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Monday Open Thread Shindig

I’m out for the day, tomorrow the whole team will be back with a day filled with exciting posts and delightful conversation. 

Have a fantastic night, and lets get chatty in the comments.

By [E] Selena MacIntosh*

Selena MacIntosh is the owner and editor of Persephone Magazine. She also fixes it when it breaks. She is fueled by Diet Coke, coffee with a lot of cream in it, and cat hair.

104 replies on “Monday Open Thread Shindig”

Another (former) Jezzie here! I wasn’t as pissed off by the commenting change as I was by the articles today. Jeez, we get it, you don’t like us, we’re leaving, calm your tits.

Anyways, I can’t stop listening to this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghb6eDopW8I

It’s so pretty, but also kind of depressing and I should probably stop listening because I’m already a little too depressed…

It warms the cockles of my heart to see so many Jez refugees here.  It’s like taking the only great part of Jez (the commenters) and mixing them with articles that I don’t have to hate read.  Lovely!  Also, I hate reading science articles on Jez, but have read a couple of good ones on here.

Grrrrr, work is bringing big buckets of suckitude and an overhanging sense of failure to my life lately. Deadlines looming, funding applications going unanswered, coworkers ignoring me, etc. And technically, I’m supposed to be on vacation the entire July.

 

 

No fucking kidding. I mean, it’s true, for a long while when I was there, I felt “left out” for not having a star. Not only that, but I felt like people didn’t care as much whether I came or went on that site simply because I didn’t have a star.

But the idea of celebrating it as some sort of discussion-promoting meritocracy, the idea of saying “you’re just gonna have to deal! *trollface*”…they’d have to be fucking daft to think that’s true. I am absolutely certain that the commenting environment will become a place I wouldn’t want to touch with a sixty foot pole.

I finally left the site because I didn’t want to deal with the content anymore, but the only reason I stayed so long was the community. Which, apparently, they have no problem with destroying.

It just blows my mind how patronizing and *dismissive* that post is. A lot of Jez’s readership has been reading and commenting for years, and that post just reads like a chain grocery store’s form letter reaction to occasional patrons who complain that the chain as a whole no longer has self-checkout lanes. Even if they’d said “we didn’t choose this, Gawker did and they’re our hosts”, it would be less frustrating.

I like P-mag better anyway. Partly the more community-like environment and partly because y’all stick with original content. There are no Hugo Schwyzer reblogs here.

I just wrote some haikus to describe my phd dissertation. I think this has been a productive use of my time while in class. Let me share:

Fragmented brook trout
Native cold-water species
Struggle to stay cool

Flood, forests, and genes
A negative synergy
Shifting trends and norms

Inappropriate
Ecological models
Won’t help, just damage

We’re just one big lunch table. There’s a Diet Coke fountain over by Selena, a fully stocked coffee bar over by me, and every once in a while we all get up and switch seats just so no one gets bored. Jump in! We don’t bite OR take our commenters for granted!

oh please don’t feel bad!  I was stifling giggles all the way!  I’m still laughing!

The whole rest of that side of my family home schools their kids (you know, the way God intended) and they have NEVER been introduced to anything LGBT – related.  I can’t wait for those kids to discover what else they’ve been missing out on!

I’m converting to Judaism tomorrow. I really wanted it to be something special, but all the Rabbis involved in the process were either assholes or indifferent. The whole process just made me resentful and miserable.

My original sponsoring Rabbi was an awful, awful person. She did a lot of terrible crap, but one thing that sticks out was a story that she told me about how she refused to help a bisexual person convert because they wanted to continue dating men and women and wouldn’t promise to marry someone of the opposite sex. As she put it “gay people don’t have a choice, but if you do you should make the traditional one described in the Torah.”

After deciding that I really didn’t want to be around that person anymore I switched to another Rabbi who seems to have a “whatever I don’t care” approach. I talked to him for all of 20 minutes and he basically just said “Fine I’ll take you to the Beit Din,” while giving me no concept of what to expect.

It’s all so frustrating and upsetting.

Oof. Not Jewish, but when the priest at my church was a total jerkface, I quit attending services for a while (until he retired actually), so I can empathize a bit. I just can’t imagine someone not being excited to have someone join their faith. It’s a big deal. If it’s worth anything, I’m excited for you. I hope the day will be special despite the apathy of the Rabbi.

Thanks guys.

I think I’m just going to look for a reformed synagogue to join. I converted with a conservative one because I was told that it’s a good idea to convert as far to the right as you can. Mostly because Israel enjoys telling converts that they aren’t “Jewish enough” to count as a Jew in their country. Not that I want to live there, but in case any of my kids ever did.

I’ve been to conservative shuls in other communities that were very open minded. I even went to one where on Passover the Rabbi discussed the Exodus and how Jews have a history of struggling to find a home, which he tied into why he believes they should empathize with undocumented immigrants and should support the DREAM Act. He then had a young man who would be granted citizenship if the dream act were passed come up and discuss his life story. It was amazing.

For whatever reason all the Conservative Rabbis I’ve encountered in my city seem to be more focused on whether I’m going to keep eating shrimp. I get that halacha (jewish law) is part of Conservative Judaism, but here it seems to be the main focus, which is disappointing.

Euch. So yesterday I got this bitchy email (cc to my boss no less), about how this report I had filled out was filled out wrong, and how all this info was covered in a conference call that I WAS NOT IN ON.

I decided to kill it with kindness and responded with something like, “Thanks for your suggestions on how to improve the report. I wasn’t in attendance on the confrence call in question, do you have any other suggestions for things I should be aware of going forward?”

The response I got indicated that the bitchyness was intended more for the other two people involved in the report. ‘Scuse me, why then was the email to me and only cc them then?

I hate office drama.

Fer serious. 90% of what I do with this report is get information and turn it into report format. I asked what people wanted included, they told me, and I wrote it into the report. Then Mr. Rude comes back to me that that is the wrong info, when he knows full well that I just write the report, I don’t generate the info going in. And copies the boss man who doesn’t understand how this stupid report works. Thanks heaps buddy. Next time you want to tell the other folks about what is supposed to be going into the report, maybe you could, I don’t know, tell them.

I surprised myself with writing a 600 words article in one go. All right, recipes where involved so a proper 300 words, but still.

I forgot my healthy salad + yoghurt lunch so now I’ve decided to get poffertjes for lunch (mini-mini pancakes).

If I start working now, I could be done at two. I’m not going to start working now, the Internet is here for me.

So, I have a Straight Talk phone. I just got a new phone because my old one was 2 years old and finally broke. I can’t get gmail to work on my new phone so I called customer service. They said since I can call/text/facebook my phone is working properly and that I should call google. Is that hilarious or what?

If I can’t get my gmail to work on my phone, I’m going to have to come up with a different option :| I hate phones.

Nope, not an android. I’m just using the regular browser. I called them back this morning and spent 30 minutes on the phone. The end solution? It might take an entire day for your browser to work properly so just keep checking it during the day and call us back this evening. So annoying.

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