The "HARD CHEESE" meme

[fpb]

"Hard Cheese!" is a British slang expression for "tough luck!" This is a meme about all the unlucky, irritating or bloody stupid things that regularly happen. Answer it, then copy it in your LJ and snigger as others tell you about their "hard cheese" moments.

1)Name one nasty, unlucky or painful thing that recently happened to you.
2)Name a severe disappointment in your life.
3)Without naming names, describe the behaviour of someone in LJ or real life that really honks you off.
4)Describe an injustice you have met.
5)Would you say that anything you ever met or dealt with personally was really evil?
6)List as many public figures, from singers to politicians, who honk you off, and try and explain why. George W.Bush and Osama Bin Laden are excluded - too easy.
7)What would you rather watch paint dry for a month than do?
8)What would you rather watch paint dry for a month than do again?
9)What would you change about yourself?
10)"If I had been present on the day of Creation, I might have given the Creator some useful suggestions." What would you change about the world?

These are my answers:

1)I fell over and nearly smashed my left hand. It is still aching and may take days to get right.
2)The worst, of course, is not having married Debbie. The second worst is never to have learned to play the piano and read music scores.
3)There is a member of my family who really behaves like the young Dolores Umbridge in my fic It was all on account of the little Russian girl. Need I say more?
4)I once had to save the life and sanity of a young man whose mind had been literally destroyed by the Scientologists. He ended up in the local mental hospital, but eventually he recovered.
5)Scientology (see previous answer).
6)Well, I thoroughly agree with Bufo Viridis: there is nothing strange about wanting to fly millions of miles for the chance of killing Tom Cruise. (Does anyone see a theme developping here?) And I never recovered from the mind-threatening trauma of eleven years of rule by Margaret Thatcher. Her nails-scraping-on-blackboard voice alone was enough to make me want to scream.
7)Listen to modern jazz.
8)Have to defend myself in HP fandom against charges of homophobia.
9)Whatever it is that made three women I loved refuse me.
10)Some extraordinarily stinky flowers, and the misguided people who actually use them for houseplants.

Comments

[thepreciouss.livejournal.com]

1)Hmm, I'm usually lucky when it comes to avoiding injury, so I suppose it would be when I fainted last weekend at the beach. More embarrassing than painful. I've been known to burn myself with irons.
2)All of the passed up opportunities to go to Europe (though I personally did not pass them up, my parents did), realizing that my parents aren't perfect, and losing the lead in a musical because of favoritism (and they probably thought I was too tall to play the romantic interest of the shorter guy)
3)Politically-correct, man-hating, self-righteous ass-clowns that I have had the misfortune to come across in college
4)I live a pretty sheltered life, so I have not met much injustice personally. I was particularly disturbed and angered when a couple years ago, terrorists took over a Russian school and killed a bunch of children. That was just horrendous. Oh, and I consider abortion, especially late-term and/or fetal parts harvesting abortion, to be a grave injustice.
5)No, but I think everyone has the capacity to do evil, and I have to battle the evil that sometimes enters my soul.
6)Hillary Clinton (another nail-scraping voice), Sheryl Crow (bad singing voice and annoying person in general), woman who runs NOW, Peter Singer, PETA in its entirety, Barbra Streisand, Susan Saranden, Rosie O'Donnell (I think I'm annoyed more by women!)
7)Attend a NARAL or NOW convention
8)Take calculus
9)Be more beautiful, inside and out, and more graceful
10)I would suggest that God should give humans the ability to fly! :)

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

1)Found out I didn't have a pinched nerve
2)walking in on someone acting severely disappointingly.
3)People who act like life is something they can pick up at the dry cleaners.
4)Young people whose lives are threatened before they ever had a chance to live.
5)Only illness. People are selfish and cruel and stupid, but I never met a pure evil one - just scary stupid ones.
6)Bechtel and Halliburton - faceless corporations are easy to pick on. Slave labor. Greed.
7)Spinal tap
8)MRI
9) Cowardice and weakness
10)That gap between how very very small things act and very big things act - can we get a little more explanation? It looks like 2 different consultants got the contracts.

