You’re MARRIED?!
on November 9, 2017 at 12:01 amYeah, I guess 24 is about when everyone else around me started being married and having babies in noticeable numbers.
Yeah, I guess 24 is about when everyone else around me started being married and having babies in noticeable numbers.
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So apparently, the retro updates don’t “fall back”.
…. it would have been funnier if I could have said the update was “late”.
I don’t know why, but this site seems to adjust to the Daylight Savings Time change a week or two after the Dumbing of Age site does.
The last couple years it hasn’t switched off DST at all.
The rules changed for DST and not all websites have the patch. It’s stupid, really.
So the implication is supposed to be that this was a “surprise wedding” so to speak? I mean, unless Sal spent more time in prison than I thought.
3 or 4 months.
Originally posted:
February 27, 2003
I’m 31, and this is still my reaction.
Same.
It seems like those milestones have been coming later for the last 10 years or so.
I’m 28 and it’s still weird to me how many of my highschool friends are now married and have kids.
I recently had a friend from college drop by fighter practice, and introduced her to my kinsman, who is married with a seven-month-old child, with, “This is my friend Becca, who I’ve known…… longer than you’ve been alive.”
This is and has been one of the most uncomfortable strips for me on reread in the entire archive.
Because god, fuck, just examine Mary’s phrasing here when she talks about this pregnancy she’s ended up in–despite taking express measures for preventing such with contraception–and not for the first time in this exact same situation happening. And then examine her body language: apparently fond expression there in Panel 2, staring at her to-be ‘bundle of joy,’ which is reassuring and what you would expect…but then the pointed look away and discomfort, bordering on outright resentment at the memory, because Mary didn’t want this.
Far worse, I cannot read anything here that doesn’t scream to me Mary still does not want this.
Perhaps unintentional, but this moment here where she reveals the pregnancy along with her marriage, taken together everything in her delivery–not just her posture, not just the fact of her even admitting this (perfect, pious Mary’s lack of perfect control and perfect consequence in her own life) in front of Sal, of all people–but also down the choice of phrasing Mary picked in “Wasn’t entirely planned, but…” to cap off her little announcement. That avoiding stare at the mention of the contraception failing, Mary looking away. We know already by her mention of using contraception that Mary didn’t want to be pregnant at 24 any more than she did back in college. This time, though, Mary has a husband that’s a doctor, a livelihood in her corner that can support both her and a future child. She has no “reason” for this pregnancy to be a problem when all the pieces are there for her that are supposed to be before you become a mother. Even by her own zealot standards.
And yet still with the husband and the security and the picket fence in place, I read this strip and its subsequent mini-arc and I do not think Mary wants this baby. She isn’t happy about this. She’s not the young woman jumping for joy to be a mom and I don’t think that has much to do with Sal being here.
And the thought of Mary having a baby she doesn’t want is awful. The thought of Mary being anyone’s parent is awful, IT IS AWFUL, but I just feel sick thinking in my head that I get this sense she’d go back in time and undo this future human being if she could and that she will take that out on any child she has from a result of that contraceptive failing because she can’t. It’s an awful thought. And I don’t remember if we ever get a glimpse of her ever again to see if any of that comes to pass, but I’m a thousand times happier imagining Mary reconsidering a second abortion over imagining her as a new mom at 24 some time after this. Even if my suspicions here are wrong and she’s happy at the way things worked out I don’t think any family of hers can be a happy one with her in the role of a parent.
You don’t think maybe whatever discomfort is there (and I’m not convinced it’s discomfort and not self-deprecation) is directed 100% at the memory?
It could be plain discomfort at that unpleasant memory (self-deprecation is another animal, we’ll see what…unique interpretation of it is coming from Mary soon). Still, just observing her over this week’s worth of strips on a level that’s admittedly micro enough to be overanalytic, I really don’t get the impression that Mary is exactly as comfortable in her current situation as she lets on even though I do very much get the sense she feels she OUGHT to be.
This isn’t borne out in Dumbing of Age, but you’d think there’d be a bit of an age/power disparity in her relationship with her husband, too. If he graduated from college at 21, he’d be out of medical school at 25, and a doctor at 28/29.
Lol, that third panel, her expression and the “but contraceptives seem to hate me” cracks me up.
SAL: “Dammit, Mary! Stop making my Biological Clock scream at me!!!“
My circle is mostly stubornly unmarried at 30 and mostly childless. Like there is the ocasional divorce, and the ocasional baby but my inmediate one is probably getting the population down inadvertely xD it happens I suppose XD