Splurge Monday’s Workwear Report: Argo Button-Down Floral Applique Top

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1. Taking unscheduled WFH day because a kid got hurt at school (hand shut in a door) and not only can’t carry Advil but they don’t have it to give out even with parental permission. But I can run it out there and give it to her in the front office. Of a high school. Going with Aleve since now I have a use case for all-day dosing.

   1. Oh that is cray. I have only run into the “can’t give meds” with Rx meds but the same issue (they can’t give advil without reaching me ON THE PHONE and of course I am always on a call when they call). Finally I just gave her advil to carry – she knows to take it where teachers can’t see. Totally ridiculous!

      1. I would totally do that BUT they will expel you if they catch you with it (never mind the weed and vape pens my kids note in the bathrooms). I just can’t take that risk or urge them to ignore it (even for an 18 year old senior). Zero tolerance has eliminated zero problems and just created more problems.

         1. Yeesh no, not here! They are more draconian about phones than meds here, IME (ymmv since this is a small town)

   2. this is insane and also how old is this child? because if they are in middle or high school i would probably have told them to keep it in their pocket..

      1. This is a crazy policy but I wouldn’t encourage a kid to keep medicine on them in direct violation of a school policy.

         1. Kids have to learn how to operate in unreasonable environments (not by prolonged suffering when they are in a position to help themselves.)

            1. I know. But if you don’t like the policy and it is unreasonable, loudly advocate for change. Be an adult about it. Show the system how wrong it is and how the policy causes harm. It will still be illegal to have illegal drugs or alcohol / tobacco at high schools and other schools for youth.

            2. Yes, this may not be the last time. I have a condition that is treated with a medication that really has to be taken frequently and on time. Hospitals are generally not able to administer the med on the prescribed schedule. So it’s self-treat in violation of policy, or risk the kind of dangerous exacerbation that could interfere with treatment for whatever else you’re in the hospital for. The systems we have and their policies aren’t designed for people anymore.

            3. The risk here is just too great. Inevitably the kid discreetly carrying Advil is the one who gets expelled. Zero-tolerance policies are enforced selectively only against good kids.

            4. There are other lower risk ways to teach this lesson. The school can call the police or CPS if the kid has medicine they’re not allowed to have. Agree with the above, be an adult and advocate for change, don’t put your kid in the position where they’re the one whose broken the rules.

            5. to 9:48 – what? is this a thing? teenagers getting expelled for keeping advil? i’ve often thought that 90% of girls have to be carrying something, they just don’t want the nurse to give it out.

            6. I absolutely send my high school freshman daughter with Advil. She gets both headaches and bad cramps when she is on her period. She knows not to give it out to her friends and to keep it hidden from the teachers. If she were to get in trouble for it, I would raise hell.

         2. absolutely — i’ve wanted to send my 14 year old SON with a little pill of advil or alleve some days

            my youngest son is autistic and gets a lot of headaches and other aches and pains so we have a doctor’s note saying they’re allowed to give advil, and then I send in the chewables. PITFA. i also sent in a heating pad for the nurse because he gets a lot of stomach aches too… I was surprised they didn’t even have that.

   3. I’ve heard so many horror stories about schools dropping the ball even with a 504 for an ongoing condition lately. I don’t know if it’s understaffing or what it is. Sometimes the requirement has been whittled down to something as simple as making a phone call to alert the parent so the parent can come handle the issue (like what they’re having you to do today), and then even that doesn’t happen reliably either. I hope her hand will be okay.

      But it does not feel like schools are preparing high school students for adult life if this is how they go about things, and I don’t know what happened to the era of the school nurse either.

      1. I totally don’t know what T1 diabetics do. You can’t carry insulin because it needs a refrigerator. I had a friend become a SAH mom because she didn’t want her kid to die at school.

         1. There are definitely people who end up home schooling after too many safety incidents. There are also private schools that end up with a disproportionate number of medical needs students thanks to a good reputation for school nursing, even if they’re not actually bound by 504 the way the public schools are, which seems so backwards to me.

            1. On the flip side of the crazy coin, I have a cousin and a SIL who are both general-education classroom teachers (not nurses) in regular all-comers public schools. They were both expected to manage tube feedings at times for students in their classes (and given no instruction or safety equipment or supplies). IDK if they even have malpractice coverage since they are only hired to be teachers.

