And one last thing... Kids are a huge reflection of their home life... if that other kid is acting the way she is, it's because she learned it from her mother. So the mother will be an even bigger, nastier version of that kid. Just like how your kid seemed to be raised right, and actually has empathy for other people, and doesn't want to hurt their feelings so caves in rather than tell them to fuck off... If you're going to go head-to-head with that mother, then do yourself a solid and stack the deck in your favour before hand (talk to the school). Food for thought.
"Angry Father Assaults Child's Mother at Birthday Party" There's your headline. That's what it's gonna read once you talk to her, she goes home, has a little bit to drink, goes fucking insane and reports it. It's fucked up, but that's the way the world works. As a male working with children, I have to think about that kinda stuff all the time. Just because I have the right intentions, just because I am doing everything proper, does not mean that if some lunatic had it out for me, I wouldn't be in a world of shit simply by being a guy. You're covering your own ass as much as your daughter's. Go to the school, let them handle it. And bring your wife with you to the meeting if at all possible. As a society, for some reason we are still largely sexist when it comes to parenting and children. People always believe the mother over the father.
Just to echo what RoTN and Nett said, something similar happened with my niece. She was 11 or 12 and one of her little friends came over a few times. She cussed me out and told me to fuck off for telling her to settle down when she was throwing rocks at the neighbor's house, she caused all sorts of disturbances like that, cussing and swearing at everyone who tried to reel her behavior in. My niece's parents decided to talk to the mother. The little girl was dropped off...the mother never bothered to meet the other parents....and she was told "We need to talk with your mother." The little girl ran back to the car and we heard the mother yell "I don't need to fucking talk to anyone. Fuck you!" And she lit up the tires taking off. As much as we'd like to give others the benefit of the doubt, some people are just not rational or even sane.
Just celebrated a good week by bbq'ing up a nice steak and some really, REALLY good tiger prawns in a white wine garlic challotte sauce. Had a nice bottle of wine with it... a killer reserve from one of the local wineries... Nice way to spend a Friday night, if you ask me.
As a good rule of thumb, just assume people are crazy when it comes to their children and parenting style. Only give someone parenting advice, talk to them about their children in anything other than a glowingly positive manner, or discipline their children in front of them or out of their presence, ONLY if you are 100% certain how they will react and ONLY if you are 100% prepared to accept the consequences of them reacting in a manner contrary to your expectations. I have seen completely stable, logical, calm people go apeshit the moment someone accidentally implied their child was something other than god's gift to the world. And I'm not talking run of the mill apeshit.
Breaking News: active shooter situation, at least 4 killed in a shopping mall. Breaking News: there's still such a thing as "shopping malls"
I'm sick of this shooting crap... Cyber Bully Mode Engaged From this point forward, no mention of it in the WDT... if you must discuss it, do it in the Serious Thread...
In other news, I picked up an Xbox One.... the Halo edition. Got it for pennies on the dollar thanks to a friend from the old video game development days. Man, I love Halo.... it was the reason I bought an XBox in the first place. It was originally meant to be a Mac game, and I remember seeing demos of it at various Mac/Apple conventions for a couple of years before it was supposed to launch.... and then Bungie sold the rights for Halo to Microsoft as THE game to launch the original XBox. Well, I bought one, and it was only to play Halo. So yeah... now I have an XBox One. Any recommendations for good games? When I do play video games, it's usually on Steam, but now that I have the One, I'm looking for any games that may be worth picking up. Right now I have Gears of War (I really enjoy that game) and Halo... anyone have anything else to suggest?
Gee, I can't watch a youtube video without watching a Hillary Clinton commercial first. Yeah, that's not going to annoy the fuck out of me.Get bent bitch. Someone's got to post a music video, it might as well be me. This song is great, even though I hate the whole formulated country thing. It reminds me of nights with a circle of 4x4's around a fire somewhere out in the woods. How we ended up there, no one ever knew, but we were there so we might as well have a fire. City folks will never get how awesome that is. Dumb video. Great song.
I think Chris Rock said you know you're getting old when you talk about sleep like sex. I think thats true. I slept so well last night and I am stoked about that.
I haven't had a solid, refreshing good nights sleep in a long time. The parallels are indeed amazing.
Re: Impending birthday party As the only one who has posted so far that has been a 14 year old girl, that type of behavior is neither bullying nor unusual. It's being a 14 year old girl. It's really not worth making a big deal over and, at 14, having your parents fight your battles for you is only going to make things worse. Best you can do is subtly encourage her to focus on other friendships and/or find new friends. That's about the age girls start shedding those kinds of friendships anyway. (It's also the age I started heavily drinking, doing drugs, shoplifting, doing stuff with boys, disappearing with a bunch of older drug addicts for long periods of time, and getting into all other kinds of self-destruction. It was also when several friends first started developing eating disorders. So perhaps you have bigger things to worry about. Have fun, pal!)
I played Gears on the 360, didn't get the last one. It would help if you would get more specific on what you like. For RPGs, Fallout is always good, Witcher less so. Dragon Age Inquisition was very good. I generally don't play racing or sports based games. Destiny looked nice but was meh, IMO. I hate the Farcry games. they look and handle nice, but are very repetitive. After you kill the same bandits at the same cross section of roads for the umpteenth time it wears thin. Started playing the Division. Looks great, very good story and gameplay - but I HATE playing for 30 minutes trying to complete a mission, getting killed, and losing all of the progress I made. I don't have the free time for that - ignore the extensive list of games I've played. FPS, I really don't like the most recent Call of Duty games. Quantum Break is decent. I'm not into games played against other players remotely - but Titanfall is fun as balls. Just mute all of the 14 year olds you'll be playing against.
How long is a reasonable time to wait for someone before giving up on them? I was at a charity walk for NAMI. I'm the president for a chapter of them out here. Two of my members were supposed to meet me there. I got there at noon expecting them to be there before the pre walk speeches which started at 1230 and the walk started at 1:00. I got a call from one of them at 12:15 saying she thought it was at 1:30, she sent out the itinerary and she thought it was at 1:30? Ok, not so bad. They ended up getting there about 12:50 and had me chasing them all over the place and they couldn't see me etc. I tried telling them I was at some prominent place in the park, but I guess they weren't going to look for me, so I had to find them, and they kept moving. I went to three different places looking for them only to hear they moved. Later I saw a text telling me they were behind Team Tim during the ongoing walk and I should try to find them in a crowd of a few thousand. How does that help me? I gave up, said fuck it, I'm going home (didn't tell them that). The walk started at 1, I started walking back to my car at 12:55 and of course got lost on the way back. I'm not going to chase people around. I'm not going to try to chase around irresponsible people who aren't meetting me halfway or really making an attempt to find me. I could've walked the little 5k charity walk solo, but I'd rather be here, watching college football with a beer or few.
Unrelated to anything we've been talking about: True Detective Season 1 is even better the second time around. McConnaghey gave the best acting performance I've ever seen.
Yeah, all I've seen is that most of the big games lately have really sucked... Battlefront, COD, Division... not really worth it. I'm quite enjoying Witcher on Steam though. I have heard great things about Inside so picked that one up. It's also nice that they're slowly hacking my old 360 games to be playable on the One now. But really, I got the One with Halo for less than $100, so I'm not complaining.