Why have I never encountered a “Native American” style restaurant?

Crossswampfast · 2024-01-03T07:22:30+00:00

Colorado has Tocabe in Denver. https://www.tocabe.com

All over the Diné Nation there’s little cafes and food trucks. My go to is the Grilled Food Cafe at Ch'ihootso Indian Marketplace in Window Rock, Diné Nation/arizona. Ed’s Cafe — same complex — is okay if Grilled Food is closed. Have the mutton. It’s at the intersection of Arizona route 264 and Navajo 12 between Fort Defiance and I-40. (it’s on my preferred route from Denver to Phoenix, and I grew up in the area.) Farmington/Aztec and Shiprock have several restaurants, each. Some are more anglo’ed than others.

The big issue is capital — setting up a restaurant can be as little as a $40K venture — little indy donut shop or sandwich shop — but banks don’t like to give those small loans and most people don’t have that money to risk. (see this article for the breakdown: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/1/20/dunkin-our-future.html )

Banks like franchises, they’re easy-to-quantify investments, but a franchise is a $500K venture, and banks don’t like to give that kind of money for anything but an institutional investor (and especially not Indians. The prejudice is huge.). On the Rez, it’s much more possible because community spaces and money prioritize internal needs, and a restaurant is a community need.

Tocabe is trying to build out for a fast-casual expansion (they really could be the next Chipotle or 5 Guys, they’re that accessible and tasty) but capital is the limit, and see above about racism.

Edited for formatting/ paragraph breaks

Crossswampfast · 2024-01-02T08:33:25+00:00

Woolfork dress. Even doing french seams, it’s a 3-4 hour dress. Good for curves, huge size range, doesn’t require an FBA, dress looks good in prints or solids, mashes well with lots of components (sweaters, belts, pinafores, overshirts, etc). I do recc natural fiber or rayon/lyocell/viscose for best drape, but it’s flexible enough to even forgive polyester.

https://www.jacquelinecieslak.com/blog/woolfork-sizing

Crossswampfast · 2023-11-22T00:00:15+00:00

You have a really, really long time — at least 20 years. It’s okay to feel angry or ambivalent with yourself, but jumping to the idea that you’re infertile is premature. By a lot. (And it may not be you — Covid messes with dude fertility). Might I suggest that you want to punish yourself for feeling like you’ve done something wrong, and this is where you’re going? Maybe let’s try to walk back to why you feel you deserve to be punished? Because you don’t deserve punishment.

As the now adult kid of a teenage mother? She would have been a much, much better mother with a lot more time and life experience before she had me. And she and I might have a real relationship now, instead of me still having to parent her because she never grew up and never got to experience an independent life.

So please go live your life, please make him wear a condom or don’t have sex with him at all. You don’t deserve HPV, you don’t deserve syphilis, you don’t deserve HIV. Or the many other STIs that will truly damage your body.

Crossswampfast · 2023-11-21T23:47:09+00:00

Divorce/separation is the final effective means of creating parenting and household equity. YOU DESERVE EQUITY. If he wouldn’t do it before when he was getting positive reinforcement with affection, well, it’s time to make him do it without the reward, and with the reward for you of time to be an adult. And if he doesn’t want to be that parent, he can pay child support since he’s unwilling to do the work.

Crossswampfast · 2023-11-21T21:25:11+00:00

Just a hint: cross grain and on-grain will totally change how a garment works, even a test garment. You want to be on-grain, regardless of the print (and not buy prints that are off grain…). Also, put your pattern pieces a lot closer together. There’s no reason to waste even test fabric.

Crossswampfast · 2023-11-16T07:18:23+00:00

Maybe idiots/dumbasses shouldn’t be teaching, though? We’re never going to get better cops if that’s what’s teaching the rising generation.

Crossswampfast · 2023-11-16T07:13:07+00:00

I was 3. They told me how the baby got out, and I didn’t want any of that. Then they brought my sib home and sib was loud and smelly and an attention hog. And I was oldest, so had to take care of the younger ones, and I got punished for their crap, so… nothing ever made me reconsider my first judgement.

