me: hey how long will this take

someone: oh like twenty minutes

me: ok

*an hour later*

me: *clinging to every learned social skill i can think of with the desperate hope my distress and exhaustion doesn’t show*

someone: hey we’re almost done don’t be so crabby

me: *smiling* *internally screaming at this SENSELESS CHAOS*

someone: hey do you want to do [involving time-consuming thing]

me: hey that sounds fun! when were you thinking?

someone: oh we’re doing it right now

me: oh. like. now-now? like right now. like you want me to stop what i’m doing and get up and do this thing with you, suddenly, with thirty seconds of warning. now. like this second. immediately. now?

is this not why people have second children

That said, if you have symptoms of a personality disorder, you should feel free to look into treatments for the personality disorder and see if they work for you. The techniques of DBT, for instance, can be helpful for people who have problems with emotional dysregulation even if they don’t meet criteria for BPD.

This is true.

But it’s also important to note that even trained professionals can have difficulty distinguishing some conditions from each other*. 

In particular, three conditions that are relevant for multiple reasons to the stereotypical tumblr self diagnoser demographic: 

On the one hand, since pros do get these confused, that could be read as a pro-self-diagnosis point in a very simplistic if they aren’t perfect we might as well do it ourselves kinda way.

On the other hand, if even pros get these conditions mixed up, it seems very likely that self-diagnosers do too. 

Some of the non-drug treatments can be helpful no matter what because they’re about coping with symptoms, but it seems like it could be obstructive to be starting with the wrong assumptions about how your problems work and what their source is. 

The drug treatments can be hopelessly contra-indicated but I don’t think that’s a big concern as I don’t think a lot of self-diagnosers are self-medicating in a serious fashion. And if a girl who just thinks she’s depressed tries St John’s Wort and kicks off a mania, that might on balance be a good thing because at least it might help her and/or her pros figure out that it’s bipolar sooner rather than later.

But I also understand that some of the non-drug treatments can be contra-indicated? Sometimes dangerously so, mostly in a ‘BPD reacts to things in ways you wouldn’t expect’ kind of way.

I also expect girls with these conditions, but especially BPD, to often have issues around personal identity - which can’t be helped if you identify with a diagnosis and the respective community that then turns out to be wrong.

So while I respect self-diagnosis for what it does, I do urge people to if they possibly in any way can get professional assessment.

My personal perspective is that I have Autism and ADHD that was misdiagnosed until last year. ADHD can respond incredibly well to drug treatment, really quite quickly. I hate that there were so many years of my life that I spent untreated, and that I am so many years behind on developing the right coping strategies for my conditions. That’s why I say if you possibly can, try to get this sorted out conclusively and professionally as soon as possible.

*Source: My clinical psychologist, it’s also in books but I don’t currently recall their names.

Empirical observation from israel(well, not perfect observation, since buses are subsidized) you always get on the first bus available, whether it’s urban or rural, unless it’s overfull enough to be unpleasant. Even for the subcultured buses.  (Why would you pick your bus for subculture? like, you either get on a bus with people you know and talk to them, or you read something for the whole ride, don’t randomly talk to potentially friendly strangers, ugh)

This makes me think that Israelis:

1. Are less likely to strike up conversations with strangers due simply to proximity. (seems extremely likely)

2. Don’t have strong preferences over the music they listen to on a bus ride. ([Redact]ians will often threaten to get off the bus if the driver plays the wrong artist. During the height of the Gaza-Gully feud*, the Dancehall buses had to split in two for the two opposing subcultures: Vybez Kartel fans and Mavado fans.)

3. There isn’t much variance in the behaviour of Israeli passengers between subcultures. (There is definitely a lot of variance among [Redacted]ian passengers. This is why I generally prefer to ride Christian buses over Dancehall buses, even though I have no desire for Christianity and much prefer Dancehall to Christian music. One set of passengers is quiet and reserved, while the other is loud and often aggressive, and that’s all it took for me to make the choice.)

Even with all this, I’d find it quite strange if Arabs, Haredim, and secular Jews don’t self-segregate into different bus systems.

Side note: Around 10% of [Redacted]’s population is Seventh Day Adventist, but almost everyone else is a different kind of Christian, which leads to another interesting outcome: Most buses stop running on Sundays, except the SDA buses, which instead stop on Saturdays. Since SDAs tend to be more personally religious than other folks, the buses that run on Sundays lean more religious, which everyone has to put up with. This, plus lower traffic, makes Sunday market segmentation harder. I would anticipate the reverse pattern in Israel: That far fewer buses run on Shabbat and that they’re driven by religious minorities.

