If you really, really want a woman you should get out there and start asking or join a dating site or something man. There are even apps on your phone or tablet for that now. Do it. Do it. Do it.
DO IT!

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When I was little I had my share of girl bullies. It's really a pretty common thing. There's this fantasy idea that girls only do psychological bulling and boys do physical: pure bullshit. I could psychologically bully anyone to tears and worse (even during a fight against bigger, older guys), because I was small and that was my best option so I honed it. Likewise strong girls played to their strengths. And there was nothing about love or affection in that, kids are just little bastards.
Tantz Areine has some great stories about when she was a school bully who did martial arts and picked on the boys. :)

______

So I sharpened up my sabre, at leat the last 6 inches of it, and tried some “test cutting”. One thing they always show is someone slicing a plastic bottle full of water. So I set one up and did a whole lot of practice swings to be sure I had good edge alignment, but even so I thought I'd just end up whacking that bottle like the impact of a baseball bat and flinging it across the backyard.
But NO! One swish and the bottle sliced clean! Then the unhoused water realised its predicament and exploded all over the place. I was very impressed. It's really quite a choppa!

meeting people is easy, if you feel confident. Doubt yourself and you've failed before you've even started. Everyone can have a bad run, and it is when you are down like that you don't see how you put yourself across can put others off. So says someone who has been single for a year… well i've met people, they just haven't been for me, or I for them. Get on a dating website, be entusiastic about who you are. You won't be everyones taste but sooner or later you will find someone you gel with.
I once had an idea to do a series of comics based on my dating exploits, but it was too close to home for me to write. I passed the ideas on to someone else to write instead. maybe someday they will appear.
Bullying… I was an easy target as a kid, far too sensitive for my own good. Fortunately I was pretty big and able to handle myself pretty well. sadly there is always bigger kids. Shit happened.

I went to school in the 1970's. Bullying and all sorts of other stuff was something you endured as part of growing up. You know that whole free range kids, no seatbelts, walking to school with no hovering parents thing. There was no PC thing.

As i indicated in the second paragraph the bullying probably could have led to a more productive relationship and there were indications it was going that way when I moved away. Relationships evolve. I reencountered a few of my aquintances when i went to college but I wanted nothing to do with any of them because of the painful memories it brought back.

Bullying leading anywhere positive? Weird.
The only positives I got were from those angry fist fights you'd get into with other kids, spur of the moment, one on one. Often you'd end the fight sitting in the waiting room of the principals office grinning at each other. Interesting way to make friends. :)
“No sir, we weren't doing anything. I swear, it was just a little playfight, nothing serious, the teacher just got the wrong idea.”

bullying can have positives… but if it is at that level it isn't really bullying, it's rivalry.

As many of you have probably already guessed, I was the weird kid in school. When my classmates were working on colouring inside the lines, I was quite happy with my colours where they were, and when they played outside, I sat in the shadows with a book. I preferred Tolkien to talking.

I've been to multiple primary schools because my parents moved around a few times, and really, only the kids in the last school really had a problem with my non comformity. Because there was no real crack in my armor, nothing I was really ashamed of, they started to invent things for me to feel weird about. They used to call me “Baboon” for a long time, before I figured out the reasoning behind it. In the end, it turned out to be quite clever.

The “Baboon” taunts became less painful after hearing them for a year or so, but still, it hurt nine year old me. Around that time I had started gaining a bit of weight. nothing extreme, but still, the other kids had a field day with that. The “Baboon” taunts stayed, but now they had a whole array of “Fatty” taunts to fill the voids with. I had never thought of myself as a fat kid, I had never really cared about my looks at all. I only started caring because all the other kids seemed to think it was important.

And then high school started, which is a place with even more vile little creatures. But instead of me being the smart kid, and being able to outwit the rest of them, I was now surrounded by monsters that were just as smart as I was. Verbal fights were not really my thing back then, but boy did I have to learn fast. I was taught to feel less attractive, interesting, worthy, and smart than I thought I was. Other kids called me childish for trying to play with them, or called me boring if I tried to rise above their level. Primary school was a nice little introduction to high school. I learned very well that people will not bother to be nice to you if they feel that they are better than you.

