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The Abuse Inside St. Joseph’s Orphanage

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In an edition of Buzzfeed News’ Investigations, senior contributor Christine Kenneally describes the traumatic, dark, and tragic history behind St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont. Ran by nuns, this now shut down orphanage has been home to many  children over the years, most of them now living their own lives- with a dark emotional baggage:.

St. Joseph’s in Burlington, Vermont. It had been a dark and terrifying place run by an order of nuns called the Sisters of Providence. Joseph Barquin recalled a girl who was thrown down stairs, and he remembered the thin lines of blood that trickled out of her nose and ear afterward. He saw a little boy shaken into uncomprehending shock. He saw other children beaten over and over.
Some of the women recognized each other not by name but by number: Thirty-two! Fourteen!
Barquin told everyone about the nun taking him into the closet. Roger Barber spoke next. Sally Dale remembered him saying that a nun told a group of older boys to rape him.
Then one woman spoke about how nuns wiped her face in her own vomit, and Sally started to remember that the same thing had happened to her. She could hear the voice of one sister telling her, after she threw up her food, You will not be this stubborn! You will sit and you will eat it.A woman said she’d watched a nun hold a baby by its ankles and swing its head against a table until it stopped crying.

The orphanage has been long shut down, legal action filed turned into settlements - however, the children that survived still live with their dark past haunting over them. Some of them weren’t able to leave the orphanage alive.

image credit : Ian MacLellan for Buzzfeed News

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veracity
1951 days ago
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Sydney, Australia
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on trust and manipulation

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fozmeadows:

Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -

And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”

And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.

Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.

The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.

I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.

I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.

I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.

And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.    

Felice never played a trick on me again.

Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed. 

And I feel like this is information worth sharing.  

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veracity
1961 days ago
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apricitic: a note on people who always say “i don’t mind” whenever you ask where they want to...

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apricitic:

a note on people who always say “i don’t mind” whenever you ask where they want to eat/what they want to watch/etc:

usually this is because they’ve been punished in the past for voicing their opinions, not because they’re out to annoy you specifically. depending on how much flack they used to receive, it can be very stressful for them if you try and force them to offer up an idea.

a lot of my friends who do this appreciate me giving out like… three options. pick three different things that you will be happy to do any of and ask which of those three options they’d prefer. it removes the fear of “what if they don’t like my suggestion” without erasing their option to chose and have preferences so, you know, good all around

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veracity
2144 days ago
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Very true. Great advice.
Sydney, Australia
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taraljc: totheonedegree: schrodingers-child: cosmic-noir: princedhunglow: anttom2016: yeaimcoo...

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taraljc:

totheonedegree:

schrodingers-child:

cosmic-noir:

princedhunglow:

anttom2016:

yeaimcoollikethat:

thecrybabbles:

brownsugargeisha:

astripperstory:

stoicdaydreamer:

qslay:

sakuyandere:

perlexnoire:

bluhippy:

jaxblade:

jaxblade:

jaxblade:

albertothechihuahua:

image

this is the money dog, repost in the next 24 hours and money will come your way!!

ehh what the hell

OH MY GOD SO NO FUCKIN BULLSHIT I SWEAR To GOD. I reblogged this an hour ago and IM NOT Lying My Tax Refund which I did in late march popped into my Bank Account, and it was a Decent sized amount……

WHAT THE FUCK Is THIS MAGIC!??!?!?! Im trying this again IM NOT BSing hahahaha thats actually pretty cool xD

yooooo

yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

FUCKIN YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

no BULLSHIT I KID YOU NOT! Look what I found while walking Home…..

OH MY GOD

OH MY F*CKIN GOD

image
image

THIS POST FUCKIN WORKS?!?!?! THIS IS PAST A COINCIDENCE NO WAY!??! NO FRIGGIN WAY!!! 