            2. That is absolutely wild.

         2. I have a friend with a diabetic kid and she has insulin in her pump. She’s able to manage it herself at school.

         3. I have a T1D kid. His insulin pens do not need to be refrigerated. They just expire after 28 days after being removed from refrigeration.

            And he uses a pump usually instead of pens so that does not require refrigeration.

            School (private) has been nbd wr2 t1d

      2. It was a thing in my high school back in the 1990s. I just carried my advil with me. It helped that I was a top student and also too poor to afford drugs, so no illicit stuff was ever near me. One does what one needs to do.

      3. It is ridiculous. I carried meds in violation of school policy in the 1990s, but I don’t recommend it to my kids now because the administration would be delighted to enforce a draconian discipline policy against kids who rarely get in trouble (it would balance out the required reporting of the kids who are constantly breaking rules).

         Our schools have nurses, but the nurses have to handle things like tube feeding and T1 diabetes so even things like maintenance inhalers are lower priority.

         In terms of the real world, I think having to obey (or at least pretend to obey) asinine rules is part of the corporate world. There’s also a benefit in learning how to have a neutral expression on your face when a higher-up is saying the stupidest/most ridiculous thing you could imagine, then politely pushing back if necessary.

   4. When I was in highschool I kept a mini travel pill thing with painkillers in my backpack at all times. I could not even tell you what the schools med policy was because it would not have occurred to me that OTC things would be of concern.

      1. It sounds like you probably just didn’t have a zero tolerance policy in effect if you weren’t aware that OTCs like Advil would be a concern.

         1. yeah, what was allowed in high school 25 years ago is… not still allowed.

            1. This was only 10 years ago

            2. Shoot, I was in high school 25 years ago and we had a zero-tolerance policy for meds.

            3. Same as Alex, I graduated 23 years ago and we had zero-tolerance for carrying meds. Everything had to be dispensed by the nurse. Would they have called the police over a kid with Advil or Tylenol, I doubt it. But you could definitely get in big trouble for things like Sudafed or ADHD meds or other things like that where there’s a valid use but it can also be misused recreationally.

      2. I think that OTC isn’t a concern. But no one has their eye on the ball or even knows students (large public high school — thousands of students and a spread-out campus). It is easier to say “all pills bad” and be indiscriminate vs actually known your kids and know what is safe (taking advil from original container and you can look up what those look like if you really think it’s something else in a legit container) vs what isn’t. And campus security carries naloxone so they know that there are illegal and dangerous drugs. I just wish they wouldn’t have a policy that I feel singles out girls and makes them be scofflaws for trying to manage things like period cramps or is indifferent to actual pain. The teachers can have all the Advil they want but for liability reasons won’t share. I think they have a nurse 50% of the time because they don’t pay enough to hire enough and they cover multiple schools.

         1. I wish they’d provide an environment where there’s adequate adult supervision in general. Responsible adults need to have an eye on the ball and know students for many reasons beyond medication access, right?

            1. Nothing is done at a human scale any more

   5. Our small town HS had similar policies, and depending on who the office worker was that day they might demand a doctor’s note before they would let the parent dispense OTC items like cough drops to the teenager. Absurd.

      We resorted to stuffing ibuprofen tablets inside cheese sticks in the lunchbox, and putting unwrapped cough drops in an empty Nerds box in their pocket. This was done at the teachers’ suggestion, because the teacher could then pretend it was just food or candy and thus was not required to tell the office.

      1. I get this. A policy that makes good people have to become habitual casual liars is just such a bad idea.

      2. That is crazy, and also unsafe.

         1. When you have debilitating cramps, or seasonal allergies and a dry throat? Parents can’t exactly camp at the school office on-call with a pre-baked doctor’s note waiting for the 16 year old to get a hall pass and trek down for a cough drop every 30 minutes. It’s not a functional way to live.

            We also did unwrapped cold & flu capsules in a pocket to get through days we couldn’t miss class, a dose of cough syrup in a Gatorade bottle, whatever it took.

2. I woke up to the news from LaGuardia today. IDK why but I cried. I wish Washington would treat air travel with some level of seriousness. We shouldn’t rely on luck so much.

