from destroying everything.

        (The other 50% is food.)

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  9. What bothers me when I give it more than a passing thought is how so many people seem to make really bad choices repeatedly and get away with it to the point that they feel entitled and victimized when those choices eventually do catch up to them.
    Drunk driving, unprotected sex, texting behind the wheel? Hey, got away with it hundreds of times. Now I have an STD, wrecked my car, killed someone. Poor poor pitiful me.
    It’s not that karma is inevitable, I accept that. It’s that sometimes it can be so frigging slow to act.

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    1. Darn you, Uncle Lar, first I had Queen running through my head due to the title of the post, now I’m stuck with Warren Zevon running through my head.

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          1. Something I’ve learned from a mistake: Don’t use the title of that song as the subject when sending an email to your Dad asking for money. Especially when he knows you’re fighting with your spouse.

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          1. Totally missed that, I guess the Teri Clark remake was so popular I forgot that Warren Zevon originally wrote and performed it.

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            1. Yeah, it was Zevon’s song, and when I think of it his version runs through my head. A number of others had more success with it.

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    2. I recommend The Up side of Down again. In particular the chapter on HOPE which does parole stuff in Hawaii. The rule there is, if you violate a parole condition, you do time. Maybe a couple of days, but EVERY SINGLE TIME.

      It works.

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  10. Mistakes. I’ve made a few. And then again, too few to mention (I did it my way). ;-)

    Okay the one supposed mistake I made was to marry my hubby (all my family were against the marriage). It was the best mistake I have EVER made.

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    1. That’s the question. From whose pov? You should have the right to leave your family once you’ve reached adulthood. You make your decisions and you take the consequences.

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    2. “Egrets, I’ve had a few, and in the end – they taste like chicken…”

      My father’s family was firmly against marrying my mother. She was too ‘high’ for him, supposedly – he was just a farm boy.

      Well, he wanted better than the farm. The marriage only lasted 67 years…

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      2. LOL– so far our marriage has only lasted 21 years and two of my sisters and one brother have been divorced once and a couple even twice since then. ;-)

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  12. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but there are some points where it’s hard to tell if I made a mistake, or if fate just jumped up and smacked me in the face. And yes, other people have told me that I have more than my share of cases of being knocked off my feet through no fault of my own. But I know that’s not the whole reason I’m not in a better position

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  13. I, while living in Madison, WI and attending college there, had been admonished not to use the word ‘stupid’ because it’s discriminatory. More than once. Said very seriously. Can you get your eyes stuck when you roll them?

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    1. I think so. On Tuesday AvWeb had a piece about phrases and terms no longer to be used when giving Sun-n-Fun press announcements, because of aviation writers no longer able to cage their eyeballs, they’d rolled them so hard. ;)

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        1. Just a “wee little” fly-in in Florida. Not quite as large as Oshkosh, fewer storms, equal amounts of sunscreen used. Sort of the unofficial start of fun flying season for those in northern climes.

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    2. It is, you are classifying people. To say some people are different than others is to claim their socialist utopia won’t work.

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      2. Well, yes, some people are different NOW. That is why we must mold them into the New Soviet Man. Then they will not differ in their eagerness to work. Indeed, the very plowhorses will be eager and never weary as they plow.

        (I’m not kidding. One writer of Socialist Realism got his manuscript back with a complaint that the horse plodded wearily instead of being bright and enthusiastic.)

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          1. When dressing the beaten down nags for the Potemkin village, blow pepper up their noses and dabble their fetlocks with gasoline: it makes their heads toss and the feet raise high and makes them prance like they still have spirit.

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      1. I bit my tongue (one person was a TA, and I needed those grades to pass.), but when I told my husband about it later that was the first thing he said. And he grew up in Madison, although his parents are of the practical, self sufficient type.

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    1. Ah, an erudite commenter! You neglected to mention the five lavish catered meals, too.

      Everyone who has suffered from fine literary writing should read Cold Comfort Farm to repair the damage :-D

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      1. I assumed the “nasty” thing she saw in the woodshed was the pile of unsplit wood, with the maul leaning against it.

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      2. Are we talking Stella Gibbons from 1932? I hope so, because that looked fun and I added it to my wishlist…

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  15. I’m not going to list all my mistakes here, because some of you might recognize … well, lets just stick with I won’t.

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      1. You see, when the oracle said “beware the ides of march”, I thought they meant “The Ides of March” felafel shop. Always gave me the runs.

