Verbal Diarrhea

Over educated, late 20-something, trying to save the world, one pointless rant at a time.

[losingthe-war]

Minimalistic look at Mental Disorders

[abreacting-blog]

#borderline

[seraphica]

Woodgreen Community Service in Toronto designed this campaign as part of their Homeward Bound Program supporting struggling single mothers. [x] [via]

[dislikethinkingofuniquenames]

J & I were actually flipping our shit last night in the car after hearing a radio news report about the police pursuing the individuals who sold heroin to Philip Seymour Hoffman. It just pushed both our buttons because he is certainly not the first person to have a drug problem, and there are millions of people with stories deserving of more attention. But, because these “others” are not well-known, we ignore their plights. 

[abreacting-blog]

Best campaign I've ever seen

[mattburkephoto]

Hello Tumblr world. I hope your Friday is treating you well. Now, I know that I am by NO MEANS relevant at ALL in any kind of music industry setting, so this blog post will probably just come off as a jaded old dude ranting about ‘the good ol days’, but whatever it turns into, it’s the way I’ve...

[abreacting-blog]

Couldn't help but share this from my good old pal Matt.

This is awesome and I generally feel the same. The difference now is, I moved to a state and into a group of friends where most of them are much older than me and twice as jaded. It's been a difficult adjustment and for a long time I felt slighted or like I was constantly the butt of some joke. But music was a major influence in my life. Shit it pushed me into the career I have now. I've found my own peace with being an "x hardcore kid." Some days I still miss it. Hell, just the other day I did a cannonball into a crowd of kids. My body paid for it the next day but I do realize on the most basic level, I'm getting too old to play as much as I used to. Nor do I have the time or money. But this post was great and brought me back a little. It also reminded me its ok to be an "x hardcore kid" and that I'm certainly not alone.

Thanx again Matt, always crushing reality from this guys keyboard.

[creestalbreeze]

“A young woman was restrained, force-fed and injected with cosmetics in a high street shop window as part of a hard-hitting protest against animal testing.

Jacqueline Traide was tortured in front of hundreds of horrified shoppers in a bid to raise awareness and end the practise.

The 24-year-old endured 10 hours of experiments, which included having her hair shaved and irritants squirted in her eyes, as part of a worldwide campaign by Lush Cosmetics and The Humane Society.

The disturbing stunt took place in Lush’s Regent Street store, one of the UK’s busiest shopping streets.

Jacqueline appeared genuinely terrified as she was pinned down on a bench and had her mouth stretched open with two metal hooks while a man in a white coat force-fed her until she choked and gagged.

The artist was also injected with numerous needles, had her skin braised and lotions and creams smeared across her face.

Passers-by were gobsmacked to see Jacqueline, a social sculpture student at Oxford Brookes University, forced to have a section of her head shaved.

The gruesome spectacle aimed to highlight the cruelty inflicted on animals during cosmetic laboratory tests and raise awareness that animal testing is still a common practise.

The Humane Society International and Lush Cosmetics have joined forces to launch the largest-ever global campaign to end animal testing for cosmetics.

The campaign, launched to coincide with World Week for Animals in Laboratories, is being rolled out simultaneously in over 700 Lush Ltd shops across forty-seven countries including the United States, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Russia.

Lush campaign manager Tamsin Omond said: “The ironic thing is that if it was a beagle in the window and we were doing all these things to it, we’d have the police and RSPCA here in minutes.

“But somewhere in the world, this kind of thing is happening to an animal every few seconds on average.

“The difference is, it’s normally hidden. We need to remind people it is still going on.”

For more information about the campaign, visit www.fightinganimaltesting.com”

I HOPE EVERYONE READS THIS AND REBLOGS IT!

[abreacting-blog]

What's sweet tea?