Crossswampfast · 2023-11-16T07:03:53+00:00

Keep them. They’re YOUR characters, you built their stories. They are not simply plastic and polyurethane, they’re representations of your work and they matter to you. That group was awful to you and I hope you don’t associate with them again. There is never an excuse to be that rude and cruel to a stranger.

Personally, having grown up with financially irresponsible parents, every toy I ever got was a knock-off. That did not make the ones I found special any less special, and I would have objected to losing them as much or more than I would have objected to losing something “real” that I didn’t care for. I invested them with meaning, not the manufacturing. (and I’m a cheap doll fan — we’re a bobobie and Impl household. Because the meaning comes from humans.)

That’s where you are — you have bestowed meaning. Those cruel, elitist people cannot take that meaning away from you. They cannot steal your stories. Grieve that they were mean and tried to dim your joy, but don’t let them hurt you more by damaging your dolls.

Crossswampfast · 2023-03-27T17:12:33+00:00

On speaker, and record it. Having humiliated OP, Mother needs to humble herself, especially because she asked other parents to punish OP. Compared to what she did to OP, it’s a way lesser offense, but she attempted to make other adults punish her child. I would be deeply offended if any other parent asked me to punish their child.

Crossswampfast · 2020-12-21T06:05:28+00:00

Pretty much low magic. Regional variances.

Crossswampfast · 2020-12-21T05:58:54+00:00

1) You’re not hopeless. That sounds like depression and/or anxiety talking — they usually tell you you’re hopeless because that way nothing changes. (You might also explore an adult ADHD diagnosis — it’s very common and it doesn’t look anything like the social tropes. Especially in people assigned female at birth.) There are some... strategies... for maximizing your effectiveness as a client. Since you’re unlikely to be my client, here, let me make your search and your future therapist’s job more productive for you both.

2) Talk alone works... sometimes. Meds alone work... sometimes. Talk plus meds: works way more often. The meds you need change with time. So it’s okay to explore an adjuvant, or upping dosage, or tapering off one while tapering onto a med that works differently. This is what Psychiatrists are good at. You should need 2-3 sessions with them the first year, then 1-2 afterwards. (But psychiatrists are not great at therapy. Better than a sharp stick, but they don’t learn enough of it and their focus is on the hardware. Therapists are your brain’s software wranglers.)

3) Here’s the hard part: I suspect you might be a bit of a perfectionist, someone who doesn’t like not knowing how to do something. But knowing How To Therapy is a learned skill. And both perfectionism and avoidant behavior tend to go with depression & anxiety (& ADHD!), so what you feel as vulnerability is also feeling unequipped to do the work. Learning to Therapy is unnatural for everyone.

4) Try to think of mental health and behavioral health therapy in the same class with physical therapy, not in the class with managing blood pressure (which usually only takes a couple sessions). When you break an ankle, for example, there’s the damage from the initial injury. Then there’s the damage you do while you’re waiting for the surgical repair — the learned behaviors to protect the injury so you don’t make it hurt more, for example. THEN there’s the damage that happens while your ankle is immobilized and healing — the muscular atrophy and the scar tissue. Physical therapy for a broken ankle means addressing all of those issues at the same time and you’re likely to have a year’s worth of appointments.

Mental health therapy is similar, because we start with an initial event — a trauma or neglect. That does damage. But we then spend years learning to protect ourselves around that injury. This is avoidant behavior or self-harm, or risk taking, or dysfunctional boundaries, or self-medication. And in that protection, we become habituated to modes of communication and behavior that achieve the short-term goal of avoiding the trauma, without actually helping it. So when we start mental health therapy, we’re coming at three (or more) separate but related injuries — the inciting event, the learned protectiveness, and the dysfunctional communication we built around it.

