Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Bedazzle it!

The interface that I need to use to access my online class is not working. I'm emailing back and forth with tech support now. They are certain the problem is not on their end. But I've never had a problem accessing the class before, and I haven't changed anything on my computer! Whyyyyyyyyy?? :(

At work I have a Spanish keyboard that is configured like an EN(US) one, I can never find anything! I can only type symbols if I'm looking away from the keyboard because the wrong symbol on the button confuses my typing memory! And yes I have tried to configure it back to ES but it only works for certain programmes and it's more of a hassle having to get used to two different keyboards! And I don't have any accents or a € symbol which is annoying!

So I feel your first world pain Lepelaar! :)

So many people around me talk about being too poor for stuff, when they make 6 figures.

For example: "Money's so tight, I can't afford $1,000 for a doula, can you see if your friend can do it for $500?" or "Oh, I wish I could afford great family photos like you get, but we are on such a tight budget." (friend who sees her $75 a session three times a week to get in shape for their 2 week holiday trip to Jamaica).

I get that you may not want to spend the money or that you may not want to do something, but to claim to be too poor when you own your own home, have a comfortable 6 figure income and have health insurance is kind of ridic and insulting to those people who really are struggling right now.

We make well under 6 figures but I'd never call us poor because we are fine for food, shelter and living expenses.

And we had a toy drive to collect gently used toys for poor kids, and I watched women who first spent the whole time complaining that their families give them too many things and their houses are full of crepe, and then carefully went over the pile and took anything worth keeping.

That is the reason I stopped reading a financial board I used to read a few years ago. People making massive amounts of money were in massive amounts of debt because they had to have certain things and were too 'poor' for things including giving to charity. I feel so lucky these days because I remember struggling when I was young but I also knew that we were better off than a lot of other families.

I don't think I mentioned it here but my husband who comes from a definite middle class family (although generally frugal) tends to want to get help to do any little thing. I grew up where we didn't have money to pay people to do things for us so we did a lot of stuff ourselves if we wanted it. So my husband says "call a plumber" when I say "let's try it ourselves first". Although I don't mess around with stuff that I think aren't fairly simple, that is definitely for the professional. I don't really know if that is a FWP though :)

I think it kind of is, linanil. Well, in a way it's like being helpless. One of the best parts of Wilson coming back to the US (besides the obvious) is that he can fix all of the things! He even fixes the umbrellas. I've never known anyone to fix an umbrella.

ETA: Perceived helplessness. I don't even know if that's right. It just seems like an American thing to get someone to fix it, throw it away and get a new one, etc.

I feel a lot better now that my friend who runs the charity has actually picked up the stuff. She was kindly ooohing over the toys we got and saying that the families would love them and that they'd be gone by 5pm tomorrow. These gifts are going to help families that can't afford even a few dollars for gifts and clothes and often have transportation challenges that make it hard for them to get to places like the Salvation Army, even if they did.

I'm going to keep collecting toys and clothing and hope that we can keep helping needy families.

I'm allergic to our Christmas tree.

I'm annoyed by being made to feel bad about blood drives.

I can't forking give blood. Stop sending rah rah notices about wanting to be the department that has a 100% donation rate. Three in the past two weeks ago, plus requests in person for me to go donate to the blood drive. Leave me alone. I was in the hospital for over a week getting blood transfusions. Believe me, I'm grateful to people who donate blood, but nobody wants mine!

Gah! Sorry. Frustrating day today. Molly is still wheezing too and we have to give her meds, which is about as much fun as it sounds. My baby is sick :( she might have a bacterial infection, but I didn't pay to do the test since vet said treatment is same regardless.

That would annoy me, and I can and do give blood! Not everyone can and it's nobody else's business why.
Also, poor Molly :(

I can't believe they would try to guilt trip people for blood donations. I give blood when I can but for a while I couldn't for visiting certain places, then getting my ears pierced. Now I'm back in the ok zone I think.

They won't take mine. Living in Europe for 5+ years in the '80s makes me a mad cow risk and sleeping with a dude from West Africa makes me a weird supersecret AIDs risk, even though the guy hadn't ever slept with anyone while in West Africa.

It's not so much a "they" as an annoying organizer person. She also has a donation list up with dollar amounts people are giving to a needy family of her choice. I find this super distasteful for a variety of reasons. Organizing this is great, but crowing about who is donating a $30 toy etc is kind of crappy. And I prefer to give items to the family homeless shelter here, so I suppose they all think I'm cheap and selfish now.

