Is Ogged a swimmer?
Glen Mills site is fairly interesting. I try to send beginner swimmers (typically tri people) there so that they can see the videos.
Is Ogged a swimmer?
I want to cry.
Maybe someone should start a second (secret) blog, to explain the hobbies, habits, and foibles of all the Unfogged regulars.
Ogged was the inspiration for Swimfan. He's not allowed within 400 yards of Ian Thorpe.
ogged: still good friends with his previous two exes, the last of which dumped him when she saw him making eye-babies with his Swedish swim instructor. He renounced sex forever when he discovered that the grad student the swim instructor invited for a threesome (also Swedish) turned out to be man, though too late to keep him from lavishing praise on his sick onion (so called). He turned to his blog to find purification in a constant stream of abuse from his commenters; from which he eventually died and ascended into blogger heaven, revealed for the first time to be the Washington Monthly. His ghost returned after a long absence, mainly because there are no titties in heaven.
That was cheap. Sorry, baa.
Did you know that apologizing is just a different mode of bitchiness? Did you, huh? 6 is awesome.
hello, nice site, will you add me to your mailing list?
It's so cliche that it's nearly unbelievable, but a friend of mine (who will remain linkless) and her bf broke up on Valentine's Day. (He still makes eyebabies with his ex.) I feel a little awful about sharing her message but it's such a succint anti-Valentine:
All these little faux deaths we have to endure. I don't think I will ever be as happy as I was with all the little ways my boyfriend marked my day. It is so hard to give them up all of the sudden and go back to feeling bleak and lifeless. It is much worse then when I found out he did not care for me the same way. Then I felt unlovable. Now I feel like I have been exiled from my own country. I hope he feels tremendous relief though. Maybe I was very heavy to him.
It's really kind of unbearable to me right now.
Thanks, you Jesuit But-for.
Double-take!
Did you know that apologizing is just a different mode of bitchiness? Did you, huh?
This is true, but only to the extent that I was apologizing for failing to mock him inventively enough.
Aw, 10. Life's a dance you learn as you go. That e-mail captures my late teens and early 20's perfectly. (Thank god I kept growing.)
I once broke up with a boyfriend on Valentine's Day. I knew I didn't want to be with him, it was long distance, we hadn't talked in a few days, and the prospect of having a mushy Valentine's Day conversation seemed too insincere.
I am now convinced that Ogged is a breaststroker.
I guess that should come as no surprise. Slightly odd, ostracized by the others in the community, wanting to belong. Typical breaststoker.
14: you could have done it with a card ...
roses are red
violets are blue
I'm mean enough to pick valentines day
to break up with you.
But celibate, so more like an aspiring breaststroker.
14: So cold! Didn't occur to you to break it off before Valentine's day?
16: I'm mean? I'm mean? He's the one who couldn't live up to my expectations. Y'know, cure my lonliness, bitterness, angst. That asshole.
Oops. Forgot to end the italics.
habits, and foibles of all the Unfogged regulars
Not enough empty space in the internet to store this.
I am now convinced that Ogged is a breaststroker.
A thousand pardons, will! You have read the archives, after all.
18 - well, I knew I wanted to end it. But it seemed mean to break up with him right before Valentine's day, y'know? I'm considerate like that.
Not enough empty space in the internet to store this.
You'll have to move your Skoals to your front pocket.
I have known the joy of being dumped on Valentine's Day, many years ago. Bonus: the one who did the dumping went directly from my bed to the bed of the girl he liked better, literally.
Ah, dorm life.
I especially like it when people of that age get really into the what-they-did-to-my-heart metaphors.
"He took my heart, and pulverized it. Then he put it through the paper shredder. Then he put my heart in his driveway and ran over it in his Toyota. And let the vultures pick at the remains."
Suitemates -- she was in the adjoining room. It ROCKED!
I guess they got right down to it.
people of that age
I think I see some kids on your lawn, heebie.
Are they meddling? I hate when they do that.
It ROCKED!
If the adjoining room is rockin', don't come knockin'.
My college years were certainly a great era for ridiculous sex/romance drama. I don't know how on earth I had the time or energy for all that absurdity. Ah, youth.
Heh. I lived in a co-op (thirty-three people in an old boarding house) at MIT. My sophmore year, I lived in one of a cluster of four rooms including (1) the house Casanova and his roommate (2) his long-term steady girlfriend (3) the girl he'd been cheating on his girlfriend with the prior summer, who was truly in love with him and who he had dumped in favor of (4) the girl he was now cheating on his steady girlfriend with, who was also truly in love with him. I was an outsider to all the drama, and got along pretty well with everyone involved, but man oh man was there a lot of tension there. The rooms faced onto a little common area with a nice couch, which most years was a hangout -- that year no one, but no one, ever sat there.