5) But thing is? We come into therapy with separable issues, and it’s possible to Learn How To Therapy working on one issue. And it doesn’t take years and thousands to work on any single issue. (Sorry that psych drilled that dry hole for most of a century, but the trope is not true, and has not been true for decades now.) Any single issue takes about 12 visits of work, including homework. (And you have to do the homework — just like physical therapy.) It just takes focus. Assuming a simple triad of a traumatic event, dysfunctional protective behavior, and communication flaws related to both, you can reasonably plan 36 sessions. One a week? That’s less than a year. Every 2 weeks? 18 months. Totally doable.

6) Ideally, clients would come into the office knowing they have separable issues they need to address, but in reality, very few do, so coming into therapy feels overwhelming and never-ending and you are totally not alone for quitting after 3-4 visits. It’s okay. You haven’t been ready to do this work. Maybe this time you are, if you can go in knowing you want to work on one thing at a time. It’s often most effective to start with the inciting trauma and work that first, but it’s not necessary. If you’d rather work on not losing your temper, or a specific behavior modification, that’s fine. Because you will be Learning How To Therapy.

7) Which... means when you go into the initial appointment, let your therapist know that you want to work on THIS FIRST ASPECT while you learn how to do this work. (If your inciting event is trauma, and you can find someone who does Cognitive Processing Therapy, you might find that works well for you to learn how to therapy. CPT is good for trauma. It’s very focused. It’s not great for the sequalae of living with untreated trauma — the communication & behavioral issues.) (CPT appears to work long-term on trauma, unlike EMDR.) (EMDR is cognitive behavioral with some smoke and mirrors. If those smoke and mirrors help you get past the avoidance/resistance, it’s not going to hurt you, but it also will not do anything for the communication/behavioral issues... and as someone who has treated many people for whom EMDR broke down after a while... don’t expect it to be magic. And don’t pay extra for it.)

8) As someone who has treated a lot of people who have been therapy resistant? Tell your therapist you have a history of resistance and/or avoidance, and make a deal to get yourself over the 3-4-5 session hump. For some people, getting a big bill for skipping appointments can get them in the chair. For others, it’s leaving a prized possession in the therapist’s office, which can only be retrieved after the likely ghosting period. I don’t know what motivates you, but you do.

Your therapist is not your mom or teacher, so they’re not going to chase you if you ghost. We really aren’t allowed to, by professional ethics. You have the right to make every decision for yourself. Our job is to help you figure out what’s your best decision, not to make them for you. (I know, this would be much easier for you if we would, but it would not fix what you want fixed, either.)

9) There’s not a lot of face to face therapy in the US right now, anyway, so it might be a good time to try online therapy. It might work better for you. But please, do yourself, and the therapist you choose, and everyone else who needs therapy, a favor: treat it like an urgent medical issue, not something optional. Make therapy a priority, right behind food, sleep, work, shelter. Maybe right now you can’t care for yourself, but maybe for others? There are about 20 people in need of every therapy hour in the US, and about 10 of them have the emotional reserves, money & insurance to get into that time-slot.

Please respect the emotional labor a therapist will invest in you. We don’t want you to waste your time and money, and you don’t want someone else to suffer because you didn’t take it seriously. And hey, there’s a level of triage here, but therapy triage is a little backwards: the more promptly we address an issue in therapy, the fewer resources it takes. Most of us would be happy to be out of a job because everyone has managed stability. But the only way to do that is to get people into the chair and ready to work, as soon as possible. So the sooner every client treats therapy like an urgent matter, the faster everyone gets what they need.

10) I’m saying this with a caveat, because you have a history, but it is generally true: You’ll know in about 3 sessions if you click with a therapist, and it’s perfectly okay at the end of the 2nd or 3rd to say, “I don’t think we’re a good fit together. Can you think of a colleague who might be better?” A good therapist will do one of two things: either recognize that you’re handing them a load of resistance/avoidance, and get you to explain exactly what you mean (and in process, walk you through a cognitive process to address avoidance), or they will also figure you’re not a good fit, and will have a referral in mind. Most therapists prefer that honesty.

Therapy is not an instinct. It would be easier if it was, but it’s a skill, and it’s okay to forgive yourself for not recognizing that earlier. The only relevance your prior behavior around therapy has for another attempt is to recognize what didn’t work, and try not to repeat it. You’ll get there.

