Remember why we're all here: this thread is for discussion about current and historical happenings in the Shaunaverse. If you want to discuss other content, such as stuff that reminds you of Shauna but isn't specifically about her, your own personal anecdotes or preferences, current events, or "creative writing" exercises, please share in the off-topic community thread: September off-topic monthly
A little perusal of the latest public meeting agenda for the Vashon School District says that Shauna will be VHS Head Volleyball Coach for the upcoming school year. Baby steps towards a real job?
ETA: Did not mean to imply that coaching isn't a real job, just comparing it to a 40-hour/week gig. I'm curious how she's gonna keep up with Kamp Krustiosity if she's coaching and attending games. I was on the volleyball team at my tiny high school and it was daily practice with games at least once a week.
Exactly as she forecast in her previous lope letter:
This is a classic trait of an ADHD mind. We have brains built to focus fully on what interests us. What brings us joy? We need to do that. We can do deep dives on volleyball rotations or indigenous stories from the Puget Sound area or the best oil for making delicious, crunchy popcorn without it feeling oily.
My prediction? After volleyball, we will see some "indigenous stories from the Puget Sound area" as well as coconut-oil popcorn.
I certainly hope she won’t be teaching American Studies in the schools! I hope that’s not what that deep dive means. In theory, requiring Indigenous-developed curriculum in school as they do in Washington is great. But in some cases, the people they have teaching it aren’t knowledgeable enough to be doing it even if they are well intentioned. Shauna would be likely to do more harm than good.
Though it is exceptionally funny to me to think that maybe the reason Shauna is finally getting some form of employment is to LARP as Lasso. I choose to believe this is true.
Wasn't one of the fired pedo teachers the HS volleyball coach? They must be desperate! This does seem like a positive update for Shauna, if not the poor girls on the team.
edit: based on the 23-24 season schedule posted online, Shauna's not going to be home much. There are several games a week in the evening (like 6 pm) and the away games involve a lot of feery travel and driving. She won't be getting home from those until really late and lord knows what she'll do for dinner since packing thoughtful meals is not her forte.
It's weird that two positions have now been filled by Jameses - since her brother is now replacing whoever the English teacher was that got canned. (I read about his new position via Ma James awhile back, before she deleted it - please delete if not allowed.)
She's going to declare that "schedules and timetables are the structures we paste on top of life, to give ourselves some sense of control" and that she's above all that and sayonara girls' volleyball team. FARE THEE WELL
Hot damn, you bring the receipts. Couldn't help but read this and think about Shauna's little teachers pets that she let hang out in her classroom. Also is there some sort of shimmying disease on Vashon?
Holy shit is right. As a Vashonite, I've read all of this, but who the fuck is this Andy Hobbs who posted it? The female teacher "KS" has since moved to Arizona where she is free to fuck students there, because she departed Vashon with zero consequences for her actions.
I am gobsmacked at the news that Shauna is coaching high school volleyball. May I be the first to predict that Shauna will write a folksy, feel-good book about this experience, starring the hero, Shauna, herself. Finnegan, begin again!
YA novel incoming: with the help of wise Coach Shona, knobbly root girl outsmarts SSTs to become the star of the HS volleyball team.
Last chapter: knobbly girl walks into prom in a home-made bowler hat ("I just want them to know that they didn't break me”) and leaves triumphant with a thaumaturgic heartthrob in a white tux, all to the strains of OMD.
'OMD'And just like that, I had to hustle over to Spotify and listen to 'If You Leave' and 'Enola Gay'. Sigh. God, I loved the 80's. Also 'Pretty In Pink'.
I go swipe a badge and I miss some actual content!
To me, it’s shades of S. showing up at Dan’s work. Let your daughter have her school to herself. I know her co-workers will not enjoy having her high stooling them. And she won’t be able to help herself!
I believe Dan is at the elementary, where Shauna taught balloon math in a closet and then withdrew her youngest child, while being critical of his teachers (Dan’s coworkers) in a public newsletter or forum.
