I love pranks like this - completely off the wall, nobody gets hurt

I think many people call themselves apolitical that more accurately should fall into the apathetic/ignorant category.

Truly apolitical people are pretty uncommon - although you may not side with a particular party consistently, it’s hard to keep informed of facts and events without forming any opinion

Congratulations on your weight loss. You are correct that it is such a psychological battle to place yourself at the helm.

After having kids I really struggled with losing the weight. Now it probably was hormonal, but naming the reason doesn’t take the weight off. I had to accept that I was going to have to work harder than some people. That there is no such thing as fair - just because some tiny person can eat a double cheeseburger with fries and not gain weight does not mean that my body will afford me that same luxury.

Once I realized that there was really no way out but creating a calorie differential, I started logging calories. When my brain begged me to snack constantly I ate cherry tomatoes or cucumber slices. I worked my ass off at the gym. And I would go weeks without dropping a single pound before my body finally would give a few up all at once. But there is no such thing as easy weight loss, and you are so correct that you have to force yourself to be the boss.

One day you’ll be able to tell your kids that you lived the golden age of streaming. You didn’t have ads. You could binge watch a whole season in a day without the service tricking episodes out once per week to try to increase user anticipation. You didn’t have increasing numbers of streaming services dividing the pie into tiny pieces such that you had to pay 5x what you used to pay for cable to watch the things you want. You didn’t subscribe to those services only to find that you needed to get a fancier membership type to watch the show you were actually interested in.

You may have missed the birth of social media. But you lived the age of excitement about ditching cable, only to watch some massively rich companies create a monster bigger and uglier than cable ever was.

I remember my grandmother telling me a story about the fact that the most romantic vacation of her life was a cross-country train trip sharing a tiny cabin with my grandfather. They were in their seventies - she was a breast cancer survivor and he had some heart health issues beginning. And yet still, they cackled with laughter trying to get changed together and share an itty bitty bed.

When we are young we seem to instinctively feel that old people enjoying each other is cringeworthy, and that them being romantic is gross. But really, wouldn’t we all want that for ourselves as we age? The voice in our heads never ages, so why would our hopes for joy and connection go awat?

I want to tell myself that sub is mostly bots, but then the guy clearly got elected, so maybe they are real…

I must ask the shoes on people: at what point in the house do the shoes get removed?

I’d expect that you wouldn’t want them in the bedroom or bathroom, getting gravel or dirt in bed. Is it that the main living room for entertaining guests is shoes on, and shoes off is for personal rooms? Or do you have a specific set of indoor shoes? Or do your outdoor shoes go everywhere?

I think a lot of the countries that wear slippers got classified as “shoes on”. I have family in the Caribbean and South America who wear slippers, but never their outdoor shoes.

In my opinion they should be called “shoes off” or at least their own category to differentiate from places that would track mud and gravel throughout their house