I find confrontation pretty difficult, and I force myself to be direct and assertive about my needs and wants with my husband, because he deserves it. A common mistake I made in previous relationships was bottling up things I didn’t like, but that leads to resentment every time. I understand the value of communicating openly with him, even if it feels like I’m not being “chill” enough and he is receptive to it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not hard.

My husband has a similar problem with talking about his preferences, because he was always taught that they’re secondary to his partner’s. He finds it difficult to tell me that he wants to spend time on solo activities, but I encourage him to practice his hobbies. Even though he knows I’m happy for him to decompress however works for him and to engage in the things that bring him joy, he still struggles against himself to do it, for us.

I make decisions differently because of our marriage (I have pretty significant executive dysfunction, so these might not sound like struggles to others, but they certainly have been for me)- where I previously might have just eaten lentils in a lean month, I now push myself to work more to support us. Where I used to write papers in a 48 hour frantic dash, now I start earlier and make sure I can allot breaks for meals with him and a regular sleep schedule (we live in basically a studio apartment, so keeping the computer on makes it hard for him to sleep). Where I would have left laundry hanging on the drying rack basically until I wore it again, I now force myself to put it away as soon as it’s dry (again because of the space issue).

I don’t think the marriage certificate itself caused these changes, but knowing that we’re in it for the long haul changed how I think about my relationship with my husband. I realized that I needed to work on myself to become the partner he deserves, but other people might be able to get to that mindset without the permanence of marriage. I just wasn’t and didn’t realize it until it changed.

Each of those changes is a positive one imo, even without considering their effects on our marriage, and we’re both improved for having married each other. That’s not even addressing the joy of being able to fully relax with the knowledge that your partner loves, accepts, and supports you, and will stay with you, even if things get difficult.

I don’t have the equipment for a nighttime emission, but the only sex dreams I’ve ever had were with partners that I felt really weird about in the morning. They include: a friend of mine, a different friend’s dad, and Mikhail Gorbachev. I don’t want to fuck any of them.

People are talking about how smartphones didn’t have those features at first, but I just carried around a 2 language dictionary when I was traveling before cellphones were a thing. I’m not sure if they’re exactly the same everywhere, but I also always found reading an atlas/map to transfer pretty easily from one country to another (across North America and Europe, so there could be much greater variation in the world than I saw).

It sounds harder and it was, but only a little. You already knew how to read maps and at least you didn’t have to worry about a battery.

The problem is when my memes only appeal to DaZ learners. German speakers think they’re dumb (they are, I’m just getting started on German puns, so they’re like little kids’ jokes) and non German speakers don’t get them. I don’t mind being the only one to think I’m funny, but sometimes I get genuine joy out of puns that I would like to share, if only there were an audience

Example (Edit: my lazy ass didn’t even want to make a meme to illustrate this, so you just get the description of it): seit dem Seifenmassakre hat sich alles geändert. Jetzt hab ich Albträume und reagiere auf Seifenblasen unangemessen. Zu mindest muss ich kein Duschgel mehr kaufen.

Es ist wahr, ich werde jetzt für immer Schauma haben

Translation (important notes at the end): everything changed since the soap massacre. Now I’ve got nightmares and a disproportionate reaction to soap bubbles. At least I don’t ever have to buy shower gel again.

It’s true, I’ll always have Schauma from now on.

Note: the word for foam in German is Schaum, trauma is the same, Schauma is a shower gel brand, and all I can think of when I see it is dogs having nam flashbacks to being washed

You love to see an Octavia Butler reference

“A bad area of Boston”

Dudes from Lowell.

Edit for context: Lowell is well known for dr. Seuss, an old mill, and a giant folk art festival.

Any worry or anxiety he has is all about helping himself out, nothing to do with the country.

Not disagreeing, but it seems like he’s in some way indebted or beholden to Putin, and I’ll grant that that’s got to be terrifying. Especially given that he’s becoming less and less helpful a person to keep around as his popularity sinks and his influence shrinks.

If that was a typo and you mean international, then certainly for Spanish speaking, African, and nearby countries as well as china (which is all we could manage at that time, though we probably would have aggressed Europe as well if we could have). If you’re talking about domestic, then yes if you weren’t the right kind of Christian white man.

Before WWII was also very bad

I’m just naming famous people with mommy issues. Liza Minnelli’s also on the list. It’s… not a good list

Unfortunately, it’ll just kill their kids

They will ask that, but there’s often space to explain because of things like this and political prisoners. I’m not sure how Canada’s forms work and if he was convicted of something closer to selling multiple pounds to minors than simple possession*, that probably wouldn’t fly no matter what, but it’s definitely worth a shot.

*intent to sell is also determined very differently in different countries- in Germany, for example, having a scale stored with your supply or having multiple strains of weed in separate bags would not bump you up to intent to sell, but it does in the US

Doritos did actually buy Taco Bell, in a sense.

Edit: that link still makes you do some digging, but here’s the Taco Bell part

Even a country where weed is legal?

Your point stands, but 2019 was more than five years ago

Merkel famously hated Putin. They worked together, for better or for worse, but she did not personally like him. She has a phobia of dogs and he’s a dog lover, which she would have obviously been fine, but he brought a large dog to one of their meetings after her office had requested otherwise, which she felt was an attempt to intimidate her.

I’m pretty sure it’s The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, here’s an excerpt with the kangaroo story.

They didn’t fall off the cruise ship, but off of a container ship nearby.

Sixteen containers fell from a cargo ship near the Nab tower lighthouse off Bembridge, Isle of Wight, at around 6pm on Saturday.

The cruise ship is stuck because the container ship needs to recover the containers to protect the environment (and they don’t explicitly say, but moving a cruise ship through the harbor will kick up sediment and might damage the containers).

I mean, ideally they want to stay.

It’s not evenly split, it’s $50/week for each week worked between 2021-2024, up to ~$7,700/worker.

It’s still not enough. Especially because that’s roughly equivalent to 200 minutes of minimum wage pay for NYC.