Of course there was a lot of physical violence too, but that is something I cared less about. You actually recover from a lot of those kinds of wounds, and if you hit someone back, you can be sure that it had an impact. The actual fights were a nice kind of emotional release, all the anger got out for a few moments. And even if I spent the rest of the day crying by myself, or bleeding gently in a corner, at least I felt like other people knew I was there.

Bullying breaks people. If I really look at the person I am today, and the things I do, there are a lot of things that would have been different, better, if I hadn't been forced to realize that nobody cares about you so early in life. A kid should be allowed to be the center of his own world for a while. Which is kind of what causes bullying in the first place, but still…

And female bullies are worse to a big butch manly man such as I (Derp). I actually tried to make friends among the girls in my school, and it usually seemed to work. But when they finally got annoyed, or just bored with me, their words would cut deeper than anything the other boys could say to me. They were not really as much into punching, biting, scratching, stabbing, and slashing as the boys were, but theyve caused a lot more permanent damage.

So, yeah. Those were my thoughts on bullying.

- - -

I dropped my iPhone 4, and now it's completely kaputski. Does anyone have any extremely good phone tip, or should I just get a newer generation of apple telecommunication?

- - -

“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” is so bo-o-o-o-o-oring! There's entire chapters about water quality! There's a one page description of the type of beans and tissue paper one of the characters likes. It's supposed to be a “Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing” book, according to some quote on the cover, but so far it has only managed to be a book, and has failed to deliver on any of the promises made. I really want to stop reading this book, but I have to make it to the end before I can read something more my style.

phone tips.
Don't touch iPhones with a barge pole, unless it is to destroy the overpriced underspecced pieces of crap.
be careful with Samsung, their quality control is pretty poor. when they are good they are good, but get a bad one…
HTC are pretty solid (except the cheapy, cheapy ones) as are high end Sony phones.
Windows phones are getting better, but I like the freedom of android.
Bullying for me was a mixed bag, a lot of it, but most of them were just kids trying to have a laugh and fit in, not realising they harm they were doing. There were only a couple of genuinely nasty ones.
I'm looking for some guest artists to do a page each on BASO. timeframe is a few weeks (ideally)
six pages in total, I have one for sure leaving five to fill. essentially each page acts as a transistion for a given character as they move to the next part of their story. anyone willing? Style isn't an issue, check the chapter beginnign here for an example.
http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/BASO/5421727/
There will be some strong language and perhaps mild nudity on some pages. and a little action.
I put a thread in the networking section but I doubt anyone looks there.

ozoneocean wrote:
Bullying leading anywhere positive? Weird.

Guess you never had the “girl feeling compassion for you and becoming a friend for life” or someone coming to your defence and making a friend (becoming a sidekick too. It did have its moments) Or the forming close connections with other victims? It's a matter of persepctive and grabbing hold of the branch to keep yourself from going under. I had anxiety attacks, periodic emotional breakdowns and later PTSD. It was hell but there were bright spots.

And with professional help and the earliest of the CBT self-help books I learned ways to turn negative to positive and when to stand my ground. One of the best ways to win a fight is to sit and take the beating. You get savaged but you win respect, hearts and minds. Take it with alacrity roll with the punches and the bully can sometimes put his arm around you and say “I was wrong about you. You take it and you're funny. You're okay.”

After my time in special education I and close workign relationship with childdevelopmetn professionals I developed a more nuanced perspective on the social dynamic that bullying represents. There is more here than beating the weak. Children are testing relationships and socialization techniques not just beating each other up. Of course all this intellectualizing didn' help me with the PTSD flashbacks and nightmares i experienced when I saw it enacted in front of me as an adult and my eventual emotional collapse. But ti helped me understand what had occured. No zero tolerance of bullying but channeling the social dynamic in a more positive direction with problem solving and teaching socialization techniques and developeing a sense of humor and fun.

Nah. Behavior BAD, expuslion! Bad, bad bad! But international relations and politics and history are full of examples of this behavior among adults. BAD! Riiight. Try actually understanding Sun Tzu, Clauswitz, Bismarck and TR you'll see how to be a bully and how to be a victim and elt it work for you. Realpolitik.

There's also the fact that if you were bullied/hurt in the past, you survived it. That's a positive! We don't wish trauma on ourselves or each other of course, but there's something to be said for having some scars or hardships in the past. We can be stronger or better because of those struggles.


