HOAs say “ew no that’s for the poors” and good luck finding a house that’s not in an HOA within a reasonable commute to your job

In my neighborhood, he’d be technically following the rules, but I’d still be annoyed and mutter about morning people thinking they’re better than everyone else.

I think it’s a red flag because rushing you (without a valid, stated reason) is an attempt to override your instincts while pressuring you to take a certain action. Outside of safety-related situations, that kind of situation has never gone in my favor.

Others have already pointed out that we’re indoctrinated into the myths of American exceptionalism and rugged individualism from a young age. I very much agree, but those myths are only part of it.

That indoctrination, combined with our lack of safety nets, shows up as a hypercompetitive attitude. (“It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.”) We feel pressured to be the very best so we might earn the privilege of feeling secure and stable. Trash-talking and bragging are hamfisted attempts to portray high status.

If you look at our social injustice issues through that lens, the injustice makes a certain kind of disgusting, antisocial sense. One who’s internalized the hypercompetitiveness will look at someone lying in the middle of the ground in a public city and think: they just aren’t trying hard enough, they just couldn’t compete. We look to others’ misfortunes for reassurance that we’re good enough, that we’re at the front of the pack. To make oneself smaller, to put oneself second, becomes unthinkable. (“Second place is first loser.”)

Can you experiment with using nonverbal communication to signal that you’re ready to go? Things like:

• If standing, shift your feet so they’re pointing away from the person (if ineffective, can escalate by rotating the whole leg away, which you can then escalate by shifting more weight to the turned-away leg)
• If sitting, put your hands to your knees/lower thighs (think an extremely subtle version of the Midwest USA joke where you slap your knees and say “welp!”)
• If sitting at your desk, gradually begin rotating back to your work (gently swivel seat back so your legs are under the table, can escalate by rotating your torso back to your work while keeping only your head turned, and if they’re still super clueless you can return your hands to your keyboard/work as well)

It’s bizarre. I’ve taken my Adderall before a flight, so as not to disturb my neighbors, and then dozed right off as soon as takeoff was over. But give me coffee stronger than 1/10 caf, and I’ll be a goddamn menance.

For being a low-key menace. https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf

Because not paying your taxes will draw attention from what remains of the system. I’m not thrilled about paying taxes to the dead and looted corpse of our government, but it’s better to stay under the radar.

Not on purpose. I’ve found that making every effort to pass as normal is far more advantageous. If I have to choose between being treated like a child because I’m different vs. being disliked because people can tell I’m hiding something but not what that something is… well, I’ll take option B.

You discovered the problem in time, and you took her for prompt veterinary care. You absolutely deserve your pets!

The only thing more aggressively suicidal than a dog/cat is a human toddler. It’s impossible to stop your pets from getting into everything.

My cats have eaten more than their share of plastic, mainly because my natural state is “wasn’t there something in my hand a minute ago? Where could it be? And what could it possibly have been?! Ooh look I see snacks!” Luckily they’ve always horked it back up, but I worry that one day they won’t puke in time.

So, I try to be careful not to set down plastic, even going so far as to mutter, “Don’t open your hand. Go to the trash. Do NOT open your HAND. You are going to the trash. After that come back and <finish the thing>. DO NOT OPEN your stupid HAND! You are going to the trash can. Then go back and <finish the thing>. But first the trash can. But DON’T open…” and so on, for the entire time it takes me to throw the thing away and (ideally) return to what I was doing.

It takes enormous effort to keep the house perfectly safe. Making housekeeping my hobby didn’t work well for me. So instead I know my pets and their normal behaviors, keep a good pet insurance policy, and call the vet when there’s anything weird that’s taking too long to resolve.

You’re giving your pets a much better life than they’d have at the shelter. So, yes, you DO deserve them, and they deserve you.

A pill organizer, if the original containers are too large (or too numerous) to be practical. I’ve only flown domestic USA, but security has never bothered me about it.

Elder Millennial here. I think I just have that “eww pedostache” reaction because, when I was young, such mustache styles were common among middle-aged men who hadn’t updated their styles since the '80s. Some of those men were creepy, so the mustache style became associated with creepy old men. And of course, teenaged giggling among ourselves about “eww pedostache!” really cemented the association.