Just over five years ago I reluctantly moved to New York and just about everyone who comes in contact with me receives an earful of my disdain for this place. This time lapse makes it’s pretty clear I’m kinda-sorta stuck here. I’m nearing the end of a graduate program, I’m married to a dude who is from here, and well, we own our house… All those things amount to the equivalent of quicksand. I love my quicksand, but it’s still quicksand nonetheless. But no one seems to really understand or even wants to understand why I hate it so much. People come chiming in with advice, philosophical quips your grandmother would say, and ungodly amounts of positivity. All I really want is someone to just agree with me that I have every reason to loathe this cold, weird state. Jerks will respond with all sorts of nonsense like, “Why don’t you go back then?” or “Why did you move in the first place?” I already answered the first question which some people still can’t grasp. Idiots. To answer the second most common question, I moved like most of my friends in their early to mid 20s. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for but I used to tell myself I needed to see new things for a while. With no real plans or goals, I said goodbye to my life in Florida, packed up and moved to Philadelphia. I couldn’t find a job and ran out of money pretty quickly. Not to mention my new roommates were hellions. Roommate 1 was a washed up trust fund scene dude that wanted to live the life of a drug dealing bike messenger complete with illegal guns in the house. Roommate 2 was, well, she was just a very loud, drunk, obnoxious, groupie. Did I mention we had a couch guy? When they didn’t like how things we’re going in the house, they drew stick figure representations of me complete with middle school insults on post it notes and meticulously placed them throughout the house. I was 22 years-old… Not 16, not 18, twenty-two. Now I know that’s still n00b age, but seriously unnecessary guys. Ok so I went a little off topic, but that had to be discussed. So with dwindling funds and a new long-distance boyfriend living about 60 miles north of NYC, I packed up in the middle of the night, just two months after moving to Philadelphia, and started crashing at my best friends studio in Union Square until I could figure things out. After over staying my welcome, I had to decide. Option one was to go home with my tail between my legs… And not just back to the splendor my old room in downtown Orlando and friends that knew and loved me, but to my grand-parents spare bedroom in my hometown that I hadn’t lived in since my sophomore year of high school. Or, option two, move in with my very new boyfriend in “Upstate” (that’s a whole other irritating debate I’ll discuss shortly) New York. The idea of permanently relocating to NY was not what I had in mind when I left Florida. I was stuck between Boston and Philly when originally planning to move, NY wasn’t even on my radar. But I loved my other and wanted to make it work. Five years later I'm still here, we're married and generally happy. But I still day dream of the time when living here is a thing of the past. Here are my reasons why. 1. Oh, you live “UPSTATE.” There I was, 22, fresh out of Florida living in no-mans-land NY. For those of you who don’t know much about the North, contrary to popular belief, NYS is not comprised of entirely city. There’s 350+ miles of highway extending beyond the city that’s just wilderness. This brings me to my first reason to hate this backwards black hole. People living in and around NYC believe that Westchester, as in like the county directly above the Bronx, is “Upstate.” Some people in Manhattan even believe the Bronx is upstate. Let me clarify, the Bronx is across a river the width of a highway from Manhattan. I only live SIXTY MILES from the city, two whopping counties away. When I tell people from the city where I live they look at me like I live on another planet. Floridians know where almost every county and semi-major city is… and we go to lots of them regularly. Living inside a box is not just a city thing. When I first moved to NY I vividly recall someone, whom shall remain nameless, say, “We’re not friends with the people on the other side of the river, everyone sucks over there,” referring to the Hudson River that divides a large portion of upstate NY. Wanna know what’s funny? Most of the friends I have made live on the other side of the river and that’s where everyone is trying to move to now and all those same haters want to pretend like they never had invisible beef. 2. Get off your horse. My relationship got really serious really quickly and we ended up buying a house the following year. All the while, I was struggling to make some solid friends. My standards were high and I don’t blame the people here for not meeting them. Florida is one of the only places I’ve been where “my type of people” exists. They’re a weird brand of sun worshipping hippie meets overly sarcastic, un-pc, low-brow, rednecks and no one judges you if you sit on the fence or dance like a lunatic on one side of it. No one is uptight or pretentious, and no one gives a shit about $500 boots (unless you live in Miami, but let’s be real, Miami isn’t even really even FL, its rich transplanted New Yorkers and Cubans). We have awful taste in music and apparel and we’re damn proud of it. New Yorkers have proven themselves to be the most close-minded, cliquey, elitist, whiners I’ve ever met. They are the liberal apologetics I was warned about. This is as a whole, and not on an individual basis, that means all you uptight New Yorkers need to relax and prove me wrong for a change. Constructive criticism isn’t all that bad. I’ve met a good amount of individuals in New York, but not really anyone I ever clicked with like back home. I’m a weirdo among weirdoes here and it’s really uncomfortable being me. Besides, NY houses the largest hipster population of any state. That alone makes this place worth incinerating. 