Granted, I'm not talking about severe abuse that results in adults who are psychologically crippled. I've heard a story or two like that, and they make you want to cry they're so horrible.


I grew up in sort of a pre-PC time, too. There was no talk of bullying or the wrongness of it (it was the 1930's). Pretty tough neighborhood, too. Some of the bullies I knew back then grew up to do some really horrible things later in life. Nothing too bad happened to me - some fights, a physical pounding or two…but overall, I'm kinda glad to have those experiences.

Okay. Just watched some romantic comedy type Filipino film. The scene that made me laugh a lot? Well…
The female lead (who is socially inept thanks to her “helicopter mother”) asks her friend on how to attract the guy she's looking at (not the guy she ends up with at the end of the movie. Her friend suggest gazing at him. To show him that she wants thim. And that she does…

As she gazes at him at a party, in her mind she hopes that he will welcome her into his life with open arms, start a family with him, and grow old together while admiring the large family they will have. What does he see when he notices her gazing at him? That that he's the mouse, and she's the cat (complete with animal ears, the hunting sequence, and his grisly fate when she catches him).

I found that scene so absurd… I hope this kind of thing doesn't happen to people in real ife… X_X

uhhh, it can happen. not quite like that but yeah people can come on too strong and scare the hell out of you.

Lonnehart wrote:
As she gazes at him at a party, in her mind she hopes that he will welcome her into his life with open arms, start a family with him, and grow old together while admiring the large family they will have. What does he see when he notices her gazing at him? That that he's the mouse, and she's the cat (complete with animal ears, the hunting sequence, and his grisly fate when she catches him).


I found that scene so absurd… I hope this kind of thing doesn't happen to people in real ife… X_X

That is an accurate protrayel of the perception men and women can have of each other. “Fear of commitment”? Every girl that looks at me wants the house and kids and all I want is someone to have drinks with.

That trope shows up a lot in Asian rom-coms and even a couple of movies made by Americans of Asian descent. It even shows up in anime. The girl looks at the guy and introduces him to dad and everyone assumes they're engaged… hilarity ensues.

It's so hard to know what's “normal” and what's not. I'm just beginning to realize that I may have some sensory processing issues which could be contributing to some of my weirder anxieties (restaurants in particular). Sounds are the biggest thing, but also certain textures/feelings are almost unbearable to me. Somehow I've been living my life assuming that touching wood or going barefoot were equally unpleasant to everyone else. Apparently this is not the case. :P

Bullying leading anywhere positive? Weird.

Yeah, that was not my experience. I had terrible speech impediments growing up, and despite not being bullied for it very often (I was fortunate to have a tight-knit group of kids moving together through elementary school), the few mean comments that I did get for it made me horribly shy and self-conscious about talking well into my teens. I'm still convinced that I sound ridiculous when I talk, actually, I just don't let it stop me from talking any more.

And then my best-friend-turned-bully in high school…that was a super crappy situation. The bullying wasn't that bad in retrospect, but they stuck us in the same chemistry class for a semester and just being in the same room as her made me totally miserable. It didn't make me stronger or scar me, it just isn't a very pleasant memory.

You can't be a hippie unless you love walking barefoot on wood. My illusions of you are shattered. Shattered I tells ya! T_T

American highschool remanisance in film and TV pisses me off and and I find the implication disturbing: the fact that many adults are still fixated on the time, as if that was the best part of their lives. Which has unfortunately been confirmed in far too many cases. I'm pretty sure that's mainly a US thing. They're fixated on high-schools in anime but I think that's mainly because it's just a standard trope rather than pandering to fond rememberances… Apart from girl's phys-ed leotards, which are a weird fettish thing for Japanese people apparently.

All that said, I don't fondly recall highschool, but I do recall it - just now because people are talking about it :P
I dressed like the popular kids, liked the same sorts of music, had the same sort of hairstyle, came from the same sort of well to do area, and all that naturally gets you membership of the popular kids club. But I thought they were arseholes mostly- waaaay too competitive with each other and frankly I lacked confidence for that sort of thing. I prefered to hang out with the rougher kids and the freaks. As well as the reeeeally rough kids, the tough little human pit bulls, but they weren't too bright and didn't have much to talk about. Very friendly and loyal, but their idea of a good conversation was punching each other and laughing, or seeing how far they could spit, “hang a loogie”, and that was them being gentle and good natured, gentle souls! Never my sort of thing.
The “freaks” though (not the rough kids), were funnier, friendlier, and way more interesting than the overconfident one-uppers that were the popular group.

