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Cal Sailing Club recently re-did the design and layout on their site and it looks great. The person who is doing all of the code/backend for it is a bit older than the usual Silicon Valley tech type, and works in PHP, and did the site in PHP. The site has workflows for a lot of things, blog, tutorials, information, membership, work hours, volunteer logs, maintenance lots, etc, etc. This always gives me a small crisis about my tech decisions and career trajectory. Also, Padrone's Mud Frontend and PHP cross wires in my brain. PHP is Padrone's Home Page.
In Tempe, I wound up moving in with a het couple. This story is about the dude in that poly relationship (she was probably asexual). Calling him "A" here. She'll be "B". This is part of a logjam of thoughts of where I'm struggling with where to start, but I want to write about what _More Than Two_ has to say about relationships in general and monogamous relationships, which imo is good and relevant, and I can't without this first. This is a string of random stories. I apologize to poly people who are decent, reasonable people. I know intent here doesn't change anything, but the intention is to air my own baggage, not attack poly in general. I think the poly community is aware of issues with people they attract for the wrong reason and tries hard to address that, a problem any kind of progressive space has.
Systems of privilege re-enforcing privilege is also making me think of this. I'd long been told that the east coast is more class centric, and then while still younger wound up having some experience with that but no real lens for interpreting my experiences.
I was welcomed to move in to a third bedroom (they had the master bedroom, and the other room was kind of their study/TV lounge) as part of an arrangement where I would do the grocery shopping and help with chores since A didn't like to do housework and B had mobility and joint paint issues. But it's a nice house, they agreed to support my special snowflake issue, and third of it was cheap rent, so yes, I can do some chores. They'd had someone else in with basically the same deal, but "it didn't work out".
"A" adopted a rooster. The rooster, predictably, started crowing at 3am. Sometimes 2am. Loudly. And this rooster was placed right outside my window. Sometimes I would get out of bed, move the rooster in to the chicken tractor outside their window by the street, and give it food and water, but the rooster always quickly got moved back. After months of periodic gentle protest (I believe B was being a gentle voice of reason on my side with A here, here and in other cases), a new home was found for the rooster, somewhere far on the edge of town in a kind of private zoo (they had a kangaroo!) with a promise not to kill and eat the rooster (this was A's requirement, not mine). Finally! Sleep!
Less than a month later, A misses having a rooster, gets another one without asking if it would be ok or telling me he was going to, and the rooster goes right outside my window, again.
I inherited a manual egg beater. I requested it not go in the dishwasher. I kept finding it in the dishwasher. I'd repeat myself, gently, patiently, asking, hey, please, the chrome will start to peel and the metal pit if this is washed in the dishwasher, and I'd like to keep it nice, please don't do that, and it kept going back in to the dishwasher (which may not be a surprise after the first story). Ok, fine, I'm not sharing this piece of personal property any more. It went in to a duffel bag in the closet in my room. And then there it was again, in the kitchen. I am 9000% sure I did not do that.
So, part of the deal is I'll help with chores, especially dishes. What I had not expected, and was not disclosed to me, was that poly here was not just "I have a few girlfriends", but full a full on rotating party circuit where poly people meet poly people apparently at least from A's point of view and stories. This meant 30 odd people in the house on a regular basis with an enormous cooking and baking effort before hand, every pot, pan, dish, plate, and fork dirty, and I get to clean up after it.
I'd been briefly exposed to the swinger scene via a neighbor and I'm not seeing how this was at all any different. Not kink shaming here but not my scene, so I'm giving these parties space. Ok, maybe crapping on poly a little bit here.
Dishes was something that started reasonable and slowly got worse. B would cook and bake and share some. But then towards the end, I'm not eating the food because that seemed like continuing to give consent to something I was trying to be clear about not being okay with. "B", always trying to be reasonable, hired a housekeeper, and the housekeeper was given more and more work, including dishes. I was eating 100% ramen with an electric kettle in my room or else Filberto's and rarely (despite the workload, I was dirt poor) a cheap Indian buffet (omg was that delicious when I did that).