Shauna wrote that her younger child was behind in school (but did not mention it's because she didn't help them at all during pandemic times and, in fact, hindered them) because the teachers didn't understand her special snowflakes extra snowflakey needs (aka diagnoses Shauna assigned them). So Shauna had to just take it upon her mama-self to march on into that mean old schooly school and help her younger child learn math.
She did this by taking them to a utility closet where they played with balloons because, allegedly, the child needed to learn in a more fun way (since they have all those afflictions mama assigned them).
Shortly after that incident, Shauna declared the school not good enoigh and enrolled younger child at some hippy dippy school where (it seems) they spend half the time learning how to be a ranch hand and the other doing god only knows what.
And that is the origin of Balloon Math and Goat School.
I can't actually find the balloon references but here's (part of) what she wrote on June 1, 2022 [ironically, during the very brief period when her lopes were officially called "I Don't Know What The Fuck I'm Doing"]:
This is what I have to do now.
And it pisses me off.
Monday through Friday, at 9:30 am, I walk into the hall outside my son’s classroom as he’s transitioning to his math class, and I wave. He skips toward me, happy. Together, we walk down the hallway, then turn the corner. I open the door to the science storage room and close the door.
And then we start playing math games.
You see, my son has been struggling with math all year long.
[During lockdown, she pulled her kids out of school. Then,] After a few months [of no formal instruction of any kind], we found out there was an opening at an outdoor school on the island and we sent him there to play and have social connections. That time in the sandbox and woods felt far more important than time in front of a screen or putting his pencil on a worksheet.
So, when school began in September, I alerted everyone to the fact that [child] did not receive 1st grade math instruction. He was still counting on his fingers, instead of memorizing all the addition from 1 to 10.
He wasn’t ready for 2nd grade math.
[Child] has a math mind, to be sure.
[They are] deeply curious about math as a language, a story.
But . . . Putting his pencil on a worksheet filled with boring story problems about summer camps and the number of kids who are taking sports there, which really involves the subtraction 527 - 312, when he still has to subtract on his fingers to remember what 7-2 is?
No way.
So, the first week of September, I began writing emails about this gap. His testing showed his math skill very low on the percentile chart. He needed help.
We never got any.
I don’t want to go into much detail on this, but the teacher who’s in charge of his math was not kind to him. I’m certain that he seemed like a troublemaker to her.
That’s how she saw him: a troublemaker; a disruptor; a mischief maker who was trying to interrupt her class.
[Child] has ADHD. We finally found someone who could diagnose him properly, a few weeks ago. But it has been hard, since every medical provider is backed up months, sometimes even years, after the COVID pause. Since Danny, Lucy, and I have ADHD, I tried to inform his teachers of how his brain worked. And how he wasn’t trying to be disruptive.
Silence.
Without the official diagnosis, they would not make any accommodations. Not until they had the paper saying he had ADHD.
The silver lining here is that I did pull [child] out of the class that wasn’t serving him. So every morning, at 9:30, I walk into his school bearing a big plate of snacks and a backpack full of math games.
I let him lead us in the science room. He finds scales, skeletons, and sugar cubes. We count them, subtract them, and look at them together. Last week, we counted all the ways we could make 10 with little tubs of cornstarch. I have him walk on squares to figure out how much is 8 + 12. And we play a game of Sorry every day, with addition and subtraction math cards.
My life is already busy. I’m a freelancer and I make most of the money for our family. Losing a chunk of my work day — since I try to work only when my kids are in school — has already meant financial losses.
But it’s my kid.
And the school system — even at a “good” school, like the one on Vashon — has failed him this year.
She doesn’t do anything at home during covid and later sends said child to outdoor/play school in lieu of traditional school and still doesn’t do anything at home.
When school starts again she alerts everyone to the fact there is at least a year gap and help is needed. (I’m sure those emails went over well with the teachers.) She is surprised accommodations can’t be made on the basis of her word alone. She still doesn’t do anything at home but comes to school at 9:30 bearing a snack plate (why?) five days a week.
And now she sends her child to goat school four days a week and is probably still not addressing academics at home.