   1. was at laguardia on saturday (i had asked last week about tsa lines). the world is a scary place

      1. Flying to SFO in a couple of weeks and my sudden bout of flying nerves has definitely amplified.

         1. SFO uses contract security so there aren’t issues.

            1. I think she means fears for safety, not long lines. But yeah SFO is one of the few major airports in the US without govt TSA so their security screening employees aren’t affected by the shutdown.

   2. My husband was supposed to fly into LaGuardia this morning… (he switched his flight to another NY area airport)

   3. there have been so many close calls lately. are the incidents getting worse because of DOGE firings and Trump “efficiency” or are we hearing about them more?

      can’t wait for ICE in airports to make it all better /s

      1. DOGE, Trump, post-pandemic effects (people calling out sick more, post Covid brain damage), …

   4. I don’t know what you expect federal policy to do about a vehicle crossing an active runway. It was human error – air traffic control cleared the vehicle to cross in front of the plane and then the vehicle didn’t hear his calls to wait.

      1. +1 I hate Trump but I don’t see how this is the current admin’s fault. And freak accidents like this have happened in the past too.

         1. Did you miss the entire news cycle on DOGE’s impact on air traffic control?

         2. not what i would normally consider a good source but this seems to summarize it the best:
            https://aviation.osu.edu/news/2025/10/how-government-shutdown-making-air-traffic-controller-shortage-worse-and-leading-flight-delays

            1. This is no longer applicable. ATCs are not part of DHS, are not impacted by the current partial government shutdown, and are currently getting paid.

      2. I feel like ATC staffing has been a known danger issue for a while. And with the various government shutdowns, that’s probably more accute because the best people go ahead and retire / take buyouts because the crazy and the stress isn’t worth it.

      3. Reports are starting to say it was one ATC working tower and air, which is insane. The cuts to ATC are absolutely the administrations fault. It was human error, but the system overworked them.

         1. At that level of staffing, an error is almost expected. I pray for that worker — no one should be put in that situation.

         2. cuts, and also the Russ Vaught campaign of humiliating, belittling and threatening public servants at every opportunity.

      4. I’ve seen some talk about how it was a cascading effect of there not being enough gate agents to help the united flight get a gate, so that flight turned to ATC for help with the truck, which if everything was fully staffed wouldn’t have happened and ATC could have fully focused on the runway clearance. Not sure how true that is though.

      5. I read an article about this. Evidently Congress has repeatedly blocked an additional training facility (likely because of kickbacks to OK) that would dramatically increase the number of controllers that are needed. They are also in a longterm mandatory overtime requirement for staff. So it is federal policy that these controllers are under resourced.

   5. I hadn’t heard the news, this comment prompted me to go look it up. Definitely shed a tear at my desk, I know a few AC staff, this one hit closer than usual.

   6. I’m absolutely worried about the administration’s effect on govt’s ability to carry out basic services, and stress+uncertainty are a big part of that! At the end of the day, these are human people doing hard work with little room for error. Of course everything going on is going to affect people. And flight is a wicked learning environment: it doesn’t give you reliable feedback in that most of the time you get away with small errors with no consequences; and occasionally small errors lead to catastrophic consequences.

      But given that, commercial air travel is still quite safe, per passenger mile, and significantly safer in the US than any previous ~decade (ie. even if things in this admin are less safe than the last, it’s still much safer than eg. the ’90’s). You can look up the numbers – there were fairly regular whole plane losses until ~2009! It’s ok to be p-off at the admin for this! But I wouldn’t let it affect your decisions about whether to fly.

      1. Yes there are plenty of better reasons to avoid unnecessary flights.

3. Any product recommendations to cover gray roots until my next salon visit? I only have a smattering of grays but they stand out against my dark straight hair.

   1. I use a Madison reed powder. It doesn’t totally hide the gray but it kinda blunts it? Makes it less in your face? I’ve got dark brown hair, very straight and I’m short so most people can see the top of my head. I also pull back in a pony tail after week 3 from my last color.

   2. The Batiste dry shampoo for dark hair has become a surprising solution for me!

   3. The color wow root touch-up powder is decent. Aapplication is a hassle but I feel like that’s par for the course with these products.