Im Going to reblog this every day to test this, its MAGIC ITS FRIGGIN MAGIC 

I need to believe in the heart of the post…

Oh? Well… *reblag*

i reblogged this and now my uncle is giving me 250 to dye my hair nani the fucko

I have nothing to lose

my palm was itchin today not riskin it

I always reblog the money posts cause I can’t afford not too lol

It works. I just got $300 for no reason.

Money dog is my friend

Money dog is the shit

I believe in the money dog😀

I believe in the money 🐶

Bless me pls money pup 🙏🐕

Just woke up 🙌🏿

Pplease😭🙏🏽

still unemployed, still needing to feed and house myself and the cat, still reblogging.

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veracity
2457 days ago
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Sydney, Australia
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piddlebucket: bettiefatal: buckobarns: This is the lucky...

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piddlebucket:

bettiefatal:

buckobarns:

This is the lucky clover cat. reblog this in 30 seconds & he will bring u good luck and fortune.

THIS ONE!!! THIS IS THE ONE THAT WORKS!!!!!

I reblogged him the day i started treatment and 1. GOT TO MY APPOINTMENT ON TIME 2. FOUND A FREE PARKING TICKET SOMEONE LEFT IN THE METER FOR ME AND 3. GOT FREE STARBUCKS AFTER MY APPOINTMENT!!!!!

I don’t ever reblog these
But holy fuck come thru tonight lucky clover cat you’re all I got

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veracity
2473 days ago
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Why not?
Sydney, Australia
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Twin Peaks: We Live Inside a Dream

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Since the near-universal reaction to the Twin Peaks: The Return finale seems to have been a collective “…the fuck?” we think it would be best for us to start off this review by recapping the ending as we saw it. We all have different takes  – if any of us were even able to form “takes” at all – so in order to proceed with our thoughts, we think we should lay out what happened as we saw it. Your mileage (on lonely, dark backroads at night) may vary. In fact, we expect it to.

So:

After the graduate from the Dick Van Dyke School of Accents vanquished the BobGlob with his +10 Glove of Hulking, the OG Cooper was reunited with the OG Diane. The two of them plus Gordon Cole get magically whooshed to the Great Northern basement (source of The Great Ringing of 2014), where Coop says goodbye to them and uses his old hotel room key to walk through various dimensions, talk to giant tea kettles who used to be David Bowie and travel into the past, the night of Laura Palmer’s murder in 1989. He takes Laura’s hand and leads her away from her fate (and old Fire Walk with Me footage), thereby altering the original timeline and more or less wiping out all of the Twin Peaks story as we know it. Laura’s body never appears wrapped in plastic, Pete Martell goes happily fishing and Josie Packard can now presumably spend more time staring at herself in mirrors, deeply entranced by her own Chineseness.

But Coop loses hold of Laura’s hand, she disappears, and her screams echo throughout the empty woods. Meanwhile, Sarah Palmer – who should be living in a world where her daughter disappeared but didn’t die – smashes Laura’s homecoming portrait in rage. Time seems to loop and repeat as she does so.

 

Later, Coop and Diane drive 430 miles from Twin Peaks (like the Fireman told him to in the first episode, evidently), to some sort of location which allows them to “cross over,” (into a parallel dimension/alternate timeline…?) after which “everything will change.” Coop becomes less like his normal self, more dark and full of purpose. Like DoppelCooper without the Bob possession, as if the more exuberant parts of Dale Cooper were strip-mined to make the new Dougie. Diane notices her own doppelganger watching her from the parking lot of a motel they’ve pulled into. They go inside and have the most excruciating, unsexy sex you ever saw, during which Diane covers Coop’s dark, impassive face completely. There’s a sense of purpose in the sex, rather than a true emotional or physical connection; an attempt to summon something. In the morning, she’s gone, leaving a note from “Linda” addressed to “Richard” saying she doesn’t know him anymore. Coop exits the hotel (except it’s an entirely different building from the one he entered) and gets into his (entirely different) car, where he drives to Odessa, Texas. He enters a diner called “Judy’s,” goes completely hardass on a trio of good ol’ boys and scares the shit out of the employees by boiling their guns in oil. Using this non-FBI-approved method of info-gathering, he secures the address of the waitress who called in sick that day, goes to her house, knocks on the door, and Laura Palmer herself answers, except she’s middle-aged, has a southern accent, calls herself “Carrie,” and is living a life unfit for a homecoming queen. Since there’s a dead body decomposing in her living room, she opts to go with the mysterious FBI man who claims she’s someone else. They drive endless dark roads at night silently – crossing over again, apparently – until they arrive in Twin Peaks. He takes her to her childhood home but no one there is Sarah Palmer or has heard of Sarah Palmer. Coop is confused and asks what year it is. Carrie/Laura looks at the house, hears Sarah Palmer’s ghostly voice calling for her, screams that from-the-depths Laura Palmer scream, and the whole universe goes dark, as if a trap has been sprung. The end.

