#and it's because it makes me basically unquotable elsewhere

[wowzask1]

Seethe Part 1, KM x Reader

Warnings: angst, profanity, toxic relationships, not healthy

Word Count: ~ 1.6k

You scrambled through your purse, fishing for your phone for the fourth time tonight. You were angry. No, beyond that. You were fucking furious. This was millionth time Mingyu stood you up. And you'd made up your mind as you sat in the freezing cold outside of your favorite restaurant, — the one in which he had confessed he had loved you, that it would be the last.

He hadn't texted, he hadn't called, hadn't nothing. He didn't even read your array of texts. Did he even care about you? Was it this easy for him to disregard you that he couldn't even take a few seconds of his time to reply?

The sound of giggles and snickers took you out of your trance. You glanced to your left. There was a couple walking towards the restaurant's entrance, hands interlocked and eyes filled with fondness. They looked like they were in love. Your heart hurt. You looked away, careful to not stare for too long. You hoped they wouldn't think you were some sort of creep. 

The hostess had refused to let you in, even with the reservations paid full and under YOUR name. She quote, "Miss, your whole party must be present in order for us to seat you," unquote. In which you relied,

"I'm sorry. Could you make an exception? I don't understand. You're still receiving the deposit for both of us. My boyfriend is just running a bit late.. can't you just seat me? I'll even pay extra. It is freezing out here," You pleaded.

I mean would one unoccupied chair really be that detrimental to a michelin, million dollar restaurant?

She hadn't budged. Instead, She huffed, clearly annoyed. "Look, ma'am I'm sorry that your boyfriend stood you up, but that's your problem not mine. Okay? Now if you'll execute me I have other people to tend to. Goodnight." And of course she couldn't wait to leave your eyesight before dramatically rolling her eyes.

Ouch. She was right, and you knew it. Maybe that's why it hurt even more. Because it was the truth. Because you were pathetic.

This was your last straw. Your feet were starting to numb from your six-inch red bottoms, the ones he had gifted you the last time he couldn't make it last time he left you in the cold. Even worn them he still managed to tower over you.

Kim Mingyu was a busy man. You knew that. He knew that. Hell, the whole world knew it. So it was expected for him to be busy all the time. You understood this. Yet you still chose to fall for him. You chose to be in this relationship. The promise ring that rested on your finger said as much. Now that was undoubtedly your fault. Still, you didn't expect your lover to basically ignore you, to pretend you didn't exist.

You both promised to put in the effort, make your relationship work, to communicate. Clearly, only one of you meant that.

You haven't seen him in 9 months. You both planned to meet several times prior, but of course that was interrupted by his demanding schedule. And you understood. Well, at least you would have, if he would've told you.

Everyday you you texted him, and everyday he replied late. Some days he wouldn't even bother to. On the very rare occasion that he answered yours calls, he was elsewhere. Your calls would last for a few minutes, before he would have other pressing matters to tend to.

When he couldn't meet you the first few instances, he would call you up, apologizing, explaining himself, and it would end with you two falling asleep to each others voices. Now he would just send you something expensive, in place of an apology.

And you could imagine the pain you felt in your heart when he would hang up your phone call only to receive a notification of his ongoing livestream. Or to see yet another video of him flirting on a fan call. You can't not say you were jealous of how much attention he have to his fans, but that would just be a sad excuse of the truth. In verity, you wish that he paid as much attention you as he did them, if not more. Was that too much to ask?

It was no doubt your relationship was falling apart. Three years, you thought. Three years for nothing.

You wondered how low he thought of you. Did he think you were some sort of loyally blind  dog? A dog that would follow its owner wherever he went, even if it was towards a burning building, it's impending death?

You opened the camera roll on your phone. And there was your reflection. Your face was swollen, hair undone, cheeks drained of color from your future frostbite. Your eyes were starting to sting. Fuck. It was coming, and you knew it. You were not about to have a meltdown in front of the humongous window which behind sat a floury of people.

I have to get out of here. You wiped your tears before they could even fall.

ʕ•̫͡ʕ•̫͡ʕ•̫͡ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ

The ride home was the worst. You were huddled in the corner of your Uber, sniffling and trying your hardest not to break. And clearly you hardest was not good enough, which was apparent through the visibly uncomfortable expression painted on your Uber's face.

After what felt like multiple, excruciating hours, you finally arrived to the entrance of your apartment building.

"T-thank you," you croaked, throat dry. You were dehydrated from your overflow of tears. The Uber mumbled nothings and drove away, racing to get away from you. Geez. Were you that unpleasant to be around?

You scurrily walked whilst rummaging through your purse. The only thing that could soothe your evening was your warm bed and takeout.  You couldn't wait to — you felt something grab at your arm.

"Seriously?! I'm not in the mood for this. Abduct me another time you piece of —" You tried to shake off whoever gripped your arm. In great impatience, you finally look up at your left. Your eyes widened, and mouth gaping at the man before you.

Mingyu.

Kim fucking Mingyu.

Suddenly, at that moment, all the self-pity you felt somehow dissipated. And your wallowing sorrow conformed to rage. Hot, red, burning rage. Your composure cracked.

"Hah! Are you fucking kidding me right now? Now you decide to show up? After making me wait in the freezing cold for an hour? What do you take me for?" You shoved him off.

"Fuck, baby I can explain. I'm so sorry. I just got caught up in  a meeting, and —,"

You scoffed. "Oh wow. Really? All it's been these days is caught up. Caught up in this, caught up in that, fucking hell Mingyu. When are you never caught up in something."

"That's not fair Y/N. You know how busy I am. I didn't choose to be late."

"Late? You weren't just late. You didn’t even show up!" You could tell he had something to say, but you weren't finished,

"And you know what's not fair? The fact that my boyfriend puts in no effort in our relationship. And I'm left looking like a fucking idiot. I’m not just one of your fan girls, Mingyu. I’m your girlfriend for crying out loud!”

"Are serious right now? How could you even say that? I have a priorities Y/N. I cant just abandon them the moment you call, okay? I'm not the only person who suffers through my actions," he scowled.

"Hah. You're right. So what does that make me? Am I just a fucking burden to you then?" You were absolutely livid.

"Y/N. For fucks sake. Don't play stupid. You know what I meant —,"

"You know you could've called me right? You could've texted me, at least gave me a heads up. But I guess I'm not a "priority", huh Mingyu?," you questioned, getting even more heated up by each passing second.

He rubbed his temple, heaving out a breath.

Oh. Seriously? He was irritated? What a fucking joke.

"I tried, alright? My phone fucking died. I would've called if it didn't."

"Oh, did it? Was your phone dead the last few months too. Cause it sure seems like it.” You crossed your arms, hoping to find warmth in your own embrace.

"Y/N, I am trying my best here! Why are you being so damn difficult. I don't want to fight right now. I'm tired, alright? Can we just head inside and talk about this some other time? Please," he urged.

No. Not this time, you thought. No fucking way. You were tired too. Tired of this bullshit. Tired of burying things deep. And tired of feeling sorry for yourself.

"Well maybe your best isn’t enough for me,” you shot. “I’m done.” You stormed off, rushing to your door. You couldn't let him see you break. You refused to.

Mingyu’s eyes widened.

"What are you —," it took him no time for him to follow after you.

Once again, he grasped your hand as you were about to open the door. Only this time his grip on you was tightened. He spun you around and pinned you to your door. Your hands were clasped together and constrained.

You looked glared at him. “Let me go, Mingyu. I’m serious.”

"Don't walk away from me." His tone was stern, his voice hoarse. He was breathless and pissed. You could tell he was fuming. The veins on his hands and neck appeared more evident. His eyes glowered down at you. Though it was delivered as a command, it sounded like plea.

"For the last time, let me go. You don't wanna talk? Then we won't. Ever, even." His grip on you only tightened. Shit. He didn't respond. He just stayed quiet.

"Let go of me Mingyu! It fucking hurts." You true to writhe your hands away from his grip, but it was no use. He was much stronger than you. "If you don't let go of me, I'm going to fucking —,"

His lips were on yours. His kiss was rough, tense. You could feel the unease. But you couldn't give in. If you did, the what would it lead to? Would things go back to what they were? You didn't want that.

When you didn't kiss him back, he stopped. He looked in your eyes, desperation in his features. This is all that you need. But you didn't want to go back to before. You wanted change.

"Y/N. Please." He leaned in again, mere centimeters away from your lips. He was breathless and so, so close. You wanted him. You needed him. But, you had to fight against it.

And just when you thought you had it all figured out and mind made, his lips latch onto yours. And in the end you couldn’t resist it, because your body betrays you, and you kiss him back.

Part 2

#seventeen #kim mingyu #kim mingyu smut #seventeen carat #kim mingyu x reader #toxic relationship #carat

[nachosncheeze]

3x13 Thoughts

For being such a good episode, this one is also surprisingly just. so. icky.

I like Nas as a character overall, but the subtext of the interactions/dynamic among her and Jeller in this episode always left me feeling gross. I feel bad-ish for Nas, because it's made pretty clear here that she really had feelings for Weller... but then, before she made a move, she had a whole radioactive lie detector to tell her unequivocally that Jane loved him, and his man-tantrum and everything he did thereafter to tell her that he wasn't over Jane, either.... Everybody makes mistakes, I guess. I have to believe that she didn't mean to come off quite so patronizing to Jane when she first walked into their flat, or at the end of the episode, but whatever her intentions were, it kind of came off that way, which just made everything else about the trio dynamic so much more uncomfortable. (kudos to Archie for playing the double-edge so well, though.)

Then there's Jane. She's in a bad spot; she's trying to mend her marriage and her daughter doesn't want to talk to her, and the woman who once dragged her back in fresh off the torture circuit, irradiated her, and threatened to send her back to the CIA - while sleeping with her husband in what is now her apartment and possibly even the same bed - has just turned up unannounced, seemingly on their day off. Then her idiot husband puts on nice clothes and wanders off with his ex at a party, leaving her - the person who, you know, not just his spouse here but has basically always been his field partner even when they actively kind of hated each other - by herself. That's all got to bring up a few things, and at the worst possible time, too. No wonder she's channeling Lady Dour of Dourton Abbey.

This episode feels like the final end of Fewer Fucks Jane from earlier in the season, too. Lady Dour feels very immediately-post-CIA Jane, and by the final scene in the coffee shop she's back to something much more like awkward season 1 Jane. It's a completely relatable shift for the character given the circumstances and although I'm not in love with seeing some of her spark go to bed for a bit, I love the progressive way Jaimie played it from around about the end of the Rossi mission/birth certificate reveal, chipping away at 'new Jane' bit by bit up to this moment. She's just less brusque now; she's reevaluating.