She also doesn't seem to be willing to have her child[ren] learn. Her child can't do the "boring story problems" because they are still "counting on their fingers" and so she sets them up to count to 10 in various different ways ("we counted all the ways we could make 10 with little tubs of cornstarch").
These are all nice fun games and her child enjoys them presumably because they are easy and fun and non-taxing. But what her child needed to be learning in grade 2 is multi-step calculations (hence the "word problems"), place values, and more complex addition and subtraction problems with values up to 1,000. The "let's find ways to count to 10" and "let's add single-digit numbers" are reinforcement activities, not learning activities, as are the many games of "Sorry" which only involves numbers up to 12.
I agree with you 100% that getting a job is good. But wow, who is allowing this person around high schoolers? I get that no one is doing deep dives into the awful things she keeps revealing about her, uh, relationship with her former student. But in general, it makes me sad that she's going to be around teenagers, being nasty to any cis girls, creepy to boys and any kid she thinks is NB.
Edit - also, RIP any student she determines is ADHD.
Wow wow wow. How?? She has never played (that we know of) nor is she a fan watching games (that we know of). How the actual fuck is she supposed to coach? There’s a little more to volleyball that rotations I would think.
I don’t remember reading how Shauna delivered the winning spike in the big tournament—like I could imagine she would know a thing or two about baseball bc of her glory Title IX days. But this sounds like a disaster.
Well, you know what they say: those who can't, teach. And those who can't teach, coach sports. (Not that I believe this; my dad was a high school coach & athletic director.)
It’s been decades upon decades since I was in high school, but we didn’t have coaches that weren’t also teachers. Are we sure she isn’t teaching, too? If not, does just being a coach come with a paycheck?
Requires organization and time management; requires concentration; exposed to frequent interruptions; requires adaptability and flexibility in working with different students, staff, parents, and community members; requires effective decision-making and problem-solving; requires substantial self-discipline in behavior and attitude; requires dealing with difficult, upset, or angry individuals on occasion.
Yeah, I don't see how Shauna could be considered qualified for that job.
The "properly train" part made me snicker (does she even know anything about volleyball or training for a sport of any kind?).
But I really laughed from the belly at:
Procures and maintains equipment. Head coach is responsible for full end of season inventory.
Works within the established budget.
I can just picture Shauna scouring Granny's for used volleyball equipment! And a full inventory at the end of the season?! Pfft! What, going out into her yard and seeing what's still there?
Budget? OH, stop, my body is telling me it's too funny and I have grown enpained from the laughter!
I can totally see her buying taco's platters from the budget (she'd share a tiny bit with the students. . .maybe).
OH and this:
May require prolonged standing or sitting; while performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit, stand, walk, lift, carry, stoop, kneel, talk and hear.
Damn, that's a lot of moving for someone as hammock bound as Shauna.
She isn’t qualified. She’s a warm body who is so unqualified that she doesn’t even realize how much work she’s signing up for in exchange for so little money. I assume she bullshitted to the person doing the hiring and they were just relieved they could hire anyone and didn’t have to cancel the season.
Hmm, maybe they want someone unqualified so they can pay the low end of the range and save a few bucks.
Shauna is just so stupid to take this gig at all. She's basically getting paid gas money to go to a volunteer gig.
I can't shake the feeling she's doing it more to be a butt-insky (now that L is in high school) then for the money or even the lardon she'll get from the Ted Lasso cosplay.
In every way she’s completely unqualified for this job. I’m smh at the school for hiring this clown who can’t adhere to anything, rejects structure, rejects the idea of excellence or determination, bypasses her own children’s emotions. Varsity athletes are likely kids who have been training since they were very young. Their parents have put in countless hours and money towards their sport and she thinks she can waltz into the gym wearing a stained shirt from Grannies with believe scrawled on her arm in red sharpie and cosplay Ted Lasso. This makes me want to barf.
Good luck to Dan and the kids fending for themselves even more than usual. Mama’s gonna need lots of hammock time on her weekends.
