OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe

I don't think the people downvoting know that there's really people out here putting American craft singles slices on their spaghetti. I should know, I'm related to a couple of them. Seen it a good chunk of my life, almost always in poorer homes, from the southern US and a few times here in the midwest.

If you're talking about my girl Keira Metz, she's a witch, not a standard alchemist. Woman definitely engages in performance enhancing magic

Having worked in the car industry (I got out after selling for a year, evil business), they don't care about cash offers. Cash is less good to them, they WANT you to finance, if not through them (most preferred) then through another bank. Cash deals make the seller no extra money, and you've already advertised that you're not willing to 'play the game' about the price. We were told to give people with cash deals less of our time and effort. You buying a car at a fair price is still a win to the dealer's bottom line, and you might catch a salesman who has a quota to meet so he's desperate for any sell, but most I met didn't give two fucks if you walked away from a cash deal

I'm fine with 'they', but I think you're misrepresenting the very real problem that is inserting a 3rd-person pronoun as a personal pronoun due to the existing patterns ingrained and interpreted through speech.

It doesn't hurt me to try and make the conscious change, I do actively try for the people in my life, but it DOES flow weird in my brain and takes more mental effort to keep straight. At least, it still does, it might get easier with more time, I don't know.

I like to think of it as this super huge structure, with all these mysterious facets and faces cut into it. We found it, have no idea how to properly measure or capture it. We started as blind men, groping their eay through the dark, and now we've found ways to light a flame and to see the surface before us, but it's so huge and there's so many patterns layered over patterns that it's uncomprehendingly beautiful and we have to continue to invent new tools and methods of processing what's before us.

I like to think this was your brain trying really really hard to remember her name too. Put her right in front of you in the dream and just cobbled together whatever sound clicked when all your neurons tried to focus on her at once. Brains are so silly

Yeah we don't call it that here in the states. I've heard 'the r word' but never 'hard r'. We reserve that terminology for the OTHER hard R.

It absolutely horrifies me as an adult. Love you Shel

I think you could get more creative with your language, with that knowledge. If nothing else, reading the Bible (or catching the cliffs notes) and getting a firm understanding of 'The Classics' gives you an immense wealth of phrases and references to help illustrate your point that are so ingrained in Western culture and media that you're likely to strike more points with it than without.

I'm still making my way through that herculean effort, that sisyphusian task. I struggled like Odysseus returning home to get through the Bible the first time, but once you get through all the parables and their Lot, there are some really interesting stories that make for easy metaphors and similes.

And my neighbors are rural Trumpers. I still don't grasp what the hell it is they're after.

Big data, plot points from individuals, statistical regressions. That's what you need to make those claims. If not, it's personal anecdotes, personal anecdotes from someone who lived in the geographical region, yes, but just anecdotes.

Yeah I'd agree with the idea that a society historically repressed would slingshot to nude beaches right away. I just wouldn't make commentary on how likely a populace of oppressed people might seek freedoms and make the same mistake of assuming what their culture is when neither of us has heard what the people of said country wants.

I don't labor under the belief that anyone operating in an area that fraught with fundamentalist religious groups controlling all key functions of society actually KNOW what their own culture is. If half your population can't speak freely, you don't have an accurate view of your people's beliefs.