Speaking of characters returning to season 2 personalities, Weller. Ugh. He seems awfully at ease with Nas, falling immediately back into "leaders/equals" mode, side by side, leaving everyone else (*cough*Jane*cough*) trailing behind. There's Nas' pointed "Jane and you seem very happy", and the idiot confesses that "We're not, but we're getting there." (Note: I've seen several posts at the time heard the line as "We are; we're getting there" but that's not what I heard, and I checked the subs on both Netflix and iTunes. Please don't come for me :P) We find out that she ghosted him when he reached out for help while Jane was being hunted (although she's apparently over it and ready to be old pals now the minute she needs help, hmm...). His intuition and absolute faith that it was her that took the device, the affectionate way he chuckles when he tells Patterson and Rich that it was her. That flirty phone call at the end, while Jane was out elsewhere. He didn't blink at all on finding out that Nas had quietly acquired and was studying a whole new set of naked pictures of his wife (you'd think this might remind a person, at least a little, of that time she held back for like a whole year or whatever, secretly watching them while Mayfair got killed and Jane was violently dehumanized?? but I guess not *sips tea*). And he had nothing to say at all that her quote-unquote limited "I'm not NSA, my contacts wouldn't have been any help to you [to find Jane]" resources are suddenly good enough that she's able to dig up info on his stepdaughter's family that even Patterson hadn't found.

And WHY does he look so confused when Jane hits on him at the end of the mission?! You've been a bit rude all evening my dude and yet the hottest woman at the party is shamelessly looking you over and planning to take you home you should not need subtitles or flash cards or any further explanation to figure this out!!!

Anyway, not every past flame is as cool and supportive as Allie, and this whole thing would have been an awkward ex situation even without their fucked up history, but the fact that "their history" involved literal murder, torture, and blackmail really dials that up to 11. And here's Kurtis "boners to besties" Weller smiling through it all, leaving Rich to check in on his wife.

Speaking of which, I LOVE that Rich found a way and the earliest opportunity to separate Weller and Nas. xD It was an uncharacteristically subtle approach for him - noticing Jane was alone and approaching on the guise of dropping truth bombs, then failing to lighten the mood with a stupid self-preening joke, and then smooshing Jeller back together, all without specifically calling attention to the distance between the two of them. This is one of those moments I feel like there's an unspoken kinship and understanding between our Butterscotch Buddies. Good job, Rich, good job. :D

At the end of the day, I'm not sure if Weller was actually clueless about all the subtext (which would make him a pretty shit investigator tbh) or if he's just willfully pretending nothing was happening (which would REALLY be early season 2 Weller vibes). But whatever the case may be, the whole thing felt gross and crappy for everyone involved. Ew.

#wtf kurt #i mean yeah we didn't want him to just immediately act like everything's fine but this is not the way to go about it my guy #(i've borrowed the tag bc i know casting shade on weller is unpopular) #rich dotcom - dedicated co-captain of the SS Jeller #thank you take2 for your 'stop flirting with your ex' gif it was deeply necessary #honestly roll on the rest of the season lol #blindspot #blindspot 3x13 #blindspot thoughts #blindspot rewatch 2022 #blindspot rewatch #blindspot s3 spoilers #i was tryna format this but i gave up bc wth tumblr #this is not ms word this shouldn't be like i moved a picture #butterscotch

[formulatrash]

Sport is political. Like, everything is political but you can’t look at a sport where 99% of people involved are white, purportedly straight, cis men and be like, “this not political” because otherwise you’re not even looking at the thing. It is what it is and you can choose to be like, “I enjoy this problematic thing” - hell yeah, I do that with the whole of motorsport! 

But also: I would like it to be better and I’m happy to tell it so, y’know. You can look at the thing and be like damn bitch, I fucking love watching overpaid white, straight, privileged men go zoom zoom that shit sends me absolutely feral and that’s like. That’s ok. But if you remove the context of overpaid, white, straight, privileged men then you’re just living in a weird reality where you willingly do not see things as they are.

I was thinking about this this morning cus a charming fellow journalist (allegedly, personally I have never heard of them) sent me some hate mail about And We Go Green and I was like, stick it up your arse motherfucker. Their beef was that by flagging the environmental element of Formula E I was “making it political” well, yeah. Because it is. 

It’s political that we haven’t had major electric vehicle development before, it’s political that it’s considered taboo to bring up the automotive industry’s massive role in global warming. It’s political that it appeared at this point in time. It’s political all the German manufacturers flooded in over diesel gate. It’s political it tries to aim for a new audience because existing motorsport fans are considered too alienated by the idea of EVs, indoctrinated to the church of V12s. It’s not, like, extra political credit to say the planet’s dying. 

It annoys me, from a journalism perspective, that in motorsport everyone vaunts themselves on truth-telling and objectivity while peeling out quotes from PR-observed media sessions given by press-trained athletes with a contractual gun to their heads. Like, that’s barely journalism, that’s more like PR.

Idk why other people become journalists but for me, back when I went into the field (rather than motorsport) it was because I wanted to be a war correspondent so I have all these like, pesky fuckin ethics and shit that motorsport considers very gauche and unprofessional of me. Like hell yeah I’ll say Lando has nice tits and then also that Carlos should not be racist and perhaps it’s fucked up that there are barely any women over the age of 25 employed in motorsport, let alone driving the cars.

I love motorsport so much  and like, it’s fucked up and people in it do fucked up stuff - hell, I’m problematic as shit - and like. That’s kind of ok so long as we’re all like, trying to be better and acknowledging the situation. You don’t have to cancel shit to be like “damn, this thing is flawed but it absolutely does it for me and I think there’s worthwhile stuff to it” but equally if someone says to me, like, yo motorsport is extremely bad because it is basically just cavorting around on what’s left of the atmosphere then I would have to be like “mmm, true but I have somehow reconciled myself to this so I respect your position and understand my own.”

anyway I’ve completely forgotten what my original point was other than people shouldn’t send me shitty emails probably if they don’t want a shitty email back

#someone asked why I swear a lot on Tumblr btw #and it's because it makes me basically unquotable elsewhere #if you were wondering why I go for the really idiosyncratic writing style here

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: INFP with social anxiety here. I have a therapist but we're focusing on some other issues right now. In the meantime, I was wondering if you had some advice for me. I know you're not a professional (you say that multiple times in your posts) and of course I'm not asking you for a fix for my social anxiety with this - I'm just asking your help to understand what part my cognition could be playing in all of this cause I'm really curious.

Basically, my problem is the time frame right BEFORE I meet someone and, sometimes, immediately after. I don't really have problems socializing in the "middle", if you get what I mean; I'm easily adaptable and once I'm relaxed, once I realize no one is there to attack me, my mind starts getting ideas and I kind of know what to say, even though I'm a bit out of practice and I still have problems convincing other people of my emotions (like, mirroring their emotions so that they know I agree with them and stuff like that; for some reason they never ---believe me when I say it with words).

When I make plans, anyway, and I still haven't met the person, I get this anxiety: like I would rather stay home than go there because it's going to be "boring" and I'm probably going to feel like an idiot or make some sort of social gaffe. I mean, I do kinda get bored after a while anyway, but I also know I tend to overestimate that level of "future boredom" to the point it hurts me to even think about showing up and forcing myself to think of stuff I can-- say.

I get anxious because I start thinking about the way people used to treat me in the past (I've always been the black sheep of my family and/or my social circles and I vividly remember some bad things they used to say to me) and I start worrying that, deep down, they still think of me like that and they're never going to forget that "preconception of my identity" and open their eyes to who I am now, or I guess to who I've always been.

I do realize it doesn't make much sense, this "who I ----really am" part - but I've always had the impression that I was a bit different than the "me" they percieved, maybe because after many, many years of being accused of "selfishness" and "inability to tune in with the emotional atmosphere" I learned that in order not to ruin the "social mood" I should've adapted myself to the group - but the problems is that I suppressed "myself" in the meantime (and with myself I mean, like, my real interests, the things I'd like to talk about for ages without-- having to be interrupted or looked down on because, quote unquote, "ok, cool, but we don't really care").

I understand now that if they don't give me hints of actually caring about the subject I should stop rambling like a fool, but this is making me feel like I have nothing "useful" to offer them and therefore bringing the anxiety I'm struggling with. It makes me scared that I'll never be able to be myself around them because of the "social rules" I want to respect to be accepted, & to make----it worse I'm out of practice like I said before and sometimes it just gets too awkward and I want to get out of there.

I bet I'm doing something wrong because friendships and relationships in general are not supposed to be "boring", am I right? And yet until I don't get distracted by the actual conversation, I feel like it's going to be really boring and uncomfortable and sometimes going through it is SO horrible... most of the time I end up making up some excuse to go home earlier and talk----my internet friends instead (thank God for the internet!!!!). Anyway, thank you if you'll answer! And have a good summer vacation c:

-----------------------

The first thing I notice is that your thought process bears a very striking resemblance to many INFJs who struggle with social anxiety due to poor Fe development (see past posts). As a general rule, if I have good reason to suspect that someone might be mistyped, I won't provide info about function development until they undergo a proper type assessment. Otherwise, they might adopt the wrong method of improvement.

You say you want to understand what part your cognition plays in the social anxiety you experience, so I will mention the aspects of your cognition that seem most significant:

1) No Chill: You overthink things to an extreme, to the point of self-sabotage, perhaps even creating a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e. when expecting the negative actually makes the negative happen). Overthinking means that you're not confronting the real obstacle getting in the way of your socializing. You're constantly trying to envision, imagine, or predict what will happen in a social interaction? WHY? What's the point of that overthinking? It's how you avoid confronting your fear head on.

2) Insecure: Your "predictions" are too often faulty because of being tainted by your underlying insecurities. You're insecure about being attacked, being accused, being misjudged, doing something wrong, being deemed of no value or unworthy of care, not being accepted or acceptable, dying of awkwardness, feeling bored, feeling uncomfortable, and on and on. You've described your thought process in detail. But nowhere do I see you confronting your insecurities, digging deeper into them, in order to understand the root of them. Insecurities are a manifestation of fear.

3) Control: Irrational anxiety is oftentimes about trying to control things that you shouldn't be trying to control or cannot have any control over - it wastes mental energy and leads to futile behavior. As long as you're trying to control social situations and their outcome, you are either trying too hard to make reality match up with your expectations or you're fumbling whenever reality unfolds outside of your expectations - you become rigid and frail. You claim to be "adaptable" but everything you say after that only proves you don't know the meaning of the word. You can't handle unpredictability, hence, the attempt to be in control by trying to "predict" everything. Do your attempts to control actually work? Do they help or hinder you? If they mostly hinder you, then isn't it time to change your strategy? Anxious people often believe that having more knowledge or control is the answer to their fear. But, in your case, the huge cost of being controlling is being incompetent. What's worse, the fear is still right there running the show.

4) Unresolved Trauma: You attribute your troubles to your past. Fair enough. Growing up in a social environment that did not respect and appreciate you is painful, even extremely traumatic for certain personality types. It also makes people too hungry for validation. It's natural that you wouldn't want to feel the pain of it again. However, if that pain remains unexamined and unresolved, you will unconsciously keep seeking to resolve it, which means re-enacting the trauma over and over again throughout life. The proof? Every time you meet someone, your first stance is defensive, because the first thing that comes into your mind is that you don't want to be attacked or invalidated. That old pain is running the whole show because you are deeply afraid of experiencing it again, yet you don't realize that YOU are the one calling it back up and rehashing it. What are you doing to resolve the pain rather than indulge the fear?

