I don’t think I am, particularly. More like I am finally in a place where I can make principled choices - kids grown, stable living situation, working, feeling mentally settled, not as anxious or struggling as before. Like from this more privileged space I can avoid more of the bad choices that I might have made out of desperation.
Lemmy I just like because it’s smaller and not corporate. Reddit was like that once too. I don’t find it inconvenient to be on this platform.
I have kids, worked full time as a parent for 25 years and no problem with this. Set the baseline flexibility and treatment good enough to accommodate parents. You don’t need to take it from childless people to give it to parents. Not a zero sum game here.
What I do have a problem with is hostility towards parents, and hostility towards non-parents. We are all in this together, and it’s not frivolous to raise the next generation, someone did that for you. Nor is it selfish to just live your own life - work should not demand our whole lives.
Now that my kids are grown, I still work at a flexible employer, and use that flexibility for doctors appointments, errands to places only open during working hours, and concerts & shows. Would I defer to someone with a child or aged parent with an emergency? Yes. Would I defer to someone with no kids whose partner was having an emergency? Yes.
Oh how I hate the whole idea of detox and clean as it relates to nutrition. I worked at a health food store when I was young and while there was good nutritious food there, plenty of good people, the whole idea of ‘clean’ comes from a very dark place. I remember the raw foods guys and the idea of breathetarians. Like the less physical and embodied you were, the better person you were, enlightened. The idea of the physical world being unclean and something you should try to be free of, I hate it.
It really is more of a religious idea than anything to do with physical health. I think you have to enjoy being embodied, love the physical plane of existence, to have a healthy body. Not perfect.
ETA: OMG another comment reminded me. Also the colonics people trying to get literally clean inside, horrified at the stuff that came out of them, convinced it was toxic. I’m sure they are all dead by now.
Community service, unpaid labor was part of the Bright Futures scholarships here (they changed it to paid or unpaid work) and was part of the IB curriculum two of mine did too. This is likely true in most states. A lot of high school kids are already doing hours and hours of unpaid community service.
But there is only one real farm inside what I’d define as close enough, an organic community farm that already uses lots of volunteers and unpaid interns and still ends up too expensive for what we got, when we tried buying a share one year. They are not raking in cash at all, either. It just is an expensive endeavor.
I have a garden with vegetables, one with flowers, a few fruit trees and a maple, some elderberry trees. And a mowed space in front and in back. I guess technically it’s a lawn but we don’t water it or put any fertilizer or chemicals, just keep it mowed. We throw clover seeds out on bare patches but weeds mostly take over. It grows, we mow.
It doesn’t last forever though - it breaks down, and gets mold. I cannot understand it at all. What a mess. Like landscape fabric. Something to enjoy for a year and regret for ten years afterwards as it breaks down and you keep finding bits of it.
Even in places that aren’t as humid and alive as our subtropical steam room here, under ideal conditions maybe 10 year life on that plastic carpet of grass. All the time it’s shedding plastic into the world.
My mom always just mowed whatever grew in the yard and called it “grass” and that’s all I have ever done. Mow the weeds, who cares? They get nice flowers, the bees like them. Except bull thistle. We dug that up with prejudice before it could flower. But as far as lawn, that is just a mowed space where I grew up, and I did grow up in a suburb, though not a house farm sort of development, not an HOA situation. And it’s just a mowed space where I live now too. Maybe 1 house in every 10 has the literal Grass Lawn, with the chemicals and monoculture. 9/10 have a mix of whatever.
I don’t believe the UFO phenonena are demons but I do think modern people saying they are aliens is exactly as crazy as people of the past saying they are demons. The people of the future will have some other explanation and consider us idiots too.
Like, the past had a whole system and pantheon of angels and demons but have you ever looked at what the alien conspiracy theorists write about aliens? There’s a whole system and pantheon they believe in too.
I am older, and have not found any of that to be true. As a lady, more makes more; more sex makes sex feel better and it’s easier to get off, and sexual frustration does not make me creative at all, just distracted and frustrated.
There is also physical benefit to sex for older women, I don’t know if it’s the same for younger, but certainly after menopause sex prevents vaginal atrophy and prolapse of internal organs, it’s sort of a use it or lose it situation. Penetration and orgasms are good for muscle tone, apparently. Beyond the obvious benefits of pleasure and relationship building.
Not on Lemmy but I have found Bratabase to be a good resource. Really good measuring guides and pictures of different people in different sizes and bra models.
