I guess I’ll keep trying to get out of the house, despite my anxiety about that now. That way, the folks in my community will be able to say they personally know (of) at least one trans person, which will hopefully inspire them to oppose any anti-trans policies that come up.

I also want to be a role model for all the eggs out there who might otherwise be too scared to come out.

Sphygmomanometer

I’d say stage 4 is being the keystone attendee: if you don’t go, the whole thing falls apart. Even if you somehow manage to get out of the meeting, it has to get rescheduled because it “needs” your input. The meeting thus becomes inescapable.

Stage 5 is when everyone else realizes you’re in stage 4 and begins to cater to your availability and preferences. Obviously this is mostly theoretical.

A bus pass maybe, that way you can just get on and not have to fumble around paying the fare when you board.

Continuing with the analogy, even the honest attempts to fix Mondays are characterized as impractical, idle fantasies.

How about we don’t schedule critical meetings to start first thing Monday morning? Even if that’s the “only” time everyone can meet? And if it’s really the only time everyone has available, doesn’t that warrant questioning a bit?

Or what if we just start later on Mondays? And maybe we consider not offsetting it but working later on other days? 39-hour week? 36-hour week?

Side note: do I have this right? You can actually picture a time in the foreseeable future where you never have to use Excel again?

If so, I am soooo deeply envious of you :P

Already lots of great answers, but I’ll add a note about intentional barriers to exit.

Many services tend to make it easy to sign up and comparably more difficult to quit. So while people always can leave and take their business elsewhere, they might not have the motivation to do it. I imagine each additional click in a form deters more and more people. OP mentioned being unmotivated, and these barriers play into that.

It’s like wandering around in Ikea. You could use a map and chart out the fastest route to find what you need and get out. But it’s so much easier to follow the little path they draw out on the floor and look at everything, which makes you way more likely to impulsively buy something extra.

Me and my gf way back in the day trapped a stray kitten once.

It was living under a car. We put little piles of dry food out for it for a few days, gradually moving the pile further and further away from his hiding place. Then one day we made a little trail of food leading to a carry box that we filled with food. Once we heard it chomping away inside, we crept up and slammed the door shut. It felt like a scene out of a cartoon lol

Little thing freaked out and clawed at the door and cried for a while. But once we took it into the house and out of the summer heat, it was very happy.

Note, I am neither an experienced pet owner nor a trapper. I just like telling this story hehe

Edit: …what pronouns do you use for a kitten from decades ago whose sex you don’t remember?

My sense is it’s getting at “what’s an overated candy flavor”

I thought most hoes would be quite easy to plow

When referring to a difficult task: “That’s a tough road to hold”, or “a tough road to hoe”, or “a tough road to [travel on]” or “a tough road to… [trails off awkwardly…]”, or just “a tough road”.

It’s a tough row to hoe.

It’s an agricultural metaphor. The row is a line of dirt in a field where you plant seeds. You use a hoe to dig the lines, remove weeds, and create little holes where you drop the seeds. Hoeing may be difficult if the soil is too hard or too full of rocks and weeds. Such a row would be a tough one to hoe.

Whatever it was, I forgot what it was today

I swear a social studies teacher told us that most rivers tend to flow north to south. Young impressionable child I was, I of course filed it away as a long-term core memory – right there next to PEMDAS, FOIL, and so on.

Then I mentioned it in college and got fucking embarrassed.

I casually bicycle around town and like to see who I can keep up with to test how fast I am. More and more folks have ebikes now and it’s getting way less fun.

This thread surprises me. Excel is fine, but I’ve seen people do so many silly things with it that it makes me dread having to use it. It’s like they treat every cell as its own special little canvas… Oh, you wanna randomly change the date format from mm/dd/yyyy to dd-Mmm-yy mid-column? With Excel, anything is possible.

Maybe I just don’t work well with others.

Shout-out to all my homies who are tired all day, avoid screens before bed, read for a bit, journal, do mindful meditation, and take melatonin, but nonetheless lie in bed staring at their eyelids for 2 hours before slipping into a kind of restless unconsciousness that’s too long and groggy to be a nap but too short to be a refreshing night of sleep.

…maybe…

lol what about at the beginning, or what if i giggle in another way at the end hehe

I feel like I’ve never heard this before, ever.

Obama, Obamala, 'bamala, Kamala