I think it’s cruel to put up with this kind of behavior and use her disability as a reason to excuse it. Basically, you’re enabling her when you could be a true friend by giving her the feedback she needs to possibly one day change her shitty attitude. There’s nothing wrong with telling her that you choose to avoid people who say things like that. Maybe she will eventually change. And maybe she won’t.
Most of the popular ones. Especially Game of Thrones. As soon as the incestuous couple threw the little boy off the tower, I was outta there. I’m so tired of shows about horrible people doing horrible things.
This sounds like an example of the “crab bucket mentality.” It’s very common, especially among groups who have experienced trauma such as poverty, war, or racism.
You can absolutely live your own life, and learn the things you’re interested in. Still, it’s good to keep some compassion for your family members. They probably do love you and want you to be happy. They might just be frightened of you stepping outside their reality.
I had some bad food experiences that led me to growing microgreens at home rather than trust store bought lettuce. It turns out to be extremely simple and cost-effective to do, plus, you can have a lot more variety. Check out a guy called Mike Van Duzee on YouTube. He has so many great ideas for growing using whatever you have, instead of spending money.
I’ve had my Galaxy Tab for a couple of years, and it’s just fine. I mainly use it as a tablet, rather than folding it all the time, but it seems like it is holding up.
Like most parents, my mom was uncomfortable talking to me about sex, but unlike most other parents, she recognized her discomfort as her problem and she did her best to work around it. She didn’t want me to have the same hangups. Fortunately, this was the 1970s, and she had a lot of resources available. There were lots of books about sex, and she gave me some, and left others around the house for me to read when I wanted.
At the time, I don’t think there was any specific law against allowing your kid to look at, say Playboy magazine, much less more explicit material. You’d probably get prosecuted for it now, which is reasonable. At that time, Playboy was still fairly softcore, just air-brushed breasts and gauzy drapes. And there were “nudist” or “natural” publications, with people having sex out in nature without the photo tricks used today, so you really couldn’t see much. I was allowed to look at those for a while, although I think the adults felt ishy about it, and soon put those away.
In this capitalist hellscape, I think it’s almost impossible to hire anyone to do anything without exploiting them. I’m fairly convinced that the whole “opioid crisis” is really just a chronic pain crisis, brought about by our system that works people to death; nearly everyone over the age of 40 has incurred some kind of permanent physical or emotional damage while working. There are degrees of exploitation, of course, but I’m not sure we can put sex work in a special category based on exploitation alone.
Most older gospel is wonderful. Here’s a song by an artist you’ve probably never heard of, because she only released this one single. She had a gorgeous, rich gospel voice, and the record company was all set to promote her as the next Janice Joplin. But she feared the music business would corrupt her soul, so pop music lost a brilliant voice. She’s dead now. I like to imagine her cranking out great albums in heaven.
ME/CFS
I’m so bored with big budget movies, especially the superhero genre. It was fun for a while, but they’ve made the same thing over too many times. The story beats, the kinds of jokes, the generic sexy actors, the attitude, the strutting, it’s all the same. I’m tired of the arrogance, and the skin-tight suits, and the glamor. I’m far more entertained by stuff an ordinary person makes with a cellphone.
I think our brains can only do so much major cognitive work at a time. Playing from your soul, and feeling big feelings, these things override the ability to maintain social control over your facial expression. Perhaps keeping emotions off our faces is a skill that evolved more recently than having emotions, and thus it’s the first to go when we’re concentrating on other things.
I’m really glad you at least partially qualified what you mean by forgiveness. Or at least what you do not mean by it. The type of forgiveness I think you’re trying to suggest is more of an internal process. It’s not really about the other person at all. For example, there are some family members of murder victims who say they have forgiven the killer. They are not saying the killer deserves to go free. They’re just saying they don’t want to carry that hatred through the rest of their lives. By that definition, I don’t think any of us know what we might be able to let go of.
Not really a lesson learned, but a line that stayed with me. I forget which book it’s in, maybe Post Office, but he writes about a winning streak he had at the track. It was so good he either quit or took a leave of absence from his job. He woke late, enjoyed steak and scotch, then ambled down to the track. And then he says, “it was a great life, and I did not tire of it.”
All our lives, we’re told that wealth won’t buy happiness, that the only true fulfillment comes from hard work, and that getting what we want will only lead to misery. But here’s Bukowski describing a life of utter self-indulgence, and saying he never got tired of it. Profound.
Those two were so gorgeous, and the two actors had amazing chemistry. Too bad it was all wasted on an idiotic storyline, and it was too bad that Izzy was such an awful character.
A bunch of us kids were hanging out one day, with the radio on. One of the boys was flirting with a girl named Caroline, and just as he sat down next to her, Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond came on.
This isn’t a winnable argument, it’s a statement of genocidal intent. Engaging with this is worse than a waste of time. It provides legitimacy to evil.
It’s ruined art for me. Someone posts something, and I don’t know if it’s real art or a theft of other people’s work.
This just sent me down a rabbit hole. I had no idea that there are around 500 cases of prion diseases in the USA annually, and that most of them occur with no known cause. They just happen,although not usually in clusters like this. Yike. Scary stuff.