But the popular kids saw me as one of them still because of how I looked, spoke and where I came from so they'd often dragoon me into their group. And they'd say things like “You're one of us, why do you hang out with those losers?” and “I don't get it, those guys are weirdos, you don't belong with them.” Which is EXACTLY like so many of those american highschool movies!
(I think that's where I got my social chameleonism from. I can mix easily with a lot of different groups.)
But they really unpleasant to be around so I preferred to avoid them when I could.

The last incidence of note: my family moved away to a much wealthier area, but I still wanted to go to the same school. Because of this when my usual group of misfit friends weren't around I was adopted by another group: the rich kids.
There were only 2 people in that group. They had all the very best stuff, went on good holidays lived in huge houses etc and were the worst bastard cruelest bullies in the whole school. But they were intelligent and funny so they were good company at times. Gavin and Charles were their names (haha). The funniest thing about them was that they wanted so desperately to be part of the popular kids group, but didn't realise everyone disliked them because of how mean they were. Plus being obsequious is very unattractive - which is how they acted around the popular kids to try and impress them.

Oh, there were the in between group that orbited the popular crowd like an asteroid belt, desperately wanting to be noticed, but still hung out with the freaks and the rough kids too at times. Good kids, but still too concerned about acceptance for my liking.
For preference I would have been a loner, but you're lot less likely to get picked on if you're with a group.

OK, that's some of my highschool crap. Kids are such little social animals.

Oh, and there were no geeks or nerds or jocks. Those American TV tropes (do they have a basis in reality?), did not exist for us.
Team sport was not thing in Australian schools so none of that dynamic could happen. And there was no dungeons and dragons apart from a book of rules of the game in the library which was an entertaining read but no one could see how it applied to anything.

ozoneocean wrote:
Oh, and there were no geeks or nerds or jocks. Those American TV tropes (do they have a basis in reality?), did not exist for us.
Team sport was not thing in Australian schools so none of that dynamic could happen.

This really surprises me! I'd assumed it was a big thing over there, probably because of the mad rivalry that goes on with any kind of Australia v England sporting match. If the team sport thing isn't being drilled in, It must just be some kind of intercontinental hate thing? All of this stuff goes over my head.

We definitely have a lot of that in our schools, or did when I was there. I've always been suspicious of any kind of physical group activity. If we're talking bullying, physical group activity seems to be a breeding ground for that kind of thing, with people bonding over whatever chemical rush is released into the brain and their shared hatred of anyone who wasn't up to scratch. Fortunately for me I was big, ugly and stubborn enough to avoid bullying and not care about peer pressure or the consequences of not giving in to it. No, team captain, I am not one of ‘the lads’. My sense of self worth is exponentially related to how low an opinion ‘the lads’ have of me!

The only proper bullying me and my friends encountered was towards the end of our school careers, when socially inadequate members of the year above started to go out with girls from our year. They would mark their territory by picking on us. I can't really blame them, full of hormones and lacking the wit, charm and personal hygeine to attract girls of their own age. It's says more about the girls we had considered friends to be honest, who on reflection were equally responsible for this behaviour. Some people have a much worse time though. I used to think, if these are the best days of our lives, just how crappy are our lives going to get?!

There were definitely nerd and geek groups at my school and those were my favorite ones! I really want to write a response to this discussion, but before I do, I need to preface it with this:

Oz, your high school social life sounded like Freaks and Geeks, Mean Girls, The OC, 90210, Twilight, and The Breakfast Club all rolled into one. Oh my, what an entertaining read.

Freaks and Geeks hit very close to home. It was set in 1980 and I went to HS 1978-1983. Except we had no idea what a geek was. Freddie Blase the pro-wrestler popularized the term in the 1950's(?) but we didn't use it. In fact i created a mythical animal that was a globe with two eyes and huge feet that I called a geek (though I spelled it ghek)

But nerd was everywhere. I was an off-the-wall nutcase loner with a love of the whimsical and passionate interest in military history. I never went out and had few if any friends and in fact was terrifed of talking on the phone. True social anxiety. I was terrified of social interaction and crowds. An aftereffect of my grade school torture at the hands of various bullies.