   4. Clairol Root Touch Up.

   5. The nice n easy root coverup does a good enough job.

      I want to warn everyone about Madison Reed. First time using it, I did the strand test which was fine. I applied it per the instructions and lost about 20-25% of my hair. It’s never grown back. I thought it was hormonal. Nope. It was definitely dye and there is an existing class action lawsuit with some women losing significant amounts of hair because the used the dye multiple times.

   6. In case you check back I use a powder from Boldify from River site. I think it works great once you figure out the color (dark brown for my highlighted blonde hair).

4. I’m looking for a show to stream – any suggestions? I like Bridgerton, Call the Midwife, loved Bad Sisters, liked Palm Royale until I got bored with it mid-second season. Same with Shrinking. Not into reality shows.

   1. I’m enjoying the new Steve Carell show Rooster. It’s darker than I expected but pretty funny.

      1. Ooh, thanks for reminding me about that one!

      2. Yes, I’ve been very happily surprised with Rooster!

   2. Slow Horses

      1. I didn’t like slow horses but PONIES on Peacock is DELIGHTFUL. It’s a spy show, but it’s not dreary! The Americans with joy. Highjinks, high tension, 70s fashion and women-centered. An absolute delight.

         Alternatively, heated rivalry?

   3. Outlander
      Derry Girls
      Only Murders in the Building
      If you haven’t seen them yet, The Good Place and Fleabag

      1. Only Murders! My favorite show! Also, check out Lincoln Lawyer

   4. only murders, a man on the inside… i’m watching west wing. have you watched downton? i love that.

      1. You have just named several of my other favorite shows, and DH and I love Slow Horses as well. A West Wing re-watch would probably be timely. I’ve also thought about re-watching Mad Men.

         1. Recent WW rewatches have left me feeling both disappointed that we never evolved to its TV political utopia, AND chuckling about how “quaint” certain storylines are now, 25+ years later (pagers/early cell phones limiting comms speed, the dawn of the 24h news cycle that wasn’t a thing in the early seasons, usually assuming good in the other side, etc.). Still great TV though!

            1. To clarify in advance, my disappointment over the failure to hit utopia is not serious. It’s unachievable. I know this. Lol

            2. same!

   5. I just finished Vladimir with Rachel Weisz. It was fun.

   6. Derry Girls, Call My Agent, Andor (I’m not into Star Wars but you don’t need to be to enjoy that series)

   7. Peaky Blinders, Diplomat or The Americans are ones that DH and I have enjoyed.

   8. I love Masterpiece and just binged their rendition of The Count of Monte Cristo. Only one season of course, but enough episodes to keep you occupied for a bit.

   9. Best Medicine. The Brokenwood Mysteries.

   10. Try Running Point! I’ve really enjoyed it, and the second season is about to start, I believe.

   11. Fisk is very funny and light. It’s about a middle-aged Australian woman who is a lawyer that works in a small law office. Very The Office/30 Rock but with Kath & Kim accents.

   12. Derry Girls, Fisk, Kim’s Convenience, North of North, Resident Alien.

   13. Gilded Age was fun.
       I also like Star Struck, Acapulco, Pokerface, and Sort Of.

   14. The ‘Burbs with Keke Palmer was fun.

   15. The Derry Girls showrunner has a new show – How to Get to Heaven from Belfast – for those who haven’t seen it. It’s one season on Netflix, wraps up the storyline nicely while also giving an opening for a season 2. Think Derry Girls + 20 years and *murder?* plus appearances by some of your favorite Derry actors.
       Sharing for OP and the other enjoyers of the show.

       1. It was so great!

          The mural 😂

       2. Was just going to recommend this. Haven’t finished it yet but it’s a wild ride.

   16. Just watched an older Masterpiece series, “The Forsyte Saga.” It was entertaining, with gorgeous sets and costumes.

5. I am going to start budgeting for the first time in my life. Can anyone recommend a template (hopefully an excel spreadsheet) to help me get started? I can create from scratch, but thinking this is a wheel I do not need to reinvent….

   1. you might want to try downloading your credit card/checking transactions to see what the numbers have been recently, then try to pick target numbers based on what you normally spend.

   2. DH and I have one big chunk for non-variable expenses (mortgage, phones, charitable contributions, etc), and then set amounts that we track for entertainment, clothing, groceries, and everything else. We also keep track of money that goes into and out of our short term savings account and college savings. I literally keep the whole thing in a notebook the way I’ve been doing it for 20 years – I’ve never felt the need to play with a budgeting app, or even excel!