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  16. I know I’ve made mistakes in my life. I live with the results of some of them every day. On the other hand, my life has been remarkably good overall, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. There are a few things I might change, but not many. I’ve also done a large number of things RIGHT, and reap the rewards of those daily, also. The best decision I ever made was marrying the young woman who has been my wife for almost 50 years now.

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  19. The “every person a victim/somebody else is responsible” mentality bugs the heck out of me. I lived in Upstate New York for a few years. One winter, we had snow piled up on both sides of the sidewalk pretty much up to the waist. Then it warmed up. Snow melted into the sidewalk and became a nice puddle. Then it froze solid, making said puddle into an ice rink. I knew it. I’d walked over it the night before, very carefully. I still came out of my house the next morning and started walking down the sidewalk like there was just concrete under my feet. I broke my ankle.

    Several people asked me if I was going to sue. Sue who? Myself, for forgetting the ice? The owners of the two properties (I fell pretty much on the border of two) because their tenants hadn’t salted (I’m one of those tenants)? The makers of my snow boots because they gripped the ice just enough to make my foot not move as my ankle twisted inside the poorly fitting boot (I chose them and wore them for a couple years).

    My mistakes all the way along. It was an ACCIDENT.

    Though it did have some “good” side effects. I lost 10 pounds in a week because I was in a surgical cast – the old fashioned, HEAVY, plaster cast, until they took out the staples and I lived on the second floor. Crutches, heavy cast, and stairs.

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    1. There was a friend of the family who helped out with a martial arts kids’ group—basically being a sparring partner for kids, because he was on the short side. Well, one day he underestimated one girl’s ability and she laid him out, messing up his shoulder. He got a call that evening from the family’s lawyer, asking for his lawyer’s information. He replied that the accident was his responsibility and he wasn’t going to sue. The family, surprised, happened to know a good joint surgeon and gave him a referral, which meant he got better care than if he’d been a jerk about it.

      Sometimes doing the right thing results in better outcomes.

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  20. Just spent a long weekend with extended family at a very nice resort. My ex was there and I treasure the reminder as to why I will never again willingly allow myself to be put in a situation where I cannot simply remove myself from her presence if necessary. I would not call our 20 odd years together a mistake as much as an extremely painful learning experience. My main regret is that it took me so very long to remove myself from what had become a psychological and occasionally physically abusive relationship. There was certainly a time when I tended towards unfounded optimism and the phantasy that I could make things better simply by wishing them so, or by trying really hard with no corresponding effort from the other side. These days, not so much. I’ve learned that the only person you can change is yourself. For others, you simply set your own rules of engagement, and if the other parties will not cooperate or negotiate a binding agreement, you cut them loose.
    Or take them for a soothing walk in the wild woods from which you return alone.

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        1. And in Celtic songs the river Bann is practically the red light district. Best stay away–and if he says he just wants to show you his wee penknife, RUN!

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      2. This is the Australian Aboriginal tradition of Walk About.

        When you have a tribe–really an extended family–and two can’t get along one leaves (this is a very simple version of it). Sometimes the one that leaves comes back, sometimes they join another tribe. Or, being Australia they get killed and eaten.

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  21. There were many bad things about the English “workhouse” (see Oliver Twist etc.) but conceptually I think it is the right approach for society. Essentially the workhouse says “yes you can get a roof over your head and food to live on but it’s bare bones so if you don’t like it find a way out”. I can see a bunch of ways to cushion the effect for the genuine strivers who’ve fallen on hard times or those who genuinely can’t look after themselves (i.e. the ones who 50 years ago were in mental institutions and are now the homeless on our streets) but not cushion the drones.

    Of course it will never happen because there are way too many vested interests sucking off the current welfare teat (from slum landlords to social workers) but it’s a nice dream.

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    1. “Of course it will never happen because there are way too many vested interests sucking off the current welfare teat (from slum landlords to social workers)”

      I would say it is hard to see a smooth way from here to there, which is not entirely the same thing. (See e.g. _Anatomy of Revolution_ (with money or a library card) or Macaulay’s _History of England_ (a marvellous free download from Project Gutenberg).)

      “but it’s a nice dream.”

      Eh, sorta. I could sympthathize with “it’d be better than what we have now” but it’s a “utopia is not an option” choice, not a particularly rosy dream. I’d rather dream that society gets so sane and so much prosperity follows that a modest number of motivated individuals can afford to subsidize basic needs for however many natural-born humans they can find. That’s still not really utopian, but letting Catholic Church side conditions duke it out (through freedom of association) with “they’re so dawwing when they do whatever they want” and “I need authentic living extras, *lots* of extras, for my WWI historical reenactment” (and various other things I can’t begin to predict) seems inherently more benign than how topdown government solutions seem to turn out.