3. What makes your geographic location so damn fancy? Everything is STUPID expensive. Sure, Floridians get paid less, but it also costs next to nothing to live. New Yorkers income to cost of living ratio is much more skewed. I don’t go out much anymore (mostly because my scale of hatred can’t handle public encounters), but when I do, the price of a night out is disgusting. Forget about the cost of living. Don’t gimme that “you pay to live in the city” garbage line. The city is fucking filthy, over-crowded, loud, cramped, and impersonal. Why would anyone pay more money for those things? To be cool, that’s why. Moving to Brooklyn is the new rebellious coming of age, right-of-passage. But that movement is becoming so popular it’s essentially main stream culture now (time to find something more ironic kids, how about Nebraska?). 4. We get it; the water makes the dough just right. New Yorkers make sure everyone knows, and I mean like really knows what they’re good at. We get it; you guys murder the competitors at bagels and pizza. Is that really what your state is so quick to put people down for? Your carb-laden food items? I don’t even really know how to argue this point any further because it’s just fucking stupid. I think it’s important to briefly note here New Yorker’s obsession with their sports teams. Grown men walk around dressed like middle-aged, leather-skinned women in matchy velour Yankee sweat suits. This is just gross and if you disagree, stop reading immediately; you’re in the wrong place. All this girl wants is some sweet tea. Florida has bagels and pizza, why you so elitist New York? 5. The NYC minute sucks. Everything takes 8 million hours in New York. I know this seems backwards, but let me explain. In the South, people need to get places, and lots of retirees and individuals with lax-a-daisy attitudes can damper how quickly you arrive at your destination. But when you stick 8.34 million people in 468 square miles of grid-lock, no one is going freakin anywhere quickly. If you live in one of the many suburbs in “upstate” the likelihood is that you’re either commuting to the city, close to it, or another far distance on mostly windy 2 lane back roads. New Yorkers have the longest average commute than any other state. That’s fact. 60 miles in Florida took 60 minutes or less. Highways are 40 bazillion lanes of flat, straight, road that lead directly to where you’re going. 60 miles in NY usually averages me around in just less than two hours. People cram in subways like sardines, on sidewalks glued to their phones; it reminds me of cognitively impaired herding cattle every time. 6. How ya doin ya’ll? That sweet sound that caresses my ears every time I cross the Mason-Dixon, it is pure bliss. It doesn’t matter if it’s a gas station attendant at 3am, people are fucking nice. Here’s a novelty, they actually look at you when you talk. I don’t know where this zombie-like and often downright rude attitude stems from but it is one of the most frustrating encounters I deal with regularly. I do meet some people that are incredibly friendly from time to time and psychologically I can maybe try to understand why your state is so closed off to courteous human interaction (I’d get over it pretty quickly living around that many people too). But when someone walks up to you with a giant smile and says, “Hello,” just stop being a dick head for like 30 seconds. It’ll lower your blood pressure. That’s a fact. 7. 75 degrees is NOT Summer. Now, I know this is a personal gripe and there is nothing short of a miracle that can alter your shitty weather patterns, but please get real; an average of 75 degrees for 3 months is not a summer. The pool never becomes swimmable temperature, and don’t pretend like you’re ok with taking a bath in ice cube melt to prove a point. It’s below 50, dark, dreary, and rainy for more than half the year. Heeelllllloooo seasonal depression. Don’t get me wrong, fall is absolutely stunning here, snow is fun for about five minutes before I can’t feel my limbs, but it ends for me there. I don’t like extraneous amounts of clothing and then having to peel it all off and then carry or store it for the remainder of my day. The second fall hits up here, girls be all like pumpkin everything, sweater weather, bllaaahh, STFU… I wasn’t always this negative. I actually used to be a pretty positive, upbeat, no cares, fun-loving kinda girl. You’re state has ruined me. I’m turning into a kermudgin just like the lot of you and I don’t like it one damn bit. I held fast for a long time, but slowly the dark evil that is New York has almost entirely consumed my sweet Southern soul. So in an attempt to maintain what positivity I have left, I will leave you with an equal number of things I like (or tolerate) about New York. 1. The plethora of vegan options 2. Decriminalized marijuana 3. Mass transportation 4. Sweet architecture 5. Woods 6. …. 7. I’ll have ya’ll know I spent 20 minutes spinning in my chair trying think of two more things. Sorry. I did put in a valiant effort though.