   3. I recommend a hybrid approach where you budget for fixed expenses and just track spending on everything else. Car payments, rent, internet, childcare, I have those as fixed expenses. Then I track my spending with groceries and gas and fun money and I naturally balance those out without having to silo off money. I’ve been using YNAB for this, and it’s not really what their software is designed to do, but it does it well enough. I need the app to make the tracking spending easier on my husband.

   4. I like the Monarch budgeting app and find it much easier to use than my previous system of keeping a spreadsheet.

      I have 6 broad categories: (1) income, (2) savings for goals, (3) investments, (4) monthly fixed expenses, (5) savings for irregular expenses (medical, car insirance and maintenance, vet bills, etc), and (6) discretionary spending.

      The first 4 categories are set up with automatic deposits, transfers, and payments to take care of themselves. I have a certain amount per month auto-deposited into a separate account for those “spiky” expenses and track those but can’t do much about them. That really just leaves discretionary spending. I know how much I have each month and stay under that amount but don’t track closely whether I spend it on hobbies, going out, or buying stuff. (I have that data, but for budgeting purposes, it’s one large pot so I don’t feel bad for being “over” on takeout when I’m “under” on my hobbies during a busy month.)

   5. I can’t give you a spreadsheet. I personally have used Quickbooks software for years.

      What has been most successful for me is 3 different categories of expenses: fixed expenses that are what they are (mortgage, utilities, donations, insurance premiums, etc.)

      Sliding expenses: groceries, household items, clothing, entertainment, etc. This is where overspending can happen easily, so I have a limit on this each month. The number has to stay under $X for all of this — maybe one month there’s more on clothes and less on entertainment, but it needs to stay under that number.

      One-off expenses: These come up each year, but not each month. I estimate #’s for these, and this amount goes into savings so it’s ready when the expense rolls around: vacations, medical spends, car repairs, big house repairs, holiday buying, etc.

   6. I use a personalized version of the Pear Budget excel spreadsheet, which you can download for free. Have adjusted over time but it’s worked well for us for the past decade and a half.

   7. We use Quickbooks and then it’s easy to export data at tax time.

   8. I built my own excel spreadsheet because none of the templates offered the details or features I wanted. I love that I can customize my spreadsheet on the fly as I see fit.

      It has a column for each category of spending (groceries, gas, mortgage, utilities, student loans, discretionary spending, dining out, vacation, charitable giving, presents, paychecks, etc.) and a row for each day. The last column keeps a running total reflecting the impact of that day on my current balance. I have a tab for each year, and the columns sum up at the bottom so I can see at a glance how much I spend on a given category each year. I enter known expenses at the time they are expected, and can very quickly see the impact of a splurge, and bonus, or a habit on my bottom line.

      1. I also built my own spreadsheet. It is set up with one tab for my credit card (used for most expenses, paid in full monthly) and one for bills paid directly from checking. Each purchase or bill gets a line with date, amount, a field for the payee, a field for comments, and a dropdown for category. I have a summary sheet that totals by category for the month. Each month I start over with a new blank copy. I also have a separate annual summary file where I copy in the monthly totals by category.

   9. I am not naturally good at budgeting, so I use You Need a Budget (YNAB) and love it. It’s easy to use and has tons of free videos to help demystify the process.

6. i did something to my back (or maybe i really pulled a muscle in my glutes) at some point last week and am not in constant pain, but it hurts when i bend down. have been using advil, stretching, used ice and now switched to heat. at what point do i see a doctor and what kind of doctor do i see?

   1. Try a physical therapist.

      1. You will likely need an order from physician

         1. Lots of health plans allow you to make appointments for assessments yourself, and the PT provides medical necessity to the insurance companies.

         2. Not in most states.

   2. How good is your insurance? Like are you trying to differentiate “when do I see a doctor bc it would be a really bad idea not to” or “How soon can I see a doctor without just being told ‘wait and see’?”

   3. PCP probably. They can assess what needs to happen next (X-ray, MRI, PT, ortho…so many options).

   4. Near me the orthopedic clinics set aside walk-in hours and short notice appts. for stuff that comes up for people. That is usually the fastest way to get checked out for an injury type issue. No idea how your insurance works though.

