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Penny Arcade - Comic - Post Traumatic Spokane Disorder
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Post Traumatic Spokane Disorder
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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And why do you take your children there?
Pretty sure that only applies if he's a practicing Catholic...
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
"Police investigating after bodies found in Spokane home"
And why do you take your children there?
Seriously this. You are a grown ass man. You are allowed to make your own decisions on how you want to spend the holidays. I love my parents, but I'm not about to make an annual trek to the craphole they live in to appease some family obligation. They want to see me, they can come out to where I live.
Most people know the feeling of the annual homeward trek to Nowhere, USA to visit the ancestral hearth and spend time with decrepit family members and burned-out former neighbors. This is the kind of unpleasant experience that lies at the heart of adulthood: knowing that you are physically and financially capable of NOT participating in the journey but doing it anyway as part of the ritualistic child-adult-parent-child cycle. There's an inkling of pain here that says, "I am going to visit my parents in the town I hate but that made me what I am so that, one day, my children might visit me in a town they hate because it was their hometown and not forget the things that helped make them who they are."
In an era where we're still struggling to decide how to handle our formal social rituals alongside Facebook, twitter, digital pictureframes, and Skype, it's interesting to see paragons of Internet culture participating in the rite instead of planting themselves firmly in the ground and saying, "If anyone wants to see me, they can come visit me...but I'm not doing it for them."
I fixed what you said.
Not that YOU would ever want to see THEM, of course. You know, your parents, who you "love." Not that both you and your parents are "grown ass" people who supposedly care about each other as family and could therefore reasonably be expected to make some sort of compromise arrangement to take turns coming to visit each other or something so the inconvenience of travel isn't all falling on one party. Certainly not.
I hope when your parents are dead and gone you can find comfort any time you miss them by reminding yourself that at least you'll never be expected to lower yourself to travel to someplace run-down or low-rent ever again.
http://i.imgur.com/vdLE8dJ.gif
So, your parents were here first. You came to the party later. How was the experience? Did they ask you, at least once, "How are you experiencing my parenting? 'Thumbs up, would child again', or not so much?"
(Love) and (Don't care you are hurting) are mutually exclusive.
Ugh, the holidays of yore... Glad I'm still seeing a therapist, was interested to hear that Mike is too!
When you don't get to see a parent for the holidays, or ever again in this life, no matter how much you want to, the attitude...
"Yeah sure I totes love and respect my parents and all that, whatever, but make an effort to ensure we spend time together? Pfft, fuck that, that's all on them bro!"
...is what you might call a hot button.
I think we need to distinguish between:
A. Not wanting to see your family at the holidays because you have a poor relationship with them due to them being hurtful and toxic
and...
B. Not wanting to see your family at the holidays because you dislike the town they live in
The subject of today's comic is B. In the comic it is played for laughs, and notably did not stop Tycho from making actually making the trip.
However, it also seems to be a reflection of some people's real, 100% serious attitudes. Those are not people I care to be "around" and they're not people I can trust myself to interact with in a way that wouldn't require entirely justifiable action by Tube, so I'll just see myself out until the next comic thread.
On a positive note: The "Old haunts/They're haunted" exchange in this comic is great.
No, you didn't fix what I said. You simply changed it and then snarked. That meme hasn't been clever for that last decade and your "supreme" wit does not change that fact.
Then by all means, make your own arrangements. But when you then choose to whine about them to public audience don't be surprised when that same audience has little sympathy or patience for it.
I live in hope.
Actually, I have a very hard time distinguishing between those two things. My parents moved the family to Spokane when I was four. I moved myself out of there when I was seventeen.
I do carry some of it with me to this day even though I am now in my 40s. With that being said though, I think it's rather silly to assign blame upon the town for these wrongs. Just this past summer I was back there, since my parents still live there, and I took a long walk around the town and actually found the quietness a welcome contrast to the bustle of city life that I've grown accustomed to over the past 20 years or so. I don't think I could go back to living in a small town, but there is a part of me that almost wishes I could. It does have a certain appeal at times.
I don't mind going back there for holidays and the occasional visit. I'm still single and suspect I will stay that way, so I figure it's easier for me to go to my aging parents than it is for them to come to me. I honestly can't imagine having the attitude that some people are displaying in these comments, but I suppose each family has their own dynamic.
-Tycho Brahe
That's really what it all boils down to. Let's be fair, if 50 people post in this thread about their family, 50 unique family dynamics would be described. Every person is incredibly complex, an insane amount of variables, so if you add in an entire family, and the location of the person's childhood, it makes for very different experiences, and nobody deals with it the same way.
I freakin love Spokane. Yeah, it's small, but Seattle and even San Francisco are tiny, rural joke-towns compared to REALLY big cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, or even Shenzhen.
I had to leave Spokane to learn engineering, and there weren't any entry level engineering jobs after I graduated so I couldn't move back, but if I ever start a company I'll definitely move back and run it there.
I guess that's probably the real issue here: Spokane's economy is too crappy, so you pretty much have to leave unless you're involved in the medical field. Maybe we should all get involved in Spokane's crappy backwater political system instead of just bellyaching about how much it sucks.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
It really is adorable.
Spokane is . . . not great. I actually feel bad that my wife's side of the family lives there, not because I don't want to go back (though I don't, I really, really don't), but because she doesn't enjoy visiting there. Almost more than I dislike it. The fight between wanting to see loved ones and not wanting to be where they are is honestly a tough one, because like everyone on this earth you know they only have so long. But sometimes, the place isn't just low-rent, it's more a kin to a dark cloud of condensed depression.
Americans, prepare to be shocked:
Since my last move, I now live 275 miles away from my parents. That's a five hour drive!
Luckily my parents are semi-retired and travel a fair bit to watch football, so they are prepared to tack on an extension to the next Bournemouth away game to see us for Christmas.
Meth-salesmen?
Hey now, it's a thriving modern city.
There's meth saleswomen too.
Really freaking heart warming.
Hey, speak for yourself. My hometown is fuckin' rad.
This comic hits real close to home.
Then we did a family vacation road trip through Washington, Idaho and Montana, we drove through Spokane with the intent of staying the night and checking it out, we kept driving and stayed in Sandpoint instead.
Because they're saving their shit for Spokane.
If Mike doesn't auction off him doing a family portrait off for Child's Play next year, they are throwing away money.