      Anything like that would probably be unable to keep up with some dysfunctional joker deciding to take advantage of all that progress to clone a zillion versions of himself — did I mention that utopia is not an option? — but keeping it fundamentally voluntary would tend to damp various failure modes worth worrying about. See e.g. Rissa Kerguelen.

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      1. You perhaps do not want to hear which of my dreams for solving social ills I consider rosy.

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        1. Oh, I can sympathize. If I were deploying omniscient incorruptible minions to arrange everything, I’d be much more tempted to do various of the things I’m dodging away from in my dream above. My dodge is not so much because I’m a nonjudgmental opponent of first degree aggravated poetic justice, as that I’m more comprehensively cynical and judgmental. In the world as I see it, it’s a very significant risk that institutions that purport to deliver satisfying justice can end up manufacturing at least as much new injustice by empowering and attracting their own breed of dysfunctional people.

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  22. Listening to Bryan Suits on KABC.

    He’s a disabled Army guy– obviously, interested in Hood. (IED)

    He got a lot more details, and laid out a very good case for the shooter yesterday being someone who was pissed that his frivolous attempt at getting a disability rating wasn’t panning out.
    (15 year E4, zero record of interaction while in Iraq, married twice, was being treated for depression symptoms that read like what you’re told to rattle off for a PTSD claim, shooting was at the center those are figured at.)

    Talked to my mom and mentioned that, she pointed out that a lot of families have a strong push for being in the reserve– but now, that means you actually do things, rather than just showing up once or twice a month. Fifteen years in, he was a reservist before 9/11, and I can remember the folks squirming around because (gasp) did you know that being in the reserves means you could be activated and deployed, not just that someone paid for college?!?

    If Suits’ educated guess is correct…those folks were victims of the same failed culture.

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    2. Of course the powers that be will once again ignore that he decided to shoot up a military base that was A GUN FREE ZONE!

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      1. Yep.

        It’ll be about a guy who (IGNORE THAT HE BROKE A DOZEN LAWS TO GET THE GUN ON BASE) bought a gun and shot people.

        Because there’s no way that he’d have, say, been willing to assault a small female MP and take her gun, just for an example. We all know that police of all types have skulls that can’t be dented with a pipe, especially when they THINK someone is a comrade.

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  24. Moved down from here because it’s way too far into the stacking.

    You keep claiming he dumped her, when they weren’t even seeing each other, that I find really hard to support. (In fact you don’t even try to support it, just state it like it is a fact)

    As you’d know if you’d read the story, he says the relationship ended after that, and you’ll notice that the father is the only source for this puff-piece.

    I actually didn’t draw any conclusions, I just was interested enough to spend about five minutes looking at the other news stories on it, finding out the state law and rephrasing exactly what the stories said out of praise mode, and without the assumption that pregnancies are something women are solely responsible for, noticing that by the laws of the state where the kid was adopted, he lost his “rights” by refusing to provide support for his child during pregnancy.

    *****

    Let’s try a parable.

    A guy’s buddy and himself make a low-ball bid on a chance at a puppy from a pure blood dalmatian, by a pure blood Dalmatian. Neither expect to win, but hey it’s fun let’s give it a throw.

    They don’t hang out for a few weekends, and then the buddy who he made the bid with shows up with a slip that says they won.

    The guy accuses his buddy of mind games, suggests that the buddy is pulling a fast one, refuses to provide any sort of support in preparation for when the puppies to show up and “the relationship ends.”

    A few months later, he gets a call from a pet adoption group– his now former buddy has been feeding and caring for the puppies and is now getting them placed, but admitted that the guy also placed a bid on the puppies, but hasn’t been involved at all since they won them.

    The guy says that if the puppies turn out to really be show-quality dalmatians, he’ll take them, but he wants the spots to show up first. Otherwise he refuses to do anything to care for the animals, show proof that they’re what he bid on.

    About the time that a Dalmatian’s spots are supposed to show up, the guy shows up– and throws a fit because the puppies have already been adopted out.

    He demands to see if the puppies are showing spots, and then sues to get them back from the people who adopted them. You see, he’s got a right to them, as an animal owner.

    That’d be silly. The right to the dogs ended when the guy refused his responsibility to care for them– the dogs have a right to the care from their owner.