I was a totally non-social misanthrope. Better to be silent and thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. And everytime i did open my mouth I was the fool or said dumb things. My lessons in social interaction came from Monty Python and Saturday Night Live. (The John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd years)

Some friends nicknamed me “Marvin” after Marvin perennially negative and depressed robot from Hitchhiker's Guide. And I was known throughout the school as an artist, actor and writer. But I rarely spoke. 2013 was the 30th HS reunion and I reconnected with a lot of people. It turned out that everyone remembers me but I remember practically no one. High school to me was “make school or die” a reference to the French Foreign Legion “March or die” Do my time in school and get out.
My HS years are not romantic but a time of inability to interact with my peers, terrible fear and missed oppurtunity. And I was the star of the Drama club, literary magazine and art class. I could perform but not interact. My legacy was to have a teacher swear to never again give essay tests because of my horrible handwriting.

In 1989 I moved in to share a house with some people I had known in high school. One who had known me rather well told me I was a completely different person from the one he had known in High school.

The social dynamics are what make the school experience simillar to the films, but if I could actually replay those years I'd have ignored all that and just studdied properlly and done the work like I was supposed to. I wouldn't have refused my parent's offer of private schooling and I would've done all the school work I was supposed to there as well.
It wasn't until university that I realised that working hard and taking stuff seriously gets you places.

Thank goodness you can't replay stuff! Ever onward and ahead! :D

@Scarf - Serious tesm sports for Aussie school age kids have always been after school activities and kids that do them are likley to come together from different schools and ages: Cricket, tee-ball, softball, swimming, little athletics, Aussie rules football, rugby, baskectball, soccer, etc.
Competative School sports are limited to “house sports”: Different school teams among the school “houses”, or “factions”. Stupid athletic stuff like running, high jump and all that kind of thing. And EVERYONE competes in it so there are no groups or cliques of sporty types. If anyone tried they'd be thought of as morons since there's no prestige or point in specialising that way in school sports that it becomes your social focus.
Though being GOOD at sport was still very highly regarded, as long as that wasn't ALL you were good at, if it was then you'd be one of the freaks or the wannabes.

Jebus, I should stop going on and on about it, hahaha!
Scarf and Bravo your expereinces were pretty interesting.

So I finally got something I had ordered from China back in December. It was a tiny little letter-sized slip of package. Though posted on January 3 it didn't arrive in the USA until January 23. Then it sat in San Francisco for two weeks. Someone drop it behind the machinery in the postal sorting facility?

All the other stuff I ordered form Asia at the same time arrived within a week. Guess this one had to be at the long end of time in transit to even out the average.

I started off my education training pretty early. One of my preschools was swimming-based, and I was one of the best swimmers in my year and that gave me a lot of confidence. I was admitted into a Magnet elementary school in Northside Chicago because I was able to pass a reasoning test that asked the simple question: Where does bread come from?

Kindergarten was similar to the preschools I attended, I made friends quickly. But after the first week, my mom was called into a teacher's conference because another little girl told her mom that a girl in her class had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle backpack that was meant for boys. She was talking about me and there was a concern that I was not fitting in with the gender norms of little girls my age. I loved the Ninja Turtles, Michelangelo was my favourite and I was very proud of my backpack. My mom was worried that I would be labeled as a Tomboy, so the following day, I remember walking back to the store to trade in my super cool TMNT backpack for a Little Mermaid one. I did not talk much after that.

Bullying still existed when I was in school. It was more of a right of passage based on where people sat on the bus. The little kids sat in the front and the rudest rabble-rousers sat in the back and would bully the people who sat in the middle rows the entire ride home. I was usually able to slip under the rader of the mean boys on the bus because they would focus their attention on the younger males. One of my good friends on the bus was continuously picked on because of his weight, but when he grew-up, he ended up starring as the main character in a pretty well-known American sitcom on FOX. I guess that is a type of poetic justice.

I believed that bullying was a lot more gender based because little girls can be just as cruel to other little girls based on silly things like hair accessories or the number of beads or embroidery string in a bead box. Some of the girls in my class were really mean and used popularity as the benchmark for being cool or deciding who was worthy enough for their friendship. I narrowly escaped being ostracized because I sat next to one of the “popular” girls on the bus.