*If anyone’s wondering what the Gaza-Gully feud was, it was this thing:

“Gaza” refers to a swath of the working-class town of Portmore, home of Vybz Kartel, the man voted, in a recent poll, the island’s most popular dancehall artist. “Gully” is for the Kingston neighborhood (a line of shacks, really, along a stretch of gully known as Cassava Piece) where fellow dancehall star Mavado was born. Initially, the two were musical teammates, protégés of the artist Bounty Killer, but since 2006, they’ve engaged in near-constant lyrical warfare. In track after X-rated track, Kartel has called Mavado a pseudo-gangsta, dubbing him “Mafraudo” and claiming to have had sex with his mother. Mavado retorted that Kartel was, among many other things, a “battyman” (a gay slur, in a country that takes such accusations very seriously), a skin-bleacher, and an atheist. The feud came to a head at a major stage show in late 2008, when the two stood face to face before a rowdy crowd—Kartel decked out in full army gear, Mavado sporting a Lone Ranger–style black mask—and engaged in a heated clash, hurling insults at each other as Kartel carted out a coffin with “R.I.P. Mavado” printed on it. Soon thereafter, Mavado abruptly marched offstage.

After this show—at which fights were said to have broken out between fans, who still argue passionately about whether Mavado or Kartel was the victor—the feud intensified to the point where much of the dancehall community, along with legions of fans, were compelled to decide: Are you with Gaza or Gully? In the Jamaica Gleaner, critic Ian Boyne lamented the fact that entire dance sessions and even neighborhoods were dangerously divided: “If your car is even passing one of these sessions, and you don’t happen to know whether it is Gaza or Gully territory,” he wrote, “you are in danger. You don’t even have the right to play the opposing gangster in your own car or SUV. What a life!” Even the fastest man on earth took sides: At Usain Bolt’s post-Olympic welcome-home party, the gold medalist allegedly marched into the DJ booth and decreed that only “Gaza” tunes should be played at his parties. “And anybody nuh like dat,” he supposedly declared, “can jump inna gully.”

The feud generated such attention that in December 2009—a year cursed by Jamaica’s highest-ever murder rate—the country’s two most-high-profile men intervened. Prime Minister Bruce Golding, who previously called the Gaza-Gully conflict “one example of the negative influences that destabilize us as a people,” requested a meeting with the two artists. Before and after the powwow, which involved four government ministers and a bishop, Mavado and Kartel strutted through the prime minister’s office providing myriad photo ops: shaking hands, laughing like old pals, and modeling shimmering jewels and designer shades.

The real peace decree, though, came just before the meeting, when the two DJs took the stage together at a Kingston concert and Kartel called Mavado “my brother.” The performance was, by all reliable accounts, coordinated by so-called community leader Christopher Coke, a/k/a “Dudus”: current target of a U.S. extradition request on drug- and weapons-trafficking charges and the son of gangster icon Jim Brown, who was the founder of the legendary Shower Posse gang that ran much of Jamaica, New York, and Miami in the ’80s.

[WTF-est lines bolded]

The Caribbean is fuckin’ wild.

Roommate is intensely jealous that he can’t threaten buses with a loss of a customer when they play shitty music.

He can’t?

Do you mean in the sense of “the bus is insensitive to his whims because it isn’t trying to make a profit” or “he is literally unable to get off the bus if it annoys him”?

Alison, my friend, I think you are way underestimating how many bus systems are socialist… You know how many bus systems I’ve experienced, and in zero of them is “choice” a meaningful concept.

have you considered: being so poor that your government is too busy putting out other fires to do literally all the things

I mean our buses and trains are mostly run by private companies now.

It seems that what actually happened is that:

a) none of them play music of any kind (thank god)

b) no company is clearly aiming at a specific demographic, they’re all aiming at everyone they can get. When there is a hint of this (I’m thinking Virgin Trains) it’s only on class/economic lines - there’s a vague thing of ‘more expensive, generally nicer and faster due to only stopping at a few strategically-chosen places’ versus ‘less expensive, less nice and stops everywhere’. This is also the distinction between Megabus and Megabus Gold, which is essentially like having First Class carriages, only in this case its a separate bus.

c) possibly related - there’s little real choice. You rarely get a choice of operators for the same route. So in most cases, you just buy a ticket from this place to this place and use whatever company’s service is doing that route. If you have to change, you’ll often change to another operator. You are unlikely to notice the difference.

d) when you do have choice (generally for long journeys), your options are price- and class-based, as above, but this usually doesn’t mean ‘which bus?’ It means as ‘bus, train or plane?’ (In ascending order of price, speed, quality of accommodations and class associations.)

Wait what the actual fuck?

I just took it for granted that “Jeb” was a name Americans would give children, kind of like “Billy-Bob” and “Mary-Lou”.

This changes everything.

still floored by this revelation. Jeb we hardly knew ya.

Y'all know that Arrested Development is explicitly based on the Bush family right?

I assumed it was short for Jebediah. Which I think isn’t an uncommon misconception, google search for ‘Jebediah Bush’ brings up a lot of hits that all seem to relate to the politician. I associate that name with sorta cowboy-film times and places but it didn’t seem inconceivable that a guy his age would still be called that.

There is a weird sorta dual stereotype of American boys’ names in the UK I think. 

