Slightly Annoying, EDIT: Whiteagle has a Manlybearpig dad

[stubby]

I find that money is pretty good motivation to get me to do stuff.

This is because you're not the adult child of an alcoholic; their priorities are often the opposite of what you'd expect. Money = empowerment, and for the ones that go hypo-responsible rather than hyper-responsible, empowerment is something they need to avoid at all costs. Because if you're helpless, then you can't be held responsible and punished.

http://alcoholism.about.com/cs/adult/a/aa073097.htm

Lack of executive function is a survival adaptation in a family like that. As long as you're stuck in that situation, you'll always be forced to see life in terms of finding ways to make everything not your fault. You will seek to gather a collection of problems that can't be solved, rather than to solve any of the problems you have, in order to protect yourself from what goes on in your crazy family.

The fact that you have siblings figuring out how to "take care" of you means they took the opposite, hyper-responsible course, which is just as self-destructive.

You should look into ACA. http://www.adultchildren.org/

[Scratch]

Title changed to reflect topic, it is sorta fucked up how this is the most active the Administration forum has been in a good while.

[Whiteagle]

I dunno about you but three hundred bucks is basically nothing for cost of living in my area. It's like, *maybe* enough to cover a month's rent of a room (not a studio apartment, but a room in someone else's house/apartment), leaving you with nothing for food or all other assorted bullshit and unexpected costs that come with being poor...

Well yeah, I'm well aware of how high the cost of living is...
Hell I think it's actually higher out here in the corn, I believe my estimated share of the living expenses was something like $400-$500.

Actually being able deal with it is one of those things that is a major source of anxiety for me, considering my natural weakness when it comes to maintaining scheduled events...

If you think you can earn a living doing reviews of lego, cool. Just be aware that that may totally not work out and there are more conventional options for employment then starting your own business. I would be very impressed if it took you less than a year after you started doing your website for it to start turning a profit.

Dude, it's a show where I'm reviewing LEGO!

...I'll be lucky if ANY revenue I make covers even HALF the cost of production.

I don't spend much money on myself either, but that is more due to BILLS BILLS AUGH making all of my money magically vanish at the end of every month. I haven't bought lego in like, shit, six years? something like that, unless you count brickarms, in which case its four years.

Yeah, remember that whole "forgetting to eat" thing?

Imagine on top of having the memory of a Goldfish, you are VERY aware of the fact you live in a world where your average person has to keep making 5-6 monthly payments.

The problem with being poor is that you have so little capital that every possible fucking thing will screw you- car breaks down? screwed. Natural disaster? screwed. Injured? better hope Medicaid will cover it. Instead of being able to fix your house or appliances when they START to show problems you can do nothing but wait till they completely break down and dip into your depressingly small emergency funds to buy whatever the store has at the time and just..... fuck.

Yes I am very well aware of the challenges of low-income living...

Lucky I have magical Autism Spectrum powers, so I can ignore a few recurring incidental expenses like personal appearance, entertainment cost, minor personal injury, food, loosing a limb...

As long as I have access to a stream of input data, I'm fucking GOLDEN!

At least we're in the States and we have internet. If it wasn't for that we wouldn't be able to pick up languages or other marketable skills in our spare time, and we'd have much less resources when it comes to DIY stuff. For all that I complain, this sure beats living in a shipping container raising guinea pigs in a warzone.

Let's hear it for the Internet, the only tool that allows you to better yourself, vent about your life to complete strangers, and connect with others who share your disturbing fetishes ALL AT THE SAME TIME!

I find that money is pretty good motivation to get me to do stuff.

This is because you're not the adult child of an alcoholic; their priorities are often the opposite of what you'd expect. Money = empowerment, and for the ones that go hypo-responsible rather than hyper-responsible, empowerment is something they need to avoid at all costs. Because if you're helpless, then you can't be held responsible and punished.

Well to be fair, I'm also pretty big tightwad, and if it were feasible I'd convert all of my personal cash into small coinage so that I could lay upon it like a dragonic hoard.

I've also got those magical Autism Spectrum powers, so I need to really convince myself something is ether really needed or worth the cost.

Lack of executive function is a survival adaptation in a family like that.

True that man, true that.

In fact, it was a bit of an epiphany for me when I realised that maybe I wasn't naturally an utter failure at being a self-sufficient human being, and perhaps it had something to do with my parents fucking up my childhood royally.

