Ten pounds of personality in a five-pound bag
I am blatantly stealing this from a friend on the Internet.
This is maybe a hot take (or perhaps a deep dive? or philosophizing a little?) but I think sometimes, people use the word “cool” as shorthand for “knows and embraces fully who they are,” which I think is mostly true for all of us here, even as we continue down the endless journey of knowing ourselves. And that, for sure, can be intimidating for peeps who are still learning to accept themselves (flaws and all), etc.
I know the original will probably get deleted, so I’m just going to paste this here.
The original context was a young woman asking for relationship advice when her boyfriend wanted to have sex and she wasn’t ready yet.
Assuming that you are in your early 20s (as listed in your other post)
If you want to remain a virgin and your boyfriend wants a relationship with sex, then you are not compatible, and yes the relationship will probably end.
> I kind of like being a virgin
> it’s not even like “oh I’ll be ready soon,” I genuinely don’t know when I’ll be ready
You may be asexual.
> how do you even know when you’re ready? it’s not something you can undo
There was a time I had never tried Thai food, and then I tried it and realised I liked it, so now I eat Thai food regularly. I don’t think about “who I was before I had Thai food”, it’s not like I lost anything by having a new experience.
But if you don’t want to have sex and you don’t think you ever want to have sex, you should tell prospective partners that you’re asexual. It means “I don’t want sex” vs “I just haven’t tried it yet.”
The Thai food metaphor, in particular, I find very apt. Sex isn’t particularly special; it can be risky; it can carry extra religious or cultural weight; but in the end, it’s just another experience, one that you are free to try or not try, as you wish.
My hot take for today is that fiscal conservatism is incompatible with social conservatism. It’s expensive to police people that hard.
It should actually be illegal to advertise a job as “entry level” and require any amount of work experience for it.
That’s not what entry level means!
That’s it, that’s the post.
https://bsky.app/profile/kenjennings.bsky.social/post/3mbuedepurs2x
No doom.
Go to bed, Emily.
Call your Senators tomorrow.
I realized today that a big part of why I never got into fanfic is that so much of it is so poorly edited I can’t get through it.
I almost put down ACOTAR because of “parameter” on page 1. I’m not exaggerating. (I instead got out a pen and corrected it.)
I read Manacled because the text was, by and large, legible. I bounced hard off another fanfic my friends recommended because it was not.
And I want to be clear: being like this does not make me morally superior. It just makes me someone who needs the writing to be basically invisible in order to suspend disbelief and immerse myself in the story. Poorly edited copy takes me out of that world as I try to figure out what the author was trying to say (usually by converting the letters into sounds in my head to guess what the homograph or malapropism was supposed to be).
I wonder if this is related to how, when I hear a word, my brain converts it into the visual “word on a page” in my head?
Short opinion.
I think that the reason people treat blocking (on social media) as this Horrible Unforgivable Crime is that to them, social media feels like real life; and in real life, Shunning and Ostracism are genuinely punishments for horrible crimes.
But the Internet is not real life.
My half-baked hypothesis is that people think this way because young adults right now had their formative years during COVID, when things forced us online much more than even the most dysfunctional people, and it exacerbated and accelerated a lot of already-bad social trends.
Being wrong is a skill that can be practiced. It takes a lot of effort and awareness to be able to just shut up and step off.
Practicing “Oh, I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective” or “I’m going to step back and think about this for a while, thank you” is a really useful thing to have in your social skills backpack.
My thought of the day: high-control religions are likely to produce high-control apostates.
If you grew up with an extremely rigid and strict religion in your upbringing, you’re very likely to carry that forward into adulthood.
This explains people who leave the Church, and then insist that everyone who stays in the Church is obviously buying into every single interpretation that they themself believed. And it explains people who leave the Church and become, essentially, Fundamentalist Atheists. (This latter was very common during the ascent of the Four Horsemen of Atheism. All the online discourse about “Magic Sky Daddy” or “Sky Fairy” came from this kind of attitude.)
In reality, religion is a product of humans, and humans are varied and mutable. Someone can be a member of a religion you dislike without necessarily espousing every aspect of that religion that you dislike.
If you have left a high-control religion: that is okay. Just try to moderate your reactions to other people’s beliefs, and really analyze why you assume certain things about them.
I think the marker for middle age and/or maturity is “when you start having opinions about Bradford Pears.”
Emilybook 