flicker

Practice.

If my boyfriend was wearing something that outrageous when I got home, I'd be delighted.

Me and my clone will be allies. I don't know if we could get along well enough to cohabitate, but we would definitely help each other.

I often shape and paint my nails and these things chip polish like nothing, so I'll use the teaspoon I have lying out from the last time I made tea, probably.

I've got fucking norovirus.

I wish we had a vaccine for that!

So again I'm basing this on myself. I think a healthy relationship doesn't necessarily require a lot of personal change. It requires healthy communication, it requires healthy compromise, but if you're compatible (and something of this comes with the maturity to understand who you are and what your needs are, versus your wants) then you can fit together well with the right person without needing to change who you are.

And I don't love the pairing of the concept of growing (as a person) to growing to be something, or someone, who fits someone else. When I grow as a person it's learning new skills or trying a new hobby, it's growing me. Not conforming myself to someone else.

Which is a very important distinction because I grew up with a narcissist for a mother and it made me very codependent, and I essentially lost my 20s to failed relationships spent learning that it isn't about making whoever I'm with happy, and it isn't about making myself better to them. It's about knowing who I am, and embracing that so I don't enter or stay in a relationship that isn't already a good fit.

I'm with someone now who had the same trauma. We've discussed these observations. We know who we both are, and we fit. And as we grow, individually, as we pursue knowledge and hobbies and help others, we communicate, we care for one another, and we continue to fit.

So again, I'm only pulling from my life experience, but I feel like anyone can settle down or find the right person. They just have to know who they are and what they want, and find someone else who knows who they are and what they want.

He looks so sad!

I have no idea what that means.

She's only a few years younger than I am and I only just now found someone to settle down with who makes me happy. Based on that and nothing else, I think she'll get there as long as she keeps trying.

I'm sure all those people who told us "that couldn't happen" will be along to explain how.

...Aaaany second now.

If I ever embrace my fate as a lonely housewife book author, I'm going to have a rough time, because the kind of people who would forever love me for producing my books and sharing them as free (with the option to donate) and the kind of people who buy lonely housewife books are two completely different circles and I wouldn't be able to spend all the time necessary to 'market' myself online to get the books in the hands of people who want them, if I'm trying to spend that time writing.

Maybe what we need is an apparatus. A website where authors can share full-size books, users can vote on them, and if you like them enough you can give money to those writers.

I just don't know how we'd get that, be able to allow any author to share their book, and still have quality control.

I haven't looked at or held or otherwise directly perceived a kindle in many years now, but when I did it was insanely easy to just pop any old file into a converter and slip that onto the kindle and pirate and read as you like. Did they put a stop to that with some proprietary nonsense?