Just so we’re all on the same page. Or more accurately, you’re on the page we’re reading from. You may actually be on a different page altogether. That’s the beauty of Lynch’s work. It’s interpretable beyond interpretable. Of course the downside to that level of obtuseness is the risk of serious frustration on the part of the audience and endless arguing over What It All Meant. But Lynch, we imagine, doesn’t see such things as a down side to obtuseness, but rather, the hoped-for response to it.

“We live inside a dream,” the superimposed face of Coop intones as he seemingly watches the story unfold along with us. Dreams almost never make any sort of linear sense and are composed mostly of symbols and imagery strung together that our waking minds seek to sort through and make sense of. Lynch told us outright what he was doing and what we should expect from it.

The idea that creators of television shows “troll” their audiences isn’t something we put a lot of weight behind. To get to the point in the production process that your vision is fully funded and your fans are eagerly waiting for your output means you have to be fairly committed to telling your story in the manner you see best. No one in that position really thinks “Let’s fuck with the audience!” Or maybe we should say no creator of any depth would. We’re trying very hard to resist the tendency to explain Lynch on his behalf, but the artist has been consistent in his approach all along. This is his vision. This is Twin Peaks. To end it in such a maddening way is not an example of a showrunner trolling his audience but an artist being true to his creation as he sees it – and as he thinks the audience understands it. If this truly is the last of a filmed Twin Peaks, then let it end on a note, line and image that will do nothing but spawn theories and endless discussion for the next quarter century. How could Twin Peaks end in any other way? How could we expect Lynch to end it otherwise? As we noted in a previous review, for a quarter century, Twin Peaks has been a pop culture artifact defined by its obtuseness and lack of closure. All Twin Peaks: the Return did was replace “How’s Annie?” with “What year is this?”

And we should note that, after an 18-hour followup to that first question, Lynch and Frost didn’t lift a finger to answer it. How’s Annie? We’ll never know. What year is this? Ditto. Twin Peaks wasn’t “explained” with this series. The story wasn’t closed; there was no landing to stick. Instead, the story was deepened, enhanced, and enlarged far beyond the boundaries of a homecoming queen’s death in a small town in 1989. What we’re left with now is so much more than what we were left with when the original series ended. If nothing else, Twin Peaks: The Return re-contextualized Fire Walk With Me as an essential chapter bridging the two series instead of a weird outlier that was hard to watch. But there is almost certainly never going to be a Twin Peaks: The Final Chapter after this season and Lynch almost certainly knew this.

Lynch and Frost were not cruel about this. We got to know the lives of Shelley, Bobby, Dr. Jacoby, Sarah Palmer, Nadine, Lucy and Andy fairly well. We got to see Ed and Norma’s happy ending. We got bare-bones glimpses of James and Audrey that underlined in bright red the idea that the Sexpots and Bad Boys of your youth age and decay like everyone else. We got the sense that, while Twin Peaks: The Return had shifted cleanly away from its melodramatic, small-town network drama origins into a much darker exploration of evil and decay spread out across America, the stories of its original players (and several barely explained newcomers) were running in the background, like a soap opera that’s been on the air for a quarter-century. In other words, the original version of Twin Peaks had become Invitation to Love (the daytime soap everyone in Twin Peaks watched in 1989) while this rawer, darker, more primal version of it was free to go its own way.