...Unfortunately, this enlightenment came the weekend before my father was sent to pick me up for the cluster-fuck that is our family hosting Thanksgiving, so my understandable reaction of "quit bugging me or I'll put these scissors through my throat" was hilariously misconstrued as a suicide threat.

The fact that you have siblings figuring out how to "take care" of you means they took the opposite, hyper-responsible course, which is just as self-destructive.

I knew I wasn't wrong about telling my sister to seek psychological help!
Really though it seems like the only ways my family deals with things is to ether be hypo-responsible, thus avoiding blame when the inevitable shit-storm that comes with something going wrong hits, or hyper-responsible so that they've got a contingency for any possible thing that COULD go wrong.

...Honestly, this makes me wonder what the hell was up with my maternal grandparents, seeing as that side of the family all has shades of hyper-responsibility:

Aunt Sherry - Arguably the happiest, but she is pretty much the living incarnation of the caricature Stephen Colbert plays on TV.

Uncle Bill - I believe he was a self-made man, but he and his wife died rather early in my life and left two post-pubescent children to fend for themselves, my then collage-aged Cousin Nick (Very similar to myself, pretty much disappeared off of everyone's radar and the last I saw of him was my grandmother's funeral, hoping he hasn't joined or started a cult) and my then teen-aged Adopted Cousin Marnie (who my mother and sister have been keeping in touch with through face-book, when and reacquainted herself with her birth parents, think she has a kid now)...

My Mother - Arguable the black sheep of the family, she got an accounting degree summa cum laude, became some dudes baby-momma (source of my eleven years older brother) only to annul his ass and appears to have married the first hypo-responsible bloke to make googly-eyes at her while also being seemingly good with her young son.

Uncle Dr. Richard Wells - The family intellectual and the one I'd hope to at least end up like, he's pretty well off but I think some bad relationships involving gold diggers and the family paranoia will leave him .
Wrote a hilarious song about my mother's taste in men called "The Ballad of Melody Ann" or as my sister and I called it because of the chorus, "Big Dumb Guys!"

Title changed to reflect topic, it is sorta fucked up how this is the most active the Administration forum has been in a good while.

Dude, LIFE IS SORTA FUCKED UP!!!

...Or maybe that's just my life...

[stubby]

Title changed to reflect topic, it is sorta fucked up how this is the most active the Administration forum has been in a good while.

Normally I ban people for talking about themselves too much, it was one of the forum's earliest rules and the source of probably thirty or so of Silverdream's bans over the years. Not sure why I haven't reached for the banhammer yet in this thread. But there's still time.

[Whiteagle]

Title changed to reflect topic, it is sorta fucked up how this is the most active the Administration forum has been in a good while.

Normally I ban people for talking about themselves too much, it was one of the forum's earliest rules and the source of probably thirty or so of Silverdream's bans over the years. Not sure why I haven't reached for the banhammer yet in this thread. But there's still time.

Maybe it's because my life is so entertainingly fucked up?

I mean, Christopher Titus created an entire routine around his childhood issues, and I find it hilarious when we have similarities!

[stubby]

Maybe, but it's not fucked up in any special way. I mean if you spend time talking to dyfunctional-family kids you just hear the exact same stories pretty much.

[IVhorseman]

It was a bit of an epiphany for me when I realised that maybe I wasn't naturally an utter failure at being a self-sufficient human being, and perhaps it had something to do with my parents fucking up my childhood royally.

Look, I'm just going to take this one quote of yours and have you stare at it. I'm not going to go into how getting assed to go to a terrible thanksgiving or state farm show or whatever horrible thing you don't wanna do is something that literally all families do in some way or another, because you're going to keep dragging out examples of why yours is different and special and thus inescapable torture. I don't care about that, and it's not the point anyways.

A fucked up childhood is a fucked up childhood. Life sucking now is, however, THE PRESENT. You need to put your childhood behind you, as well as all the horrors of the past, and gear up for the NOW and the FUTURE. Trust me, if you were shipped off somewhere to be forced to be self sufficient, you'd bitch and moan about it, but you wouldn't starve to death. You'd figure something out. Fortunately, you don't have to be shipped anywhere - I just want you to believe that first part again. You, now, are not an utter failure at being a self-sufficient human being. Vocational rehab is pretty sweet. We've all got our ills. But you ARE competent. You CAN learn. Don't tell yourself you can't, because you and I both know that's horseshit.