36: Oh dear. Not only can I visualize that, but I can report that history repeats itself.
There are playas at MIT? What about playa hatas?
I had a wonderful piece of awkwardness like this in high school. My junior-year roommate and his girlfriend broke up a couple weeks before returning to school and she and I started dating just another couple weeks later. It was especially awkward because the two of them had never done very much, making any time I answered the door in hastily thrown-on pants another little kick in the crotch.
The truly terrifying thing is that he was still the second-best roommate I had in high school.
standpipe:
You cannot hide your inner breaststrokerness.
I am in favor of IM without breaststroke.
I was once the guy making out with a girl in the back of a car that was going down the highway with 5 people in it, one of whom was her scarily jealous and wistful ex-boyfriend. If you want to hear my rationalization for that, let me know, because I thought about it for a while afterwards.
38: Some MIT-connected folk are running the Black Morbid Fling again this year. Decide for yourself it that constitutes playin' or playa-hatin'.
breaststroke
Are there any other English words with an s-t-s-t string? I assume there are, but I can't think of any that aren't compound words, like rest stop.
They would definitely all be compound words. Just like words with "ngthw" in them, or "zzk", or "nchb".
"zzk"
While perhaps technically a compound word, I'm going to proclaim "buzzkill" real.
I was wondering if it would be obvious which words those were. Except I was thinking of "lunchbox".
The B. is for Buzzkill.
No kidding.
35: For sure. Pregnancies, knife fights, STDs, Older Guy with romantic (no symptoms) fatal disease, ad nauseam. It doesn't get better than that. Now people take antidepressants instead.
44: Later, after the morpheme cluster discussion dies down. BTW, "ckgr" and "ooddoo".
Bydd y cyllyll yn y cwpwrdd wrth y bwrdd, you Goidelic bastard.
Příští zastávka: zvratekhrady.
Where's John Emerson to type something witty in !Xóõ?
54: Background, but I can't come up with anything for the other that isn't clearly an ad hoc invention. Flooddoor? Wooddoor?
Zvratekhrady??
This may not actually be idiomatic Czech for "Barfsville".
I imagine one is far more likely to be dumped on or near Valentine's Day than most other days, for reasons like those mentioned in 14. The prospect of having to proclaim devotion, etc., forces people to do what they'd been putting off due to its unpleasantness. Alas, I don't know of any good data sets. Sociologists in the crowd?
But on the general thread topic: I've never understood why some stranger's misfortune, even when borne with good humor, should be allowed to interfere with my self pity. I just got dumped, goddamnit!
re: 62
Ah. I have no idea. Hrad is castle, iirc. Mesto is town or city. Zvratek is a new word for me, though. My czech is poor (to say the least).
Have a drink? Go buy some half-price chocolate in a big red heartshaped box and eat yourself sick as you choke on the irony of it all? Figure out what Ned's word from 54 is?
My Czech is Google and guesswork.
Flooddoor is a word, but I confess that it's probably never used unhyphenated except in collections of linguistic oddities, thus making it not a real word.
Anyway, my line of thought was as follows:
"Dammit Brian*, it's over. Laura* broke up with you three weeks ago, and you're still part of the same group of friends, and you choose to still hang out with her, and you have to deal with it. All you do is mope around and try to make everyone pity you. You're not even trying to get her back, even though you're acting all wistful toward her. You're just trying to make her and everyone else uncomfortable until we agree with you that you're not to blame for anything.
(hmmm....I wish I could frankly tell him this...but it would disrupt the conversation in the front seat, and force everyone into a confrontation. What to do...what to do...how can I subtly send the message without actually confronting him...)
(Wait! A genius idea! I can send him the message that Laura no longer longs for him through the highly underrated and underused communication technique of...making out with a hot chick!)
(But...can I really kill two birds with one stone that way? It seems too good to be true. Well, might as well try.)"
*not their real names
I think that's the only time I ever might have demonstrated my dominance Gavin Newsom-style over a lesser male in the status hierarchy. But he was asking for it, man.
Speaking of breakups, nothing says "I think we should talk" like raw, bloody meat.
I'm not sure. I think it's a piece of liver cut in the shape of a heart.
A quick grep through the words returns:
breaststroke
breaststroke's
breaststrokes
Wow, that's actually kinda surprising.
A liver heart a uniquely repellant organ from a deformed animal, symbolising the malformed, inchoate and unsustainable love that now has to be snuffed out.
15: I've always suspect that Ogged was an aficionado of Grob's Attack.
