Commenter Archive

See, that sort of thing blows my mind a little, because I remember learning where babies came from at 10 (my mom gave me the "talk") and for more than a couple of years after that I was like "Holy crap, if I ever want to have a kid, I am going to have to do THAT first." (And also: "Holy crap, my parents did THAT twice, seeing as I have a brother.")

I don't know if I was just a weird kid or if this is a common thing.

I can roll my eyes and go "That's BS" to the old saying about "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels" (which is probably why I am 40+ pounds overweight)

I can't quite do the same about "no purchase feels as good as future financial security does," even though my faith in my doing everything "right" ensuring my future financial security has been severely shaken.

though if space aliens nuke us from orbit, I'll probably be dead before I have time to regret not having bought that fancy stereo equipment.

Sometimes I wonder if I bought in too much to the lessons of the marshmallow test. Every month these days, as I budget carefully so that a chunk of my paycheck goes into a TIAA/CREF account for a future retirement that may not even exist. (I could get hit by a car crossing the street, we could get nuked by space aliens, the government could decide to confiscate/"nationalize" those kinds of retirement accounts to prop itself up, a pandemic could come).

I don't know. I see people with fancy smartphones and expensive shoes and purses and newer cars than what I have (though my car is perfectly serviceable and I actually like it) and I wonder: are they the chumps, or am I?

Yeah, there are lots of issues with defining statutory rape. I see a 17 year old guy having sex with his 18 year old girlfriend (in a state where 18 is the hard age of consent) as being WAAAAAAAAAAY different from a (say) 32 year old woman preying on a 16 year old boy. Yet often they are treated the same and in some cases - especially if it's an 18 year old GUY having sex with a slightly-under-aged girlfriend, the guy gets stigmatized with a "sex criminal" label for life.

The "teacher student sex crimes" thing is in the news again because of a case in Houston. I admit these cases always make me feel vaguely ill. (I had a teacher - I was never one of the ones at risk and I only learned about it years after - who apparently preyed on several young-teen girls in his class. I don't want to boast about any kind of "spidey sense" here but I always did get a creepy vibe off him and tried not to be alone in the lab or classroom when he was around).

also, I am a college prof. You occasionally hear of cases of "sexual harassment" where profs and students get involved. It's not technically statutory rape because they're all over 18 but still it's creepy to me because of the power/authority imbalance there.

Yeah, the whole referring to your daughter as a "princess" things seems just weird to me. Maybe I came from a more bohemian/egalitarian family, I don't know. My parents would never have called me "Princess."

Then again, I was kind of a tomboy/nerd so maybe I didn't seem like the princess type. (Boring fact: I am more girly as an adult than I was as a child)

I wonder if princess culture is a more recent thing, or if I was just an oddball. When I was a kid I found the whole "princess" idea incredibly boring - your job was to look pretty, marry well, and produce heirs. Ugh. I preferred going out and catching frogs and getting muddy. Fortunately my parents were scientists so they were okay with that.

I think I would have made a better warrior princess than plain princess. (I joke now that I am a "worrier princess," which is closer to the truth)

That said, Queen Victoria is probably one of the more interesting British monarchs, in an historical sense. Still, I don't think I have the time to sit through the hours of a PBS docudrama.

I read about some drug that apparently decreased appetite/eating (I'm chunky not because I'm so very hungry, but because I tend to eat for emotional reasons). Problem was, it interfered with the brain's reward system, and a fair few of the drug-trial participants had to drop out because they became so anhedonic they developed serious depression.

I suspect that there are still some who's say "it's a fair tradeoff for being thin."

I read about that. My reaction was "faster, please" - I have four crowns because of old fillings (I was bad about brushing my teeth as a teen) and I've broken teeth requiring crowns.

(Some people would say the dental work is what I deserved for not taking better care of my teeth as a teen. But there are now a lot of things I either can't eat, or am not comfortable eating, lest I damage a crown. And I'm young enough that at some point the crowns will probably wear out, and then I don't know where I will be. Implants, I suppose, ugh.)

Ignorant question (in the sense of, I don't know because I have no experience with this): is age the only factor?

