I finally blocked my mom’s phone number earlier this month. It’s only taken me 7 years since she blew up at me in a way she couldn’t/wouldn’t take back.

It can be a slow journey and you might question it as you go, but it’s worthwhile. And more people than you might expect are estranged from their families. I used to worry that my IRL acquaintances and friends would judge me for it, but nope.

I took all my meds on time, and so did my dog.

Oh! I also baked a pizza and it was really tasty. Pup didn’t get pizza, but did get oven-dried fish skins and he’s really happy about that.

It is hard to find onion-free chicken stock. My dog goes nuts for chicken but is a fussy eater otherwise, so we’re always on the lookout for dog-friendly stock to add to his kibble.

I don’t eat pig and Applebee’s adds bacon to their Mac and cheese. They list like 8 different cheeses in the description but don’t mention the bacon. Parents didn’t want me to make a fuss so I ate it. That was not fun. (This was years ago, ymmv, I don’t talk to those parents anymore because reasons.)

Me and mine have various food sensitivities (latex, nightshades, pork). I use an android app “fig” to check things at the grocery store–scan the barcode and Fig tells me who shouldn’t eat it and why. It does smart things like label “spices” as yellow because maybe it’s peppers maybe it’s not. The free version is sufficient for one person. The paid version lets you add more profiles.

That’s effectively what I had as an undergrad and it was lovely. Wednesdays were (mostly) reserved for labs, so if you weren’t taking chemistry or another class with a lab, you had Wednesdays to sleep in. I rather miss that.

My last office had a gym and a shower. It was awesome back when I to was “between wells” at my house and so didn’t have any water pressure for a couple of weeks.

(Oh the glorious day when my new well got hooked up and I could take a bath in my own home again!)

I’m too pale AF to have a loving relationship with the sun. I’ve been burned too many times. I always use protection, but last weekend the sunscreen failed me :(

MS-DOS 5 or 6. I guess technically I used whatever Apple IIes had, first, but really I just loaded games from disk.

Makes sense. I’m a librarian and we still use cards from the old card catalog for notes.

Come on, I’m counting on you!

This last election, I googled the candidates and voted for the ones that hadn’t tried to ban books at the local library.

I do. I left my pour-over coffee maker at the office, so I make do with instant coffee. It’s… ok, if I drown it in almond milk.

That’s my emotional understanding of the current situation. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan whole-heartedly the night it happened, but I was a child then. 9/11 was upsetting and rockets are exciting. Now, with maturity and hindsight, that invasion was a cruel mistake. I believe this current invasion is also a mistake.

TBF you just described most of capitalism.

I don’t need a gun, but the pawn shop on my commute has some musical instruments in the window which intrigue me. I’m a serial hobby-starter, and prefer gently used hobby tools over new, because used items have less of an environmental impact than new items.

Sounds like you use it for about the same reason I do.

Talk to a doctor! I found it much less stressful than I expected it to be. I started meds last year and my consult and check-ins have been all online. The biggest problem has been, ironically, remembering to take my meds constantly consistently.

I’m a serial hobby-starter, but not a project-finisher.

Silly nosy question: what do you get out of Adderall? I’m prescribed ADHD meds and don’t get any recreational benefit from it, so I’m just curious what I’m missing out on.

Robert Evans wrote a post on it and did multiple podcast episodes.

The TL&DR is that AI-generated children’s books are crap, without a coherent storyline or any literary niceties like “foreshadowing” and “beginning middle and end”. Kids are still learning what stories look like, so if you hand them AI-generated stuff they might know it’s unsatisfying, but they can’t put into words why their books are wrong.

I grew up with Mrs and Ms pronounced nearly the same, so I get the pronunciation confusion.

I’m wicked sorry, I don’t have a good answer. You could try Mx and see how it feels. I’ve dropped sir/ma’am for folks that I know, or that appear my age or younger. I still use it for older folks I don’t know out in the wild.

I, personally, never take offense at being misgendered in a Southern accent if I’m called “ma’am”. I grew up in the South and to me it just feels like someone’s trying their best to be polite and I take it as intended. Sometimes I also just misparse it as “man”, which feels a bit informal, but whatevs. Miss still feels creepy, but I get that less now that I’ve hit 30.

If you’re working at a drive through where there’s a customer/service worker dynamic, I’d 1. go with ma’am or sir 2. accept it if someone corrects you, and 3. recognize you’re more likely to be yelled at by someone for using a ‘new-fangled honorific’ than for misgendering someone.

Edit: Oh! I have replaced “Thank you sir/ma’am” with “Thank you, kindly” and that seems to work for me.

Not really. There’s plenty of gender-neutral names, some you wouldn’t expect. The names Ashley, Chris, Harper, Morgan, and Stacey are all gender-ambiguous (Showing my white American background with this list). Plus, people can have genders that don’t match their name.