I should clarify, it’s not your fault you know these things, but he needs to learn that enough bosses won’t be understanding that he should learn to curate the aspects of himself that he professionally displays.

Having good and amicable professional relationships is awesome. My coworkers know that I’m into bicycles, they don’t know that the bike shop I volunteered at was explicitly anarchist. They know I’m married, they don’t know I’m polyamorous. He needs to learn to find a level of sharing that can keep him safe, because elsewhere in the thread you mention he’s on the verge of disciplinary action.

You seem to have professional boundaries as well, and I think that yours are totally reasonable. A friend of mine is a manager of software developers and she has similar boundaries to you with her subordinates (she describes her job as basically being a kindergarten teacher for adults), but if you have to discipline John, that closeness will bite back.

And it’s good that they seem to actually be on good terms with each other, though she still may have given him the old pocket veto.

Have a conversation with John, make it clear you aren’t disciplining him, but attempting to help him in his career, because this oversharing is going to fuck him hard someday if he doesn’t get it under control. It’ll be a lot easier of a pill to swallow from a boss he likes and respects than from one who brings in HR on his first week. He should know you’re doing this specifically because you think he’s a good guy and you want what’s best for your subordinates.

For what it’s worth it sounds like you quite like this lady and like nothing you do is going to avoid a mess, so yeah have fun with that. I don’t think John is going to avoid pain here. Both from what you described of that crush and from what you’ve described of him possibly needing a PIP. It sucks, and it really sucks for you. But fr, act like he didn’t tell you about Jane and pretend you forgot. It’s probably the only winning move here even if it sucks. Well, that and posting follow ups. Posting follow ups as things continue is the ultimate winning move.

To answer your title: don’t shit where you eat.

Jane sounds lovely, and based on what you’ve said, it’s unwise but not wrong to go for her. Dating a coworker is shitting where you eat, but it’s usually mild.

John seems like a good kid, but he needs a conversation about professionalism. He put you in an uncomfortable situation by telling you he’s romantically interested in a coworker who’s been hitting on you. You probably shouldn’t know he’s a furry either. Hell, you shouldn’t know he’s so unhappy he’s looking for other work. He sounds neurodivergent, and that’s cool, but non judgementally, he needs to be aware that that level of openness with coworkers can cost jobs and possibly even risk sexual harassment claims.

Like let’s remove the you and Jane leg here. A generic friend of yours is telling you that he thinks he screwed up, he told his boss that the only reason he’s still working there is because he’s trying to date the head of another department. He’s asked her out, but nothing seems to have come of it, but it’s ok, they’re friends. Somewhere in this conversation he mentions that everyone at work knows about his mental health struggles and that he’s in therapy. How fucked do you tell your friend he is? Because I’ll say this, I’d be terrified that friend is misreading the situation with the woman, she’s afraid to say no (if they were actually friends he wouldn’t need to see her at work to pursue her), and she’s afraid to turn him down directly lest he hurt himself. And barring all that, he’s still given them reasonable cause for firing. That’s not necessarily the situation or even the most likely scenario, but it’s a plausible one.

I’m sympathetic to John. At my first few jobs when I was his age I was far too open about myself and my life. I never hit on coworkers, but otherwise relatable. It fucked me hard, and I really benefited when I learned to create a professional boundary and barriers.

Also, figure out your liability in all reasonable scenarios. Not from strangers on the internet. If John’s advances on Jane are unwelcome are you going to be in trouble for knowing and not reacting.

Also the years you lose/gain don’t come from the end, they come from wherever you are now. If you’re 30 and start exercising you feel better and younger longer in addition to living longer, the inverse if you decide to start smoking.

As a tall lady, yeah my short ex was way stronger than me. Like, I’m generally pretty strong, but she was built like a longshorewoman. And yeah she was vicious and scrappy.

Hell adolescence to 32 is pushing green into purple territory. At a certain point you have to just accept that early adulthood involves a lot of growth, maturing, and continued development.

That sounds so nice. I’m currently in a wall of awful about trying to find a new adhd psychiatrist after changing insurance because I’ve been so mistreated by so many psychiatrists over the years.