[avus.livejournal.com]

1. Painful. Dealt w/ a suicidal 6 y/o boy this week. Horrible situation, as you can well imagine. Tragedy all around.

2. Dropping out of music (mainly conducting) & musicology. I don't regret my current work -- it's quite rewarding & worthwhile. But I truly miss the music deep in my heart.

3. My psychotherapy group is disbanding, which is going to cause some real disruption, and probably a bit of financial hardship for the next 6 mos to a year. Mainly due to a colleague we should never had included 6 yrs ago. (Hindsight.) Borderline personality disorder -- raving. Extremely hard to deal w/. (And I treat them, but treating them, and having one a colleague is very different.)

4. I meet injustice, horrible injustice many times each day. Today? Abuse being raised in an alcoholic family; current trauma & neglect from the medical system, not understanding that client is dually diagnosed, both Asperger's & seizures; horrible abuse & abandonment by biological parents. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea. Past & on-going injustice is constant. It's especially hard when it's on-going, and it involves children, or when the effects on those children are to prevent them from believing themselves lovable or trusting others' love.

5. See above. Abuse & neglect are evil. That's constant. Addiction is evil. That's constant, too. Hate & human disinterest, that's also evil. Again, all the time, every day at work. I could go on, but again, I suspect you get the idea.

6. No. I'm trying, very hard, not to go there when I'm dealing w/ politicians in a democratic society. Not that there aren't evil public figures, present & past. Totalitarianism is always evil, as are torture, murder, genocide, terrorism, racism, and many other horrors. And I would also say that any politician, who trucks w/ hate & woeful unconcern is, indeed, trucking w/ evil. So I can't exclude politicians in democratic countries. But I'm trying, hard, to understand, even if it's clear that I don't agree, and won't ever agree. The key, too, for me, is not to get caught, myself, in hate, or in twin swamps that can so easily drag one into evil, though in different ways -- dogmatism & relativism. Fighting evil w/ evil -- which, of course, war is -- is sometimes necessary, even honorable. But I'm trying not to add hate, and to always include some form of understanding. I'm certainly not always successful; sometimes I'm not often successful. But I'm trying. And how evil is struggled against is desperately important. For example, my father was on Iwo Jima in WWII. Every boy in his platoon was either killed or wounded. On the first day, he drew his rifle away from killing his first-sighted Japanese soldier b/c, as he said, "It was so outrageous -- killing another human being." Within 2 wks, he was crawling ahead of the lines w/ his lieutenant, knifing sleeping Japanese in their foxholes, so his buddies would have a better chance to survive. Quite a transformation. But he didn't, as some of his fellow marines -- and they were all just boys, none of them over 22 -- did -- kill the few Japanese who tried to surrender. That, for dad, was, I believe, a real moral victory, and an example of what I mean. I have a lot of respect for him, not just what he did & what he had to go through, but how he did it.

7 & 8. I can't answer these questions. Literally, nothing comes to mind.

Oh, dear. I'm rambling on, and have to go to another post.

A Very Boring Part II....

[avus.livejournal.com]

9. I wish that my anger wasn't as great, that it was easier for me to see human beings rather than fools & enemies. (There's a long-standing family tradition which might be labled, "not suffering fools gladly" and another one very close to paranoia when opposed. I'm happy for the passionate caring, but I do work on tempering that when it creeps over from caring to attacking viciously, though sometimes defending is necessary, and I certainly don't shirk from that, especially when children are involved.

10. There's so much I don't understand, always starting w/ why children have to suffer. But what your question brings to mind is the comment Neils Bohr made in a debate w/ Albert Einstein, when Einstein ranted on that, "God does not play dice w/ the universe!" Bohr replied, "Al, quit telling God how to do His job." I'm also reminded of the comment by one of my great teachers, Eugene Gendlin, who talked about a larger wisdom present in all of us. "If I cut my finger, and I had to line up all those capillaries & nerves, I'd surely fuck it up." And so, I think, I'll give it a pass and let someone wiser do the advising.