5) Self-absorbed: Social anxiety makes people too absorbed in their own thoughts, feelings, hopes, and expectations. They are too preoccupied with what they want, what will happen, how they will be perceived, how they might make a mistake, how they might be attacked, etc. This means they're not truly present with people, so the relationship can't really go far. Driven by fear and insecurity, they are always behind a wall, too difficult to reach.

Even if you happen to meet the right people, do you make it easy for them to befriend you? It seems that you can't open up with ease, you can't go with the flow of the other person when they don't live up to your expectations, you can't keep your emotions in check and misjudge situations, you get bored when it's not about you, you run away instead of making things better. Looking at yourself objectively from the outside, would you want to be friends with someone like that?

If you want to have good friends, you first have to BE a good friend. You want care, love, and validation? We all do. The best way to receive it is to be the first to give it. By being more aware of other people's needs and doing more to show that you care about them, you put them in a better position to care about you and meet your needs in return. This is the difference between actively trying to "make" a friend vs passively wishing for a friend to drop into your lap.

Being a friend isn't about what "value" you have, as though you're some kind of object being appraised and sold. Being a good friend is quite a simple matter of putting out the energy to care and show that you care. When you meet someone who's moved by your care, they will care for you in return. When you meet someone who's unmoved by your care, figure out the real reason why, in order to determine whether you should keep trying or put your energy elsewhere.

You never really know who you'll hit it off with. One of my favorite experiences in life is making a friend in the unlikeliest of places. As an adult, meeting new people is a numbers game. All you can do is keep pushing yourself to meet new people. The more people you meet, the greater the odds of clicking with someone. If you're looking to meet like-minded people, go to places that are likely to have people who share your interests. If you don't hit it off with someone, simply move along. You don't have to be friends with everyone, do you?

Yet, you take every little social interaction so seriously that each step is like life or death - that's what makes socializing tiring, laborious, and unfun. Why not enter into every social interaction with an open mind and an open heart? Why not truly go with the flow, without having to undergo the repetitive ritual of predicting what will happen or fussing over what did happen?

6) Poor Emotional Intelligence: This point is the common thread that runs through the previous points, which is why I keep repeating the word "fear". You have extremely low tolerance for negative feelings and emotions, which means you really need to work on learning how to deal with your emotional life better. Any little sign that things won't turn out the way you want and you start to panic, overthink, blame, or flee. Why do you recoil from yourself and your own feelings and emotions? Why are you so easily shaken by boredom, awkwardness, invalidation, failing, other people's negativity, etc? Why do you react so badly to these things (when others just brush it off and keep going)?

7) Low Self-Awareness: It's not enough to just name the fear ("I'm afraid of____"). Does the label explain why you have this particular fear and not some other fear? It's not enough to blame the past ("It's because of ____"). Why did someone else with a similar past as yours not develop this fear? To get to the root of fear, you have to identify, in exact terms:

what aspect of you has to change to overcome the fear

what aspect of your identity has to "die" (i.e. be let go of) in order to evaporate the fear

Until you answer the fear properly, it won't go away.

#social anxiety #anxiety #fear #emotional intelligence #mental health #ask

[96thdayofrage]

The #ADOS critique of Kamala Harris receives a treatment not unlike that of ultra-processed foods. And in much the same way that a microwaveable dinner is meant to minimize the consumer’s culinary labor, the prepackaged description of #ADOS’s position on Harris’s background seems crafted solely to discourage a reader from devoting any time and mental effort to researching and taking seriously what the #ADOS political project actually sets out to do. The most recent example of these freezer section-style ‘analyses’ of #ADOS comes courtesy of Matthew Chapman, a reporter at Raw Story who yesterday tweeted, “FYI, to all my white followers who may or may not know what I’m talking about: ADOS (American Descendants of Slaves [sic]) is a movement that basically seeks to exclude the ‘wrong’ Black people from civil rights spaces—ie anyone who can’t trace their lineage directly to a Southern plantation.”

What inspired Chapman to achieve new heights of numbskullery with that total mischaracterization of #ADOS was—in his words—their “posting anti-Harris content questioning her ethnicity and heritage,” and the group’s “nonsense claims…that [she] ‘isn’t Black'”. This activated something of the helicopter mom in Chapman, who evidently feared that his white followers might be rendered dumbstruck when confronted with a particular group of black people making the argument that descriptors such as ‘Black’ or ‘African-American’ have become woefully insufficient in their ability to meaningfully capture their specific, centuries-long experience of targeted exclusion in the United States. “While black activists are used to this,” Chapman informs us, “a lot of white voters might have never seen it before and not know how to respond to it.” And so he sought—as so many before him have also sought—to tube feed his white readers a stunningly reductive and deliberately misleading rendering of #ADOS.

Perhaps what Chapman really feared, though, was not the possibility that his white followers wouldn’t join him in denouncing #ADOS, but that those white people might actually begin considering what it would mean to belong to a group for whom the ability to partake in the bounty of opportunities throughout America’s history had been chattel slaveried and Jim Crowed out of their lineage by reason of their ancestors’ Blackness. That these white people might begin to consider Blackness not as a skin color that occasions identical discrimination in America, but as the heritable mechanism of that total exclusion, a thing that is suffered by one specific community of black people and that is naturally circumvented entirely by all others who arrive from elsewhere. Maybe the fear was that if they gave ADOS a fair hearing they might begin considering the injustice of the bagginess of a term like ‘Black’ in 2020. How while Blackness is nowadays conceived as a shared burden among melanated individuals, it is in fact ADOS alone who know and live the full cost of Blackness in America; how it is still being absorbed into their bloodstream even now, centuries since its vicious invention, because Blackness in America was indeed designed to have that delayed, transmissible property, like a slow-release capsule of crushing disadvantage.

Maybe, above all, these white followers might consider how unspeakably offensive it would be to ADOS to watch someone such as Harris—someone who ascended to high office while shamelessly inhabiting the profundity of a centuries-long struggle that was never hers to claim—publicly repudiate the idea of ever doing a single thing to benefit that particular community. Maybe white people wouldn’t wonder why ADOS label her a squatter in their community; maybe then it’s like way less that ADOS is quote-unquote purity umpiring and more that they’re just pointing out the fucking obscenity of someone who is happy to cash in on the accolades and distinctions that attend barrier-breaking Blackness while being equally content to ensure that the real and enduring consequences of Blackness in America persist without interruption among the great assemblage of those whose ancestors’ experience in this country is apparently just a mere political expedient.

Ask yourself: how would you respond? Tell me you would not be enraged. Take a second and posit yourself and your parents and your kids in that place of utter neglect and indignity, and seriously ask yourself: how else could you possibly respond when you are being told to shut up and celebrate a(nother!) useless substitute for what seems your family’s permanent brokenness?

[tough-bit-of-fluff]

Prompt #3 - Muster

“And THAT’s the story of how Turnip, Liv, Kail, and I, stopped the quote unquote bandit attacks on traveling merchants and their chocobos, vanquished a massing army of undead, and secured the supply of feed for all chocobos everywhere but especially ours!” Alyona seized her mug from the bar beside her and took a triumphant swig of cider as she finished her tale. Her pink tail swished happily. A tidy, self-contained story of heroics with neither casualty nor rampant collateral damage was not always so easy to come by.

The woman behind Aly let out a sigh of relief. The petite lalafell was waiting for a blind date at the bar counter, and had gotten caught up in the story in spite of herself. Focused on the exploits of the heroes, she had let her ice melt in her drink, which she now eyed skeptically. It was watery beyond recognition, but she was on a strict budget. She smoothed her dress, telling herself the cost had been worth it, to wear a shade and style so similar to the Sultana. She sipped at her drink, eyed the clock on the wall, and grimaced, though whether more at the late hour or the watery cocktail’s taste could not be said.

The man two seats in front of Aly let out a sigh of relief at the story’s conclusion as well. He was a feline-featured miqo’te, like Alyona, but his ears were folded back beneath his cowl in annoyance, and what little could be seen of his face looked deeply unhappy. “Thank the bloody Twelve,” he muttered, just loud enough to be overheard. “I thought she’d never quit her yammerin.’” 

This tavern patron seemed to be waiting for something as well, though what, other than the cessation of Alyona’s speech, was unclear. He ordered himself another drink, perhaps as a reward for having endured the boisterous bar talk. Although there was ample seating elsewhere, he remained firmly planted on his stool. The scowl, likewise, remained planted on his face.

The man directly in front of Aly was none other than Ramius Raske, an inventor of some notoriety, and her new associate. He chuckled, shaking his head in bemusement at the tale’s resolution, jotting a final note into his leather-bound journal. “And all that in answer to the question, ‘So what do you like to do for fun?’” The story ended, he closed the small tome and replaced it carefully in the depths of the satchel beside him on the bar counter. He had listened gamely and intently all the while, Aly noticed, while still keeping an eye to his surroundings. Aly liked that.

Ramius swept his fingers through his fiery hair, and shrugged a shoulder. “Well, with the whole ‘zombie horde’ element, one certainly couldn’t say that it wasn’t an adventure.”

Alyona nodded. “Right, malevolent animate corpses equals adventure, everyone knows that.”

“That’s just basic monster math,” Ramius agreed, raising his cup slightly as if to indicate “I’ll drink to that,” and then doing so.

Aly broke into a broad grin. “You get it!” she enthused. “This guy gets it,” she announced to the nearby patrons. The lalafellin woman giggled, curls bouncing prettily.

The cowled miqo’te hissed something under his breath about how someone was going to get it. Ramius raised an eyebrow, but Alyona was unbothered, seeming to take no notice.

“So,” said Ramius, “Refresh my memory. Kail is the...captain, of the Four Winds?”

Aly shook her head. “Nope, he’s the Head Pirate for sure, though.”

“An esteemed position, no doubt,” Ramius said, straight-faced.

Aly nodded emphatically. “No doubt! Norah’s right-hand dude! A real go-getter! He’s a Getter of Things. And of injuries!”

The Midlander chuckled again. “I believe I’ve filled that role myself a time or two, unfortunately. The injury part,” he added quickly, seeing Aly’s eyes widen. “Not the ah, Head Pirate aspect.”

He rubbed the back of his neck and cleared his throat. “So, this Norah. She’s the captain? Flies the ship?”

“Norah is the captain, but Argent flies the ship. He’s a teacher you know, an educator, which is very good because I am veeeery new to the fast-paced fun-filled field of navigation as far as I know, and I am looking forward to benefiting from all his years of experience. I will try try try! I’m a Try-er.” Aly beamed happily as she took a drink. She put down her empty tankard and took on a thoughtful expression.

“Norah is...our Must-er, I think.”