67:Easy for me to say, since my college experience did not involve the kind of mixed-gender friendship networks so typical of small colleges for the last several generations, but hanging around the same groups after a breakup with one of the members has always seemed wrong in just the way this illustrates. Somebody should leave, as you imply.
I can't believe this is the consonant cluster thread rather than the bad breakup thread. Come on someone, tell me I'm a bad person for #67.
69: A heart sculpted out of beef liver?
Which would have been easier to do out of chopped liver. But less bloody.
The last time I dumped someone, I made it official in the middle of July. Not even on Independence Day. I have no flair for this associate-bad-thing-with-holiday-just-so-he'll-never-forget-it thing.
75: Eh, I don't think that makes it past 'tacky'. Rough on Brian, but I'm not seeing that he had any particular entitlement for you not to do what you did.
Sorry, I don't think it makes you a bad person.
Sans animal parts, it barely rises to "thoughtless," Ned.
Besides which, you are not the only, and probably not the more important, person doing what you did in this story.
75: Doesn't make you a bad person, because it's all too common. My lifelong best friend is married to my ex-girlfriend. I felt betrayed for the first few months of their relationship, but got over it. Plus now there is the added bonus of, whenever I get irritated with him, being able to bring up the fact that I [crude reference redacted].
Plus now there is the added bonus of, whenever I get irritated with him, being able to bring up the fact that I [crude reference redacted].
Added bonus for him? Because he gets the better of this comparison, I would think.
re: 81
Yeah, my high-school girlfriend, with whom I had a tempestuous/crazy/destructive relationship is now married to another high-school friend of mine.
75: You will find no approbation here. Damn loving and supportive virtual friends.
80: Yes, I was quite certain that she was feeling the same way I was. Still, it was odd that someone had annoyed me so much that I did something I knew would make him feel like a colossal loser.
84: Oh shit, I swear I used to know the definition of that word.
77 and similar: You have got to be kidding me. Ned did a bad thing and then created as dippy a rationalization as he could possibly find. We've all done it, repeatedly, and, often enough, done it in relation to much worse acts. But it was it was: wrong.
84, 86: Opprobrium? I can remember confusing those two.
Oooh! Here's a GREAT awkward roommate situation!
My (female) friend moved into a converted-triple dorm room freshman year. (Read: three people living in a walk-in closet.)
The other two girls had been in a relationship with each other during the fall semester, and had a hostile break-up. (The old third roommate left for Europe.)
My friend moves in. Then hooks up with one of the two ex-lovers. Then decides she doesn't want to continue that, because she's not gay at heart.
Voila! Everyone hates everyone in the shoebox!
What's a "beef liver heart"?
A missing comma?
Awkward roommate situation: Mr. B.'s sister and I rooming together sophomore year, I'm sleeping with a Greek guy, she tells me that she'd rather I didn't fuck other people in the apartment while I'm dating her brother.
Awkward V day breakup: I call Mr. B. long distance from Brighton to break up with him. He says "oh. I thought you were calling because it's Valentine's Day." I say, "oh, it is? Sorry."
88: What made it wrong? That it hurt Brian's feelings? Would it still have been wrong if Brian had never dated Laura, but had an unreciprocated crush that Ned knew about? If not, what's the difference?
94: That it hurt Brian's feelings, and that he did it for the purpose of hurting Brian's feelings.
That it hurt Brian's feelings?
Not that it hurt Brian, that he did it to hurt Brian.
Admittedly, it's a complicated notion that takes two people to explain it.
Can we split the difference and say that Ned did a bad thing, but B is a bad person?
I have one friend who basically fell out with me because I slept with his girlfriend. Not his ex, but someone he went out with *after* I slept with her, i.e. we had a fling then a month or so later he started dating her.
For some reason he couldn't handle it.
I have been in the CrypticNed situation a few times too. Both in the Ned position, and in the position of the ex in the (metaphorical) front seat.
People are bastards. That is all.
Hrmphf. I think that if you go around telegraphing by your behavior that someone doing something that they're perfectly entitled to do would be emotionally devastating to you, there's not a thing wrong, generally, with their going ahead and doing it to make the point that you don't have the power or the entitlement to control other people's actions in that regard.
It's one thing to date a friend's ex, it's another to fool around while the guy is in the front seat and can't escape, but I like the posterior (har) rationalization of it.
Your soul is mildly bruised.
No George, the person causing the trouble is "Brian"; he should go away already.
B's sister appears to rue the day she introduced them, but he's had many opportunities to show he doesn't care about her sense of propriety, so she should give up.
100: There are any number of things that we're entitled to do that we don't do because it would hurt someone else. Actually, I'm not sure how important "entitled" is here; assuming consensual sex (or something similar in non-sexual situations), everything's entitled.