This isn't an example of whiteagle telling us about himself - it's us digging into the goldmine of crippling self-doubt that has been unearthed. He's blathering because WE ASKED, and goddammit he might be able to fix himself.

[Natalya]

Batteries are very expensive too.

Also I think you should buy as much helium as possible while it's cheap and resell it when corporations are desperate.

No, what you're probably thinking of is Helium 3 which may end up valuable one day but is currently close to useless. Also, hardly any is present on Earth because our magnetic field deflects it away. The Moon however has no magnetic field, so Helium 3 from the solar wind gets embedded in the lunar regolith.

[Keldoclock]

Deuterium and tritium are probably good choices for gasses to stockpile, what with ITER's Tokomak reactor (currently being built in the south of France) posed to prove fusion as a commercially viable option.

[simg]http://www.iter.org/doc/www/content/com/Lists/Stories/Attachments/1449/Mockup_1_small.jpg[/simg]

Time to crack open them broken watches and pistol sights, those delicious delicious tiny bits of tritium are worth $30K a gram!

[Silverdream]

My Great Grampa left us a bunch of watches he probably looted from the war, I'll have to check them for tritium.

[Whiteagle]

It was a bit of an epiphany for me when I realised that maybe I wasn't naturally an utter failure at being a self-sufficient human being, and perhaps it had something to do with my parents fucking up my childhood royally.

Look, I'm just going to take this one quote of yours and have you stare at it. I'm not going to go into how getting assed to go to a terrible thanksgiving or state farm show or whatever horrible thing you don't wanna do is something that literally all families do in some way or another, because you're going to keep dragging out examples of why yours is different and special and thus inescapable torture. I don't care about that, and it's not the point anyways.

A fucked up childhood is a fucked up childhood. Life sucking now is, however, THE PRESENT. You need to put your childhood behind you, as well as all the horrors of the past, and gear up for the NOW and the FUTURE. Trust me, if you were shipped off somewhere to be forced to be self sufficient, you'd bitch and moan about it, but you wouldn't starve to death. You'd figure something out. Fortunately, you don't have to be shipped anywhere - I just want you to believe that first part again. You, now, are not an utter failure at being a self-sufficient human being. Vocational rehab is pretty sweet. We've all got our ills. But you ARE competent. You CAN learn. Don't tell yourself you can't, because you and I both know that's horseshit.

Oh no, I probably wasn't clear with the context, allow me to explain:

It was my third year in school, my second time taking a class called Mineralogy (which traditionally use to take a full year but now is crammed into a single so Geoscience students can immediately take Petrology in the Spring) and as usual I had fallen behind in my work, specifically lab work due to side effects of taking amphetamines for ADHD.

I had also been recently informed that I was act risk of loosing my financial aid due to failing to make "reasonable academic progress", which was bad news considering most of that money was used to pay for my single dorm room with Bathroom (something we went with after rather troublesome roommate issues during my first year) as well as the requested meal plan.

What ended up happening is that I tried going though life like I did during my childhood; as a living automaton that went from one task to the next as directed.

Of course in the real world that doesn't work, as you have to run your own life instead of some personal authority figure being responsible for you.

So this epiphany wasn't simply me blaming my parents for being fucked up, but realising that I wasn't some organic machine that was simply unable to operate independently and instead a damaged human being who has some serious trauma and personality issues to deal with.

This isn't an example of whiteagle telling us about himself - it's us digging into the goldmine of crippling self-doubt that has been unearthed. He's blathering because WE ASKED, and goddammit he might be able to fix himself.

Well to be fair it is healthy to vent, to both get those nagging demons out of your head as well as getting much needed outside perspectives for a reality check.

I mean, a lot of the conversation I have in real life end up sounding like patronising bullshit, ether from family members who come across as believing me incapable of caring for myself let alone living independently or "thesnuggly workers" whose agencies' livelihood truthfully requires you to be permanently dependant on their services.

[Bragallot]

This is probably no longer on topic by this point, but Rev.'s idea of putting the links to your stuff in your sig actually isn't so bad. Your sig shouldn't have to be too big if you have like a couple of threads where you dump everything, or even simply assemble your links in a few threads, like I did for my forum battles, and you can always use spoiler tags... Then again the Wiki might often be the better option since it should be 'cleaner', if less 'complete' (but which of you wants to read a LOT and know every single detail anyway) than the forum.