So, would a (say) 55 year old woman with X, but who otherwise strives to be healthful (eats right, exercises, doesn't smoke) and has close family connections get bumped out of getting treatment for X over a 25 year old woman who smokes, drives fast, doesn't exercise, and has no dependents?

I'm just kind of morbidly curious about this, as someone who tries to stay healthy but sees youth fleeing....

Same here. And I sometimes go days without eating meat in the sense of it being the flesh of an animal. (But I kind of consider cheese to be "honorary meat")

I eat fewer carbohydrates than I once did; that is largely related to the fact that I'm supposed to reduce sodium and most grocery store bread is pretty high in sodium. I know how to bake bread and I enjoy it, but at this point in my life I rarely have time for that.

And things like crackers and cookies are mostly off limits - a combination of weird sinus issues (echoey) and fragile teeth (I broke a tooth badly a couple years ago) makes me not want to eat anything hard and crunchy. (And I am suspicious that part of that whole thing is some weird phobia/ocd thing that started up about the same time as I broke the tooth)

yeah, I tried being a vegetarian a few times and I just wasn't *happy* on that diet. I need meat at least occasionally. (Local supermarket choices are uninspiring in the beef front, so I more often make do with chicken thighs)

And cheese. I could not be happy as a vegan because cheese.

I also find that eating a little more fat is better for me in a lot of ways than doing extreme low-fat.

I've given up on being "thin," I tend to now try to optimize my diet for "not dying too young" which means mostly limiting sugars and fake fats and getting lots of good nutrients. And eating things that make me happy once in a while, because living to 100 but being miserable doing it isn't worth it.

I tried a veggie-heavy diet (essentially, the DASH diet) when I was first diagnosed with hypertension.

My conclusion is that it's a YMMV thing. Eight to eleven servings of fruits and vegetables (mostly vegetables) in a day is no joke. I lost a little weight partly because vegetables are very calorie-sparse, but I also found they had, um, quite an effect on me.....I spent far more time in the bathroom than I wanted to....and my body didn't adapt. (I kept going "Damn you, gut flora, undergo ecological succession to cope with this!" but they didn't listen to me, I guess).

I can manage 5-6 servings of fruits and vegetables in a day, but more than that - I can't do. And some days I can't even do that, I seem to have a sensitive gut.

I've also concluded I will never be skinny and my doctor seems okay with me being a somewhat chunky woman who exercises and tries to eat healthfully rather than a thin woman who got that way through several grueling years of extreme calorie restriction (which is what getting down to a "normal" BMI from "overweight" would probably take me)

*golf clap*

(The less vs. fewer thing is one of those things that raises my hackles. Along with the folks who use "your" and "you're" as if they are interchangeable)

Oh, I totally agree on the "this isn't part of government's purview" and my argument back at the claim of "it makes insurance rates go up for everybody" was "maybe if the police knew there were lots of car thefts in that area, they might want to patrol it more or have a special task force out there"

It's kind of....to me, it's kind of like when some story comes out about credit card skimmers on gas pumps and the media says stuff like, "Oh, just go and pay INSIDE the gas station, don't use the outside credit card set ups." Maybe instead they come up with better ways of catching, or better prosecution of, the actual CRIMINALS instead of inconveniencing the law-abiding citizens. (and in some weathers, some situations, some locations - it might be less safe to hike up to the gas station office than to run the card from your car, and anyway, who's to say your card number won't be stolen from inside the store? I suppose the answer is "just use cash then" but that brings another set of problems).

The argument I saw was "the neighbors were upset because there have been car thefts and it makes THEIR premiums go up." which seems very busybodyish on the part of those neighbors to me.

I think it's more likely the PD and others were told "Find new sources of revenue" and this turned out to be a hare-brained scheme. Where I live - like where Will lives - this is a common, common thing. Not just in the winter; I have seen cars sitting in parking lots in the summer, running, their AC going, so they don't heat up while a person is in the store. I can only assume the person has more than one set of keys and has locked the car.

(I don't do it; I'm too cheap to burn gas that way. I'd rather just get into a hot car and deal with it the few minutes it takes to cool down)

Maybe it's even better than tunafish (the thing I have seen recommended). A colleague of mine was trying to catch ferals on his property, and he used live traps with tuna.

