Tell HN: Call your mom
Programming, gaming, startups, and other nerd activities can get pretty involved, so it's good from time to set aside time for your parents.
Today is Mother's Day in the U.S.
Get out of the zone for a bit. Call your mom.
Today is Mother's Day in the U.S.
Get out of the zone for a bit. Call your mom.
My father died less than a year after my mother did, and it was far worse even though I was arguably closer to her.
I know this is not a particularly good time to be warning you about this but I wish somebody'd warned me and I probably won't get another reminder to do so. So, um, sorry, but I hope I'm right that it was worth saying.
ps. I love when HN gets emotional.
And I wasn't the only one to get her support. She was a social worker who dealt with the very heaviest of drug users. She worked tirelessly to help them get a grip on their lives, and often spent her spare time following up on their troubles.
She, and others like her, contribute actual good to this world. I, with all of my inhibitive worries and hollow ambitions, admire them infinitely for that.
My condolences. A week is nothing after so deep a loss, so I hope you're ok.
<goes back to reading a book in pyjamas, today is not a very good day. />
Wait, actually I'm envious of how many days you must have that are even better than reading a book in pyjamas.
Nothing is easy. Take the first step to remedy the situation before you regret it.
In the rush to be clever, we got a really snarky post from someone who has no knowledge of the parent comment's context.
Not everyone has a great relationship with their parents, that doesn't make it the child's fault like super-counselor above likes to think.
Asked her about her holiday. Asked her how she was. Talked about family drama [they love that shit].
I told her about my last meeting with a key gatekeeper for our tech start-up [CTO in one of the top 200 companies in Australia]. She told me how her new friend, Susan, is a computer "wiz" that helped her reset her router last week, and that I should present my idea to Susan for feedback. Note: Susan is a customer support officer my mother was connected to when she called the Netgear customer support hotline last week.
We confirmed I would pick her up from the airport on Tuesday. Said our farewells, and hung-up the phone.
That wasn't so hard at all.
Better yet, visit them, spend time with them regularly. Mothers have done so much to get you to where you are now. They deserve more than a simple phone call.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother's_Day#Dates_around_the_... ( learn somthig new today. Mother's Day is celebrated on different days in different region of the worlds ).
Honestly, since I absolutely do not have that kind of relationship, nor will I ever, sometimes it's hard to watch. It can rip open certain scars that never really healed well.
Five Mother's Days ago, I paid for beverage of their choosing to all local bar patrons who phoned or even just sent SMS to their respective mothers that night.
Horrible conversion rate! <20%. People are just silly sometimes.
But no A/B testing, it wasn't a buzzword back then really.
I do live within a 3 hours drive (or 30 minute flight with a helitaxi) from my family though. So it's very easy for me to go see them.
To all you people, albeit we shouldn't need a day to celebrate her awesomeness but it doesn't hurt to do that esp today.
This is not your personal Facebook-feed to farm karma by surfing on some novelty holiday solely invented to make you spend money on presents and feed the capitalist-machine.
The modern American holiday of Mother's Day was first celebrated in 1908,
when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother in Grafton, West Virginia.
Her campaign to make "Mother's Day" a recognized holiday in the United States
began in 1905, the year her beloved mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died. Anna’s
mission was to honor her own mother by continuing work she had started and
to set aside a day to honor mothers, "the person who has done more for you
than anyone in the world." Anna's mother, Ann Jarvis, was a peace activist
who had cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the Civil War and
created Mother’s Day Work Clubs to address public health issues. (...)
Although Jarvis was successful in founding Mother's Day she soon became
resentful of the commercialization and angry that companies would profit
from the holiday. By the early 1920's, Hallmark and other companies had
started selling Mother's Day cards. Jarvis became so embittered by
what she saw as misinterpretation and exploitation that she protested and
even tried to rescind Mother's Day. (...) Jarvis organized boycotts and
threatened lawsuits to try to stop the commercialization. She crashed a
candymakers convention in Philadelphia in 1923. Two years later she
protested at a confab of the American War Mothers, which raised money
by selling carnations, the flower associated with Mother’s Day, and was
arrested for disturbing the peace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_%28United_State...
I interviewed my parents, grandparents, and relatives to write a family history for my children. (And my wife's, too.) It was one of the most powerful things I've done, and this process brought our entire family closer together -- and it wasn't easy, there are many tough, painful moments in my parents' and grandparents' lives, including still unresolved fights.
I'd strongly urge any fellow hackers to record their parents' stories for posterity.
~William Makepeace Thackeray
My condolences to those who recently lost theirs. Correspondingly, my sympathies to those who had/have negative relationships with theirs.
Glad to be with mine today.
Fracking wurtbag..."
Scrape CL, apply a lexical categorizer (porting Syntactic[0] to Python now), pseudo-randomize, apply Tangle[1] as a front end; allow users to scale between language species-norms over categories and submit their creations, apply a speech-to-text tool, there's a voting board involved.