It depends on who is coming over, I more usually impress with cocktails & make food to satisfy people not impress them. Gumbo, I have had people say best they ever tasted. Lamb for my mother-in-law, slow cooked 4 hours in the oven with fennel and apricots and harissa. Sourdough baguette one year at Thanksgiving, those were chowed down on. Vegan kid is impressed when I nail a dessert for her. I do grow some of what we eat, feel like that is sort of impressive I guess.
But cocktails is where I get the most compliments - I made the
https://imbibemagazine.com/recipe/friend-zone-a-zero-proof-strawberry-drink/
With some really nice spiced strawberry fermented soda I made, with the goop from the strawberry syrup like she uses in the recipe, but also the tops and leaves. It doesn’t even have alcohol, my heavy drinking ex brother outlaw could not understand how it could be so good. “What’s in this?” “Tepache de fresa” “No, I mean what is the booze?” “None.” “See, THAT is why you are the best. How is this so good?”
You have to know your audience to have it be well received. There’s no one dish that is going to universally be magic.
If you are cooking for me, gumbo or a soup with an amazing broth. Or a really good sandwich. I love a good sandwich.
I love the mouthy golbat in Pokemon go. Play him just to see that gaping maw! He is all mouth, the design is just awesome.
Not religious but my mom was Methodist and open-minded. Basically she said the Bible was a document from a different time, and the most important commandments were to love your neighbor and take care of the least of us.
The behavioral rules she just thought relics of an earlier time, said many had been solved with science (ok to eat pork, be gay, whatever).
My grandma was Catholic and she just basically wasn’t evangelical, right? So sure, maybe we were going to hell but that was between us & God, nothing to do with her. On homosexuality she (like others I’ve talked to) said, yeah of course gay people were made that way by God, that was their cross to bear, they had to be celibate. “So do nuns and monks and priests, some people are not supposed to have sex, it’s always been that way.”
Same age, same thoughts. The past was violent & sucky but it really felt like we were making progress, things were getting better. Some things have, there’s a lot less violence where I live, and more to do, the city has progressed.
Honestly I think the slide started after Bush vs Gore, and very often wish I had been in the other timeline, where the votes got counted before he conceded, Gore seemed conceited but smart, geeky and took good ideas seriously.
Living behind the shop or above it was my favorite location, for certain, but I think I’m in a smaller minority on that. Not in a high rise, just the shops had living space behind and above them. That was a long time ago though, since then I’ve lived in detached houses and that’s what we have now. I don’t need a car but do have one still - I was lucky, my work moved from one business district to another and landed a mile from my house. They moved to make it more accessible to more employees but coincidentally made it very close to me. The old location, if my car was in the shop, could only be reached by bus by first riding downtown then getting a ticket on a bus run by the next city over, their express bus to our city had a stop at the old office, but in one direction you had to walk across, not kidding, an eight lane state highway. At a light so there was a crosswalk but still.
I have lived in Tampa for my whole life without ever stepping on a lizard. Yes they are all over, but they aren’t running underfoot. I don’t like Orlando, so haven’t spent much time there but the lizards can’t be that different.
I once (before cell phones put a video recorder in our pockets) saw an epic battle between a lizard and a palmetto bug. They were wrestling, same size as each other, thankfully the lizard eventually won. It was like a miniature version of a Godzilla fight.
55% is just past half, and the US is pretty sprawling. I wouldn’t call my house big, or small either, but being able to walk or bus to work is something I have not compromised on since I was 20, it’s more important than a big house. Which apparently puts me in a large minority.
I feel bad for the 45% of suburbanites who would prefer to be closer to everything, we have those house farms in the exurbs here. The houses are big, but not far apart. I know several people who moved down here, bought one of those houses because they looked nice, them realized how trapped they were, but right now the price of houses in my previously very affordable neighborhood in the city has risen to eye-watering levels, and that is true for most of the areas in the city.
Yeah, same. Every day, no matter what happens, I wake up happy not to have to go to school. For decades now, the knowledge I don’t have to go to school has brought me joy daily. It was the worst “job” of my life so far, by far. College not as bad (I did work and have kids between, went as an adult) but work has still been better, and certainly pays better.
I am not at all nostalgic for high school, it was a nightmare. Don’t know anyone in real life who thinks it was a good part of their life.
It’s a common setting for stories from all over, though. Coming - of - age stories are eternally popular. And here, kids are in high school as they transition from child to adult, so that’s where many of those stories are set.