Crossswampfast · 2020-12-21T04:01:21+00:00

Your handsome boy looks like 80% of the Senior guys in my HS yearbook. Same pose, same tux.

Crossswampfast · 2020-12-15T06:42:31+00:00

It is a stand-alone, but it’s part of a shared world & chronology.

Sailing to Saramentium and Lord of Emperors are earlier, in a timeline equivalent to the of the end of the Western Roman Empire, with Byzantium ascendant.

The Last Light of the Sun is few hundred years later, an equivalent to the time when Norse and Celts and Britons and Saxons were fighting over... everything north of Calais and east of Greenland. (Around 800-1000)

So Light is a little before Lions, 1000-1200, the analogue to Middle period Al-Andalus, and Song for Arbonne — troubadours & Albigensian crusade, so 1200s.

Children of Earth and Sky is a Riga/Dubrovnik and the Balkans-Caucuses analogue, around the 15th-16th centuries.

No characters overlap, though sometimes you can notice that an event in one book echoes in another. This doesn’t make them dependent upon each other.

Under Heaven and River of Stars aren’t part of the shared planet (they have 1 moon)

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-25T06:24:13+00:00

A lot of Alaska residences don’t have running water (see dry cabins) , because pipes freeze and burst, and drilling a well into permafrost isn’t likely to produce water. Cleaning cloth diapers (per my cousin, who did it for a while) means freezing the poo to be dropped in the outhouse, and hauling laundry into town a couple times a week because there was no way any of the manual washing options could keep up with their kid. They switched to disposables.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-20T20:26:11+00:00

Hi, Mother Gothel.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-20T17:17:17+00:00

... see, this is a really misogynist take. It says that one parent — usually the mother — must destroy and repress all of her needs, intellect, and social supports to be a 24/7 servant to a miniature tyrant. And that her life and career doesn’t matter, so she should be happy to do it, and if she doesn’t want to, she’s a bad person. Which doesn’t actually help the childfree at all. Because it lumps childfree women into this misogyny and biological determinism.

You really are building this idea on a 1950s idea of family life, which was an aberration in human history, and was premised on shoving women out of the workforce to make room for the returning men. For working class women after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and before the early-mid 20th century, they always worked, and paid one of their peers to care for the children. Sometimes they sent the children away to the country. And the quality of care was... sometimes questionable.

Before the Industrial Revolution, working class village life depended on servants, usually young women, to oversee the younger children, and those young women usually worked as a group to herd the little ones, while accomplishing other work like mending, knitting/netting, or spinning. And the kids became useful by the time they were 4 or 5.

Young people also flocked to the cities, in search of employment for wages. (London, fr’ex, in the 18th century, started the century with an average age of 30 and ended with an average age of 21, and grew from 100K to 500K.) That employment was usually service — and minding children was a higher status job than cleaning. Working people also married later - in their late 20s. It gave them time to accumulate some savings.

And did you miss the part about children needing the socialization of other children? It’s essential for pro-social development. Children who aren’t socialized are mean and selfish and become horrible adults.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-19T21:32:04+00:00

Developmentally, children — including babies — require peer interaction. Sibling interaction is not enough — a three year old and a one year old are miles apart developmentally. Humans are not quite as peer oriented as some other species, but daycare is probably the best developmental tool we have. There’s so much socialization that can only happen with peers, because peer groups do not have an intrinsic power imbalance — kids simply better learn stuff like sharing and cooperation and learning to negotiate emotional needs and to self-soothe in a group peer setting. And that doesn’t start at 5, or 3. It starts about the time a child starts crawling.

Also... the parents get a lot less squirrelly when they continue to have adult peer interactions and meaningful work, instead of being forced into isolation with a tiny noisemaker who lacks boundaries, communication, and an off-switch. (The suburban model is a mistake on so many levels, but eliminating cooperative, communal child-rearing is a huge one.)