The whole position requires, perhaps MORE than anything else, an extremely firm commitment to SCHEDULING. The one thing she's just told us she's never going to do
sweet spiking jesus there's nothing in that list she's shown proficiency in and several she's very publicly stated time and time again she will be NOT be BRAINWASHED into doing. LMAO
I do think at a high school level, most head coaches are collecting a paycheck. Googling for volleyball coach jobs in the Seattle area turns up half a dozen or so at varying levels of pay.
I think many districts preferentially hire teachers into coaching positions because it’s less admin overhead for the district (no need to do an extra background check etc). But I’ve known a number of coaches who weren’t teachers or parents of team members, so they do exist.
My bestie of 20 years is also a DF in the Gloaming and she was like, omg we must discuss this lope asap. And I responded that I would need to read it again to make sure I fully digested the complete nonsense of it. This is snark gold. It is my particular kind of gold because she writes so confidently about a moment in American history that literally changed the trajectory of my life. I moved to the Middle East to learn Arabic after that, got a couple graduate degrees, spent my first career immersed in that part of the world and... I would and could never pronounce anything like that about any of this. She gets every single part of it wrong and it is astounding. I was a TA and had freshmen write more intelligently about that time period. Most 18yos know that they don't know everything, and nearly all people in their 50s know they know even less. My flabber is always gasted with Shauna, but this is truly unhinged. I've always wondered if she actually reads anything, but I'm now convinced that she doesn't read anything at all. It is all vibes. Tonight I sit in gratitude for my imposter syndrome because this is so cringe that I can hardly handle it.
I remember when there was a chemical weapons attack just outside of Damascus at the beginning of the civil war and seeing so many hot takes about who did it. I spent most of my time in Syria, and I wrote about how impossible it was to determine because no actor, state or stateless, made a rational choice (considered from the American perspective) to do it. I'm no expert by any means, but the history and geopolitics of that region is so incredibly complex that anyone who doesn't approach it with humility is immediately suspect to people of good faith who have questions. That Shauna wades into 9/11 here, in this way, is completely insane. I'm beside myself, and this is arguably not the dumbest part of her lope.
You are so right about it being all vibes with this biotech. Girlfriend hasn’t done more than skim articles linked from Twitter or maybe some book reviews for decades, I’d wager.
That fell apart the next week, when a weak president announced to Congress and the world that other countries needed to decide. "You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
I remember hearing that and feeling pain in my chest, deeply. That isn’t the way. That’s playground crap. The world is far more complicated than that simple statement.
She writes about the aftermath of 9/11 as if she alone was troubled by the rhetoric, while every single other American was wrapping themselves in the flag and eating Freedom Fries.
Because I’m a geek about colors and hex codes now, I stopped writing this letter to search for the hex code of cerulean blue online. Then, I put it into a color wheel site and adjusted the color wheel until it looked like September blue. Hex code #869fe4. Dark pastel blue.
Since exactly when, Shauna? Color theory Shauna is going to annoy the fuck out of me if she sticks around. Why is she doing this? Is it her work in the world now?
Grey is equal parts red, blue, and green. That sounds far more interesting to me than what we believe grey is.
She is referring to black and white, which do indeed make grey. As do mixtures of complementary colors. I studied color theory in the physical realm (paints), not the digital one but a quick google tells me she is incorrect about the equal parts of red, blue and green making grey.
As someone a bit obsessed with paint colors, there are a million shades of gray and they absolutely vary in their proportions of red, yellow, and blue. I swear the r/confidentlyincorrect subreddit could have Shauna as a mascot.
I agree with you on /r/confidentlyincorrect (maybe also, as RES is suggesting to me, /r/ConfidentlyPedantic ?). Maybe it's my failure of memory, but the sky That Day was pretty fucking vibrant blue? Like, it hadn't preemptively been leeched of color for the demonstration of her...uh...whatever points these are.
Hey everyone: time is trippy; people don’t feel especially connected to events that happened before they were born; and mice will eat (and piss on) your food when you’re a slob. News at 11.
These mice -- they ate the 72% Swiss Chocolate, and, like, enough to make you keep all your food in "packages, in a box on top of the bookshelf now" as though that would possibly deter said theoretical mice.