Lol yep. Fun perk of being 5’11"

Eh more like that decision was the supreme court’s version of a valet standing around and saying “ahem” before taking your car away

Assuming they’re Americans talking, it’s basically impossible to get convicted of defamation against a politician here. Like, it’s genuinely impressive that Candice Owens is managing it. It requires you make statements that are defamatory to them, presented as clear statements of fact, and display reckless disregard for the truth. And in edge cases courts tend to lean with free speech over defamation. That’s just for any public figure, for politicians the courts are even more cautious to avoid chilling political speech.

That would be good, and in line with Plains Sign Language’s legacy. It was created as a trade language and adopted by the deaf. That said, sign languages are living languages and without much mass communication in them they drift pretty hard and fast. All said Plains would be a really cool choice, but French Sign Language (LSF) would probably be the most practical choice.

So yeah, if everyone could agree on a sign language to learn, my deaf ass is in.

And teachers. And authority figures in general. My favorite is when psychiatrists aren’t understanding of adhd behaviors

Idk I’m pretty sure that’s the trauma associated with growing up/living with adhd.

Also it’s not that I didn’t do anything wrong or forgot anything, it’s that I have no idea if I did. I could be sitting around having completely forgotten to pay rent until the landlord angrily calls.

I’m all for returning fire in the class war, I just really don’t want everyone the populist right accuses of pedophilia to get attacked, because that’s everyone.

That really relies on their ability to accurately identify a pedo. The moral panic in which people are being called pedos for anything and nothing is still going on even though we have learned that the Epstein conspiracy was huge and horrible.

Now if they only targeted the people heavily present in the files, yeah probably they’d be seen as heroic

Yeah, he doesn’t even understand how to hit up a divorcee. You don’t tell her she’s young, you tell her that she’s aged like a good scotch, gaining complexity to be cherished by those who understand the value of it. That the subtle sweetness one finds in vanilla notes are much better than that of a saccarine drink for a 21 year old.

He wishes he was president of a thriving country in a thriving time. He will likely never get over the fact that he isn’t JFK but is instead Hoover (for any non Americans, Hoover is the one who really fucked up the great depression in remarkably similar ways). FDR was the sort of man who could not only get that divorcee into bed, but get her to stop living so damn self destructively while doing so, and it begins with an honest appraisal of the situation and seeing the value underneath anyways. Donald Trump has never been someone capable of doing that with anyone or anything.

And yeah, the scotch line has worked for me.

“If mr president says it’s raining then that’s why my leg is wet!” /s

For real though I strongly agree with the thesis here. Don’t give the carney (as in carnival person, not the Canadian politician) a stage, and especially don’t give the clown a respected stage unless you want him to use it to mock the stage and all it stands for. Trump revels in public speaking and direct attention, and he hates writing outside tweets. Hell, congress can openly rebutt and fact check a written state of the union.

The institutions and norms are broken. That’s bad, but you don’t fix a damaged deck by replacing the broken part of one board and painting over the other damage, you check the structures and you replace anything that might be damaged, and you try to make it able to resist what happened. The wood of our deck grew soft after incomplete repairs to damage and people kept jumping on it and stabbing it trying to break it for a long time, then this jackass showed up with an axe swearing he’d fix it. Now it’s partly on those who let him try, but there’s a lot of damage to fix and we really need to take this opportunity to do that and fix some errors in the initial designs that seemed good at the time

Yeah I have a friend who’s really into the bronze age, and I just think it’s fascinating how the stories we tell and the ways we reinterpret stories says so much about us. Fiction is a tool to share our values and ideas in a palatable and entertaining way, even if we don’t mean to do so.

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I could never go down on her, I’d just keep getting distracted by the cute snakes

Also within mythology different people completely change the story to fit their narratives. There are stories of Medusa where she’s just an ancient monster from before the Olympian age.

Also to add to your bit about the Amazons, it’s likely that they were just the mythologization of the people of the Eurasian steppes such as the Scythians. They had a lot less divisions in gender than the Greeks including female warriors and leaders. To the Greeks that’s the same as a society completely run by women who are “less of women” where men are subjugated (though be aware, I’m telling this story, and that right there was a parallel I threw in to compare the Greeks to modern anti feminists, just like how bits of mythology got tweaked as they entered new cultures and contexts). But yeah Tomyris of Scythia is said to have killed Cyrus the Great of Persia. And the Romans continued the Greek tradition of accusing any society where women could hold the same power as men of being a matriarchy totally comparable to their patriarchy, something we have no evidence of ever being a thing historically.