I am kinda like this - I don’t usually ask for things unless I NEED them. If it’s just a request that a no is fine for, feel like I need to make that clear. Like if my hands are full, “could you open the door” but if I have a hand free but am wrangling the dog, “do you think you could open the door, I can if you can’t, I just want Dog to sit while you go in and then while I go in” I do feel like I have to explain it’s not a demand.

Recess. I can’t nap, and am not hungry, but a break is always welcome.

Absolutely not. There is one TV and it is in the living room. We actually have two ‘living rooms’ (spaces that are not bathroom, bedroom, or kitchen) and if it was up to me the TV would be in the secondary one, farthest from kitchen and bedroom. I do sometimes like to watch TV but don’t want it in my face all the time, and think living room looks better without one. But everyone else wants it in the bigger living room, which also holds the kitchen.

I am from the US and went to England for school one year. In the lunch line here, if there is a choice, you ask for it and say thank you, like “Carrots and potatoes” then “thank you!”. But in England they said no, that is rude. It’s “carrots and potatoes, please.” Then “thank you” when you get them. Needed both just to be minimally polite.

I AM polite with my kids, I model it but don’t demand it really. They catch on fine. I have friends and relatives who made their kids “yes sir” and “yes ma’am” them. I don’t think that’s cool. I told my kids to ma’am and sir wait staff, cashiers and teachers but not family, it does seem almost cheeky, somehow, to be too polite with family.

My mom worked as a university professor, then advisor, and what she said about college was “it just shows a prospective employer that you can follow rules and commit to doing something for a few years and follow through on it. That’s why they want the degree. Also cuts down on applicants, fewer to sort through.”

So, from someone on the inside, she didn’t think the main reason was education, in terms of specific jobs. I know in accounting I don’t use so much of what I learned and that’s a pretty specific degree. Anyone with a mind for numbers & systems could be trained on the job to do what I do.

Health, I would like health until I die (I suppose that’s a limit in a way but I wouldn’t want it to keep me alive forever. Just unlimited health for a lifetime)

Money would be the most useful I think. It would be so nice to never worry about it.

Cat yes, dog no. Dogs seem more comfortable with rules, and I don’t like them in the bed. So I train them not to and we are both ok with that.

Cats I can’t control, but they tuck in easily and don’t take up much space, they are kinda relaxing to have in the bed.

Same rules for the couch. So relaxing to have a cat next to me, purring. Dog at feet, or sometimes we get a chair for them, so they can sit up high like us.

Rainbows.

Radio. Radio is magic.

The only time I saw my kids afraid of me, I was glad of it, it was the younger two, they had been fighting with each other and called me at work to complain about each other and I told them I was coming home, by the time I got there they had decluttered the room and were sitting at the table across from each other, calmly.

I’m not sure what they thought was going to happen. But it made them stop fighting and work together.

In general they are not, certainly they tell me anything (stuff I would never have discussed with my mom) so I know they trust me, and I don’t just love them I like them, and they seem to like me. It’s sad when parents think respect comes from fear, it most certainly does not.

Anxiety does lie. I’m not saying your mom wouldn’t hurt you, but you can’t trust an anxious mind, it can distort things. The fear comes first then looks for a cause to pin it on.

Night, to get into bed clean. I am a cool sleeper and live in a hot and steamy climate. Only shower in the morning if I need to wash my hair, so twice a week or so.

But are none of the streets long enough to end up with a 1867, or whatever?

I am not good with left and right, mostly orient myself in the world using north, south, east, west and it is oddly disorienting to be on the diagonal road, my mind keeps wanting to think of it as a north-south road. Until I can FEEL it I keep saying it. The corners of the house are the compass points. My work office right now also is set diagonally like that!

May I ask a question about German addresses? Here, they go up and up as you move out from the center of town - we have a zero/zero, so to speak, at one corner, and if you live at 100 N, you are one block north of center. So if you are 100 blocks north of center you live at 10000. I lived at 1500 E on 15th St I’d be 15 blocks away in two directions from that central point.

Our German addresses are always like 6, never a big number. How?

Our house is on a slanty road and I’ve never lived on one before, my mind rejects it. The CORNERS of the house point in cardinal directions. It’s because we are near a river, some of the streets in my neighborhood follow its course, which right here runs southwest.

I just have to stop and think every time. Because I have only stayed on N-S or E-W roads my mind thinks our walls ought to be along those lines. I have to point at the corner and say NORTH out loud more often than you’d think.

I am not at all nostalgic for high school, it was a nightmare. Don’t know anyone in real life who thinks it was a good part of their life.

It’s a common setting for stories from all over, though. Coming - of - age stories are eternally popular. And here, kids are in high school as they transition from child to adult, so that’s where many of those stories are set.

I don’t think I am, particularly. More like I am finally in a place where I can make principled choices - kids grown, stable living situation, working, feeling mentally settled, not as anxious or struggling as before. Like from this more privileged space I can avoid more of the bad choices that I might have made out of desperation.

Lemmy I just like because it’s smaller and not corporate. Reddit was like that once too. I don’t find it inconvenient to be on this platform.

I have a garden with vegetables, one with flowers, a few fruit trees and a maple, some elderberry trees. And a mowed space in front and in back. I guess technically it’s a lawn but we don’t water it or put any fertilizer or chemicals, just keep it mowed. We throw clover seeds out on bare patches but weeds mostly take over. It grows, we mow.

It doesn’t last forever though - it breaks down, and gets mold. I cannot understand it at all. What a mess. Like landscape fabric. Something to enjoy for a year and regret for ten years afterwards as it breaks down and you keep finding bits of it.

Even in places that aren’t as humid and alive as our subtropical steam room here, under ideal conditions maybe 10 year life on that plastic carpet of grass. All the time it’s shedding plastic into the world.

My mom always just mowed whatever grew in the yard and called it “grass” and that’s all I have ever done. Mow the weeds, who cares? They get nice flowers, the bees like them. Except bull thistle. We dug that up with prejudice before it could flower. But as far as lawn, that is just a mowed space where I grew up, and I did grow up in a suburb, though not a house farm sort of development, not an HOA situation. And it’s just a mowed space where I live now too. Maybe 1 house in every 10 has the literal Grass Lawn, with the chemicals and monoculture. 9/10 have a mix of whatever.

I am older, and have not found any of that to be true. As a lady, more makes more; more sex makes sex feel better and it’s easier to get off, and sexual frustration does not make me creative at all, just distracted and frustrated.

There is also physical benefit to sex for older women, I don’t know if it’s the same for younger, but certainly after menopause sex prevents vaginal atrophy and prolapse of internal organs, it’s sort of a use it or lose it situation. Penetration and orgasms are good for muscle tone, apparently. Beyond the obvious benefits of pleasure and relationship building.