On the one hand, we expect Americans to be more likely to have short modern-sounding names like Chuck*, Chad, Chase, Tyler, Troy, Buck**, Todd, Hank, Dale, Chip**, Brett, Corey, Kyle. 

(* I think this is more a nickname for Charles that isn’t used much outside the US? But it is also some people’s legal name, and I think we do also have a stereotype that Americans are more likely to have a shortening or nickname as their legal given name.)

(** I don’t know to what extent these are likely to be nicknames, not given names.)

On the other hand, I think we also expect some names we would consider quite long and/or old-fashioned to come up more: rarer Biblical names, for instance, particularly those ending in ‘-ah’ or ‘-iah’ (Jebediah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Josiah, Obadiah, Zachariah), as well as surname-as-first-name ones like Jefferson, Finnigan, Langdon, Bryant, Henderson, Harrison, etc.

Of course the surname-as-first-name thing also applies for girls, and also explains*** some of the shorter, modern-sounding names, such as Bryson, Sawyer, Mc- and Mac- names, Brady, etc. 

(*** I believe even the ones that are place names are often surnames as well, and in the US it seems likelier that they were surnames first, and the place was named after a person. In the UK, it may be more likely that it was a place name that became a surname - ‘John of Wakefield’ becoming John Wakefield, etc - which, of course, is how the family of the person the place was named after may have come by it.)

I think this might follow the pattern of many stereotypes? Which is to say that the list of most popular boys’ names (in Anglophone families at least) in both countries over the last century or so would mostly consist of the same old standards like John and Alexander and Thomas and so on, with some shared and some differing trends over which are most popular at which times. But, if you were to isolate the names that have a large gap in prevalence between the two countries - the most distinctively USian names - they would conform roughly to the stereotype.

This is conjecture, though, I don’t actually know. I also imagine doing that would bring up names common to ethnic/cultural groups that are much more numerous in one country than another? A greater proportion of Joses in the US and Mohammeds in the UK, etc.

I mean, looking at my list of Biblical names above, they all look pretty Old Testament, which makes me wonder if there’s a link to the size of the Jewish population - but my instinctive associations for a USian Jebediah or Zachariah is that he’s either a salt-of-the-earth working-class background character in a movie about cowboys or the Gold Rush, or his full name is Jebediah D. Rutherford III and his family made their fortune back when you didn’t have to pay your plantation workers. Neither of which feels very Jewish, as stereotypes go.

(Epistemic status: I know very little about any of this. I just find it interesting. I definitely don’t know how names actually are in the US to any degree beyond ‘I can google the popularity of names’, and I’m only reasonably sure I know what UK stereotypes of USians are like, if that makes any sense. These are the stereotypes I have observed from the media and people I have come into contact with, and as such may not be representative of UK stereotypes about USians in general.)

So fun fact about the name Jebediah—it’s not a real name! As far as I can tell, it was invented by the writers of The Simpsons for Jebediah Springfield. But it sounds enough like real Biblical names like Jedediah and Obadiah that everyone just assumed it was one. The existence of Jeb Bush probably didn’t clarify matters.

The association of “Old Testament” names like Zachariah with salt-of-the-earth Americans goes back, I suspect, to the Puritans, who revived a lot of Old Testament names (along with more oddball religious names like “Praise-God”). But my name books are packed so I can’t double-check this right now.

It’s interesting that you report “a stereotype that Americans are more likely to have a shortening or nickname as their legal given name”. The Baby Name Wizard blog reported that British babies (as of 2011) were much more than American babies to be given nicknames as given names; the names with the highest frequencies in England and Wales relative to the US were Alfie, Olly, and Archie.

I believe “Chip” is a nickname for “Christopher”.

Yes, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that one isn’t true. It fits too well with the idea that USians are more casual and informal, which is something you kind of implicitly get a lot in both UK and US media, and simply isn’t true. Formality norms are just different, and I think we each do things that seem weirdly formal to one another.

(Incidentally, I’d be really interested to know if anyone has encountered a real-life case of a child taught to call their father ‘sir’. It comes up in US media from time to time and I’ve never been sure if this was ever actually a real thing.)

I can confirm several dozen children I knew personally who were brought up in this manner.

So what is this like? Do these households differ in any consistent ways from households where kids call their dad ‘dad’?

Also: 

what do they call their mother?

are they taught to call adult strangers ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am?’

what week is this, july?

- i’m not sure i’ve ever existed until just this moment and i have no idea if i’ll continue existing past it, so i can’t figure out if it’s worth the effort to figure out who i am 

- i see people trying to interact with me but i’m not real so..?

- i just noticed my hands are shaking so i must be scared, cool! that seems like an appropriate emotion to be having

- why did all these primates gather in a room together like this?

- this could literally be any room in the entire world or i could be outside, if it shifted right in front of me at any moment it wouldn’t even faze me

- i might die but ??? 

sound takes ten million years to reach me; I am probably underwater