“Your...muster?” Ramius propped an elbow on his satchel, rested his chin on his hand. The cowled miqo’te growled, perhaps because of the man’s marginally closer proximity.

“Yeah like...she knows what must be done. Even if it seems difficult it won’t sway her. I bet lots of people said, don’t sell all your stuff and buy an airship! Live a comfy life! And she said, ‘No! Nein! I must! Baby I was born to fly.’” Ramius had never met Norah, but he was already reasonably confident the woman had never said such a thing. He did not interrupt, however. “And I bet other people said to her, don’t kiss a sky pirate on the lips, you don’t know where that’s been! But she knew she must do that sometimes too! And she was right, Ramius, don’t you see? Because under that cool mask-goggle-combo-dealie, Kail is totes kissable-looking, and it’s important for our rag-tag plucky protagonists to appeal also to an older demographic! We should, nay, we MUST!” Alyona slapped her fist into her open palm, as if that was explanation enough.

Behind her, the lalafell began to sniffle, and then to weep. Aly whirled around, flailing her hands in the air, a look of confused panic on her face, as Ramius patted his pockets for a handkerchief.

“I-it’s okay!” Aly babbled. “You can still like the ship even if you’re still young and cute! Or, or does it contradict your head-canon? There’s always fanfiction, it’s as real as you want it to be! Imagine yourself with everybody, I certainly do!” 

Ramius coughed, handing a clean white hankie to the tiny, tear-stained woman.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” she sobbed, accepting the handkerchief. “I just know I’ll never have someone like that, a captain or a sky pirate or a Raubahn to call my own.”

Ramius mouthed, “Raubahn?” to Alyona, wondering what that had to do with anything. Aly shrugged in response, then narrowed her eyes. “Hey! That doesn’t belong to you! That isn’t even a sleight of hand, it’s just a hand! Where it’s not supposed to be!”

Ramius whirled around to see the cowled miqo’te making for the tavern door in a hurry, something tucked under his arm. In the same fluid movement as his turn, Ramius had unholstered his gun and leveled it at the fleeing feline.

“Did you honestly think you were going to get away with that? Drop the journal,” Ramius said in an even, practiced tone. “Who sent you? Harvelle? Blavenhauer? Start talking and I might let you live, instead of bleeding out senselessly on a dirty tavern floor.”

“That got dark fast,” Aly murmured. The lalafell, wide-eyed, could only nod in agreement.

The miqo’te hissed, baring his fangs. “Does everyone think himself a hero anymore? It’s these stupid adventure stories, filling heads with fool ideas that get people killed.” He shifted his robes to reveal a pistol in his own hand. “How about if you drop the gun, and I let you live.”

“How about THIS!” Aly yelled, and the journal thief shifted his gaze just in time to see the hurtling tankard that caught him squarely in the face. “Looks like I wasn’t the one to ‘get it’ after all,” she observed breezily to her staggered target.

In the moment of distraction, Ramius blasted the man with a pulse of energy from his weapon, catching him in the hand, and causing the miqo’te to cry out and drop his gun. The inventor tsked and shook his head, closing the gap between them with a half-dozen quick strides. “You poor sod,” he lamented, kicking the dropped weapon across the floor. “You really went for it literally as soon as I turned my back. This job was above your pay grade.”

“Alsoooo, maybe everyone you try to steal from wouldn’t think they’re heroes if you weren’t dumb enough to steal only from heroes!” Aly piped up, crouching next to the seething, disarmed man with a length of rope she had produced from her own pack. “Hands please! We’ll get some first aid on that as soon as you’re alllll tied up.”

~*~*~*~

As the authorities questioned the last remaining witnesses in the tavern, Aly hefted a pouch of coin. “Feels like the reward money for his capture should juuuust cover the damages we’re being billed by the bar. Maybe next time we’ll get our drinks to go…”

Just then, the tavern doors swung open. A towering mountain of a roegadyn burst, panting, through, a sheen of exertion shimmering on his copious muscles. Pushing past the Brass Blades who tried ineffectually to stop him, the man made his way purposefully towards the bar.

Ramius groaned. “More trouble?” He got to his feet, ready for another conflict.

The roe’s eyes lit up, and then, dimmed with guilt, as he dropped to his knees directly in front of the lalafell. “It’s ye, right? Th’ pretty lil rose petal Fufelu tol’ me about?”

The lalafell’s eyes widened again. “Fufelu!? Does that mean you’re my-”

“Yer date, aye, an’ about two bells too late by me reckoning. Gorgeous creature like ye deserves better’n’ me busted wagon wheel woes. Ye look just like th’ Sultana, ye do! Can ye ever forgive me?”

His lowered gaze rose abruptly, for the woman had already thrown herself into his arms. “Take me to see the sights, and I’ll think about it! But I must insist on the best seat in the house,” she laughed merrily. The roegadyn laughed too, in relief, and hoisted her effortlessly onto his shoulder.

Aly clasped her hands together in delight. “Looks like you’re a Must-er, too!” She called to her departing newfound friend, who tossed her an eager thumbs-up in response.

Across the room, the miqo’te hissed again as he was taken away into custody. “A Must-er isn’t a thing,” he thought in utter annoyance. But he didn’t mutter or grumble. He had other things to worry about.

~*~*~*~

@ramius-xiv @norahnightsbane @erstwhile25 @matter-of-a-pinion @argentrenard - thanks for being compelling co-protagonists in our shared stories! <3

#FFxivWrite2020 #FFxivWrite #alyona amariyo #ramius raske #norah nightsbane #kail gerrad #argent renard #ffxiv #ffxiv characters #ffxiv stories #miqote #hyur midlander #lalafell #roegadyn

[mctreeleth]

What’s your major since you said the quilted plague mask was for research for you PHD?

I double majored in Sociology and Womens’ Studies, and my PhD supervisors research and teach Sociology and Cultural Studies.

The mask was not created to be part of my research. I was struggling with motivation last week and my frustration was making work harder and I was snowballing stress. My therapist said to go do something else, and my brain smushed together the fact that everyone was sewing face masks out of printed quilting cotton with plague doctor masks, and so I made it happen, because, why not? And then people were super into it, and asking for a pattern, and offering to buy a pattern, and I was like… oh shit. This is research now.

Backstory; I did my honours thesis on the use of norms to regulate acceptable practices of pattern and design sharing and use in the quilting community. My original research had three parts. The first was going through a lot of blogs and facebook pages and comments sections about quilting and finding examples of members of the community making assertions as to what could or couldn’t be done. The next bit was the same, but looking for cases where members of the group had attempted to enact sanctions on individuals whose actions had been deemed deviant. This was usually in the form of someone asking for a pattern and them being strongly criticised for doing so, or someone saying that you aren’t allowed to copy patterns and… being roundly criticised for doing so. Norms are enforced by call-out posts, basically. The third bit was doing surveys and interviews of quilters to find out about their own attitudes, how they came to these views, and any examples they had seen of conflicts or sanctions taking place.

Then this research got considered in in conjunction with the existing academic literature. 

Firstly, there are other communities that use norms-based Intellectual property systems like the one employed by the anti-copying half of the quilting community, but the pushback against the them isn’t there as much. Stand-up comedians, magicians and Michelin-starred chefs generally agree to not recreate one another’s creations. The question then is, why do quilters?

So then I had to look at, what about quilting as a craft makes people feel that copying is the done thing? The assertions of intellectual property rights without any confirmed legal framework aren’t as important - they are happening elsewhere too - what matters is that aforementioned pushback against these norms. Part of it is technical - the geometric nature of quilts, and the fact that their entire design is literally flat out visible on them, mean that you can copy a quilt without ever seeing a pattern. And the second part is historical - that that is exactly what happened. Quilt “patterns” were not patterns as we would think of them, they were sketches of a block configuration, shared so much that we no longer know where they started.

So we know what is happening - an IP-favouring norm system has taken hold in the quilting community, but there is pushback against this because of quilting’s history. 

That was meant to be my Honours thesis, and then I was going to look at why the IP-favouring norms had come to be for my PhD. But I inadvertently came to the conclusion a little too early that the IP favouring norms were tied to the commodification of creative pursuits as part of the whole idea that, if you are good at something, never do it for free. So then my honours thesis also contained a lot of stuff regarding how society values the works of women, particularly the art/craft divide, and the notion of feminine hobbies such as quilting being undertaken for love, plus some real-talk economic realities about the prospects of actually making money from quilting.

And that meant that I had answered my PhD question in my honours thesis. 

I gave some pretty serious thought to not actually doing a PhD - I had started this whole thing in order to interrogate my own views towards the arguments I had been observing for over a decade, and achieved that goal. I spent about 4 months flip flopping on the decision, but it seemed like a wasted opportunity to not at least apply. And I got accepted, and had to come up with an actual research question.

I spent 6 weeks over the summer mainly chilling next to the river in my hometown, and came to realise that the little old ladies resisting putting a price on quilt designs might have something big to teach us about resisting the post-fordist neoliberal capitalist rhetoric that underpins modern society. So that was my PhD. Can I take the arguments they use in resistance towards the IP-based norms system in quilting and draw from them to challenge the valorisation of hustle culture?

I have made a lot of quilts over the last decade, but I have never used a pattern, because I am in Australia and I really like the metric system, whereas most quilt patterns are in inches. But my supervisor and I had discussed the idea of me writing some patterns and putting them out there; tracking what happened to them, seeing if they got quote unquote “stolen”, maybe even for the hell of it publishing something with an aesthetic similarity to a popular quilt pattern that was also rooted in a traditional quilt block, just to see if I could get called out and start conflict. But I also wanted to know what it was like on the other side, to have worked very hard on something and then put it out there for people to use. To have people saying that this piece of your work is worth x amount to them. To know that your creation will be used in ways outside of your control. For people to feel entitled to your work, or for people to feel like your work isn’t good enough, that it was not worth their “investment”.

But we are only 6 weeks in, and this would be something I would do second year, maybe, if we did it at all. I would need ethics clearance, and to write about my motivations beforehand, and tie it to the literature to explain what I thought would happen.

I did not think that I would make a pattern as a distraction a month and a half in and get to do all that so soon. Plus I kind of threw the impartiality by adding terms of use that were aggressively the opposite of most of the claims you see on sewing patterns. But that was my little treat to me.

And now it is part of my research because it is a way to have people tell me about their experiences and attitudes, whether that be explicit “this is what I think is okay and this is what has happened to me” stories, or examples of the pervasiveness of commodification in people asking where they could buy the pattern. 

More helpfully, it is letting me articulate in a different medium and to a different audience aspects of my research, and why I care about it so much. Two weeks ago I was basically bashing my head against a wall trying to explain what I was going for to a blank word document. It feels a lot easier to try to explain it to curious people on the internet.

And it is all thanks to a dumb idea about how, if I am going to sew a dubiously effective fabric mask, I want it to look dope as shit.