I’m pretty sure our parents had the same initial reaction when we brought aviator glasses back into fashion. We’ll get over it, the cycle continues.

I’ve had good and bad experiences with mostly-male and mostly-female groups. I think it has less to do with the actual gender of the group, and more to do with: (a) the manner and extent to which group members are invested in performing their gender, (b1) whether the group embraces deviation from that performance, or (b2) whether one’s own performance of gender is similar enough to the group’s.

I’ve often described myself as “not very good at being a woman.” My weirdness and difficulty with hidden meanings has gotten me shunned by fellow women and usually bullied out of all-female groups, particularly when I was young. But as I discovered a few years ago after adopting a more active lifestyle, I get along fantastically with most women who play sports.

All-male groups were usually not much better. I still had to keep LARPing a persona, it’s just that the “cool girl” persona came easier to me. The main advantage was that mostly-male groups didn’t tend to say one thing while meaning the opposite. (For example, “stay as long as you like” actually means “you should probably go home now” and that is absolutely nonsensical to me.) But all-male groups never accepted me either, so the best case scenario meant being tolerated instead of shunned.

When it comes to work environments, it’s only been women who played the game of psychologically tormenting me until I have a breakdown and quit (although one of those was a woman boss in a mostly-male small office). So mostly-male groups have been somewhat better because I usually don’t have to waste as much brainspace on LARPing the correct persona. I still tended to be treated more as a tagalong or novelty, though, and gender isn’t a guarantee of future behavior (for example, one of my current coworkers is a man who politicks like a woman).

I still don’t like vertical videos. My natural field of view is landscape and portrait feels crowded and stressful. Also vertical videos have to be watched 2-3 times to see everything, because the person filming has to pan the camera so much, and they usually move too quickly. It’s like everyone forgot that a phone can be rotated.

press X to doubt

I can’t forage for missing sunglasses that are right in front of my stupid fucking face. My dumbass would be bringing back half a handful of poison berries like “This is all I could find and I have no memory of picking them but they probably didn’t come from the poison bush I guess.”

I have similar opinions about the “iT’s nOt a diSoRdEr iTs mOdErN sOciEtY” thing that’s going around lately. Even if we lived in a utopia, I’d still be expected to listen when others speak, cook without burning myself or the food, speak without repeating myself, speak in a way that makes sense to others, keep appointments, read and comprehend instructions, transport myself from place to place without injury or forgetting necessary items…

According to my urogynecologist, who specifically instructed me to always point my shower wand downward when washing my nethers, spraying water can indeed push bacteria up there!

It may only be dangerous for the subset of women who have problems requiring a urogynecology specialist in the first place, IDK, but better safe than sorry.

It’s pretty common for people with ADHD to be able to play video games for a long time, because games are designed to make the brain pump out dopamine.

Up to you whether to get an assessment, ofc, but time blindness is a really common symptom. Your OP and others’ responses sounded really familiar to me.

Example, I recently had an argument over what a habit is. The other party claimed it’s something you do without thinking about choosing it, like muscle memory. Which I still insist is bullshit because everyone knows a habit is when you feel weird not doing the task, and the urge to avoid the wrong feeling makes you remember the task and outweighs the urge to be lazy. (Apparently this isn’t how it works for normal people?)

Have you considered getting evaluated for ADHD? (One of us, one of us!)

I was also expected to be very quiet and perfectly behaved, and have also struggled with resentment toward rowdy children as a result. Even now, at 39 years old, I sometimes want to retaliate with an Aztec death whistle.

Therapy can be really helpful in learning to deal with that resentment. If possible and reasonable, so can talking about it with your parent(s).

Several years ago I said to my mother, “I’m feeling angry right now because I’m thinking about that loud kid we saw in the store today and remembering how I had to repress myself as a child.” Then we had a really productive conversation about the pressure to defy stereotypes about poor parents, being a parent with unrecognized and unsupported neurodivergence, and sensory issues.

I hope you’re able to dissolve a significant amount of your resentment, too. In the meantime, there’s a kind of reusable earplug that reduces noise just a little bit so you can still have a conversation (can’t remember the brand name though).

I’d like to piggyback on this question and ask: if the bidet is in the toilet bowl, doesn’t it get dirty while you’re shitting?