I was able to leave all of the ugliness and judgemental behavior of my peers behind when my family moved West to California. I was given a clean slate and reinvented a new persona for myself that was based around academic achievements and I was not held back by my elementary school years.

___

High school was a whole new monster to navigate socially, but I was fortunate because I was able to keep the friendships I made in middle school as a foundation. I went to a really large high school of more than 3,000 students. We had every single high school stereotype under the sun: jocks (football), cheerleaders, goths, emo kids, track runners, skaters, surfers, nerds, loners, ROTC kids, ethnic-based groups, stoners, artists, Christians, Republicans, ASB, queer, drama, ballers, band geeks, and the list goes on and on. There were just too many students to keep up with the popular kids because I had no clue who was considered popular due to the fact that the school was too big.

I found my identity as a JV and Varsity letter-earning member of the academic team. I would sneak into the Magic the Gathering room during lunch and play chess against random people until I would win or they would forfeit. Overall, I was too preoccupied with college acceptances to focus on the drama and cliques of high school.

Now looking back at the hilarity of high school stereotypes, I must say that I loved solidifying my own unique identity during my college years. However all of my experiences, even the negative ones from elementary school have all played a major part in shaping my personality today.

kawaiidaigakusei wrote:
But after the first week, my mom was called into a teacher's conference because another little girl told her mom that a girl in her class had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle backpack that was meant for boys. She was talking about me and there was a concern that I was not fitting in with the gender norms of little girls my age.

That is so sad, kawaii! I had something slightly similar happen in first grade, although it wasn't gender-based. I can't remember exactly what the issue was, but basically I wasn't doing something I was meant to be doing even though all the other kids were. Rather than just telling me what I was meant to be doing, my teacher phoned my parents to complain. My mom and I haven't always gotten along, but I'm still indebted to how awesome she was in this situation. She told the teacher that I wasn't like the other kids and I wouldn't just copy whatever they did, and that that was a good thing. Basically, I was given the message early on that it was okay to march to the beat of my own drummer. Probably not a message that served me well in terms of popularity in high school, but I still appreciate it.

—

I always find American high schools in TV shows/movies to be really strange. Like, cheerleaders? I think we probably had them, but they weren't the “popular girls” or anything. The “nerdy” group was just the IB kids, and their being friends was more a result of being in all the same (small) classes all the time. I spent most of my spare time in the art room and just talked with whoever happened to be there, or no one. When I wanted to hang out with people it was either the IB kids or a group of slightly geeky/strange kids who hung out in the same alcove all the time. I found both groups to be too dramatic for my liking, though, so whenever arguments arose I would just slip off to the art room again.

Wow, what kind of a mother picks on another person's child about their gender identity? That woman must have been a Z-grade loser. Probably had some serve idenity issues… Poor old closset case, repressed by society so she represses eyerone else in retaliation.

Man, my sister LOVED toy cars when she was little, especially racig cars. She wanted to be a racing car driver when she was older. I on the other hand loved dressing up and making clothing, hinking about hairstyles, outfits and hats. Neither of us are gay. My sister is a very girly girl who just happens to love cars. I'm arty and my outfit thing has gone into collecting hats, and assembling Hussar outfits, antique white tie and morning wear etc- collecting vintage clothing mainly.
Though I just finished putting together a killer pair of cheetah print flared jeans. ;)

I've got the opposite end of the spectrum with bullying now.

My kids.

I took my eldest (9) to the local skate park, well local to me. He doesn't know anyone in the area so he minds his own business skates and tries to be friendly. He is a bit on the clumsy side so not much of a skater, he doesn't fall off but not tricks, nothing flashy. When I take him up I sit at a distance and let him have his fun, he started talking to a group of lads, who after a little while started picking on him. He asked me to go over and tell them to stop being mean to him. They were swaearing at him and taking the piss because he couldn't do any tricks. I didn't because that would make it worse, instead I gave a little advice on how he would deal with it and asked if he wanted to leave. He tried his best but they were caught up in group mentality and just continued being rude regardless and he decided to leave after a bit. Still not sure I di the right thing, but I figure if I stepped in then he will get more shit for getting his dad to fight his battles for him.
Problem is he used to fight his battles a little too well and lash out, have worked very hard to rein that behaviour in it has gone the other way.