#slyfox101honk #This got long I am so so sorry #But I can't explain why it is research without explaining what I am researching #TLDR: Sociology and because people use and share and have expectations about craft patterns because capitalism

[vocalfriespod]

French (Canadian) Fries Transcript

CARRIE: Hi and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

MEGAN: I'm Megan Figueroa.

CARRIE: And I'm Carrie Gillon and today we have another guest. We're gonna be talking about Canadian French with Dr. Nicole Rosen, who is a Canada Research Chair in Language Interactions at the University of Manitoba. She studies Canadian languages, including English, French and Michif. And full disclosure okay we actually wrote a book together on Michif, which is coming out early January! So welcome to the show!

NICOLE: Thanks for having me!

MEGAN: Hi Nicole!

CARRIE: Thank you for coming.

MEGAN: And also just a side note, this is the first time Carrie and I have recorded in the same room.

NICOLE: Really!

CARRIE: It's true.

MEGAN: Yeah, so, that's exciting.

CARRIE: Alright so we have - I don't know there's so many things we could talk about in French, so… where would you like to begin?

NICOLE: Well, there's the political, there's a linguistic, I'm not sure where we want to start.

MEGAN: As someone who knows absolutely nothing, maybe the political, actually, would be helpful. Cuz even though we're so close to you over here in the US, I have no idea what the political status is of French in Canada.

NICOLE: Alright, well, I guess the question then becomes, how far do you want to go back? Historically.

CARRIE: I think we kind of have to go back, somewhat to the beginning, because I do think a lot of people don't know. Canadians generally speaking know the big picture at least, but most other people don't.

MEGAN: I have no idea why there's French in Canada. Like, why? Why did that happen?

NICOLE: Well actually the French were here first, before the English.

CARRIE: It’s true.

NICOLE: Back in the 1600s, there were settlers that came over from different areas of France. The first came from the west of France and settled in what is now Acadia, and those Acadians actually ended up - well being moved out by the English later on and ended up down in Louisiana, which is why they're called Cajuns, that comes from the word Acadian actually. So there is a US kind of link there. There's also another group that came originally from more northern France and then moved in along the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the eastern side and it's now called Quebec of course. And so we have sort of two groups that came over, within the same century, but they ended up settling in different places and they have pretty different histories and different current realities too. I mean they have two different accents. The Acadian accent is different than the Laurentian French accent. And I'm using the word “Laurentian French” because it seems to be the generally accepted term now, regarding the languages spoken in Quebec and from people that moved out of Quebec. So now those peoples live in Ontario and St. Boniface - sorry in Manitoba - and in other provinces as well. But it's just a way of distinguishing between Acadians and Quebecers. Because Quebecers are not only in Quebec, if that makes sense.

MEGAN: Are Acadians only in the US now?

NICOLE: No the Acadians are in Canada, in the Maritimes. So Acadia is an area - it's not really a province or anything. It's just a designated area, that really is part of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in that area. There was this thing called the Great Upheaval, where the British government decided to just ship them all out. They split up families. People escaped. People got shipped down to Louisiana, shipped back to France, all the way down the coast. But the word Cajun comes from Acadian basically, because of the way it's pronounced. There's a pretty strong link between the Acadians and the Cajuns down in Louisiana.

MEGAN: Okay. So you're in Manitoba, which, is that Eastern Canada?

CARRIE: No. That’s the West.

NICOLE: This is the West, and so what we have here - near where I live is an area called St. Boniface. And that is really the biggest French settlement that still exists in the West. It was settled really - people came out here, the second half of the 18th century, and that's sort of the third group of Francophones that are around here, and that's called the Métis. They were the ones that came out here quite early, much earlier than everyone else, and they ended up intermarrying with the First Nations women that were here, and they ended up with their own dialect, actually the Métis, Métis French, or Michif French, depending on how you want to call it. Throughout the West, I guess you'd say, there’re certain settlements that are more Métis than then other than other French. They also have a distinct accent. There's sort of three historical groups that speak French in Canada: the Laurentian French, Acadian French and Métis French.

MEGAN: And is there gonna be - I'm just assuming that there's probably a dialect that is favored - I mean I say quote unquote favored.

NICOLE: Yes. Definitely. So as you might be able to guess, the group with the most political power is the one that is the one that - it's sort of the “best”, I guess, if you want to call it in prescriptive terms, the one that the people seem to prefer, it would be Québec French. That said, it depends on who you talk to. A lot of Anglophones will still think France French is better, right. They go way, way over that way, and these don't want to learn Quebec French, they want to learn France French, because it's, I don't, know prettier or something, I'm not really sure.

CARRIE: I think it's got to do with the anti-Québécois sentiment in Canada. I mean when I was in school - I was not - okay, so this is getting into the French Immersion facts, anyway - I was not in French immersion, I was just in regular, you know, the French classes that you had to take, and then you could also take later on. I took them all. Most of the time yeah our teachers were teaching European French, as opposed to Quebec French.

MEGAN: Hmm.

NICOLE: Yeah, that doesn't happen in Winnipeg because there's a strong Francophone community here. There really doesn't seem to be any preference for European French. I was taught by Franco-Manitoban nuns in a French immersion school in one of the first immersion schools that sort of arose in the seventies here. But I don't see that so much here, to be honest, which is good. I think that that sentiment is more definitely with the Anglophones. That said, there's also this sort of downward or upward - there's a hierarchy anyway, within Canada - so the Franco-Manitobans that I've talked to that have gone to Quebec, for example, often don't get treated particularly well. Or they might get - people think that they're Anglophone or people, they'll switch to English. I have a friend here who is very much like - she and her husband are very much Francophone. Their kids did not speak any English until they went to school. That's sort of Grade 4, when they learnt French in school, because they're in the French school division, they can take French swimming lessons, French soccer, and everything like that. Because you can actually do that in St. Boniface. And she works in French, and she went out to Montreal and asked for a jus d’orange, and then the person responded back saying, “oh I'll get you an orange juice.” And she got so mad and told them what they could do with their “orange juice” - because they say it in a very accented English. And French is definitely her first language, but there's a different accent, and some of it is just because the people out here are bilingual, so they have different ways of speaking French. Here it's totally normal, and nobody seems to really worry about it, but I hear stories anyway of people going elsewhere, especially in Quebec, and definitely being sort of not treated as well.

CARRIE: Yeah I should say that I'm from British Columbia, which is one of the more Anglo provinces, so that feeling that I might have gotten might have only been because of the province I'm from.

NICOLE: Yeah, it could be. Although I don't think it's necessarily there. I think it could be from other schools and things like that and definitely Alberta. I think that's probably true among Anglophones. I think it's not true about Francophones, but I think Anglophones do prefer, or at least they say they prefer, European French. I'm not convinced that all of them would be able to tell the difference. If they don't actually speak French. But they just have this sort of thing where they think that Quebec French is ugly and European French is nicer. Not that different I don't think than what we think about British English versus American English.

CARRIE: Yeah, exactly.

MEGAN: Ah, okay. How does it intersect with other identities? Because in the US, a Spanish speaker that is actually Anglo is actually more respected in some ways.

CARRIE: Oh what you're saying is, someone who's an English speaker in the United States who can speak Spanish well, gets more respect than a person who speaks Spanish natively.

MEGAN: Natively, and then learns English yeah.

NICOLE: There’s this really interesting - when it comes to that - if we're talking about in Quebec, for example, because things have completely switched. So in the 60s, there were a number of studies that were done, because Quebecers and Francophones in Quebec, specifically, were consistently doing economically more poorly than Anglophones. And they did all sorts of research and found that Anglophones - in fact monolingual Anglophones -earned more money than bilingual Francophones. So if you were a Francophone originally, who learned English, you made less money than a monolingual Anglophone. And a bilingual Anglophone was better. So that's what you're saying about the Spanish I think.

MEGAN: Yes.

NICOLE: If you're an Anglophone, but you speak French, back in the 60s, that was probably - economically you did the best. But what happened - this caused a lot of fury, basically. There was what we call the Quiet Revolution in Quebec in the 60s, where they essentially decided that their language and their way of speaking the language was not actually that bad, and they should be proud of it. That's when they started implementing a lot of different kinds of laws and things like that. But what's happening now is, if you go there, it's actually better to be a Francophone that speaks English than an Anglophone that speaks French. A lot of people are bilingual, but it is it is better for jobs and things like that, if they're looking for a bilingual person, that usually means Francophones that's can speak English, not an Anglophone that speaks French. Because, I think it has something to do it the fact that, if you're a francophone that speaks English, you speak better English than an Anglophone speaks French, if that makes sense. Because the surroundings are all English, in most of Canada - this is this a bit different in Quebec. But in general, if you are Anglophone you learnt French, you learnt it in school, and maybe you're not that great at it, you're kind of functionally bilingual, but you're not comfortable in the same way as your own language. Whereas it is the flipside if you're a Francophone and speak English, you are probably almost perfectly bilingual.

MEGAN: So then French is looked upon positively in Canada, but there are like a hierarchy of dialects.

CARRIE: [sighs]

MEGAN: No, it’s not true?

CARRIE: It's more complicated than that.

MEGAN: Okay okay okay.

NICOLE: Yeah, it really depends on the region. I think if you’re anywhere east, like Ontario, east, I think that's probably true. I think French is not looked down upon. I think things have changed a lot - like in the 60s or TV shows making fun of French people and making fun - this was really common before the seventies, I'd say. Really that's when this whole revolution started. But now in the West, with these official language laws from 1971 - that's when English and French both rose as official languages in Canada. And that caused a lot of controversy. That was basically Pierre Trudeau, our Prime Minister, trying to appease the Quebecers, who were quite upset with all these things that they had found - this is a commission that found all these inequalities basically - educational inequalities too. In Quebec, most kids stopped school at 13, 14 years old. It was still a confessional system, all run by the church and things like that. It was really a very different system than elsewhere. Even within Quebec, the Francophones were consistently more poorly educated, or less well educated than the Anglophones. So there was a very big economic split ane educational split. When this official bilingualism happened after 1971, that made a lot of people in the West pretty mad. Because in the West, yes there were a bunch of Francophones in Manitoba, but there were way more people who spoke German, for example, and even to this day there are more people who speak German in in the West in Saskatchewan and Manitoba anyway than speak French. So all these people who spoke German at home and learned English and worked in English, all of a sudden their language was lowered. By raising these two official languages, you were actually effectively lowering the importance of all the other ones. So that caused a lot of problems in the West for sure.

CARRIE: I definitely had the impression when I was growing up in British Columbia that there was a lot of antipathy towards French - not from my family. My parents put my brother and sister into French immersion - I was too old. It didn't start until I was too old, in the city we were in. And also I got that impression in Ontario, at least in Toronto, as well, that some people really did not like French when I when I was living there. I was only there for a year, but I did I did get that impression.

MEGAN: Were they bilingual in something else?

CARRIE: No. They just they were monolingual. Or partially bilingual in French, like me. I’m not even that anymore, but I used to be a little bit more.