[abreacting-blog]

Too many carrots will turn you orange.

          Ya know what I really miss? Good old-fashioned human interaction. Remember when we used to call our friends to hang out… and then actually hang out? I do, although I’ll admit it’s becoming a distant memory. Some loneliness is expected nearing 30, but I didn’t anticipate that my social life would take a nose-dive as early as it did. Not thinking twice about it I dredged on through my mid 20s. We all got busy, we stopped hanging out at bars, most of went back to college, and a few of us beat the odds, finished and got a career. A small number of unsuspecting old party pals had kids. WEIRD. After calculating for lost hangouts based on the known factors, something still wasn’t adding up. But I chalked it up to other variables like living in remote areas or having mismatching schedules. During all this early-onset loneliness I was still consistently discussing potential plans with living, breathing, human flesh… Funny how the best laid plans go awry.

            At some point I decided it would be a great idea to get a masters degree in one of the lowest paid professions on earth, social work. As I write this I’m registering for my final semester. Um, yay? I’m crazy busy, and I mean, irresponsibly so. I own a house, married, part time job, 21 hours a week of unpaid internship, full time graduate course load, 2 dogs and a cat, and did I mention I have an up to 2 hour commute one way? At what point did I actually think I’d have time to get together, kick back with a few chums, and shoot the shit? Well, turns out I do have time; it’s everyone else that sucks. Want to know why? Because I make the time, because friends are important to me. Then I got kinda-sorta angry. Why in the hell am I the only idiot still trying to not be a hermit just because I’m nearly 30?

            I’ll tell you why… THE INTERNET.

            The internet has single handedly ruined human interaction. And I hate it for that. But damn, the internet has done incalculable amounts of good for the world! The “information age” has allowed otherwise remote third world countries to flourish, it has fueled ground breaking research, particularly in medicine, information dissemination of pivotal news (the few unbiased sources that can still be called that and actually discuss world events and not celebrity gossip) has been catapulted into mainstream discussions, and has enhanced education in priceless ways. How could I hate such a force of progress? Because it’s made the human race a bunch of techno-zombies. Just like mom said, too much of a good thing is bad. Like too many carrots can turn you orange, or in our sad culture, so can too much fake tanning. A part of me daydreams about living in the agrarian age sometimes. The target of my anger is the behemoth, social media. Surprising, right? I’m quickly realizing that the topic of technology distorting our relationships with literally everything around us that we come into contact with is a more popular idea than I originally anticipated. It’s not that far fetched so just hear me out.

           Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman written in 1985  (as in like the year I was born) warned about just this. Postman is a pretty prolific writer and I won’t attempt to summate his work, so just do yourself a favor and read it. This tidbit should give you a well-rounded idea though, “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility.” Otherwise the long and short describes how we are completely and totally screwing ourselves with a constant regenerating need for novelty and excitement. Techno-zombies with ADHD… Brilliant idea.

           It’s not that this was the intended purpose of technology’s information dissemination, but the information has lost its value. The news would be kinda boring without makeup slathered pretty ladies and epic intro and outro music. Reality shows psychologically trick us into believing we really all can be insta-celebs or subconsciously alter our desires for any level of privacy. I’m starting to believe the real world version of Idiocracy is actually happening. Twelve-year-old girls desire to be half naked tabloid news and boys are evolving into bravado cavemen. These fads don’t seem to be a tween phase that goes away either. Each sex or age group and religious or political affiliation are all blaming each other for the devolution of our culture (or what’s left of it). We’ve Huxlied ourselves folks.

           Ironically I ended up reading Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, the sequel to the famed Emotional Intelligence immediately following the Postman book. This guy is a brilliant psychologist that studies the brain in relation to behavior. If you don’t know who this dude is either, get yourself on Amazon, stat. I’m only about half way through thanks to post-midterm mind fry. Yet it only took me to the halfway-point to feel a flood of emotions that leave me relieved that I’m not the only one thinking something is really wrong with how we go about human interaction these days. Goleman states, “To the extent that technology absorbs people in a virtual reality, it deadens them to those that are actually nearby. The resulting social autism adds to the ongoing list of unintended human consequences of the continuing invasion of technology into our daily lives.” Social autism… Ding-ding-ding! My aging, uncool, heart did a little flutter. It wanted to do a backflip, but let’s be honest my knees are getting bad.