    ****

    Rights come with responsibilities. If you refuse to fulfill the responsibilities, you lose the rights.

    The kid is the one whose rights have been violated, and should have been protected.

    He has a right to be raised by his parents in a home– both of them refused him that when they had sex with someone they didn’t even live with; sex makes babies, even if the chance isn’t that high.

    He has a right to the physical support of his parents– the father refused him that.

    His father then sued those who fulfilled the obligations that he had refused.

    *******
    *I see you state he was failing to support the mother of his child. As we have both agreed, it is likely that she slept around and neither knew if the child was his, and they weren’t together.

    No, we don’t agree. Especially since the kid DID turn out to be genetically related. In as much as the idiot slept with the ass, she slept around. That doesn’t mean she was the town bicycle.

    Also, again, according to the article that is strongly supportive of him, they were ‘together’ at the time and had simply not hung out ‘in a few weeks.’

    From conception to a missed period is about two weeks.

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    1. Your parable is very twisted (we’ll ignore the age when Dalmatians get spots is younger than weaning age, because I get what you are saying there). I happen to raise dogs, nobody but a fool pays for puppies before they are born, they might put a small amount down to reserve one if there is demand for them, but they don’t pay the owner of the female for them when she is bred, and as the owner of the female I wouldn’t expect them to.

      Both you and the authors of the article have a very different definition of a relationship than I do, if we are living in the same area and haven’t seen or talked to each other in a “few weeks” I wouldn’t consider my girlfriend to be my girlfriend any longer.

      You specifically stated in your previous post that “both of them slept around” so yes I assumed that we agreed she slept around, since strangely enough I assumed she was half of that “both.” So to go back to your parable, I would expect him to pay half (or possibly all if he wanted all rights and she wanted to give the kid up) of the costs when the kid was born and was his. To make your parable fit a little better, it would be more like have a purebred Dalmatian bitch bred to a high-falutin’ Dalmatian stud, but also getting tied up with a Blue heeler. I certainly wouldn’t expect the buyers to pay for the pups until they were born and they could see they were Dalmatians.

      We can see that the woman lied to him repeatedly, yet you expect him to believe her without question and pay for everything because she MIGHT (chances are if she has been sleeping around she doesn’t know herself if she is telling the truth or not) be telling the truth this time. She didn’t want to take any responsibility for the child (and it takes two to tango, while you keep trying to put it all on the guy she was half responsible) and I’m not sure if it was out of spite, if she was a purely psychotic @#$, if she was getting paid to give the baby up, or to give her the benefit of the doubt possibly she thought he would be a poor father and it would be better for the baby to be raised by some couple she didn’t know; but regardless she got rid of the child while leading him to believe that she hadn’t even had it yet.

      Let’s have another parable, say you and your husband have a falling out and split up, and you’re pregnant. It is a difficult birth and has to be taken Ceasarean, and you have complications and are in ICU for a few days. Your husband tells you your baby is in the nursery and doing fine. A couple weeks later you are on the mend and want to see your baby, only to find out that your husband gave the child up for adoption as soon as it was born. He did after all pay for all the hospital bills since you are still on his insurance, so he should have the right to decide what to do with baby without consulting you, shouldn’t he? I mean you could have paid for the operation and few weeks stay in the hospital before you went in to give birth if you really wanted the child, couldn’t have you?

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      1. 1) If people actually do it has no bearing on if they can claim dogs they commited to and then did not fulfill the commitment for

        2) the “both slept around” was a restating of your proposed situation, not the actual case

        3) It is not that unusual for college folks in a physical “relationship” seperated by a half-hour drive to miss a weekend, and thus not see each other for “weeks”

        4) you keep assuming that she was cheating on him, based apparently on the fact that she slept with him

        ****

        You can’t seem to grasp that it does not matter how much of an idiot he’d have to be to stay with her— by not supporting THE KID, he abandoned the kid, and thus lost his claim. Morally, and by the laws of the state.

        ************

        Your C-section parable ignores that I’d spent the child’s entire life up to those few days directly supporting him, while the deadbeat ended the relationship with the mother of his son and provided no support.

        It also ignores that a c-section is an unexpected expense and issue while pregnancy is not, and that a couple of weeks is not four or five months. (I’ve had three c-sections. It never took more than a minute before I was holding the baby, and by “a few weeks” I was off of pain killers….although still not allowed to lift anything.)

        To match the situation, imagine we break up right before I go into labor, and then it’s a C-section– and when it’s done, I leave. No bills paid, no support to the kid for the next several months.