I agree with 100. But my feeling of guilt was justified. I mean...it's not like that made him stop moping around filled with wist. I could have said something to him (we all could have) to let him know that he could be behaving a lot more reasonably.
And we probably could have made out in a different venue, although it would have been hard because our parents didn't want us seeing each other.
"(we all could have)" s/b "(we all could have but nobody did)"
I wouldn't say it makes you a bad person CrypticNed, but at that moment kindness was not your greatest virtue. Isn't that a frequent consequence of indulging annoyance?
I've been--fairly recently--a version of Brian except I try really hard not to mope or be wistful, but sometimes you can't help it. And it does feel like one is being kicked when one is down. Luckily the kicking has only happened a few times and somewhat abstractly; nothing quite so awful as being stuck in a car. I tend to fall for people who usually prize kindness. Should somebody leave?(74) Perhaps but all too often it ends up being the person who is the loser, exactly when that person most needs friends and some help mending self-esteem.
Re: the broken heart blender analogies--my favorite involved "spicing then roasting." I have a vendetta against such analogies; hearing them too much as a child is my only (psychosomatic) explanation for why my chest always hurts so much when my heart gets broken.
96 explains why 100 is slightly wrong. But it's not like it was a hugely terrible thing to do. Life is complicated, there is something to the point in 100, and these things happen.
I must say, even though the line of women, including a couple of wives, who have dumped me (some multiple times) is quite long, no one has broken up with me on Valentine's Day. I suddenly feel so much bette rabout my life.
although it would have been hard because our parents didn't want us seeing each other
So this is high school? I'd been thinking college.
96 explains why 100 is slightly wrong. But it's not like it was a hugely terrible thing to do. Life is complicated, there is something to the point in 100, and these things happen.
I must say, even though the line of women, including a couple of wives, who have dumped me (some multiple times) is quite long, no one has broken up with me on Valentine's Day. I suddenly feel so much better about my life.
[sorry about the double-post. computers are hard for old people]
Dead Female President
Edith Bolling Wilson?
Edith Bolling Wilson?
Shhh. Woody doesn't know about my cross dressing as Brian. The ties make him very cross.
Ah, bad breakups!
My girlfriend broke up with me, and then while she was out of town I hooked up with her best friend, and then when the (now ex-)girlfriend came back, I broke up with the (now ex-)best friend and got back together with the (now no-longer ex-)girlfriend, whom I later married.
That was 18 months of unpleasant drama, which has aftershocks to this very day.
I also experienced a situation very similar to RFTS's in 25 only with the sexes reversed. And it wasn't Valentine's Day. Possibly the same dorm, though.
109: Yes, I was about to go away to college (so was Brian), and she was two years behind (hence the parental misgivings; I guess Brian's parents were a lot more enthusiastic)
This was a group of friends that was usually convened by one guy who liked to have a lot of people around while he was talking. Despite the potential awkwardness he continued to invite both Brian and Laura (and me) to various get-togethers after the breakup, and Brian kept coming along despite sulking and saying nothing.
So these get-togethers involving a bunch of other people were really my only opportunity to see her, barring the possibility of lying to parents.
The monologue in #67 was prefaced by another monologue, as follows:
"You know, Ned, you and Laura probably won't be able to kiss each other in any private situation. And there'll probably be only one or two more get-togethers before college starts. And here you are, sitting next to each other in a car, secretly holding hands. This is the time to kiss her, dammit. There will be no perfect opportunity.
"But look, Brian's right here, not to mention that he'd find out about it anyway and get embarrassed. Brian's supposed to be my friend, although he's been annoying recently, and he's been sort of stalking her, and that'll all get worse if he feels more humiliated."
-cue rationalization, which depends on an artificially enhanced level of distaste for Brian.
If I wanted to be effective in my anti-relationship crusade, I could do no better than to Cryptic Ned every couple I could find: "Relationhips! No good! She never loved you! I don't love her! She doesn't love me! It's all misery".
Phonemes: the mongol language is full of beboppish scatsinging consonant-vowel words like Yabadabadoo! and Bubala! and so on.
A story I've heard about two different couples: a small-town couple breaks up, and the woman/girl spends the next two months screwing every single one of her ex's friends.
Phonemes: the mongol language is full of beboppish scatsinging consonant-vowel words like Yabadabadoo! and Bubala! and so on.
Jesus, that's a beautiful sentence.
OK, age changes the degree to which I feel Brian should have known better, and the opprobrium! I felt for his hanging around, because it had different meaning in context. I still think you're ok, and in fact less culpable because of your age.
No sympathy for "Brian". Weeks under her window blaring Nickleback? He had it coming.