We also got explanations (as much as L&F were willing to, anyway) of some of the series’ biggest mysteries and unanswered questions. Chet Desmond. Diane Evans. The Giant. The Lodge. The beginning and end of Bob. Judy. And in the end, we got something we didn’t have the nerve to ask for: Laura Palmer, alive. This was Lynch taking nostalgia to its furthest and most absurd end. If you ask to return to Twin Peaks, a place of mystery, magic, and dimensional doorways seemingly every few feet, you’re risking the whole thing getting swept away from you. You got your return, viewer. You went so far back into nostalgia that you accidentally erased the whole thing, leaving a weirder, unexplained universe in its stead. This is very much of a piece with the most persistent themes of The Return: The world is full of decline and decay, but indulging in nostalgia is at best a pointless exercise and at worst, a dangerous one. What makes Twin Peaks: The Return a masterpiece of television is how Lynch and Frost leaned so hard into the very reasons anyone would want to see another season of Twin Peaks – and then showed how that very wanting was flawed and incapable of giving the audience satisfaction. It was a tale about aging and the pointlessness of nostalgia, told by the very people best suited to tell it: the elderly. Lynch never once shied away from the inescapable fact that everyone you want to see from Twin Peaks, as well as everyone you trust to tell you how they’re doing, got old. We can’t recall a television show so committed to ensuring that every line, wrinkle and darkened tooth of its stars got photographed with as much detail as possible. We also can’t recall a show so committed to depicting dementia and loss of mental faculties in such excruciating detail. As we said in our previous essay on the series:

“This is not the ‘Thank you for being a friend’ version of aging. It’s a world of sadness, decline and degradation. This is a world where old men sell their blood to buy food and even older men spot them a fifty to keep them healthy for another week. A world where grandmothers get robbed by their grandsons. This is a world where the blasted landscape of Sarah Palmer’s mind is randomly available for viewing by any passerby. Where the Log Lady is wasting away while she whispers her last mysteries. Where Dr. Jacoby is a ranting lunatic and Harry Truman is dying somewhere far away. This is a world where Big Ed sits alone, eating his soup and watching the same car drive by, over and over again.”

As many an old person will tell you, getting old ain’t pretty. And as the wise ones will tell you, there’s no use worrying about what’s done. These ideas are so basic as to be cliches and yet you’ll rarely see so much time, money, effort and sensitivity put into portraying them as major themes of a prestige television drama. It may not be the AARP-approved idea of the state of being old, but that doesn’t make Lynch and Frost’s efforts here any less poignant.

We didn’t get answers and we didn’t get closure. What we got was a purely Lynchian world of diner waitresses and motels and dark country roads at night. Of drugs and murder and abuse. Of pie and coffee and life-long love affairs. Of prostitution and gangsters and hitmen. Of fathers and sons. Of mothers and daughters.  Of insanity and depression. Of demons and angels. Of quirkiness, local characters, and self-expression. Of sadness. Of despair. Of the deep, lush woods and the blinding, blasted desert. Of showgirls and receptionists and exasperated wives. Of randy old men leering at women’s asses. Of virtually no people of color. Of rape and addiction and poverty. Of death, of death, always and forever, full of death.

Do we want a new season? Not at all. This ending is so pure, so perfect. It’s dark, bleak, and maddeningly obtuse. Utterly Twin Peaks.

 

 

 

The post Twin Peaks: We Live Inside a Dream appeared first on Tom + Lorenzo.

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veracity
2632 days ago
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"All Twin Peaks: the Return did was replace 'How’s Annie?' with 'What year is this?' "
Sydney, Australia
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