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Skating and a book
Jan. 26th, 2019 04:28 pmNo more heating problems so far, though my landlord has told me to keep the thermostat higher so the furnace runs more often so it's less likely to have issues. I'm not happy about the thought of my new utility bill, but if it keeps the furnace going, I'll live. (And my landlord is already lowering my rent because I have to pay for the space heater that keeps the furnace area from freezing, so it probably won't be a money issue. I'm just grumpy about not being able to see my 'real' utilities usage for half the year.)
US figure skating nationals have been depressing. First the Coughlin situation, then the fanwank about how dare skaters express any grief at all vs they're allowed to express it but only in this way that I've decided is correct vs due process! innocent until proven guilty! vs Chris Knierim. And now a 13-year-old has won Nationals, and USFS is already pushing her SO HARD and the media has already all but proclaimed her the next Olympic champion. Meanwhile, I'm looking at what's been happening in Russia and the NYT article that came out yesterday, where Gracie Gold talks about how intense pressure even at an older age ruined her mental health to the point where she was suicidal, and getting very concerned. She hasn't even competed internationally yet. She does not have good technique on that 3A. And yet all reporters want to do is fawn over how she's going to save us from the Russians and the Japanese before she's hit puberty.
Maybe this would make an interesting discussion post for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
figure_skating, but right now I don't feel like writing it. I'll probably just watch Jason Brown and Emmanuel Savary, and maybe some of the free dance from nats or Euros, and leave off FS until 4CCs.
Outside of skating, I just finished a book called The Last Place You'd Look: True Stories of Missing Persons and the People Who Search for Them. Hm, maybe I should pick something more cheerful for the next one. Anyway, I read it because I was under the impression that it was mostly about those people who try to use online databases to find possible matches between missing people and unidentified decedents. In fact, that was maybe one page of the book. But the rest of it (about missing people primarily in the US and Canada) was interesting.
It's a sad book, of course, because even when the cases mentioned in the books have endings, they don't usually involve a family reuniting. As I was reading, I kept being struck by the urge to Google almost every unresolved case to see if there were updates - and usually there were not. Sometimes just a Charley Project page about the person; sometimes news articles from a couple years ago about a family still searching, or still parted.
The chapter that got me the most angry was the one about parental abduction, usually involving parents who don't have full custody of their children. These drive me crazy because so many people don't take them seriously. They're with their parent, what's the problem? Probably the other parent was abusing them and they just wanted to protect their kids, right? But this kind of thing is so often about power, not about the welfare of the kids. Sure, maybe there are cases where there really is abuse and abduction really is the only recourse, but it happens over and over again that the abducting parent will claim all kinds of terrible things, but then they can't make a single allegation stand up in court when arguing about custody, or when they get arrested afterward. And they often tell their kids the other parent didn't love them, doesn't want them, committed suicide. Not to mention how the efforts they might have to go through to hide their tracks are abusive in themselves, like withholding kids from school.
The chapter in the book covered several international cases, which must be an absolute nightmare to go through, because a lot of countries will point-blank refuse to return abducted children (especially if it's a mother who abducted them). And even if the children are eventually found, they often want nothing to do with their other parent after years of being told that they didn't love them or abused them, which has to be devastating. (This happens in the occasional non-parental abduction where the child was raised by someone else, too. They naturally consider their parents to be the people who raised them, and sometimes don't want to see the biological parents who spent years searching for them.)
The rest of the book talked a lot about how change in attitudes and technology are helping missing persons, which was nice. Mental health is getting taken more seriously, police are less likely to brush off missing kids and teens are runaways and to take missing adult reports, DNA and isotope analysis are a thing now, and of course the internet changes everything.
I would like to see an updated version of the book (it came out in 2010), and while it did do a good job at covering various perspectives, one that I don't remember it covering was voluntarily missing adults (or teens), and that would have been nice to see. But overall an interesting book, even for someone like me who has read about a lot of different missing persons cases. Would recommend. Though not my particular library copy, where in two chapters only, someone just had to cross out every instance of 'different than' to correct it to 'different from'.
US figure skating nationals have been depressing. First the Coughlin situation, then the fanwank about how dare skaters express any grief at all vs they're allowed to express it but only in this way that I've decided is correct vs due process! innocent until proven guilty! vs Chris Knierim. And now a 13-year-old has won Nationals, and USFS is already pushing her SO HARD and the media has already all but proclaimed her the next Olympic champion. Meanwhile, I'm looking at what's been happening in Russia and the NYT article that came out yesterday, where Gracie Gold talks about how intense pressure even at an older age ruined her mental health to the point where she was suicidal, and getting very concerned. She hasn't even competed internationally yet. She does not have good technique on that 3A. And yet all reporters want to do is fawn over how she's going to save us from the Russians and the Japanese before she's hit puberty.
Maybe this would make an interesting discussion post for
figure_skating, but right now I don't feel like writing it. I'll probably just watch Jason Brown and Emmanuel Savary, and maybe some of the free dance from nats or Euros, and leave off FS until 4CCs.Outside of skating, I just finished a book called The Last Place You'd Look: True Stories of Missing Persons and the People Who Search for Them. Hm, maybe I should pick something more cheerful for the next one. Anyway, I read it because I was under the impression that it was mostly about those people who try to use online databases to find possible matches between missing people and unidentified decedents. In fact, that was maybe one page of the book. But the rest of it (about missing people primarily in the US and Canada) was interesting.
It's a sad book, of course, because even when the cases mentioned in the books have endings, they don't usually involve a family reuniting. As I was reading, I kept being struck by the urge to Google almost every unresolved case to see if there were updates - and usually there were not. Sometimes just a Charley Project page about the person; sometimes news articles from a couple years ago about a family still searching, or still parted.
The chapter that got me the most angry was the one about parental abduction, usually involving parents who don't have full custody of their children. These drive me crazy because so many people don't take them seriously. They're with their parent, what's the problem? Probably the other parent was abusing them and they just wanted to protect their kids, right? But this kind of thing is so often about power, not about the welfare of the kids. Sure, maybe there are cases where there really is abuse and abduction really is the only recourse, but it happens over and over again that the abducting parent will claim all kinds of terrible things, but then they can't make a single allegation stand up in court when arguing about custody, or when they get arrested afterward. And they often tell their kids the other parent didn't love them, doesn't want them, committed suicide. Not to mention how the efforts they might have to go through to hide their tracks are abusive in themselves, like withholding kids from school.
The chapter in the book covered several international cases, which must be an absolute nightmare to go through, because a lot of countries will point-blank refuse to return abducted children (especially if it's a mother who abducted them). And even if the children are eventually found, they often want nothing to do with their other parent after years of being told that they didn't love them or abused them, which has to be devastating. (This happens in the occasional non-parental abduction where the child was raised by someone else, too. They naturally consider their parents to be the people who raised them, and sometimes don't want to see the biological parents who spent years searching for them.)
The rest of the book talked a lot about how change in attitudes and technology are helping missing persons, which was nice. Mental health is getting taken more seriously, police are less likely to brush off missing kids and teens are runaways and to take missing adult reports, DNA and isotope analysis are a thing now, and of course the internet changes everything.
I would like to see an updated version of the book (it came out in 2010), and while it did do a good job at covering various perspectives, one that I don't remember it covering was voluntarily missing adults (or teens), and that would have been nice to see. But overall an interesting book, even for someone like me who has read about a lot of different missing persons cases. Would recommend. Though not my particular library copy, where in two chapters only, someone just had to cross out every instance of 'different than' to correct it to 'different from'.