NICOLE: I mean I think everyone hated their French classes, and that's a common thread. You can go across the country and everyone hated their French class. Some people could say they kind of wish they spoke it, but it was such a terrible class and all that kind of thing. So there’s that.

CARRIE: I mean I loved my French classes. I’m a linguist, so that'd be why, I guess. And I was jealous of my brother and sister.

NICOLE: Yeah, I'm really glad I did French immersion. I only did it for elementary school, so Grade 1 to 6, but it was also very new, and they really were all Francophones. I think nowadays it's a bit tougher, and it depends where you go, because they have these French immersion schools, but the teachers are not necessarily completely comfortable in French. I mean, they're supposed to be and a lot of them are, but it depends where you go, right. It's like it's like anywhere else. If you don't have enough teachers, but you have the demand, then you have to kind of try to get someone who's good enough in there.

CARRIE: Yeah I definitely saw that there was a shortage, a couple days ago I saw that on CBC I think, that they're looking for more teachers. And I had no idea. I mean it makes sense, because it's a popular program.

NICOLE: Oh yeah, it's a hugely popular program in Canada. It's partially for the language and it's partially actually the socioeconomic advantages.

CARRIE: Mmm-hmm.

MEGAN: Yup.

NICOLE: So this is often talked about - that the parents who want their kids to advance and do well socioeconomically, if they're upwardly mobile, they put their kids in French immersion programs because it's - you don't get a lot of the kids with learning disabilities, and you don't get a lot of the kids with behavioral issues and things like that. And so it's almost like a private school, but it's free. That's also one of the criticisms of the program is that it's segregating kids already.

MEGAN: Did these French immersion schools come about after French became one of the official languages, is that what happened?

NICOLE: Yeah, exactly. So in the 70s, that's when they started to become popular, sort of mid-seventies.

MEGAN: And is there a waiting list? How does how does one get their child into a French immersion school?

NICOLE: Yeah, often there are waiting lists. I mean technically it's public school, so it's free, and anyone can go, but I don't think they can usually keep up with the demand. So often they're either opening new schools or they're switching schools so that all the English schools end up getting put into smaller schools and then the French immersion school get in the big ones. There's also some schools that are splits, like they're streamed. Within one school, you'll have kids in an English program and kids in a French immersion program, things like that.

CARRIE: Yeah that's that was my school. I was in the regular English programming and my sister was in the French immersion programming. We were at the same elementary school.

NICOLE: When I went to elementary school, it was only French, but then when you went to junior high or high school then it was split into different streams.

MEGAN: And in your opinion, what would what would make someone choose not to put their kid in a French immersion program.

NICOLE: Well, there's a couple of things. One of them is this sort of the negative view of French. There is that. There are people just don't like French or don't think it's important. There's definitely people who decide not to put their kids in that because of that. Some parents decide that it's too hard and they're worried about their kids not being very good at English. There's also people who are worried that they're not going to be able to help their kids with their homework, because it's all gonna be written in French. There's that. Even though, I mean these schools are designed for parents who speak English, but still they want, I guess, to be able to help more or something. And then there's parents who think that their - or their kids may have some kind of language delay or something like that, and they don't want to put them in for that reason, or they put them in and they pull them out. Then there’s also some educational things. So a lot of these - we don't like to talk about them, we don't like to say anything bad about French immersion. It's kind of like this pet project and Canada's supposed to be really great at it, and we are, but I don't think the outcomes are necessarily what everyone is expecting. So you don't get absolutely high-level bilingualism coming out of these schools, you get sort of functional bilingualism. You get kids who are very comfortable in French. It doesn't really matter what they're saying, they're super comfortable. But they certainly - I mean if you imagine - these are all kids - you have a class of 25 or 30 or whatever kids who are all Anglophone, and they're all speaking French amongst themselves, it's not exactly natural, and they aren't getting exposure to the sort of authentic French. You're not getting exposure to actual French speakers, you're getting exposure to other Anglophones who are also trying to speak French. And so there's something sort of called “French immersion French”, which is in a lot of ways, it's like speaking English using French words, if that make sense. You don't learn all - you don't definitely don't learn the colloquialisms, and you don't learn the sociolinguistic differences and things like that - you know, how to be formal and how to be informal, and how to speak to other kids, because the model you hear is a teacher. And you hear one teacher in a class of 25 or something. So it's not exactly - I still think it's great, and I think you should put your kids in that, if you can, only because then at least they get the chance later to go somewhere where they speak French and really learn it like a native, if they want to. And if not, then they can still get by in work or that kind of thing. So I think people just have to have reasonable expectations. Kids are having to write in history and geography and whatever else in a language that they're not super comfortable with, so I don't think a lot of them can actually go for the depth that you could in your native tongue. I do think there's issues with that.

CARRIE: Yeah there are I think at least - well, at the time, I think some of the upper level high school classes were switched to English, because they wanted them to get that depth.

NICOLE: Yeah and that happens a lot in high school, I think very often there's not as many courses available. I mean, you still have an English class course, it’s not like you don't have anything. I think for me I would normally recommend putting kids in that in the early years and then, yeah, like you say, maybe switching them out for high school, because if I do think that they've learned mostly what they're gonna learn in that sort of environment. And then to really learn it, you want to go somewhere where it's actually French. You go to France, you go to Quebec, wherever.

MEGAN: Well that certainly sounds like, I don't know if you want to call it a problem, but a situation you’d run into in any sort of immersion. It doesn't seem like it's specific to-

CARRIE: No. Yeah, it would be the exact same for any immersion. So one of the things that when Megan and I were talking about this, I think we should also mention that there's actually like real French education - obviously in Quebec because it’s supposed to be a bilingual province, but it's more French than English, but even in in Winnipeg where you are there are actual French -

NICOLE: Yes. Yeah. I come across this a lot, as my kids are in the French school system. Then when I people ask me what school my kids go to, I have to say well they're in a French school, and everyone always says, “French Immersion?” No actually it's French. So you have a French immersion stream for Anglophones who want to learn French. Then you have a Francophone system where the schools are actually for people who speak French at home. That's different from the French immersion. So in Winnipeg there are quite a lot of these schools. There are four or five elementary schools and then maybe there's only two junior highs and two high schools - or one high school? I can't remember anymore. So it definitely peters off when you get to the higher levels, but there's also a French University where everything is done in French here. The difference is that if you are from an Anglophone family, you can't put your kids into the Francophone school system, you can only put them into French immersion.

MEGAN: Wow.

NICOLE: And those exists in most provinces, where there's demand. And that actually is part of the language laws that came about as well, is that you are entitled to go to school in your own language, as long as you have enough people to warrant it basically.

MEGAN: That's something I cannot imagine in the US at all.

CARRIE: I know yeah, it’s so different.

NICOLE: But there are two official languages, right, so. If they're official - well the US doesn't actually have an official language, right?

CARRIE: No, it does not.

MEGAN: No, there is a movement.

CARRIE: But functionally, there's only one language that everything works in. For example, in the legal system, it's English. I mean you can get translators but everything's in English.

MEGAN: But that's so problematic.

CARRIE: Yeah I mean translators are better than nothing, but yeah.

MEGAN: Yeah yeah.

CARRIE: But in Canada you have to be able to access it in either French or English, depending on what your language is. So it has all sorts of effects throughout the country.

MEGAN: Yeah.

NICOLE: Yeah, in fact though there was a big - I guess in Manitoba and in the prairies in general, a lot of French sort of ended up falling by the wayside. And although with the Manitoba language - so I should preface this by saying that education is provincial, and so it's kind of like every state is different, every province is different. But talking about Manitoba just because it's a primarily Anglophone province, but has a very strong Francophone population, I think it's just an interesting place. And so the Manitoba Schools Act back in I think 1890 or 1891 dictated that you could have access to French or English education. And this was mostly, of course, related to the church at the time. So this is really about appeasing the Catholic Church, because the French schools were done through the Catholic Church. So there's a very strong tie between religion and language here - and still is actually. There's still religion in the lot of the French schools, which is really strange to think about. I think it was 1916 that they eliminated that access to French education, and so kids weren't able to go to French school anymore. And then, again in the 60s and 70s, really happening after this quiet revolution in Québec, the same kind of thing here happened here in Manitoba, where they started to get access to French education again. When you were talking about having a to all sorts of things in French and English, one thing that made me think of was, in the 70s, it was in 1976 or 1977, this guy, he was very famous here, he refused to pay a parking ticket, because it was only written in English. It was hugely publicized, and I remember this growing up. It was really well publicized. He said, “I am legally - I was parked in St. Boniface, I am legally allowed, from the government - like I'm supposed to be able to access services in English and French, and this was only written in English. I'm not paying it.”

MEGAN: What a hero!

NICOLE: I know, seriously! And they kind of settled it. They didn't make him pay, but they didn't change anything. But then he got another parking ticket, that poor guy. Actually, he took it to court, and it had huge legal repercussions, because he won. What it basically said was that all the laws written in Manitoba were not legal. They were all supposed to be written in English and French. So of course they put things on hold, saying, “for the moment, they're still legally binding, but we have to write them all in French.” And they did. And so everything now is in English and French. It's a huge precedent, here in Manitoba anyway.

CARRIE: Very cool.

MEGAN: Yeah.

CARRIE: Do you wanna start talking about the different varieties of Canadian French?

MEGAN: Yeah. Coming into this, I just assumed that French was being treated better in Canada than Spanish was being treated in the US, but I have been proven wrong.

CARRIE: Well, I would say, yes, that’s true-

MEGAN: Still, though yeah?

NICOLE: Yeah.

CARRIE: -but maybe less than you thought.

MEGAN: Yeah I know I had like beautiful picture. Cuz Canada’s beautiful in my mind, especially right now.

CARRIE: It is beautiful.

MEGAN: Yes. It’s a beacon of hope.

NICOLE: There's still people here. Where are people, things are not perfect.

MEGAN: So yeah: assholes. You have a big group of people, there’s gonna be assholes.

NICOLE: Exactly. It’s inevitable. MEGAN: So there are still people that view French generally as just -

CARRIE: Less than.

MEGAN: less than. So now we're gonna go into - there's a hierarchy of how the dialects are treated.

CARRIE: Well, within French probably, I mean I would say that Anglo Canada doesn't really think about the different varieties at all.

NICOLE: No.

CARRIE: Like there's just like French.

MEGAN: Yeah.

CARRIE: And it's either fine, like it's just another language, or -

MEGAN: Or it’s French, okay. Then within speakers of French in Canada there's gonna be some biases.

CARRIE: Right.

MEGAN: Okay. Got it.

NICOLE: Yes.

CARRIE: Cuz we’re humans.

NICOLE: I think Anglophones will kind of know that there's different dialects, but not really. They wouldn't know any details, and they hear from other people that there's better ones and less good ones, but they don't really have any opinions on them.

CARRIE: Okay, yeah that's kind of what I meant.

MEGAN: Okay.

NICOLE: Other than yeah other than France versus Canada.

CARRIE: Right.

NICOLE: That one they do think is better, in Europe usually. I don’t know.