Probably off from what you wanted. But then I cheerfully march to a different drummer.

Re: A Very Boring Part II....

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Er, well, I would say that you took one or two of these questions more seriously than they were meant to be - epecially the last. (The quotation is from a king of Castile, after he had been given an enormously complicated explanation of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy.) And I don't think any one of us really wants to kill Tom Cruise - although if his tongue suffered a really nasty accident I for one would not be sorry.

Scientology, on the other hand, I am in dead earnest about. I thought that, as a historian, I knew what evil looked like, until I saw their handiwork.

Re: A Very Boring Part II....

[adeodatus.livejournal.com]

Scientology, on the other hand, I am in dead earnest about. I thought that, as a historian, I knew what evil looked like, until I saw their handiwork.

:) I'm happy to hear someone else say something like that. I'm just saddened that Catherine Bell (of JAG fame) is a Scientologist (and married but so am I so I can't go down that road).

Re: A Very Boring Part II....

[avus.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm lucky that Scientology hasn't come w/in my range. I suspect I have enough evil to deal w/ as it is. But then evil can never be safely left to someone else. I'll bear your comments in mind should I run across it.

[gunderpants.livejournal.com]

1. Probably screwing up the last part of my senior year at school with untreated paranoid attacks and having my university entrance rank dropping.
2. That being a film student ruined my love of the visual media.
3. Probably my sister's extremely selective ethics and absolute inability to comprehend how things work in the humanities.
4. I haven't personally had too much injustice in my life. Watching people like Cornelia Rau be continually fucked over by evil bastards in DIMI is pretty nauseating though.
5. Oh, several, the most recent being a former friend who I learnt to be a white supremacist. Fortunately our friendship ended before I found out his particular views on race, otherwise he would seriously be injured.
6. James Dobson. No, seriously: he's the epitome of everything wrong with our world.
7. Play Satie.
8. Oh, god, work in a film-making group with people who turn up late, decide to skip a shoot so they can do acid, who feel too precious to take orders from a director and who are just generally incompetent, lazy, untalented and without a creative bone in their body.
9. I am so quick to irritate. I would like to have a bit more patience and tolerance for those around me, but it gets so damn hard.
10. For every insincere, hateful person who calls themself a Christian to be automatically smighted. Or smaught. I just don't know.

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

1)Name one nasty, unlucky or painful thing that recently happened to you.

My miserable cough that isn't clearing up. It's been three weeks!

2)Name a severe disappointment in your life.

The fact that I actually don't like my law course AT ALL.

3)Without naming names, describe the behaviour of someone in LJ or real life that really honks you off.

Somebody who refuses to accept things about themselves and insists that they're fine when they're not. It annoys me because I'm trying to help.

4)Describe an injustice you have met.

Bureaucracy. :p

5)Would you say that anything you ever met or dealt with personally was really evil?

No. I don't believe in evil though.

6)List as many public figures, from singers to politicians, who honk you off, and try and explain why. George W.Bush and Osama Bin Laden are excluded - too easy.

Um. Pauline Hanson. She's kind of out of the political arena now though. Silly xenophobic idiot. She was far too ignorant to be in politics.

7)What would you rather watch paint dry for a month than do?

Phone somebody.

8)What would you rather watch paint dry for a month than do again?

Er. Phone somebody. Anybody, really, I guess.

9)What would you change about yourself?

Nothing. If I did, I wouldn't be myself.

10)"If I had been present on the day of Creation, I might have given the Creator some useful suggestions." What would you change about the world?

Not create it. Simple as that. There would be no problems if the world did not exist.

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

10)Some extraordinarily stinky flowers, and the misguided people who actually use them for houseplants.
One word: geranium.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

YES!!! Thank you thank you thank you! God, how I hate that smell. They had it in the nuns' school where I did my fourth and fifth year, and I just could not bear that particular end of corridor.

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

God and I thought I was the only one. Everybody else adores the stinky parsley impersonator and says it smells of "citron". Citron, my arse. If that's citron, my... Right, I'd better stop here.