He wound up catching a skunk. (It turns out skunks aren't quite so hair-trigger to spray as you see in cartoons. I asked him what he did and he said, "Threw a towel over the trap so it couldn't see me and used a stick to open the door. It just walked out and ran away.")

Given my dealings of late with over-the-phone customer service, I'd be really, really leery about letting them drive a car for me with me in it. And that doesn't even presuppose "sleepy or not sober."

Biology #1 made me chuckle....isn't there an old Twilight Episode about some guy who supposedly dies at the same time as his dog, they show up at a place that looks like the Pearly Gates, and the dog refuses to go in? And of course it turns out that that place was actually The Other Place all along?

Bacteria fleeing bad water makes me think of that.

I have rental houses on either side of me. I am nice to the neighbors (in as much as I see them; they seem to leave for their jobs after I do and arrive back home after I do) but they change every couple months, so it seems hard to actually build much of a relationship.

I am assuming people would have to have a real investment in me and a real desire for whatever I could contribute to make me a part of their "tribe," and I just don't assume that would happen in a major-bad situation. I may be being needlessly pessimistic here, I just kind of see myself as someone who, by not marrying or having children and moving far from blood relatives, has kind of "edited themselves out" of any kind of clan. I figure people will do for family first, and then lifelong friends....and I am far from either.

I am civil to all, friendly to many, but I only have one or two people I would call "close friends."

I've made my peace with that. First, because a major-bad situation is pretty unlikely (I am talking of something of the Zombie Apocalypse variety) but second, because if it did, nearly 50 years is a pretty good run.

"I can insult the place because I live there, but don't YOU (outsider) dare do it"

That's an aspect in our culture I've seen as well. (Also applicable to sports franchises.)

I contemplated the need for a move last year when it looked like my job might become untenable (serious budget cuts). Books were one issue, I may well own as many as you do. The pain of buying and selling a house was the other one, especially since my house is older and small and has some deferred-maintenance issues. I was actually telling myself, "You need to divest yourself of half of your crap" but that was just painful to contemplate.

I think, given some horrific dystopian outcome, I'd be a lot more likely to bunker down (Canned goods. I have lots of canned goods) than actually leave.

The biggest issue with a true violent dystopia that I think would make it a moot point for me: I'm not part of a "tribe," really, here. I don't have a family. I don't have friends so close that I think they'd take me on as an extra mouth to feed even given that I'm strong and not afraid of manual labor. I'd be one of the leftover people without a tribe to help protect me. I'd probably wind up as cannon fodder in the first week, and you know? If civilization was totally shot to hell and wasn't coming back any time soon, I'd pretty much be OK with that. And anyway, it's my own damn fault as an extreme introvert for not trying to make myself part of a tribe, so....

That's it. There's stuff in my state that would make me crazy if I let it (and I just said to someone this week, in re: the state of small businesses/places that are not Wal-mart to shop at here, that were it not for my job and owning a house, I'd move). But most of the time I'm too busy with work or housework or hobbies or worrying about aging relatives to get too bent over what some idiot state senator said.

Maybe every society is actually a dystopia. That's what I'm beginning to suspect. I guess the answer is finding the dystopia least intolerable to yourself.

(And of course, Utopia is a cynical name, coming from a made-up but ancient-Greek-sourced word for "no place")

Yeah, but there was the one time when I got the sense of "You are voluntarily living THERE so therefore you must be suspect in some way...."

It was almost enough to make me state some extremely theologically-conservative position that I don't actually agree with, but then again - I don't like to lie.

I can see the stereotyping thing. I ALREADY see it when I travel (I live in what is, culturally, the South - I thought it was more Southwest-y when I moved here, but most people think of it as the South).

I once had someone sneer at me: "OMG, how can you LIVE there?" and my response was "My job is there, and there are actually a lot of good people there. And the cost of living is about half of what it is on the coasts." (I own a house here. Most other places I've lived I could not do that, or it would be in such a hell-hole of a depressed neighborhood that I'd be afraid to live there)

I dunno. My big concern would be having to take a passport and all my "papers" and crap (and maybe even get something like a visa) to go visit family. Or have to have an identity card to go shopping in what is now the next state but might someday be another country.