jaycifer

Driving straight through a stoplight from the right turn lane. There’s this intersection where I live that looks like this:

Most people going straight through that intersection want to take the exit right after to hop on a freeway. Twice now I’ve dealt with people following the red line from the right turn lane, forcing everyone else to merge around them to take the exit.

I see what you’re saying and I know you didn’t ask for advice, but putting “rugged” and “brave” in quotation marks could have conveyed that patronization.

Thank you for creating self-worth content!

A couple years ago I was moving my dad cross country back to the city where our family lives because my stepmom was separating from him after a couple years of his heavy alcoholism. When I got there he had been drinking again so I had to call my uncle to fly over last minute so he could drive the uhaul and I could drive my dad’s car with him in it.

Just past Louisville on the way to Indianapolis he said he was feeling funny and seeing light. I was a little concerned and I don’t remember what I said, I just remember him saying “okay, I trust you.” A minute later he looked at the corner of the car, said “oh my water,” while reaching for a cup that wasn’t there, and his seizure started. I don’t remember exactly why I didn’t immediately pull over to the shoulder, instead I sped up to get ahead of my uncle and take the next exit. My dad was already secured in place by his seatbelt, but it seemed like he choking on something, so I had to bang his chest with my fist a couple times while yelling “breathe dammit!” That worked, but he wasn’t conscious.

I pulled over, got in a travel center parking lot right next to the exit, felt lucky because I saw the uhaul pulling in behind me, and ran around to get at him. He started to come to and I dredged up my one first aid class from high school to check his memory/mental state. He could answer my general questions about the current year, president, etc. but then he looked around and asked why his dog and my uncle were there as they got out of the now parked uhaul. It appeared that his memory of the past couple days was messed up. I called my stepmom and she said that sort of thing had happened before.

I guess he hadn’t gone to a hospital after his withdrawal seizures in the past so we decided to continue to Indianapolis, monitor him, and go to a hospital there if something more happened. I was very disconcerted by his lack of memory for the last couple days, but like half an hour later he referred to something recent and after asking his recollection had returned at least to some degree.

There weren’t any other health issues beyond him feeling like shit, so we were able to make it the rest of the way home the next day after crashing at a hotel.

Yeah, that crossed my mind, but I do think there’s a difference. US corporations shoot themselves in the foot to pursue short term profits because the people in charge believe they can get out of the business with that profit before those decisions come back to bite them.

In the show though, they’re doing the opposite. They’re giving up their short term profitable corporations for some nebulous future “market monopolization” in the long term, despite there no longer being a market for them to monopolize. I think that makes them even more stupid.

Great, here I was about to say I thought the Habsburgs were Austrian, and now I have the Wikipedia page open for Habsburg Spain open. Thanks a lot, both sarcastically and unironically.

This is semi-related so spoilers for the Fallout show: this right here is the reason I stopped being invested in the plot of Fallout. When they revealed that Vault Tec dropped the bombs that created the post apocalyptic setting I was dumbfounded. I can accept silliness and characters being nonsensical sometimes, but in that moment every person in that room was proven to be outright stupid. They tried to say that it would let them “corner the market” in the aftermath, but how could they not see that they were destroying their own marketshare too?

“I can’t even feel the pain anymore!” 🥲

Here are some thoughts based on past reflections I’ve had (so they might not be phrased the best) in no particular order:

First, you mentioned sometimes not understanding what is being said. I minored in philosophy during college, and the first and most important thing I was taught during Intro was the principle of charity during discussion, composed of two parts. The first, assume the other person has something worth saying, isn’t super relevant here. But the second part is that questions of meaning come before questions of truth. If you can repeat back what the other person tells you in your own words and have them agree, then you can start forming a rebuttal.

Speaking of forming things, I believe that the thoughts you express are not your thoughts, but a linguistic representation of your thoughts. When I envision a thought forming, it’s more like a glowing ball of thought and words can be put together to form a kind of shell around the thought. The better the wording, the closer the shell gets to matching the shape of the thought itself. Improving your English toolset will allow you to better shape your words to match your thoughts more quickly and easily. The primary way to do this is to expand your vocabulary/lexicon/internal thesaurus and ability to connect words together, and the primary method to accomplish that is to expose yourself to new words in new orders, and you do that by reading new stuff.

All that is just the prep work. In an actual conversation you don’t have the luxury of reading a bunch right now. My advice there is that, if the other people are cool, be upfront that you are still formulating your thoughts into words and ask for help in finding the right ones if your struggling. Doing so will leave less space in the minds of others to assume anything else, likely leading to not just more patience from them but possibly help for you as well.

I think the process of forming thoughts into words is one of the most fascinating things there is. The times when I have observed myself pulling an original thought out of the ether of my mind or better yet being able to help someone else in pulling their thoughts out of their head and into the world are some of the most beautiful moments I have experienced. I wish you well in working on your ability to find those moments!

Vanilla is my favorite smell. Back in college when my buddy went to Mexico and brought back cup souvenirs for friends, he didn’t get one for me. Instead he gave me a big bottle of fancy vanilla. I kept that thing at my computer desk and every so often for the next couple years I’d pop it open and take a big rip of the smell just to feel a little more alive. It was so great.

In our friend group slack we do a purge every couple years or so to cut down the member size, so they could have been doing something similar. But we also send at least an @everyone notification to give folks a chance to say they want to stay, and it sounds like they didn’t do that here.

Ah man, Pacific Coast Highway is one of my favorite synthwave songs from when I was getting into the genre. That sucks. Rest in peace.