CARRIE: So one of the one of the varieties that comes up sometimes, the joual. Do you know anything about it? Can you talk about that?

NICOLE: Yeah joual is really just a term - it's a term that’s not really used so much anymore - again it was in the 60s, everything happened in the 60s - but it was just a way of describing the Québec accent, basically. So you ended up getting this - well we had this playwright called Michel Tremblay, who's still around, but he started writing plays actually in joual. So written in the Québecois accent, as opposed to in a standard French accent. He was sort of part of this whole movement to raise Québécois to that level, to a higher level and in art forms too, right. I guess the term as well is really just kind of a short form for the Canadian or Québécois French, and like I said, it's not really - I don't hear it use very much anymore. It's almost a derogatory term really now, I think.

CARRIE: Oh!

NICOLE: Even though I don't think it really was before, but it does seem to be now. Because I think it's sort of thought being when you describe French in not such a nice way.

CARRIE: I did not know that.

NICOLE: Yeah. Anyway. I mean some people might argue with me for that, because I think it sort of depends on where you're coming from, but I always thought it was okay too and then someone said, “no, not really.”

MEGAN: So just to clarify when you said standard French do you mean like European French? Is that what that would be?

NICOLE: Ohhhh, you're gonna call me on that! Yes. Yes I do. It's just a very difficult thing to define, because nobody really speaks that standard French. There's sort of this international French they call it. Yeah, I guess I would call it European French.

MEGAN: Okay. So okay, so that variety is just called Québecois French then, is the best way to describe -

NICOLE: Yeah.

CARRIE: I’ve seen it described as more like a city version of Québécois French, but I don't know if that's accurate, that could be wrong.

NICOLE: Well, I think there's a lot of different dialects even within Québec, and so people know if someone's from Trois-Rivières and things like that, so there's at least certain towns that are kind of known for having different accents. There's obviously some differences. I mean overall Québécois French, which I was calling Laurentian French, really, is I guess characterized by a few things. For example, the t's and d’s before - I don't know how technical I need to go into these -

MEGAN: Not technical.

NICOLE: These sounds like /y/. There's these weird French vowels like /y/ and /œ/ that don't exist in English. You get this word tu [ty] in standard French, you end up sort of adding an s into it and saying [tsy], and du [dy] would be [dzy]. It's called assibilation. You add a little s or z in between there. That's very common. The vowels are different. Certain vowels will change where they don't in European French. So you'd have like vite [vit]. Vite is “fast”. But you'd say vit [vɪt] in Canada. So vite and vit instead of just vite. Things like that. They have a lot more diphthongs too. In the vowels. So something like père - and this is where - I started learning French here in Canada, and I had probably a pretty decent Franco-Manitoban accent, but then I moved to France and it all went away. And so now I have more of a European French accent. So I'm not so good at doing the Canadian accent, which makes me sad actually. So the père [pɛʁ] for father is more like pay-er [paɪəʁ], and they have this sort of diphthong. But the dialect thing is actually interesting. Because I go to my kids schools a lot here, everyone thinks - they don't know what to make of me, because they don't understand why I have the accent that I do. And honestly people come straight out and say, “so, like, tell me about your accent.” And I've been at parent-teacher interviews, and I could see that the teacher wanted to ask me, but didn't really have the courage, and then finally eventually after the third interview with, her she's like, “um, where are you from?” And I have to say I'm from here, because I actually was born in Winnipeg, but I happened to move elsewhere. But I was born as an Anglophone and did French in school, and then went to France for a couple of years, and so I speak French, and I studied French, but now I come back here, and I don't feel local, right. I really feel self-conscious about it. The teacher really didn't understand why if I was born here, why I spoke like this, especially if I was only over there - because no, I was born Winnipeg, but I lived in France for a couple of years, and they go, “okay”. But they know that you know if you were really a Francophone and just spent some time in France, you wouldn't actually change your accent. You would still have your accent from here. But it definitely makes me self-conscious, which is funny because it's supposed to be the better - the more standard accent. But here it really it makes you stand out as not being local, not being from here. Which is not actually a good thing because of the Franco-Manitobans are a very small community, and it's very - everyone knows each other or they know - and they're very protective as well of their language. And so being from somewhere else? Not quite as good as being a Franco-Manitoban. Although things are changing. And I shouldn't say everyone's like that, right.

CARRIE: Right, of course not.

NICOLE: Yeah it's not the case that everyone's like that.

MEGAN: What's the difference between Québécois French and the Franco-Manitoban French?

NICOLE: Alright so there's a couple different Franco-Manitobans, but the main one - so they were actually people that came from Quebec about a century ago. So they share a lot of similarities, but they haven't changed things in the same way as they did in Quebec. So one of the main one of the main differences I guess would be the r. So in the 70s, for some reason, everyone switched the way they pronounce their r in Quebec. And I shouldn't say everyone, but Montreal and the urban areas really did. So instead of doing an apical r [r], which is like a [rə], they ended up doing like a French one, which is [ʁ], where its velar or uvular, in the back, and it's a completely different r. And here in Manitoba you'll hear that apical r a lot more than you would in Quebec. It really makes you stand out as being from a farm, right, or just being not very urban, not very smart. That's kind of the type of r it is. And so here in Winnipeg or St Boniface I guess you do hear it, but you hear - you still hear probably more with people from rural French areas, but you hear it a lot more. And even my kids, when we moved from Alberta, where it was mostly taught by Quebecers, when we moved here, where it's now mostly taught by Franco-Manitobans, my older son did ask about why they were using that r. He didn't get it. He heard the difference, right? And he's like, “everyone pronounces their r’s differently here.” So that's a pretty obvious one. I think there's also a lot of things that just come from being in such close contact with English. So there's loads of monolingual Francophones in Quebec, of course, but there are not loads of monolingual Francophones in Manitoba. You'd be hard-pressed to find any Franco-Manitobans that don't speak English pretty well, other than a lot older people. You’ll people who may not be so comfortable in English. But because they speak English in French on a daily basis, a lot of things, and going back and forth right, so a lot of it is influenced by English. So there's a lot of what we call calques, so they change - they use what would be English words in French. So when I grew up, I learned all these words that that were called faux amis or false friends. I don't know if anyone else has done these language classes where you learn about false friends?

CARRIE/MEGAN: Yup.

NICOLE: So you learn you're not supposed to say this even though it sounds like the same one in English, because it doesn't mean it's the same thing. Well they all use those here. So all those false friends that you're not supposed to use, they all use them. It's really weird. So I'm just trying to think of an example. “Support”, so like supporting a team or whatever. You're always supposed to learn that it's appuyer, not supporter. That's a totally different word. But here everyone uses supporter, which is the calque from English right. They think the English “support” and they switch it over and they use it in French. And there's a lot of examples like that, and all these things that I have a hard time using, because I mean they feel like errors, but that's just the way they speak here right. It's not an error, there's a semantic shift in the word. Of course that comes from English, but whatever. I think as long - I think the big problem is that they may not use these always in Quebec, and they definitely do not use them that way in France. And so it comes down to a language purity question, and if you think that a “pure” language, whatever that means, is the better language, then you're not gonna think that these calques are any good. You're gonna think, “oh they're too influenced by English”, and that kind of thing. But that's not the way I look at things.

CARRIE: That’s not how language works.

MEGAN: No, it’s not.

NICOLE: Right.

CARRIE: These things happen all the time.

NICOLE: Yeah, so all these language laws that they're trying to implement, they only go so far right. They can work at a sort of institutional level, but not on a day-to-day level.

CARRIE: No. tilting at windmills. So one of things that I thought about when you were talking about the vowels is that kind of reminds me of the Southern drawl.

NICOLE: Yeah. It does, sort of. I think what it was is that a lot of those diphthongs - I believe they existed in France at the time, right, and then when they got transplanted here they just didn't evolve in the same way as they did in France. So there are some things that are innovations and are new pronunciations, but a lot of things are actually just from older archaisms from France that they brought over in the 17th century or the 18th century, and they still have that kind of - they have some of the same vocabulary items, and they have some of the same pronunciations - or similar. I mean it's not gonna be exactly the same from the 1700s, but still. Just follow different paths.

CARRIE: Yeah. So what's your favorite Canadian French expression that only exists in Canada?

NICOLE: Oh boy.

CARRIE: Because I found some that I thought were kind of cool, but then I thought maybe you would have better ones.

NICOLE: I don't know which - what did you find?

CARRIE: I'm gonna probably butcher this, but there's accouche qu’on baptise, which means “speak up”, but literally something to do with “birth that is baptized” or something?

NICOLE: Okay.

CARRIE: Avoir les shakes - I don't even how to say “shakes”, cuz I just want to make it English.

NICOLE: Avoir les shakes that probably is English. That's the way they would pronounce it.

CARRIE: But there are so many more that I just -

NICOLE: Well yeah, I mean I think one of the main things that people love is that the way you swear in Quebec is different than the way you swear in France. So it all has to do with religion here. Everything.

MEGAN: Oh! Tabernacle!

NICOLE: Yes, exactly. Hostie, and all these - and it's not native to me. It's funny because I can't swear in Québecois. I can swear in European French, but it just doesn't come out. I love it. I do love hearing it. I think that's what it is: I love it, but I can't do it. That makes me sad.

MEGAN: Yeah.

NICOLE: But yeah, it all comes from religion, and the host, like Hostie and tabernak. That’s tabernacle. I also didn't grow up Catholic, so it's all foreign to me. I don't really know what any of those things are or what they mean.

CARRIE: Yeah I was gonna ask you what at tabernacle was.

MEGAN: We still don't know.

CARRIE: Yeah cause we talked about it in our second episode, the swearing episode, and I was like, “oh, I actually don't even know what that is.” And then I didn't even look it up.

MEGAN: Yes. I meant to.

NICOLE: When I teach it, or when I used to teach French, I always had a swearing class, cuz people like that. I would often use that as a good opportunity to get the students involved, saying, “who knows what this is?” Cuz I didn’t really know it was either. But I guess the host, that’s the thing-

CARRIE: The wafer.

NICOLE: The wafer.

CARRIE: That one I can figure out.

MEGAN: Yeah yeah.

CARRIE: I know enough Catholicism to know what a host is, but not enough to know -

NICOLE: The tabernacle is something up on the, the, I don’t know.

CARRIE: The altar?

NICOLE: The altar.

CARRIE: Maybe.

NICOLE: Or something that’s at the altar. I’m not even sure. That’s very embarrassing.

CARRIE: I'm glad it's not just me.

MEGAN: Someone's gonna tweet at us when we release this episode and tell us what tabernacle is.

CARRIE: They never did last time. But maybe this time.

MEGAN: That’s true. This is a plea. So that I don’t have to google it.

CARRIE: Alright. So I guess we'll ask now: why is it bad to judge Francophones in Canada or anywhere else for that matter?

