Natter 75: More Than a Million Natters Served
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, butt kicking, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
Would this be the place to discuss The Manifest (new TV show; first episode aired last night)?
If someone answered Toddson, I missed the answer. Also, Toddson, how was Manifest? I meant to watch it, but worked late and didn't set the DVR.
Today, I watched a screener for A Million Little Things, which premieres Wednesday night on ABC at 10/9 C. It's pretty unabashedly tapping into the same vein as (not plot-spoiiling premise talk --->) *
This Is Us, but it is about friends rather than family.
* That said, I really liked it, and if I can find the time, will probably watch the screeners for episodes 2 and 3, also.
There's more on the show on the ABC website [link] if anyone's wondering what I'm talking about. David Giuntoli, Ron Livingston, Romany Malco, Allison Miller, Christina Marie Moses, Christina Ochoa, Grace Park, James Roday, Stephanie Szostak, and Lizzy Greene star.
Is anyone planning to check it out?
I keep finding myself thinking how assassination seems reasonable to solve some problems, but there's so damn many targets it probably wouldn't be that efficient.
Thank god someone else thinks this. The first part anyway. I'm willing to work on logistics.
I'm feeling very strange about Cosby. I know what he did, and he deserves everything he gets/got and more, but it's also really hard to associate that behavior with the public figure who sold pudding and talked about "my brother Russell" and was Cliff Huxtable to me for a really long time.
And the fact that the same man who did those things was also doping and raping women just makes me ill. In a "who *can* I trust" way, I guess.
I'm feeling very strange about Cosby. I know what he did, and he deserves everything he gets/got and more, but it's also really hard to associate that behavior with the public figure who sold pudding and talked about "my brother Russell" and was Cliff Huxtable to me for a really long time.
My theory is that we're feeling like this, because we're no longer in our original timeline. Consider this:
- Bill Cosby is a serial rapist
- Donald Trump is President -- of the frigging United States of America
- Dunkin' Donuts is all: "Our name is now 'Dunkin'."
In high school I hated the fact that I was essentially treated as non-sexual (and I know that this isn't the experience of every person with a disability), but lately I'm starting to feel grateful for it.
Me too, although I did not have a disability. But what I was was some sort of attractive to both friend's dads and old men. So I was not assaulted, I had dads talking about how good I looked in a bathing suit from 6th grade on and older men who pinched, groped, and made lewd comments, mostly at my workplace. I remember always making sure if I was putting the lotto numbers up, I did it before opening, because I was sure to get me pinched/groped as I had my hands over my head, but some 60 plus year old man. And I thought nothing of it. Just a thing to endure. So now I am mad, but also with a side heaping of how having a sort of jolie laid face and a sort of Marilyn Monroe body, and just a sense of innocence made me invisible to young men my own age and but just brought out possible predators. And it makes me angry, but also a little glad that I escaped relatively unscathed. But I was perfect prey, because I was like dog shit to young men my own age and I think they sensed it. I think it was only my experience with my cousins being victims and my mother's paranoia that all older men were sexual predators that kept me safe. And it is a weird place to be because I do still sort of resent my mother for being so suspicious and vigilant, because I haven't been in a relationship for around 20 years. I make an assumption that my mom was assaulted or molested due to how vigilant she was about it, but it also could be because she was the mandated reporter that my cousin went to.
It's funny, because I'm always thinking about how lucky I was in college -- I got drunk at parties all the time, and left without my friends, and went off with guys I barely knew, and it was always fine.
Except for all the groping. If I wore a skirt, I would ask friends to walk behind me at parties, because people were constantly grabbing my ass. And not just slapping my ass like the guy in the gay bar after college, but fully reaching in. Yikes.
You guys, my ass isn't that amazing.
I was long term dating a guy in my twenties and his BFF was groping me constantly. Again, my ass is not that great. And I talked to my boyfriend about it and he said I needed to take care of it myself. But I was so polite in those days I could only deflect or avoid, so it was really difficult
Would this be the place to discuss The Manifest (new TV show; first episode aired last night)?
Melania is a quietly intriguing character in this show.
I was gonna be really impressed if there was actually a character named Melania on The Manifest!
My high school was public, but it was a small school in a tiny town with really high property prices and taxes, so it really resembled a private school much more than a standard public school.
I just remembered that, a few years ahead of me, there was a guy who put in either his yearbook or the senior issue of the school newspaper that his goal was to become a pediatric gynecologist. And they printed it.
Up until, IIRC, the year before my senior year, the "senior superlatives" thing in the school newspaper would have the whole senior class vote on a bunch of different categories. Some were things like "smartest" or "most athletic" or whatever, but there were also a bunch like "ugliest" or "sluttiest" and things like that. They wouldn't print your name for those categories unless you said it was OK, but the process for asking you if it was OK was for someone on the newspaper staff to come to your classroom and ask to talk to you for a moment, and then, out in the hallway, show you that your classmates had voted you ugliest or whatever, and ask if you wanted it printed. Almost none of them were ever printed -- they just printed the category name and "Name redacted" or something like that -- but it was a small enough school that everybody knew who got called out of class and then came back in looking like they were trying not to cry.
Oh, and sophomore year, I got voted homecoming princess as a joke. A third of the class voted for me. And the class advisors, rather than just announcing whichever actual popular girl got the next highest number of votes, pretty much just let the news get out, and announced that there was no princess that year. About a month later, for my birthday, my friends decorated the outside of my locker (which was standard thing there for friends to do for birthdays -- you'd "casually" mention your locker combination to your friends a few days before your birthday, and they'd get to school early that day and decorate the outside of the locker and fill the inside with candy and stuff.) During first period, some guys tore up the decorations and wrote rape threats all over them. One of my friends went with me to report it to the vice principal (I'd been unsure about whether to say anything, but this friend insisted that I had to), and three of the guys got detention for a day or so and had to write me apology notes.
Sorry. This week sucks. Getting way too many flashbacks to stuff I hadn't thought about in years.
Holy shit, Hil. All of that sounds nightmarish.