"A" liked to talk at length about all of his super cool accomplishments, including love interests, but unless he was actively trying to court you, romantically or part of his entourage (this is part of why extrovert with entourages keep of creep me out now) or to get you to do stuff for him, he really did not want to know your situation. He'll tell long stories about his struggles (depressed, stressed out by school, these mean people were not adequately kind and patient with him) but as soon as you mention something you're dealing with, he'll fire off an "I can't help with that" faster than you can blink. I wasn't fishing for help... and me and B are constantly gently trying to entice, incentivize, help you schedule, help you remember to do just a few small chores, so it should be obvious that if we want something from you, we'll be direct and clear about it, not sit there and fish for help like you do. If you talked about things that clearly had even no opportunity for help, it was clearly boring to him, so he basically had no idea what I was up to.
"B" and I trying trying to get "A" to do chores was classic Bartleby, the Scrivener style passive avoidance, but with more diverse strategy. It was guaranteed to take far more energy for the both of us to get him to do anything around the place than the effort of actually doing it, and he'd have managed to hold out for a large reward, and then use the fact that he did that one thing as argument against having to do other things for a surprisingly long period of time. He'd promise to do things then forget. Or he'd wake up feeling depressed... but you know what will cheer him up? Going to a play party. We want him to be cheered up from his depression, right? Depression only kept him from doing chores, never from going being social or sexual. Or else, oops, too busy to do that, A has a very important party to go to because a romantic interest will be there and he thinks he's making some headway on wooing her and her polycule. Often sitting around playing video games or watching Netflix but always too busy to help with housework.
"A" was working on his masters degree. He'd gotten to the point of getting a thesis defence committee together... but then he didn't actually do anything, or so incredibly extremely little, until, after repeated warnings, his committee chair resigned. But having infinite energy for social finagling, "A" recruited another committee chair. During all of this, A was obstinately working on his master's thesis. I got recruited by A and B both to help try to keep A on track so he doesn't screw it up again, so lots of gentle encouragement, gentle reminders, colorful promises of how it will be when that's done and not hanging over him. A few times, he briefly tried to work on it and got distracted. I'm not completely sure here, but I think he made a very minimal rough start, and then there were endless meetings with committee members... just going from one to the next. I'm thinking he basically got the committee to write the paper for him, piece by piece, and then wound up a week's worth of revisions he actually did do. Then he was blase about defending, not really being stressed, not concerned about whether he could defend it. I'm guessing he'd already socially finagled things with each member of the committee and also if they basically wrote the paper, they must be ok with it.
Since this is no longer over A's head, we all agree in a house meeting, which we've started having, that A should now be less stressed out and depressed (I'm absolutely not convinced that there was a drop of stress anywhere in that journey) and less busy (or that) so he can now start helping with chores. A has no excuses here. Great, I made a huge show of support pushing him through, now I'm going to take some classes, even though I have an incredible work load (lead on two flagship projects, other developers quit and fired, deadlines slipping, complete chaos). Expected result: some basic level of consideration, may be even actual help with chores. Actual result: Now that A has finished his degree, we're going to have non-stop poly parties, and when we're not having a party, we'll be loud and obnoxious watching Netflix. I wound up on a reverse sleep schedule because it's easier to sleep with a pillow over my head through the chaos than to concentrate during it.
"B" often worked from home, usually working but often not (seeing other examples of people "working from home" makes me understand why the industry is so against it) and "A" kept quitting jobs and getting fired so was seldom on any job long.
I may have written about this earlier... there were hens, including hens he'd taken from myself and R when R moved out of her space. Obviously, had I had known him better, that would not have happened, and "B" is not helping with animal care here. I mostly took over animal care when I moved in, during the time that I was there, thinking that if I'm away a lot for stretches of time, it makes sense for me to do it while I'm there and "A" to do it while I'm not. You probably see where this is going and I should have... I guess I just didn't appreciate how bad it was and social charm is incredibly powerful. Every time I went away for a while, some hens died. Emails circulated and "A" made a big point about how saw of an event it was and clearly awful he felt about it, and "B" talked about all of the things they were trying (but actually, mostly talking about then A promising to do) to make sure the hens had everything they need and can't escape and wander off and be found dead down the street. Eventually I remembered that after they adopted hens from me, they mostly quickly died, and I didn't tell them when I was coming back from travel. The hens had no food and no water and were clearly desperately starving. B swore up and down that A had been taking care of the hens. It must be a fluke. Even though they had a treedle feeder that holds a few weeks worth of food so anyone checking on them any time in the last week wound have seen it was getting low. How long does it take a 10 gallon metal mini-trough to dry up? At this point, they aren't my hens any more, I'm just taking care of them, so I can only say so much, and I'm thinking about reporting this to the SPCA, but then I'm out looking for my own hard to find snowflake living situation again.