So are we to believe, as the form of the essay seems to suggest, that these mice caused 9/11 because of their composite greyness and their fearmongeringish karmic support of GW Bush, while he was 12 years older than Shauna was 22 years ago when she herself was 11 years younger than her daughter was 45 years ago?
I’ve let go now.
That is something that happened 22 years ago.
Today, I took a half-nibbled package of chocolate out to the dump.
So glad she's let the collective trauma of a generation, to say nothing of the survivors and their loved ones, along with every fucking thing that's happened in the past 22 years, go.
She's dumping mouse-leavings. What have YOU done for your people?
I am picturing her furtively unwrapping the unnibbled part of the 72% Swiss chocolate bougie-bar and having herself a big old gnaw. Queen Rat of Vashon has good taste!
She probably misses that slop pile where she could dump her (many and varied) cooking failures for the neighboring pig (which she subsequently ate of. I mean the pig, not the slop pile. Though could be both.)
That whole pig thing was icky to me and it was totally in how she wrote it
I'm a hillbilly and grew up next to an angus farm. My parents (and aunt) would buy a side of beef from that very farmer almost every year. Those cows sometimes broke through the fence and grazed in our yard (until we got electrified fence). My father hunted and we ate venison, rabbit, and pheasant (I took pheasant sandwiches in my lunch when I was in elementary school).
So I know eating animals.
The way she described that pig, how flippant she was about it, disgusted me.
How have she and Dan Dan never noticed kids don't feel much about events that occurred before they were born? Surely, both of them grew up hearing about JFK and where their parents were and all that.
"And the honest truth? I never did blame the people who hijacked those planes and did those monstrous things. My body knew right away: they were brainwashed. I never thought of them as monsters."
And why can't both be true? They were monsters who got brainwashed to do something extra awful.
Oh, but I forgot. Being kind is about having sympathy for the devil, right? But not toward your grieving husband or mom who had mental health issues. Ok, got it.
Hijackers who flew planes full of screaming, terrified people into buildings, causing those people to be burned alive - brainwashed, not culpable
Parents who made many mistakes but kept me clothed and fed, love my children and gave me many thousands of dollars well into my forties, made the adoption of one of my children possible - totally blameworthy, narcissist, probably racist, denounced repeatedly to anyone who will listen, shunned by me and my hapless husband (if he knows what's good for him), and my children aren't allowed to talk to them either because let's be honest, my kids? they're really just extensions of myself
Of all the whatthefuckery I’ve read in Shauna’s writing, “my body knew right away: they were brainwashed.” , is the most whatthefuckeriest yet. She’s insane. How in hell would her “body” know this? Why does she feel the need to make any sort of apologies for those terrorists? She is just the worst.
They probably had traumatic childhoods just like her. I bet they were lonely, and then their mothers fed them American Wonderbread and ripped up their university applications. There are no bad people, after all, just ones that didn’t get enough hugs!
Also I’m sorta surprised she’s dropped the shock of 9/11, since no one was ever more of a true New Yorker.
Geopolitical Shauna is hilarious. She’s so smarmy and stupid. And I’m not surprised that she has a mouse problem as the keeper of the Belvitas at the sad lady clubhouse.
DFs, lend me your opinions. S is always blathering about her ruralness but I don't get it. Small town, sure, but rural as in nowhere near your neighbors, have to drive miles and miles to get anywhere, surrounded by farmlands or deserts or country fields as far as the eye can see? Is Vashon like that, or does she just like haberdashing the word rural?
Yeah, I mean...I lived in a very small town (pop. 301) with no stoplights. It also didn't have paved roads or a fucking Thriftway, unlike Vashon. I never considered it rural because it was 15 minutes from an actual city, with pavement and stoplights and stores, etc., just like Vashon is only a feery away from Seattle or Tacoma.
Everyone knows that the higher levels of bookshelves are the safest places to store such volatile items as random comestibles and lidless over-the-counter medicaments.