   5. Cue the haters but I go to a chiropractor for this. YMMV.

      1. same here. I have one I trust and it has really helped!

   6. if you think it’s glute related have you tried a foam roller or a lacrosse ball? i wouldn’t use a massage gun but if you have one of those therapy canes (I think Theracane) they can also help. but if you can find an especially sore point in your glutes i would push into it for 30-120 seconds, as long as you can stand. there may be sharp pain. i like a lacrosse ball best for this… then move around until you find another spot and then repeat. this is probably what a PT will tell you to do. “myofascial release” if you want to google.

   7. Chiropractor works for me.

   8. You aren’t doing anything different than a PCP would advise at this point. No imaging would be recommended. Things often just need time (ex. 6 wks). See a PT if you want to pay the $ and try to get advice on optimizing posture/core strength and to help figure out how you did it and how to avoid doing again.

      Do you know how you did it? Are you working out regularly? How?

   9. You may want to try a massage therapist who does sports massage. It could just be a strained muscle that they can get to release. Or use a massage gun if you have one.

7. Please help me style this necklace: double strand of lapis beads with a statement silver and mother of pearl clasp.

   I usually wear it with a merino turtleneck sweater (my former? winter work uniform). I am looking for ways to wear it in warmer weather, and also accepting that I don’t look as good in my very close fitting merino turtlenecks as I used to.

   1. White is the easy choice here – can see this looking great peeking out from under a b-ttn down, or filling in a v-neck, or over a boatneck?

      1. Maybe I’ll buy a boatneck top!

   2. Wear them with literally anything, necklaces “go” with all things. The only look I don’t love is actually your turtleneck approach. That always feels stuffy to me and they should just be a casual toss on.

   3. what is the length or where does it fall on you? if it falls to your stomach try wearing it with a plain black summer dress (or another blue would be pretty)
      https://www.eileenfisher.com/washable-stretch-crepe-jewel-neck-dress/S4TK-D5208.html?dwvar_S4TK-D5208_color=414

      if it’s above your collarbone i agree with others, it’ll look nice beneath a button-up or other collar

      or are you concerned that the statement clasp is hidden in all but a turtleneck?

      1. It falls around the top of my bust. I feel like it’s too long for a button down? I had the turtlenecks before I had the necklace….my office is freezing and every little bit of warmth counts.

         1. Can you shorten it? Depending on the connection between the beads you might be able to use a safety pin to shorten it and bring it up by a couple of inches.

   4. Do you have any boatneck tops? If a necklace covers more real estate than I’m willing to show at work, a boatneck is usually my solution.

   5. Suggestion: Use a search engine to look up “choosing necklaces for necklines”. Does this graphic help you at all?

8. cleaned my desk! trying to resist the call of a doom pile for all the stuff i can’t throw away but am not ready to look at yet

9. Did anyone read the extremely sad and frustrating cover story on Camp Mystic in New York Magazine (there have also been recent pieces in the NYT and Texas Monthly)? There’s so much in there that it’s hard to know where to begin but what I can’t get past is how callous so many people are to the parents who lost their daughters. In the Texas Monthly piece, many of the Texas parents who support reopening/want to send their own daughters back admit that they have never delved into the details of the flooding and that they don’t know the facts of why the parents have filed lawsuits claiming that Camp Mystic committed gross negligence. I like to think that I’m not a judgmental parent and that I “live and let live” – but when I see parents whose girls are alive and well saying things like “Camp Mystic is the safest place on Earth” to the faces of parents whose daughters died there under extremely credible and evidence-based claims of gross negligence, I suddenly feel differently.

   1. This is just human nature. People tend to want what they want and to dismiss the very real feelings of others if it’s too hard to understand. Lots of people are heartless and a little bit stupid when it takes too much brain power to have empathy.

      1. I’m not sure, I find there’s a level to this that seems to vary by people’s culture, religion, and values. There are things that some people would just never ever say, that for other people are normal. Maybe that means that some traditions overcome this successfully while others amplify it, or maybe it’s just a learned and taught thing.

   2. I was just thinking of Camp Mystic again after reading about Okawa Elementary and the 2011 tsunami (in terms of grief, commemoration, accountability, liability, even if there are also a lot of differences).