           We’re all entitled to some healthy narcissism. But, let’s be real here, all of you and including myself are 100% guilty of going a little overboard on the internet narcissism. Social media has allowed us to make mini webpages made by us, for us, and dedicated in our honor for all the caring citizens of the world to give a shit. Beyond our own egotistical relationship with technology is how it has affected how we interact with one another. Think about this scenario for just a minute: A long, long time ago in a land far, far away, when we wanted to hang out with a friend, how did you go about it? You called them, right? Now we go to whatever social media is popular at the time and put out a public beacon of our loneliness and sit back and wait for others to respond. No matter how you approach it, when you want to hang and no one else can, it just plain sucks. The difference lies in whether we broadcast our needs via candle or a lighthouse. But seriously, how annoying is it that people who you know can’t hang out like your “hang out with me please” post?

           So let’s say you finally get to hang out with that bud you made loose internet plans with. When was the last time you two actually talked, like with voices? How kinda-sorta awkward is your hang out? How much are you on your phones updating your mundane hang out in your mundane place for the 500 people from high school you kinda-sorta remember on your friends list to pretend to care about? I’m all about creating a “phones off during human interaction” law. Next I’ll be screaming at children to get off my lawn. We tell people happy birthday on a wall, we tag friends in posts telling them we love and miss them, we give condolences on the fucking internet people… Where is the value in that? What ego beast are you feeding in letting the world know you’re hanging out doing every day people things or telling someone you probably would have lost contact with over a decade ago if it weren’t for social media that you’re “so incredibly sorry about their loss.” My absolute favorite is the reply; “I’m always a phone call away.” Ya know what takes time and energy? A phone call, hell I’ll give an award to a late 20-something that sends snail mail cards. Want to know what takes little to no effort, assuming you have 4G? Conversing via the cold, dead, black hole that is the internet. I can’t stress the lack of value in social media enough… I want to beat it into pre-teens faces.

           The scale of hatred (this is an actual measurement, ask my friends) has tipped to loathing and despair. We give out social media site addresses instead of phone numbers or we lurk through mutual friends a few days later (assuming we’re trying not be too stalkerish) to find our newfound pal. Instead of actually interacting with people we base judgments on their internet likes and dislikes. Remember the top eight? Do you remember your sense of dread when one of your besties didn’t reciprocate the same undying internet love for you? The invention of the seen timestamp in social media messaging has altered our values placed on conversations. If you were on the phone or in person and the person on the other end said something, you heard it, but weren’t ready to respond, how awkward would that be? We all like a lot of stuff and have friends far away that we use technology to make keeping in contact simpler, but there is nothing simple about the psychological mind-fuck social media has had on us as a culture. If your pal “misses your face” then there is this fantastic invention called video chat. My two best friends live more than 1500 miles away and we keep in touch by having video dates regularly. 

           I’ll step off my soapbox now because I am guilty of ALL of these things. Hell, I met my husband on the internet who lived 1000 miles away at the time. But the difference between me and my 30-something friends still living their lives through internet personas is that I want to change, and all of you can too. Over the last few weeks I’ve been making a lot of positive changes in regards to my social media usage. I’ve seriously contemplated getting rid of it entirely. Instead, I ironically started blogging. Look, this beast is hard to break, and it makes sense in my head, so just run with it, ok? I’ve actually met or reconnected with a seriously small handful of worthwhile people due to the demon that is the interweb and I half-heartedly thank it for that. But honestly, I’m a serious believer in the Ron Swanson “1-3 is sufficient” rule. We’re all allowed to have acquaintances and people that fill the boredom holes when our best buds are busy with life. But let’s stop pretending we have hundreds of dedicated companions or even followers and focus on those that matter. Let’s get back to real… human… interaction. Because if we don't, I give it 20 years before we develop technology that allows us to stay out of boob and testicle jail 24/7 sipping craft beer from our beds while we navigate our clones through awful city traffic, day jobs, and eventually real life interactions.