He's too soft and sensitive. He's like me in that, I was a sensitive kid and got bullied so much I ended up raging. Eventually I learned to control it but it caused me a lot of trouble, both in fighting and later becoming a target for the “tough” kids to prove themselves against. I wanted to avoid that for my son but now it seems to have gone awry, and despite being very intelligent he takes things to heart and his heart rules his head. Where as young ozone was able to be clever about it his emotions cloud his judgement. An additional problem is he's on the autistic spectrum and social interaction is hard for him at the best of times. I'd keep him away from everything if I could but that's no solution.

My middle son (6) used to be far more interested in girls toys than boys. He used to like to dress in his sisters clothes and when you asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would say “a Queen” That seems to have been a bit of a phase as he is very much a typical boy now.

Ugh. This gender thing can be a headache. Especially when people pry into other people's business. But sometimes we get this as grownups. Long ago, I'm shopping at the grocery store when one of the male shoppers comes up to me and tells me I'm not supposed to hold the basket in the crook of my elbow. And the reason? Nothing about health, more about how only “ladies” are supposed to do that.

I bet somewhere out there, some guys are raging at the celebrity chefs and cooks in The Food Network because of their profession… which is supposed to be female only. Then again maybe the ragers have been living in a rock since the 1950's and can't accept anything outside of what they were taught as children… hmm…

This is why I am so scared to have kids In this generation. How is it we have progressed so much, especially in gender identifying, homosexual rights and acceptance and the sorts; yet it seems the bullying has gotten worse? Maybe it's always been this bad but I have only become more aware of it as an adult. I'm sure cyber bullying doesn't help..

Back when I were a lad (and this is going back quite a way I should stress) homophobia, sexism, racism and all the other favourites were definitely a lot worse - entrenched in the media as well as witnessed everywhere you went. That's not to say they've gone away, far from it, but at least there seems to be a general consensus that these are bad things now, which is progress of a sort. I'm going to start carrying a basket in the crook of my arm as of tomorrow.

As for cyber bullying, the internet is where the dark underbelly of humanity really rears it's ugly head, thanks to the anonymity. Why do we need anonymity? What's wrong with “If yer name's not down, yer not comin' in!”?

ashtree house wrote:
This is why I am so scared to have kids In this generation. How is it we have progressed so much, especially in gender identifying, homosexual rights and acceptance and the sorts; yet it seems the bullying has gotten worse? Maybe it's always been this bad but I have only become more aware of it as an adult. I'm sure cyber bullying doesn't help..

I don't know if bullying has actually gotten worse. It's just gotten easier. Children have always been bad people, they're just bad people with iPhones now. With the increase in possible ways of communication, and the increased frame of reference for children nowadays, we can bully people in more different ways, and without even being in the same building.

Also, television and the internet diminish social skills a bit, or at least mold them into a form that is less useful in actual face to face social situations, so children need a longer time to learn the same level of social skills that earlier generations had to work with. They're probably hanging around a maximum level of bullying for a longer time, instead of the shorter period of maximum bullying that we all experienced.

I'm not sure I actually made sense, but all the thoughts I have on the subject are there in some way, so I'm done talking about the subject for now.

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I miss Robin Williams.

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Genders are stupid, and we'll never solve this problem until we come up with a few more of them. I'd prefer not to have a gender, and just be myself, but if a gender is required, I'd prefer to be a trunk person (Rick and Morty). Sadly, Michael Denny and the Denny singers will never let me be one.

Imagine not having a gender. You wouldn't share a gender with anyone, and none of your little quirks could be attributed to something you have no control over. You'd just be you. It seems like a much better way of being.

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I got a new iPhone, even after Genejoke urged me not to get one. (I'm agreeing that they're overpriced, but they're also exactly what I want in a phone, and the one I got was on sale.) It's an iPhone 5s Gold 64 GB. I'm really excited about it, but I need to get a nano SIM card before I can force it to do my bidding, and I have no idea when I get a chance to pick one of them up somewhere. Supposedly you can cut a bigger one down, but Im afraid of doing that. Does anyone have any experience with cutting into their own SIM cards?

call yu phone service provider, they will send yo one out usually free of charge.

Children have always been bad, and now they have iPhones.. Truer words have never been spoken Kroatz. Kids today scare me, I'm 26 and totally get intimidated by teenagers hahaha