   3. Bluntly, there is a LOT of magical thinking in certain, specific conservative Christian circles. “If it happened, it’s for the best.” “Tragedies can’t be prevented.” “Maybe the parents somehow deserve this.”

      It’s passive, fatalist, and sometimes dangerous.

      I have had people tell me that everything, literally everything, works out for the best. They said this to me when I was in a wheelchair after an assault. I responded with: “So you think that the millions of people who were gassed to death during the Holocaust experienced their best possible outcome?”

      Dead silence followed by some version of “I never thought of that.”

      1. Yes. It’s the “everything happens for a reason” crowd. I grew up in this sort of world and I loathe it. Sure, “everything happens for a reason” explains North Korea, if you have the emotional intelligence of a small child. Actually, I’ve met small children with better emotional intelligence.

         1. I’m the one you’re responding to. My kindergartener knows better than this.

            It’s an excuse for laziness. No reason to do due diligence, leave bad environments, be more careful, or work HARD. It will happen or it won’t.

         2. Funny you say that, since the Camp Mystic disaster did in fact show that small children had better survival instincts than the adults in charge of them who are now saying “it was unavoidable.” Girls wanted to evacuate and were told not to.

   4. People want to believe their good luck is the result of their own decisions. When someone else experiences misfortune people want to blame it on something that doesn’t apply to them. I remember a cancer survivor here saying her athletic friends claimed she didn’t exercise enough and her overweight friends told her she must be malnourished. People want to believe they’re immune to tragedy.

      Also, acknowledging Camp Mystic is dangerous requires these parents to admit they sent their kid away without performing enough due diligence.

      1. Eh I feel like things are not 100% luck, nor 100% actions. Would my alcoholic dad still gotten liver cancer if he was a teetotaller? Maybe, but much much much less likely.

         1. No one is saying it’s 100% luck, but very bad things can indeed happen to anyone without any warning or any reason. And people can be less empathic to others when they ignore that reality.

            1. This is very true.

      2. Cancer survivor here as well. I had someone blame my vegetarian diet and another went through all the reasons it wouldn’t happen to her when I shared my diagnosis. Truly is wild how some people react. I hadn’t heard this happening to other people. I guess it is really mental self preservation?

      3. People also want to believe in the “Act of God” approach instead of grappling with the fact that people they respect can make extremely dangerous and stupid decisions. At Camp Mystic, every girl could have been saved with 2.5 hours to spare if the camp owners had initiated a simple walking evacuation at 1:15 am. Even if that had failed, there were about five other ways they could have saved every single life if only they had had a plan as legally required. It’s heartbreaking.

   5. As the mother of a teenaged camp counselor, I was and remain absolutely horrified by this story. To her credit, my daughter says she asked a lot of safety questions when interviewing for this summer’s position. But she is a rule-follower who I fear would obey the faulty directions of the adults in charge rather than take matters into her own hands. We are going to have a very serious talk about this before she gets on the plane this summer.

   6. I read it, and yes, it’s tied up in prosperity gospel kind of magical thinking. But also, these people have their entire lives intertwined with this camp and camps like it. Most of us just go to camp and then move on. It’s not a part of our entire life identity.

      Obviously there are a number of choices that could have been made that would have saved some of those lives. Anyone who has been involved in some kind of emergency response knows this. Even the basic fundamentals that cabins should all have some type of weather radio and way to contact each other during severe weather. Not having any way to reach someone immediately other than by foot is also extremely dangerous if someone had a medical emergency too.

10. I don’t understand the long droopy sleeves. Do ya’ll have really long arms?

    1. This just screams Noel Fielding to me.

11. Lawyers (and maybe people interested in this):

    Would you go to a CLE where a lawyer, someone from an ER or hospital admin, someone from a hospice, and maybe a chaplain discuss how POAs, health care POAs, living wills, DNRs, POLSTs, and HIPAA waivers work in emergencies and with people going through something like a stage 4 cancer diagnosis? Or is this just too bleak and maybe emotionally overwhelming?

    1. Lawyer here, and I absolutely would.

    2. Sounds great to me. I would absolutely go if it would complement my practice. And honestly, I would also go just out of interest. It is something that pretty much every person/family should know, and very few do.

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