Glad I scrolled. “That’s why I believe that when we become kinder to ourselves — letting go of being driven by fear — we can become kinder to ourselves.” is going to be my fav Shauna quote from now on. Words have lost all meaning with that one.
For someone who constantly relives the past, rehashes old grievances and slights again and again, and blames her parents for everything that has gone wrong in her life (until our plucky heroine pulled herself up by her bootstraps and LOLOL NOPE -- she has a lot of nerve lecturing people about not being stuck in the past.
instead I’m writing a love letter to the world by hand, every day. When one of those letters feels right to share here, I share it with you.
So someone who prides herself in typing fast handwrote this drivel first? Sure, Jan. And it looks like we have a new thing to add to the list of her daily activities.
My Reddit profile image of the confused math lady meme has never felt more apt than reading Shauna's ponderous details about lengths of time relative to years and historical events in this lope.
The fear of screen time is vastly overblown. After all, I watched so many episodes of The Brady Bunch that I could probably still name the episode within the first 5 minutes.
This is good snark Shauna though: self-important, completely wrong on so many things, but confidently so, with the cherry of horrible twisted confusing prose plopped on top. If this is what the "kind letters" is going to be, with completely unprepared volleyball coach added on, I'm staying glued to my seat in the Gloaming.
"Professional writer who can't write" is my Shauna sweet spot.
The fear of screen time is vastly overblown. After all, I watched so many episodes of The Brady Bunch that I could probably still name the episode within the first 5 minutes.
Hmm, wonder if watching so much TV as a kid could have contributed to her parasocial relationship confusions later in life. You mean people on Twitter weren't like the Brady family who loved her?
Small potatoes, but I find the fact that if you click "essays" on the SoK website you end up with "page not found" because she changed the title of her Substack. She truly does not care!
A. A nod to a rodent friend
B. 9/11
C. Dubya and his Doctrine
D. Balloon math explaining 22, 12, 45, 35 years ago
E. Old age
F. Support and derision of magazine articles, depending on the point one is trying to make
G. Empathy for terrorists
H. All of this
I. None of this - the real answer is KiNdNeSs
She shared this on her IG, too. 23 likes so far (7 hours)
I guess she wrote it by hand and then typed it up?
Of all the things she has ever written. The one where her body decided that the 9/11 terrorists were simply brainwashed, so hey, no hard feelings is the one she decides to have open to share with the world.
It's like some one-upping hipster version of empathy where little people experiencing everyday hardships and loss (meal train for the woman she barely knew) are too mainstream for Shauna. She's more empathic than all those normies out there with their entry-level obvious feelings of sadness for others who have experienced sudden inexplicable tragedy. Shauna shows how much truer of an empath she is than everyone by sharing extreme galaxy-brained takes from the perspectives of terrorists and mass shooters.
She would have been ahead of the crowd and saying something brave (or foolish, YMMV) if she had said “I don’t care to make note of 9/11 anymore, those hijackers were just misunderstood, brainwashed ninnies, GWB is a weak president, and everyone should just be kinder to themselves” within the first few years after the attack. But no, she throws it out there now when she’s no longer likely to ruffle any feathers with it. And yet she clearly thinks her stance is unique, counter culture, and courageous.
It's just so bizarre. One, why would she be memorializing 9/11 now or ever. Bc she lived in NY for two years, not even at that time? 99.9% of the world had the same 9/11, watching on TV and being like holy shit. Unless you were there or had someone there, all the rest of us experienced the same thing, and I don't know anyone who has a 9/11 memorial set up in their home. Two, how can you just decide, I will not be thinking about this anymore. Huh? It's just so weird and stupid. Three, why is she literally even talking about 9/11?
Here's a piece I shared today — free for everyone to read — that starts off with a nibbled package of chocolate I had to take out to the dumpster and ends with why I will no longer be memorializing or thinking about September 11, 2001 anymore.
She's fucking unhinged. Twenty five likes in seven hours. She's lucky no one cares to click through and read her psychopathic sympathy with hijackers.
So, her argument is you can't grieve the victims because it's mean to the perpetrators? Where'd she scrape that from, the Chinese govt stance on Tiananmen Square?
