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[Geti]

Thanks. He died a day after being taken off life support (yesterday), apparently painlessly and reasonably calmly, and we've had a lot of community support around it, but yeah it's just one of those things that happens and kinda blows everything else out of the water.

I'm finding work to be an easy distraction if I can get my motivation up but every morning and every night there's been a long, hard reflection on (life the universe and everything) and vaguely overwhelming sadness and sympathy for the guy's family in particular.

It's been hard enough losing him as an internet buddy, I can't imagine how hard it'd be to have a close family member snatched away so early in his life.

[Praying Mantis]

Fuck, Kouji died? I don't even know what to think. I remember talking with him a lot on KAG IRC a couple of years ago when I was a guard, I think I may have played a few rounds with him and the others too. That sucks to hear.

[Geti]

Yeah he was dealing with cancer for the past year or so but we all thought he was on the uphill. Chemo and the like does carry increased stroke risk but it's one of those things you just never see coming you know? It's been touching seeing how far a reach the guy had though.

[Snow]

He was too young. Very saddening.

[TheLastBanana]

That's rough, Geti. Sounds like he was a good guy.

[Geti]

Thanks for the support guys, it means a lot (hi tlb!)

[Fallsburg]

3 months into this having a kid thing and I have few thoughts. I'm sure that having a kid is difficult for everyone (it's a lot of pressure/stress/responsibility to take care of a being that is completely helpless and not the most communicative), but people really don't understand what a truly difficult child is like.  Other parents are well meaning, but I mostly want to tell them to fuck off when they offer their sympathies.  Because their sympathies aren't actually sympathetic.  They are all just come off as humble brags by people who think that you aren't doing a good job/don't get it.  When they tell their stories about the "difficulties" with their children, I just want to laugh. They got easy babies, we got a devil baby, but they feel that they are the source of their child's easiness (and as a corollary, that we are the source of our child's difficulty).  Instead of just nodding and saying "Wow, I couldn't have gone through what you are going through" they try to talk about their child's difficulties which just seem so pathetically trivial that I want to laugh at how pathetically weak they are for thinking such trifles even compare to the constant difficulties that our son has thrown at us.

Note: I love him a fucking crazy amount, and things are definitely getting better, but we're still in day-to-day survival mode.

[Impmaster]

Uh... I'm kinda in the it's your fault party... What type of things does your child do?

[Tanner]

...says the child

[Fallsburg]

@Impmaster
I find it laughable that you think that a 3 month old's behavior is attributable to the parent's actions.  Fuck, he's been doing it since day 1, so you think that my actions caused my child's behavior from when he was in utero. 

Anyway, since you asked:

My child has severe gastric reflux.  This means that he projectile vomits multiple times a day.  Yesterday he hit 14 projectile vomits.  Because of the fact that his esophagus is constantly being bathed in stomach acid, he has never found nursing to be comforting.  Nursing is supposed to be the most comforting thing in the world to infants.
Most infants in the 0-2 week range fall asleep after nursing.  Not our son.  We've had to fight tooth and goddamn-nail for every minute of sleep that he has ever given us. 
He also had no instinct to eat from the beginning, refuses to take a bottle, and wouldn't latch unless he and my wife were laying on their side on the floor (as any soft surface caused him to sink and be upset) [he has gotten better at this, but we still had to fight to get every ounce of food in him for about a month].  Doing this every hour and a half, 24 hours a day, for 3 weeks is emotionally and physically draining.  And because he was a bad eater, his nursing sessions would last about an hour, so he would nurse for an hour, my wife would have 30 minutes to recover and then back to nursing.   
He refuses to sit in a car seat.  He will straight up shriek (he has never done the standard plaintive wah-wah-wah cry of most babies and has just been exploring new, higher pitched shrieks from the moment he was born) from the moment he is placed in the seat until the moment he is taken out.  No amount of a person talking to him, comforting him, playing with him, giving him a pacifier (which he refuses to take) will cause this to stop until he is being held by a person.

Essentially, he demands at least 1 person's attention constantly.  There is no setting him down.  If you set him down, he will either shriek, or vomit, or both.  This lasts through all hours of the night.  3 months of sleep deprivation will weigh heavily on a person. Infants are supposed to do 2 things, eat and sleep , and when one of them literally causes your child to erupt acid,

Most parents of easy babies talk about how difficult diapering was, or how their child now wakes up every 4 hours instead of sleeping a solid 8, or how they can't do anything until their child takes a nap.