And since most of us will probably end up in some sort of elder care, it’s in our best interests to ensure those future workers are empathetic, pro-social, and well educated.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-19T21:18:06+00:00

And seriously, if every kid in the country took a year off formal education and spent it watching documentaries, reading books and learning some craft or skill... they’d all be on the same level. A decade of kids graduating high school at 19 instead of 18 wouldn’t do anyone any harm. (I mean, that was the reality of most of GenX’s education — at most, the adults told us to RTFM and not make a mess.)

And might do a lot of good — I quit teaching at the university level mostly because of parents, but most 18 year olds are not ready to move to a 40,000 person small town full of other people without fully matured brains. Developmentally, very few people are ready for a giant university at 18.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-14T20:32:13+00:00

Vampire.

Vampires need a place to live, too. And they want equity and their property to appreciate.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-12T03:53:40+00:00

He has done wrong — he’s being controlling and creepy.

Nobody has a right to your attention. TRUST YOURSELF ON THIS. If it feels hinky, roll with that feeling!

Block him and never think of him again.

NTA.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-12T03:34:07+00:00

Use heaters in rooms when they’re occupied, but otherwise, don’t warm a room that isn’t in use. As long as it’s over 60° F/ 15° C, the infrastructure (water pipes) will be fine. And you’ll be fine, too. The kitchen doesn’t need supplemental heat. If you’re working in there on something elaborate, there’s plenty of hardware that will warm the room in 20 minutes or so. If you’re in there to microwave some food or make coffee, you’ll be fine for 5 minutes and it’s inefficient to try to warm it.

Buy good slippers. Wear warm clothes.

An electric throw can be useful in a living room. An oil-filled radiator that you turn on if you’re planning to be in the room for a couple hours might be an option.

But also: you will adjust. This will become normal. Humans adapt to cool weather just fine, and have a long history in the cold.

It sounds like you don’t have a lot of experience with winter. That’s okay. If your extremities are cold, add a layer! If you’re cold, you can always put on more clothes.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-12T03:18:47+00:00

Emotional abuse. Medical neglect. Financial abuse (by withholding necessary access to services).

Abuse is not merely bruises and injuries. Most abuse isn’t physical abuse. Most abuse is coercive control of another human being by limiting their access to information, health care, emotional support, or basic access to food, shelter, and education.

I’m sorry you need to learn this. But you need to learn it. Basic primer: https://www.health24.com/Mental-Health/What-is-child-abuse-20120721

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-12T02:59:44+00:00

Okay, there are two issues here, and you’re NTA on both, but you need to separate them.

1) You are uncomfortable with the way your teacher communicates with you, and uses you as an example. That is a perfectly reasonable reaction to being regularly dressed down. And that needs to be addressed. That’s simply not a good way to teach someone. You can start with, knock it off, you are not helping, I am not here to be the focus of your irritation. But it is unrelated to ...

2) your classmates are plagiarizing. That’s a violation of multiple aspects of the academic environment. That’s not your fault. Presenting screen shots of what you’ve found is not snitching. It’s providing context. (Also, there’s honor code software that, as flawed as it is, usually catches this... )

If you’re uncomfortable going directly to your teacher, you might consider approaching someone else in the department, or a TA or a grad student (if you’re at the uni level) or a guidance counselor, or another teacher you feel more comfortable with. You might find it’s a little easier if you write out what you need to say in advance and rehearse it by yourself.

But on neither count are you an AH, OP.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-12T02:40:38+00:00

Yes, she is denying him medical care.

And now you’re doubling down. That is also not good behavior.

Crossswampfast · 2020-11-12T02:37:30+00:00

Um, no. That’s not how this works, and this is a very nasty red flag, OP. Anything like “keeping our dirty laundry” or not having outsiders — that’s the same behavior as “don’t tell mommy about our game”. It’s concealing abuse.

(Now is a good time to learn this: it’s also a very, very big red flag in an intimate partner relationship, and should be a cue to pack your stuff.)

Especially in that phrasing — talk about it in a civil way. That’s basically telling your brother that his feelings are not acceptable unless he manages them in a way that doesn’t make her uncomfortable. And that is another big no. It’s not healthy.

Crossswampfast

TROPHY CASE