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After my dad died, we found the love letters

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Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#71

Post by lazide »

dtech wrote: post #53
djohnston wrote: post #13

This is a sad story but I don’t like that the onus is entirely on the father to have ended things and lived his best life. He also was under pressure. He also had a family and was trying to juggle things the best way he knew how. It is tragic to live this way but I cannot consider him a villain of any sort.

There's a follow up linked a few times in the thread, and unfortunately he looks to be pretty villanous

The person who ends up making decisions which underpin what actually happens, almost always does.

It’s easy to throw them under the bus, but the followers generally always know what’s going on - when they aren’t actively avoiding it anyway.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#72

Post by popularrecluse »

nojs wrote: post #50
zdc1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the age of the author, but interestingly, Gen-Z doesn't seem to use that key

It’s ironic because you have to go to additional effort to turn autocorrect off, which contradicts the “i dont even care” effect they’re going for

It's a lot less effort than changing every nth word because of an aggressive autocorrect.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#74

Post by lr4444lr »

dtech wrote: post #53
djohnston wrote: post #13

This is a sad story but I don’t like that the onus is entirely on the father to have ended things and lived his best life. He also was under pressure. He also had a family and was trying to juggle things the best way he knew how. It is tragic to live this way but I cannot consider him a villain of any sort.

There's a follow up linked a few times in the thread, and unfortunately he looks to be pretty villanous

People are rarely anything less than complicated.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#75

Post by pavlov »

Ouch. This hits incredibly hard.

I’ve been this dad who sits frozen at the TV every evening. I had the affairs with the emotionally unavailable men, and became one myself.

Before you judge the man in this story too harshly — and there’s certainly much to judge, especially given the follow-up post — consider the environment he and I grew up in. Being gay as a young teenager in the early 1990s could feel literally like a death sentence. AIDS panic was everywhere. Gay men in movies were comedy sidekicks or dying wrecks (“Philadelphia”). There was a real threat of violence from other kids. If you could pass as straight, why wouldn’t you give it your best shot? The alternative was to be a laughing stock and die alone in a hospital where nurses don’t dare touch you. (This is literally how I imagined gay life at age 13.)

I still feel like I’m barely getting started on the therapy journey to recover from those decades. Seems like the man in the story never had the chance for professional help (or didn’t seek it). The compartmentalization can be extremely taxing. He disappointed many people, but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#76

Post by jeswin »

quitit wrote: post #38

From reading both posts, there's a few things that come to my mind: - It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post. - I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a vio…

[flagged]

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#77

Post by webdevver »

pkrotich wrote: post #66

Man… the battle between cultural expectations and our true selves is humanity’s oldest conflict. A few people get lucky. Most of us survive in the cracks. No capitalization was as surprising as the narration itself… not sure how to feel about it! Counter culture?

honestly ive had it with the shift key myself. just a nuisance. besides, the text looks much nicer and 'even' when every letter is broadly the same height, but that is ofcourse subjective.

it would be good to track down the 'etymology' of capital letters.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#78

Post by webdevver »

gritten wrote: post #22

[flagged]

war on the four olds:

- capitalisation

- signatures (already dead, but go check any vintage mailing list archive!)

- private messages (good riddance bulletin boards and forums)

- emojis (sadly resurrected in unicode after being defeated on forums)

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#79

Post by pcthrowaway »

siva7 wrote: post #60

Did it ever occur to her that he wanted a child with his wife? That he loved his wife - even though not romantically? And still had a happy life as a father of her? The author seems to have many misconceptions about gay people..

The author mentions in the follow-up that she is gay herself.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#80

Post by Freak_NL »

wiether wrote: post #49
pja wrote: post #4

> “He wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. His entire life, and mine as well.” What a burden of expectations to lay on both yourself & your own family. I’m glad the author was able to put those aside & live her own life more authentically than her father did.

Is the capitalization of the quote your own doing or was it displayed like it for you? There isn't a single uppercase letter when I open the article, it's impossible to me to read it because it feel like a single sentence and I can't breathe

The author obviously has this as an acquired habit or affectation, possibly for stylistic reasons. It's interesting that some people can read this just as well as normal prose, but to others it feels as if someone is pouring sand all over their well-oiled gears. I gave up after a paragraph as well.

I fully support people writing in whatever way pleases them, but for broadly accessible article length text capitalisation is a must in English. Not because it is 'correct', but because many readers rely on capitalisation.

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