The point here is that I find prescriptive morality to be quite droll. Upon reading this HN title, I immediately dashed over the CL to see if any analogues might exist. The CL in my State took on a characteristic countertone to this HN post. I intuited this immediately. The output post above is a follow-up to the OP [on CL], where the output post is consistent with the HN OP. But there's more hilarity now.
Goal: Use "nerd" activities to diffuse prescriptivism. Now I have a port to consider and maintain.
—
[0]: http://syntactic.omershapira.com/ [1]: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/
After shouting a few times, I got impatient and tried to open the door ourselves. Thankfully it opened. She began to move slowly, as we got in. Thank God she was there! She half rose from her bed, and sat in a confused state. I could see that she had wet her bed. Sad at that, but relieved that she was alive.
How she had raised me and my sister so caringly when she was young and had lot of energy. But now she was in her twilight, and had lost control over many of her functions. But she still could recognize us, and so retained the most important part of her brain function. I was filled with emotion and could not breathe properly. There was less air in the room I thought. ‘Oh God, please cure her of this, and I will be nice I promise’, I thought and continued to breath forcefully.
…
Then I woke up. I had been asleep and it was a dream. Normally, when waking out of a bad dream, one is very thankful. But not today. I was still breathing forcefully. ‘Oh God, please cure her of her ailments and let me see her daily. Let today not be the day, and I will be nice I promise’.
(via my blog https://shiningleaf.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-mother-a-drea...)
Also it seems to trigger a reaction. I have seen it go upto +6 points and now it is at 0. Means people either like it or hate it. I don't get it, whats in that that people have to react strongly to it.
I would really like to understand.
edit: minor
I personally rarely use down-votes, and would just ignore a comment, if I sense that its written in an earnest way, even though bad in quality. I agree its not very high quality writing. But I believe, that it does hit its mark with many people. Many more people upvoted it, than those that down voted it.
You say it's a "near true account of my dream". Well I could give you a near true account of the shit I had this morning, but you wouldn't be interested.
Plus the extreme offence you seem to be taking to people saying they're not interested in what you're saying is making me dislike you even more. You come across as one of those people who thinks they're really profound, but they're not.
Finally what is "uthiye", and what grown person calls their mother "mummy"?
>what grown person calls their mother "mummy"?
I do. You display your prejudice by asking the question in such a way. Also your total ignorance about other cultures.
>You say it's a "near true account of my dream". Well I could give you a near true account of the shit I had this morning, but you wouldn't be interested.
You also can, if what you share is in context of the discussion. If you care to note, I wrote this piece more than an year back. And seeing the topic here, thought it may be relevant. And it sure is, as more number of people seem to like it. Then those that don't.
Even if you don't like it. Can't you just ignore it. I would expect trolling or something off topic or irrelevant to be typically down-voted.
In any case, thanks, for replying. Even though, it took a throw away account for you to explain it, and then attack me back again, by commenting on the way, I address my mother.
I won't care about downvotes on another topic. But seriously either you are heartless or out of your mind to downvote me on this. Get a life, Idiot downvoter!!
Edit: I see several others have compensated, for that enough. Thanks! Sorry for being harsh. But downvoting this made me angry.
Mothers day is meant to be about celebrating the good things about mothers for those who still have them and still get along. Why not write about all the strong and positive things your mother did before?
And why do you have such a narrow idea of expressing one's love - either totally tragic or a "strong and positive". The present frailty could remind one of the earlier strength in a loved one. Also that, that we still cherish the life that we have although dimming away. Meaning, in that dream I was cherishing that she still remembers that I am her son. Although she is too frail, and wets her bed. And I was so sad for her, that I felt breathlessness.
And again, just like that other insensitive person, you also make the same mistake as the other person by putting mummy in quotes. My friend, this is the way so many people address their mothers across the Indian sub-continent. Its sort of a hybrid word evolved out of the British Raj here, and the Indian way of addressing. And that is true for so many words.
At the same time, I admit, that I could have worked on that story a bit more, to convey its general significance to others. But as I said, earlier, I wrote it an year back. And today, I just thought some people could enjoy reading it, by being thankful that they have their mothers around (close or remote, or even in their memories).
I must say, that some guys have been very insensitive today. At the same time, I am happy, that few others got something from that crude text. So be it. Peace.
I want this account to be deleted. I know this feature is not there yet. But please do it, as and when you add the delete feature. Or manually if possible.
Someone said above they like when HN gets emotional; well no, when only positive emotions are allowed that's just being soppy.
So here's to people with a splinter in their paw, may you find peace.
edit: I don't have narcissistic parents, I don't think, I was drawn to this sub because of other people in my life; but it's a very supportive place, one of the parts of reddit that are purely awesome: http://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/ (notice how Mother's Day is quite the issue for a lot of people)