All of this time, I'm trying not to know anything about their poly, but slowly over time piecing together that "A" is just completely cheating on the deal every time "B" is traveling for work, and it sounds like it was already pretty damn permissive, with just a few rules.
Another trip, I have fig cuttings that starting to get maybe 16" tall and have branches and are looking like proper little fig trees. This is 100% predictable. Oh, and the death of the worms was predictable too. I'm trusting "B" at this point, not "A". "A" and "B" don't want someone coming in to the yard to water plants even though they have a housekeeper coming in to the house. They won't really say why except apparently B is trying to redeem A and prove that he's ok. B promises that she will watch the plants herself and make sure they're getting watered. Instead, she just asks A if he has done it. A says he has. I come back and not only are they dead, but they are so bone dry that the 3 gallon pots are as light as styrofoam. B admits she wasn't actually checking them, even though I'm texting and asking her to check and she says its being taken care of. This is the beginning of the end here... "A" is lying. "B" can't accept that, which is understandable as when someone is being extremely fantastically horrible to the point where you can't even comprehend it, your brain kind of shuts off and you assume you're missing something. "B" at least understands why I'm upset. "A" is confused as to why I'm upset. When I show him the bone dry pots, he immediately changes the subject to one of his parties like I'm not there and clearly hurt and betrayed. To him, it didn't even happen. "B" tried to get him to apologize and acknowledge it; the apology was something like "I didn't mean to" then walking away. Next house meeting after I'd been avoiding him, upsetting "B" that "we were fighting" (not much of a fight), I brought up that and getting reports that the hens had food and water when they very much did not, so this is no accident, this is a pattern of being lid to. A's response... and I will never forget this... and all of this really just leads up to this... was "you're just looking for something to be upset about". Plants I've put a lot of work in to, that you've refused to let me hire proper care for, and living, breathing creatures that you murdered with neglect lying about, is me "just looking for something to be upset about".
I'm spacing stuff out and this isn't even half of it (fighting for access to my coffee maker; constantly asking me to make him coffee or for the coffee I'm making for myself; coffee maker being left on even after moved in to the back yard and declared off limits (ha), water in the Z600's engine mysteriously and it's air cooled, violently banging at 7am... and on and on and on).
"A" was apparently born and raised and did undergrad on the east coast so accurately or not has become the posterboy in my brain for east coast entitled privilege.
In Tempe, I wound up moving in with a het couple. This story is about the dude in that poly relationship (she was probably asexual). Calling him "A" here. She'll be "B". This is part of a logjam of thoughts of where I'm struggling with where to start, but I want to write about what _More Than Two_ has to say about relationships in general and monogamous relationships, which imo is good and relevant, and I can't without this first. This is a string of random stories. I apologize to poly people who are decent, reasonable people. I know intent here doesn't change anything, but the intention is to air my own baggage, not attack poly in general. I think the poly community is aware of issues with people they attract for the wrong reason and tries hard to address that, a problem any kind of progressive space has.
Systems of privilege re-enforcing privilege is also making me think of this. I'd long been told that the east coast is more class centric, and then while still younger wound up having some experience with that but no real lens for interpreting my experiences.
I was welcomed to move in to a third bedroom (they had the master bedroom, and the other room was kind of their study/TV lounge) as part of an arrangement where I would do the grocery shopping and help with chores since A didn't like to do housework and B had mobility and joint paint issues. But it's a nice house, they agreed to support my special snowflake issue, and third of it was cheap rent, so yes, I can do some chores. They'd had someone else in with basically the same deal, but "it didn't work out".
"A" adopted a rooster. The rooster, predictably, started crowing at 3am. Sometimes 2am. Loudly. And this rooster was placed right outside my window. Sometimes I would get out of bed, move the rooster in to the chicken tractor outside their window by the street, and give it food and water, but the rooster always quickly got moved back. After months of periodic gentle protest (I believe B was being a gentle voice of reason on my side with A here, here and in other cases), a new home was found for the rooster, somewhere far on the edge of town in a kind of private zoo (they had a kangaroo!) with a promise not to kill and eat the rooster (this was A's requirement, not mine). Finally! Sleep!
Less than a month later, A misses having a rooster, gets another one without asking if it would be ok or telling me he was going to, and the rooster goes right outside my window, again.