NICOLE: So there's all these different sort of layers of French in Canada, and everyone ends up kind of being denigrated by somebody else. So the Métis in Manitoba, certainly there's lots of examples of when they went to - they tried to go to regular French schools or French University or college or anything and they get made fun of for the language, and it just made them feel bad about themselves. I heard some really crazy things like - so we didn't talk a lot about the Métis French, but there's some towns in Manitoba that are really Métis towns, and so the French they speak is really Métis French. It's not even a standard Québécois French or anything or standard St. Boniface French or whatever. But there were federal jobs, for example - I met someone who applied for a job, and you need to be bilingual for that job, and she didn't get it, even though she was a native Métis French speaker. Because she couldn't pass that test. That was a written test. But the thing is she would have been dealing with people in person, in her language, in their language. But so economically it’s actually - besides all the sort of social things or making people feel bad which is also something you probably don't want to do, there's also reasons where using a standard as the standard - I actually shouldn't call it a standard - using a different dialect as a standard is problematic, because it's not taking into account the local realities. So locally what's important is that people speak what's local. It shows that there there's a sense of belonging, things like that. It's similar with speech pathology and things like that. So if they're analyzing kids here, there is no norm for the local kids. So they're using norms from Quebec or from elsewhere - and actually I'm doing some research with a colleague who is a linguist and speech pathologist specifically on that. Because we found and he's found that the kids are failing in certain things, like for example the pronunciation of r. They're actually failing that and they're being branded as not being able to pronounce those, and they need to go in for speech path. But they're getting a whole host of different r’s all over, right, so either it's just taking them longer, because they have to absorb them all, and before they can figure out how to pronounce their own r. They're not getting the same consistent input, or maybe the actual r is different here.

MEGAN: And r comes in late anyway.

NICOLE: It does come in late.

MEGAN: If they’re getting so much input.

NICOLE: Yeah, consistently coming in even later. I think there's actual educational ramifications, and economic ones, and people are not going to get a job, or they're going to be labeled as speech delayed, and things like that, when they're not. I think there's real problems that go even past the normal social things, which I think are - socially, I think it's bad to discriminate. But I think it goes further than that.

CARRIE: Yeah. Are there any other questions?

MEGAN: No.

CARRIE: Is there anything else you want to talk about Nicole?

NICOLE: Oh, I could go on forever, so I think you want to cut me off.

CARRIE: Ok.

NICOLE: There’s just so much really. At the provincial level, at those federal level, at different areas, it's just lots.

CARRIE/MEGAN: Yeah.

NICOLE: It's a very interesting topic TO ME.

MEGAN: I learned so much. I always say this. I think this is my new thing is just to say how much I learned.

[Laughter]

CARRIE: Did I learn this much, or this much?

MEGAN: This much. You can’t see what I’m doing. Or if anything. But yes I did, I learned a lot.

CARRIE: Yeah, so thank you so much for coming on again.

MEGAN: Yes thank you.

NICOLE: Thank you.

CARRIE: And: don't be an asshole!

MEGAN: Do not be an asshole.

CARRIE: Alright. Bye!

MEGAN: Bye!

CARRIE: The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by Chris Ayers for Halftone Audio. Music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at [email protected].  

#transcript #linguistics #linguistic discrimination #French #Canadian French #Canada #Québec #Manitoba #British Columbia #Alberta #Nova Scotia #New Brunswick #bilingual #Acadia #Cajun #Laurentian French #Acadian French

[steven-heisler-law-firm]

Rob Schenk: Assisted Living  Facilities Are Not What They’re Made Out To Be!

About Rob Schenk: Rob’s law firm Schenk Smith is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and is focused on representing individuals injured in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. He’s also the co-host of the Nursing Home Abuse Podcast. A  bi-monthly video podcast dedicated to educating families on nursing home care. 

In this episode, Steve and Rob Schenk discuss:

1. In Episode Six, you refer to assisted living facilities as the Wild Wild West. What exactly did you mean by that?

Primarily the fact that if you and I are talking about nursing homes, there’s going to be uniformity with regard to how they’re regulated from state to state. Assisted living facilities, what we’re calling assisted living facilities. There is no uniformity and regulation and guidelines across the country. Every state handles things differently and I believe that it’s the wild wild west, because that, in turn, causes a lot of, quote-unquote, brand confusion. What are you getting out of these facilities? it’s a gray area, in my opinion. 

2. What is the difference between a nursing home and an assisted living facility? 

A nursing home is defined by the federal government and doesn’t differ from state to state and it’s essentially a facility that provides skilled nursing care according to those guidelines. Because an assisted living facility is different from state to state, there’s no broad definition. However, typically, there are no skilled nursing services provided at an assisted living facility, like there is in a nursing home. An assisted living facility is a facility that typically only provides what’s called personal services and assistance with daily living activities. 

3. Are administrators advising people that there are no skilled professionals at the assisted living facilities?

Well, hopefully, so by way of example, in Georgia, there are state regulations about who is even qualified to go into assisted living facilities. So it’s the facility’s obligation to do an assessment to determine if this person can even come in or needs proper 24-hour skilled nursing care. Also, from that, they’re required to tell them the services that they’re going to get there. But you know how that works. I mean, like, if you ever made a huge purchase, like a house or car, whatever the case may be, you’re signing 16 different pages. A lot of times these are decisions that aren’t made weeks in advance. These types of things grandmother fell, and now she can’t do the things herself. We got to get her into a place quickly. So there’s a lot of moving parts to sitting down in that admissions office and talking about these things that go over overlooked. 

4. Would it be fair to say that for the most part people that are going into assisted living facilities, their health care concerns are not as serious, as ones that are going into nursing homes?

That’s a fair assessment. I think that’s kind of the concept behind the assisted living facility. Ideally, it’s for someone who only needs assistance with what we would call ADLs. For the most part, ADL is being activities of daily living. So, if your grandmother needs help with personal hygiene, toileting, transferring locomotion, these types of things, otherwise, she’s okay. Then that’s probably the candidate for assisted living facilities across the country. That’s usually what it is. What you’re finding though, is that these are individuals that need more than that. They need somebody that has eyeballs on them and can tell whether or not that is a wound that is a pressure ulcer or that this person has a cognitive impairment such that if there was some type of issue, they would not be able to find their way out of the building. On our podcast Will and I talked about how people think that it’s Driving Miss Daisy? Like it’s something where it’s a perfectly capable lady that just needs a friend. That’s oftentimes not what you get in assisted living facilities. That’s kind of the idea is that you have someone that can pretty much take care of themselves in some activities, but just needs a little bit of help from somebody that doesn’t necessarily need to be qualified as a nurse.

5. So, in assisted living facilities where you’ve got somebody who’s maybe making a little over minimum wage, who’s got a high school diploma, how are they going to be able to detect that type of wound or that type of problem since they have no training?

That’s exactly right. That hits a particular issue about the differences between the two. In a nursing home, the staff is obligated to assess skin and for by way of example, skin integrity risk, and based on that assessment, put in place a care plan, and revise the care plan as they have observed it to be working or not working. In the state of Georgia, you have to do an assessment in an assisted living facility. But it’s not as in-depth because you’re not obligated to do anything with regard to skin integrity, preventing pressure ulcers and things like that. Therefore, these things will happen, particularly if the person shouldn’t be in there. So that level of care isn’t quite the same and it’s not the obligation to provide that care is not the same.

6. Is it that the problem is that while they’re in there as they continue to age or that things happen, the adequate staff that has the qualifications to diagnose or to treat are just not there? 

Yes and no, I think that to the extent that any assisted living facility advertises memory care, and such that the public believes that well, my grandfather has Alzheimer’s and is only lucid five minutes a day and can’t recognize me and believes that they’re living in 1976. That person, in my opinion, is not going to get the correct level of care in an assisted living facility. They’ve kind of progressed out of that level. But yet, assisted living facilities are advertising care for these types of people. In my opinion, there is no difference between an 87-year-old person with advanced Alzheimer’s in an assisted living facility versus a nursing home, they’re under the same level of risk for fall, skin integrity, these types of issues. So that’s what creates the gray area. That’s what creates the problem. That’s why it’s kind of like the Wild West. At what point does someone graduate from an assisted living facility to a nursing home and I don’t think that most assisted living facilities can determine that appropriately. 

7. Is it true that half the people with COVID or who have serious consequences from COVID come out of assisted living facilities and nursing homes?

That’s exactly right. It’s a vulnerable population. Now, I’m not saying that you can’t have an intermediary between somebody living independently at home and needing 24-hour skilled nursing. I think we can all agree that that’s okay to have in the middle spot. I think the issue that needs to be addressed is there needs to be heightened care. They need to have a set parameter for who is working in these places 

8. In your opinion, why has the assisted living facility industry basically been left untouched, and unregulated? 

99.9% of nursing homes receive Medicare or Medicaid money, and that allows the federal government to regulate the facility. So nursing home A, in whatever state, if they want to receive Medicare funding reimbursement for taking care of these people, they have to follow these rules. That by and large is not the case for assisted living facilities. I’m not quite sure how it is across the states but Medicare and Medicaid are not paying for assisted living facility stays.

9. Would you agree that it is like an insult to injury when the state does come in when there are deaths and they cite the facility for a lack of safety safeguards for the residents and only fine them $150?

I would absolutely agree. I think that’s why it’s important to always have a strong civil justice system because if we can agree that a citation or regulation is not going to act as a deterrent, then certainly a large verdict would.

10.  To the best of your knowledge, are infections more prevalent in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, or elsewhere?

I actually don’t have an answer to that. All I can tell you is that the federal regulations regarding infection control that would apply to nursing home facilities are pretty stringent. Each facility has to have hand hygiene protocols when PPE should be used, these types of things. There should be an infection control preventionist that oversees those policies. With assisted living facilities that’s not the case. Now, each state might have infection control, you know, regulations for assisted living facilities, but in Georgia, they’re not very strong in my opinion, and they’re not really enforced. So whether or not there’s led to some, you know, wide gap between infections and assisted living facilities and nursing homes. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that.

  “It’s simple online research, depending on what state you’re in, almost all states have some type of database where you can look up the facility and you can look up whether or not it has been cited.” —  Rob Schenk

  To get the rest of the story about assisted living facilities: go to http://www.injuredseniorhotline.com/podcast to hear the rest of the episode.

To find out more about the National Injured Senior Law Center or to set up a free consultation go to https://www.injuredseniorhotline.com/ or call 855-622-6530  

Connect with Rob Schenk:  

Twitter: @Schenk Smith Facebook: Rob Schenk Instagram: @Schenk_Smith Website: Schenk Smith Trial Attorneys Show: The Nursing Home Abuse Podcast LinkedIn: Rob Schenk

CONNECT WITH STEVE H. HEISLER:

Website: http://www.injuredseniorhotline.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/attorneysteveheisler/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-law-offices-of-steven-h.-heisler/about/ Email: [email protected]

   Show notes by Podcastologist: Kristen Braun

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it. 

The post Rob Schenk: Assisted Living  Facilities Are Not What They’re Made Out To Be! appeared first on The Maryland Injury Lawyer.