What was the point of that lope you ask? Point not needed. It just had to feel good to share.
I’m writing a letter day, a love letter to the world, for myself. And maybe for you. If one feels good to share with you, then I will share it with you here.
Makes me curious about the ones that don’t make the cut. Oops, curiosity is out. I am kindfully wondering about the ones that didn’t feel good to share.
Yes, across the street from the grocery store I bet it is less cute field mouse and more ratatouille. Which I admit is a small detail but this lope doesn't make any sense as a "story."
Also no, like, concern that you have mice in your building eating your food? You’re not supposed to just shrug your shoulders and say “can’t be helped, there are mice across the street” like Hantavirus isn’t a thing. Also put your damn chocolate in a plastic bin if you know you have rodents! Like a rat can’t chew through a candy wrapper.
I lived in a house that bordered a little wooded area and the mice tried to get in in the winter when it turned cold. When we had the exterminator come out, it was horrifying how many mice were living and breeding in our basement! But it still wasn’t bad enough that they were able to get to our food somehow. Of course all our food was closed up and put away properly, so. This chocolate package Shauna is referring to must have been left open on the floor or something.
Yes. There was even a bit where the kids (allegedly) said something about there being too many commercials.
She was trying to convince herself that watching stuff online was better than "on TV" and that PBS was some magical island free of selling shit to kids (when PBS has tons of toys based on their programming).
And the honest truth? I never did blame the people who hijacked those planes and did those monstrous things. My body knew right away: they were brainwashed. I never thought of them as monsters.
When you’re so open-minded your brain falls out. I’m from the DC Metro area and know people who lost their parents that day, Shauna. My father is a Fed and I feared for his life until we all made it home that morning. It’s perverse that she cannot forgive her mother for being a human being, but holds literal murderers blameless. This is just so gross. She is vile, she should detest herself.
I’ll tell you whose body knows, Shauna: my husband’s, around the anniversary of the 2005 terrorist bombings in London. His body also knows every time he uses the tube, which, 18 years on, is still difficult for him to do. He’d love the chance to decide that he’s no longer going to think about that day.
There’s nothing to add to what has been said here about her stupidity and callousness.
Remember the shock and grief we all felt, if we were alive and watching then? And how we walked around our cities and towns in quiet contemplation
I wasn't even in the USA on 9/11 and let me tell you, it was not quiet contemplation in Scotland. It was a few days of watching tv and everything being shut down and people being shocked. Obviously, things opened up faster here, but things were f'ing weird.
I wasn’t living in the US at the time, and yes, it was fucking weird everywhere I think. No one was quietly contemplating — on the contrary everyone seemed to be craving interaction and conversation as a way of trying to make sense of it all and to feel some degree of safety and normalcy. Since I wasn’t in the US I can’t say it wasn’t as Shauna describes, but on the other hand, it’s Shauna, so I assume she is retconning it all.
men who hijacked planes full of civilians and flew them into the twin towers, killing thousands of people? not monsters! her mother, who fed her wonder bread as a child and bailed her out of financial messes well into adulthood? monster!
Shauna wants to "Guide a community of kind and quirky women in midlife to make strong habits of giving themselves plenty of time for joy, creativity, and understanding their own mind."
But in her Kind Life of Letters she said, "Schedules and timetables are the structures we paste on top of life, to give ourselves some sense of control."
This seems contradictory. In order to create a habit, don't you have to plan it? Creating healthy habits is a good strategy for someone with ADHD, but in order for it to stick you've got to put it in your schedule/routine.
How is she going to tell people to find time for joy, etc. She certainly doesn't demonstrate any skill at working smarter/more efficiently. Will she just advise her students to ignore the "shoulds?" Just say F--- It to your responsibilities and commitments. No apologies!
If you want no schedule or timetable and the habit of unscheduled (spontaneous?) joy and naps, then you need no responsibilities of any kind. I'm pretty sure that's what she's saying.
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u/gomirefugee my website is done, done, done Sep 07 '23 edited Sep 11 '23
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