Man, Tlish, you are a walking biohazard disaster waiting to happen.

I gave blood once, as soon as I could, at high school. It was a horrible experience, I scared the crepe out of everyone and they told me to not give blood again. :( I was sad because I really wanted to help. I would be pretty angry if I was getting harassed like that too.

Hopefully Molly feels better soon!

Me too. Every wheezy little breath makes my heart constrict.

Of course, SHE is fine and not stressed at it, or so it seems, she is lively, chatty, hungry. The only thing is she sleeps a little more soundly and we can sneak up on her.

The vet assured me that she sounds worse than she is and pointed out that since she isn't even doing any mouth breathing, she can't be struggling to breathe.

I'm still continuing to freak out though. She is so tiny and fragile and so precious. How can so much amazing preciousness be in such a teensy little 68g package?

Did you know that if you're a man who's had protected sex with one man, one time in your entire life, you are not allowed to donate blood...but if you're a man who's had unprotected sex with 189948328184856642 women, you are allowed?

There have been rigorous testing standards for every drop of donated blood for decades now, so it's virtually impossible that HIV, hepatitis, etc can even get into the blood supply, Even if someone who is infected donates blood, that blood is going to get tested repeatedly before it comes anywhere near anyone else's blood, and there are protocols in place for notifying the donor that they may have an infection they didn't know about! They have all the systems in place to get rid of those archaic guidelines, but yet they're still refusing to accept blood from many people who would be eager to donate if they could.

Wait... pretty sure this is a problem in first and second world countries too.

Does anyone else find the idea of "first world problems" kind of weird and problematic? I mean, sure, there are parts of certain "third world" countries where there are issues with hunger or high infant mortality, but then there are parts of those same countries where people sip beverages and complain about their wifi connection. I feel like it contributes to seeing certain regions as a monolith of starving children who need to be saved when really there is a large range of economic circumstances.

Edited because I found this, written by Teju Cole:
"I don't like this expression 'First World problems.' It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn't disappear just because you're black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here's a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are."

I'm not trying to criticize anyone here. I just thought it was interesting.

In real life, I actually tend to use the expression "Luxury Problem".



If you have a ten-key pad on your keyboard, you can do ALT+0128 for the Euro symbol. You can make the other accents using the ALT key too, but this is the only one I know by heart because I use it so much at work. Sadly, ALT+ for symbols doesn't seem to work on my laptop, I assume because it doesn't have ten key.

Yeah, I don't like the expression. For one thing, now that I'm not worried that my children aren't going to die of dysentery and I'm not going to be sent to a forced labour camp because of something my parents did, does that mean I'm not allowed to worry about anything, ever? Excuse me, please, while I shimmy down Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

But then again, it has been shown that I get a bit over-sensitive or confrontational about meanings sometimes (which is somewhat exaggerated online due to the lack of non-verbal communication cues that show I'm often not fully serious and more exploring an idea and following it to a conclusion).

I imagine I would give blood, if I could, but I also think realistically I'm kind of lazy and would end up not giving blood all that often. If they did permit men-who-sleep-with-men to give blood, I imagine there would be a slight increase, for a short time, and then it would go back to fairly low numbers again. Also, one of the secret reasons I'm a registered organ donor is that I don't want to risk being buried alive, so it's in my best interest that they recycle as many bits of me as they can, as that will make sure I'm good and dead.

I know we've had the topic of 'first world problems' as being problematic in this thread. I figured that we agreed that this thread was basically for trivial problems. Someone having a bad soy latte may 'ruin' their day but in the end, it is a trivial issue even for the average person in the 'first world'.

Yes, I was troubled by the title as well, for all the reasons listed above, but thought we figured it was okay to use a term that had slipped into the vernacular and is more pithy than "Minor Problems Too Insignificant To Warrant Their Own Thread But Annoying Enough to Bother PPKers that Don't Fit Into the Myriad Other Minor Things Threads That Have Accumulated Over The Years Like the Pet Peeves Thread or The Space For Things That Don't Deserve Their Own Thread."

I accidentally bought old-fashioned oats instead of quick and now my breakfast is taking like eight minutes to make instead of three. Gaahhhhhhd.

I think it's great to fix things that can be fixed! Gives me much more satisfaction than having to call someone in. And I have fixed several umbrellas in my life. Apart from anything else, if I can't fix it I usually can't afford to get anyone else to fix it either!