I inherited a manual egg beater. I requested it not go in the dishwasher. I kept finding it in the dishwasher. I'd repeat myself, gently, patiently, asking, hey, please, the chrome will start to peel and the metal pit if this is washed in the dishwasher, and I'd like to keep it nice, please don't do that, and it kept going back in to the dishwasher (which may not be a surprise after the first story). Ok, fine, I'm not sharing this piece of personal property any more. It went in to a duffel bag in the closet in my room. And then there it was again, in the kitchen. I am 9000% sure I did not do that.
So, part of the deal is I'll help with chores, especially dishes. What I had not expected, and was not disclosed to me, was that poly here was not just "I have a few girlfriends", but full a full on rotating party circuit where poly people meet poly people apparently at least from A's point of view and stories. This meant 30 odd people in the house on a regular basis with an enormous cooking and baking effort before hand, every pot, pan, dish, plate, and fork dirty, and I get to clean up after it.
I'd been briefly exposed to the swinger scene via a neighbor and I'm not seeing how this was at all any different. Not kink shaming here but not my scene, so I'm giving these parties space. Ok, maybe crapping on poly a little bit here.
Dishes was something that started reasonable and slowly got worse. B would cook and bake and share some. But then towards the end, I'm not eating the food because that seemed like continuing to give consent to something I was trying to be clear about not being okay with. "B", always trying to be reasonable, hired a housekeeper, and the housekeeper was given more and more work, including dishes. I was eating 100% ramen with an electric kettle in my room or else Filberto's and rarely (despite the workload, I was dirt poor) a cheap Indian buffet (omg was that delicious when I did that).
"A" liked to talk at length about all of his super cool accomplishments, including love interests, but unless he was actively trying to court you, romantically or part of his entourage (this is part of why extrovert with entourages keep of creep me out now) or to get you to do stuff for him, he really did not want to know your situation. He'll tell long stories about his struggles (depressed, stressed out by school, these mean people were not adequately kind and patient with him) but as soon as you mention something you're dealing with, he'll fire off an "I can't help with that" faster than you can blink. I wasn't fishing for help... and me and B are constantly gently trying to entice, incentivize, help you schedule, help you remember to do just a few small chores, so it should be obvious that if we want something from you, we'll be direct and clear about it, not sit there and fish for help like you do. If you talked about things that clearly had even no opportunity for help, it was clearly boring to him, so he basically had no idea what I was up to.
"B" and I trying trying to get "A" to do chores was classic Bartleby, the Scrivener style passive avoidance, but with more diverse strategy. It was guaranteed to take far more energy for the both of us to get him to do anything around the place than the effort of actually doing it, and he'd have managed to hold out for a large reward, and then use the fact that he did that one thing as argument against having to do other things for a surprisingly long period of time. He'd promise to do things then forget. Or he'd wake up feeling depressed... but you know what will cheer him up? Going to a play party. We want him to be cheered up from his depression, right? Depression only kept him from doing chores, never from going being social or sexual. Or else, oops, too busy to do that, A has a very important party to go to because a romantic interest will be there and he thinks he's making some headway on wooing her and her polycule. Often sitting around playing video games or watching Netflix but always too busy to help with housework.
"A" was working on his masters degree. He'd gotten to the point of getting a thesis defence committee together... but then he didn't actually do anything, or so incredibly extremely little, until, after repeated warnings, his committee chair resigned. But having infinite energy for social finagling, "A" recruited another committee chair. During all of this, A was obstinately working on his master's thesis. I got recruited by A and B both to help try to keep A on track so he doesn't screw it up again, so lots of gentle encouragement, gentle reminders, colorful promises of how it will be when that's done and not hanging over him. A few times, he briefly tried to work on it and got distracted. I'm not completely sure here, but I think he made a very minimal rough start, and then there were endless meetings with committee members... just going from one to the next. I'm thinking he basically got the committee to write the paper for him, piece by piece, and then wound up a week's worth of revisions he actually did do. Then he was blase about defending, not really being stressed, not concerned about whether he could defend it. I'm guessing he'd already socially finagled things with each member of the committee and also if they basically wrote the paper, they must be ok with it.
