Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

In response to baldanders, I got anecdotal:

My grandfather was retired before he got his first credit card, not having felt the need earlier. (He was born in 1898, and was almost 50 when he came to the U.S.) He had no history of debt (no car, rental apartment).

That made it hard to get a credit card. However, at some point he had bought a few shares of stock in an oil company--I think it was Gulf. So they sent him a credit card offer, which he took. After he'd had that card for a little while, and I think charged a couple of tanks of gas for his daughters' cars so he'd have something to pay off, someone else was willing to give him a card he had actual use for.

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A long reply to shadowin_minds, who, over in polyamory, is pushing people to tell zir all about our lives and relationships, has said zie doesn't want to look at FAQs because "these aren't your words, i want your words, your thoughts typed," doesn't have specific questions, and has almost no personal information on zir own journal, and who then said that if we asked questions, zie would be willing to provide information:

You're missing the point. From over here, what this looks like is a complete stranger saying "You're different from me. Tell me all about your life. I have no interest in living the way you do, I'm just curious. About everything." And when people say "here's some information about what you're interested in," you're insisting that no, that's not good, you want to know about my life, and furthermore you want it right here, right now, on your terms.

There are a lot more monogamous people than polyamorists, just as there are more straight people than queer, more cis- than trans-gendered people, and more Christians in the US than any other religion. That means that anyone in the minority groups could spend a lot of their time answering the questions of all their well-meaning friends, let alone strangers on the street. That's one of the reasons there are things like FAQs.

If a stranger came over here and said that they've read the FAQS (there are some good ones at polyamory.org as well--I recommend the "How to Fuck Up a Relationship" one to anyone considering any sort of romantic or sexual relationship, including monogamous heterosexual till-death-do-us-part) and are now wondering about $specific_thing, I'd likely answer.

As is, it feels as though you've decided that you have the right to interrupt my life, work, and leisure to indulge your curiosity. If I wanted to write "my poly in 200 words or less," it would already be on my userinfo page or on my non-LJ Web site. The way I work, this stuff comes out incrementally, as life goes on. Much of my journal--and that of a lot of other people who post here--is public.

Possibly relevant questions to answer, if you want us to open up in turn, include "Why should I answer your open-ended questions? What makes you unable to benefit from a FAQ? What are you going to do with this information? and Who are you involved with? How long have you been partners, and when and why did you decide to be monogamous? Are you of the same gender, and is the gender of your partner important to you?"

[saving this less because I think it will interest you all than for my own reference, as usual, and because I half-expect a flounce soon.]

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In response to something oursin posted about societal disparaging of cooking when/as a women's skill, and the resulting discussion of cookbooks, learning, et cetera:

I'm currently learning, a little, how to cook on an electric range. I've always had a gas stove (one of the advantages of big-city life). adrian_turtle has an electric. It's different, and thus far the only advantage I've noticed is that the kettle boils faster. It responds more slowly--I sometimes move a pot to a different burner in order to turn the heat down, where with a gas stove I'd just turn it down. But I'm learning what the different numbers on the dials mean--again, with gas I just look at the flames.

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elisem asked "What's it like to write something sparked by a piece of jewelry I made?"

It's not "like" something.

Sorry, that isn't very helpful. Mostly, I've worked off the titles more than the shapes of the earrings--"Twilight Beacons" might be an exception, a bit, but for example when I wrote "Song of the Lesbian Elephant" I was definitely playing with ideas of elephants, not of charoite.

Come to think, that may be why I've made no real headway on that little artist's challenge branch I've had for, I think, at least a year--it has no name.

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rezendi posted about LibraryThing's most-unread books, annotating it for what he had and hadn't read, including notes for "mean to read" and "hated this book." My reaction:

I skimmed through this, and realized that most of the books listed here that you haven't read and I did are either things I had in high school (we read a lot of books in four years of high school English) or by Jane Austen. I have no idea of whether this Means Anything. (In college English/lit class I read parts of the Aeneid, Don Quixote, and Ulysses. It wasn't my best semester for getting things done, and Virgil suffers from being read immediately after Homer.)

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Another comment to ozarque, this one in a discussion of caregiving as work and the difficulties both class and rigid gender roles can add to that work. The post was partly about communications problems, and Ozarque's thesis that our culture is making a lot of effort to avoid discussing these issues.

A problem with the conversations you describe in the last paragraph, the ones with "How can you talk about something like this?" is that they're starting from a difficult position. If you were being asked for directions, you'd say "If I wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

It's not just that people can't un-say what's been said. It's that the havoc that would be wrought by saying something is built up from years of silence and resentment. I don't think there would be nearly as much havoc if, when two people of different genders were considering getting married, one of them said to the other something like "You know, when I was a kid I saw my mother doing an awful lot of stuff like keeping track of appointments and sending cards to Dad's family, and it was a big drain on her. Let's figure out a way to reduce that." Even if the other person said "But you have to send cards to all your relatives!" there'd be a starting point that wasn't "he's made me do this for years" or "my mother keeps complaining that Great-Uncle Rupert doesn't hear from us."

I don't see any way that two people can have a discussion about their relationship that includes, or even starts from, "I feel horrible that you're doing so much work because we can't afford to hire someone to do it, but there's no way I'm going to start doing some of that work." ["I feel horrible that you're doing so much work because we can't afford to hire someone to do it, so let's get rid of some of it altogether" might be productive.] Nor that there's much if any way to have a discussion if you start with "I feel horrible about resenting you, and I feel horrible when I realize that there is nothing I can say that will get you to do some of the work that I resent having to do all of." It's not just the resentment--it's that a conversation that starts with "I feel horrible when I realize that nothing I can say or do will get you to change this" has nowhere useful to go.