[Geti]

That sucks, I'm sure you're seeing doctors and stuff where necessary (hence the diagnosis) and I don't have kids of my own to brag about so nothing to offer other that sympathies and internet hugs. Hope it eases up over time.

[Fallsburg]

Well, he's on baby Zantac which eases the symptoms (i.e. his stomach acid isn't acidic), but he still has a weak sphincter (i.e. he vomits all the goddamn time).  He's mostly ok with the vomiting, but still has some lingering bad memories with eating.

[Impmaster]

Ah. Nevermind. Nothing you can do then. Due to the fact that I seem to have ignored the 3 months part, I thought you meant stuff like refusing to eat veggies or some bs like that. So like, behavorial rather than physical. Sorry that I was rude.

[Fallsburg]

No, it's ok.  If he were a monster as a 3 year old, that would be on me (barring developmental issues beyond my control).

[Blambo]

long distance relationship haha fuck life

lol ok this didnt last long at all

this is a little bit of a heap of shit

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

long distance relationship haha fuck life

lol ok this didnt last long at all

this is a little bit of a heap of shit

raaaaay </3 sorry man. lots of us have been there

[Blambo]

thanks

la donne è fucking mobile

[Slader16]

*Edit* Looking back, I've realized that I totally posted this in the wrong thread

[Finalinsanity]

"Do you ever plan to make something of your life?"

Someone keeps asking me this. I never give an answer. Frankly part of me wants to just scream at him "Well what would you even fucking do if I said NO?!" because I'm getting really tired of them acting like I'm not trying to do something about it.

Of course, that would only fuel even more bullshit, and it wouldn't exactly be honest either.

I want to make something out of life, I'm sure of that.

But how do you even define that? The qualifications for having "made something" are completely different for each person. What exactly they mean could be entirely different from what I mean.

So, I suppose really the question comes out of what I want out of life at this point in time. It makes the most sense (not complete sense, but the most sense regardless) to judge my success based on my own expectations rather than those of another person.

Of course, I also get the feeling that no matter what I do, it won't ever be good enough for him, so there's no real point in trying for that in the first place. *shrug* Regardless, I have my own goals.

I want to live out on my own (so I can stop, in their own words, "being a parasite"). I want to have a stable source of income (this would make the most sense for them to have meant by "making something out of life"). I want to pass my drivers tests (helps with the other two goals and is just something that's long overdue).

I'll be taking the latter in September, and should hopefully have enough practice under my belt to do it without any problems.

I have a very-part-time job right now. So I do have some source of income, but it's not exactly a lot. Not an amount I could ever live off, so certainly not enough to say I've fulfilled that goal (I like the job and all, but due to reasons beyond my control more hours there are simply not possible). There aren't exactly any other job openings in my area. Well, okay let me word that more accurately; there are no job openings in my area that I have the qualifications to apply for. So that makes things a bit harder. I'll have to manually look around at any place I have the qualifications to work at and just pray that by some miracle they have the want+ability to hire me. Alternatively, I'd have to look for a job outside my area (to explain, I live on the west side of town which is across the highway bridge, meaning I'd need to either wait until I can drive or work my schedule around the bus/other people heading that way, which would make transport a bit trickier.)
 
...after which, I have to hope I don't screw up so badly that I get fired. Which has a very real possibility of occurring (not that it has happened yet, but I have only ever had two jobs, one of which was over the summer and the other I've already mentioned) because I'm as fucking clumsy as Greased Rubber Man (the greatest of all superheroes).

I can't exactly check "living on my own" off the list until I actually have a) a place to move out to and b) the resources to do so (read; money), the latter of the two certainly higher priority.

All of this would be hard (for me, because I am a dumbass) to do on my own, but on the flip side if I did get help I would probably be accused of "relying on others to do my work for me", and I can't give him that kind of fuel.

I think more than anything right now I'm frustrated because both I and another person want me to have more accomplished right now than I actually do, and they don't seem to realize that they don't need to insult me and beat me up (not literally) over it.

I do plenty of that on my own, and I don't fucking need them contributing to it.

Even if they believed me if I told them that, they'd probably still do it anyways.

tldr; whine complain worry-over-nothing whine etc, etc.

[Dissident Dan]