Since this is no longer over A's head, we all agree in a house meeting, which we've started having, that A should now be less stressed out and depressed (I'm absolutely not convinced that there was a drop of stress anywhere in that journey) and less busy (or that) so he can now start helping with chores. A has no excuses here. Great, I made a huge show of support pushing him through, now I'm going to take some classes, even though I have an incredible work load (lead on two flagship projects, other developers quit and fired, deadlines slipping, complete chaos). Expected result: some basic level of consideration, may be even actual help with chores. Actual result: Now that A has finished his degree, we're going to have non-stop poly parties, and when we're not having a party, we'll be loud and obnoxious watching Netflix. I wound up on a reverse sleep schedule because it's easier to sleep with a pillow over my head through the chaos than to concentrate during it.
"B" often worked from home, usually working but often not (seeing other examples of people "working from home" makes me understand why the industry is so against it) and "A" kept quitting jobs and getting fired so was seldom on any job long.
I may have written about this earlier... there were hens, including hens he'd taken from myself and R when R moved out of her space. Obviously, had I had known him better, that would not have happened, and "B" is not helping with animal care here. I mostly took over animal care when I moved in, during the time that I was there, thinking that if I'm away a lot for stretches of time, it makes sense for me to do it while I'm there and "A" to do it while I'm not. You probably see where this is going and I should have... I guess I just didn't appreciate how bad it was and social charm is incredibly powerful. Every time I went away for a while, some hens died. Emails circulated and "A" made a big point about how saw of an event it was and clearly awful he felt about it, and "B" talked about all of the things they were trying (but actually, mostly talking about then A promising to do) to make sure the hens had everything they need and can't escape and wander off and be found dead down the street. Eventually I remembered that after they adopted hens from me, they mostly quickly died, and I didn't tell them when I was coming back from travel. The hens had no food and no water and were clearly desperately starving. B swore up and down that A had been taking care of the hens. It must be a fluke. Even though they had a treedle feeder that holds a few weeks worth of food so anyone checking on them any time in the last week wound have seen it was getting low. How long does it take a 10 gallon metal mini-trough to dry up? At this point, they aren't my hens any more, I'm just taking care of them, so I can only say so much, and I'm thinking about reporting this to the SPCA, but then I'm out looking for my own hard to find snowflake living situation again.
All of this time, I'm trying not to know anything about their poly, but slowly over time piecing together that "A" is just completely cheating on the deal every time "B" is traveling for work, and it sounds like it was already pretty damn permissive, with just a few rules.
Another trip, I have fig cuttings that starting to get maybe 16" tall and have branches and are looking like proper little fig trees. This is 100% predictable. Oh, and the death of the worms was predictable too. I'm trusting "B" at this point, not "A". "A" and "B" don't want someone coming in to the yard to water plants even though they have a housekeeper coming in to the house. They won't really say why except apparently B is trying to redeem A and prove that he's ok. B promises that she will watch the plants herself and make sure they're getting watered. Instead, she just asks A if he has done it. A says he has. I come back and not only are they dead, but they are so bone dry that the 3 gallon pots are as light as styrofoam. B admits she wasn't actually checking them, even though I'm texting and asking her to check and she says its being taken care of. This is the beginning of the end here... "A" is lying. "B" can't accept that, which is understandable as when someone is being extremely fantastically horrible to the point where you can't even comprehend it, your brain kind of shuts off and you assume you're missing something. "B" at least understands why I'm upset. "A" is confused as to why I'm upset. When I show him the bone dry pots, he immediately changes the subject to one of his parties like I'm not there and clearly hurt and betrayed. To him, it didn't even happen. "B" tried to get him to apologize and acknowledge it; the apology was something like "I didn't mean to" then walking away. Next house meeting after I'd been avoiding him, upsetting "B" that "we were fighting" (not much of a fight), I brought up that and getting reports that the hens had food and water when they very much did not, so this is no accident, this is a pattern of being lid to. A's response... and I will never forget this... and all of this really just leads up to this... was "you're just looking for something to be upset about". Plants I've put a lot of work in to, that you've refused to let me hire proper care for, and living, breathing creatures that you murdered with neglect lying about, is me "just looking for something to be upset about".
I'm spacing stuff out and this isn't even half of it (fighting for access to my coffee maker; constantly asking me to make him coffee or for the coffee I'm making for myself; coffee maker being left on even after moved in to the back yard and declared off limits (ha), water in the Z600's engine mysteriously and it's air cooled, violently banging at 7am... and on and on and on).
"A" was apparently born and raised and did undergrad on the east coast so accurately or not has become the posterboy in my brain for east coast entitled privilege.