        That’s called abandonment. It does happen, and it results in parental rights being terminated. Even if the one doing the abandoning is female.

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        1. “You can’t seem to grasp that it does not matter how much of an idiot he’d have to be to stay with her– by not supporting THE KID, he abandoned the kid, and thus lost his claim. Morally, and by the laws of the state.”

          You are right, I can’t grasp it, because I don’t believe it is a fact. The KID was still in his mom’s belly, and the mother was not struggling to survive. I cannot see how not giving the lying manipulative mother money, but staying in contact with her and attempting to be there when the child is born (remember she lied to him for weeks about having the child, and yes I keep pounding that point because it makes me see red whenever I think about it) is abandoning it. No way to know if he would have paid for the hospital bill, BECAUSE SHE LIED ABOUT HAVING THE CHILD, although one suspects by how much he spent to get his kid back that he would have. Legally it might be abandonment, although I suspect the fact that the woman willfully deceived him would give him a fairly good case against that (and I suspect had much to do with the legal decision to return the child to him). Doesn’t really matter, I know I and suspect you are arguing right and wrong, not legalities. Abortion is legal too, but we both agree it isn’t right.

          “4) you keep assuming that she was cheating on him, based apparently on the fact that she slept with him”

          Based on the fact that he assumed she was sleeping around (I hesitate to say cheating on him, since I don’t think of them as together when they aren’t talking for weeks) and the fact that except for one or two on the rebound from a serious breakup/divorce I have never known a woman who casually slept with a guy who didn’t sleep with multiple guys.

          The reason I used a couple of weeks in my C-section parable is because that is how long she lied to him and claimed to still be pregnant, while she had already had the child and gave it up for adoption. I understand that modern C-section operations are generally no big deal, but there are occasionally complications, and it was the only scenario I could think of where the man could realistically lie to the mother about the whereabouts and health of the child.

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          1. It doesn’t matter if she was struggling to survive. Failure to support doesn’t stop being failure to support just because someone else does support.

            No way to know if he would have paid for the hospital bill, BECAUSE SHE LIED ABOUT HAVING THE CHILD, although one suspects by how much he spent to get his kid back that he would have.

            You mean that, according to his recounting of what happened, she lied about the time she had the kid.

            The kid he’d refused to support, thus legally ending his parental rights.

            I understand that modern C-section operations are generally no big deal, but there are occasionally complications, and it was the only scenario I could think of where the man could realistically lie to the mother about the whereabouts and health of the child.

            My first one was… really bad. I was still off of everything but motrin in a bit over two weeks, and the Princess slept on my chest every time she wasn’t under the sun-lamp.

            The problem with the example isn’t the details, it’s that it lacks the long term, willful and openly refusing to give any support to the child.

            The guy wasn’t physically prevented from supporting the kid, he refused to do so without extraordinary proof that the kid was his. (If he was so unsure of the girl’s loyalty, he should not have had sex with her.) You can’t refuse to feed a dog because you don’t have a DNA test proving it’s yours, and then get upset when the results come back after it’s been adopted out because you abandoned it.

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            1. Hey people, I think this argument is getting old with more smoke than light. [Frown]

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              2. I don’t know, there seems to be a nice hot fire burning where I’m at. :) But I’ll shut up because it is obvious that we totally disagree on what we both believe are basic facts.

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  25. From Jaberwok up above

    Given that she had the legal authority to kill the child without the alleged father’s knowledge or consent (let alone the child’s), why should he have had any responsibility for it? Women aren’t held responsible for men’s decisions, but men should be held responsible for women’s? That doesn’t sound like “equal treatment” to me.

    It’s twisted, but a successful abortion is functionally the same as the father refusing support to the child during pregnancy; a parent removing support that by nature they agreed to provide the child.

    Difference being that maternal support is more direct, and removing it results in death.

    If you look at some of the rhetoric about abortion, you’ll notice that some of it is even explicit about abortion on demand allowing women to engage in behavior that results in children with the same ability to walk away that a type of man enjoys. I believe the topic has come up before, where I pointed out the male form of ‘slut’ is ‘cad’….

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    1. “some of it is even explicit about abortion on demand allowing women to engage in behavior that results in children with the same ability to walk away that a type of man enjoys.”

      And so the legality should be the same — they say, not noticing that the man can be hounded to the ends of the earth for walking away.

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      1. Which is probably why they draw the line at birth– before paternity tests, it was a LOT harder to prove that a guy had ever had relations.

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