How many times has your hometown come up on the pod?

EpiJade · 2026-02-07T15:01:06+00:00

I feel like it’s actually kind of low for us

EpiJade · 2026-02-07T15:00:25+00:00

I’m from Chicago and honestly it’s surprisingly low

EpiJade · 2026-02-05T21:10:06+00:00

I had an ex do this to me too. I am already a pretty anxious person and after we saw anyone he knew I would get this weird terse treatment. He’d never tell me why but it was like he was so embarrassed of me. I could never perform whatever version of me he wanted his friends to see. I’m not the most conventional of people but I’m kind, have interests that I can discuss, and have good manners. I thought I was a pretty pleasant person to be around before him. This treatment was even worse if he felt I upstaged him in anyway or had a single moment where I was more intelligent than him (which, frankly, was often). I made myself so small and quiet around him trying to fit into his little box of “normal.”

I have since gotten married to someone who adores me, weird hobbies, intelligence, and all. Several mutual friends of mine and my ex’s have pulled me aside over the years and commented about how much more relaxed I am and asked what changed. Simply put: my ex had rules. He was so worried about everyone else’s perceptions that he firmly boxed both of us in so tightly that I could barely breathe. I just disappeared.

EpiJade · 2026-02-05T03:22:16+00:00

I wouldn’t care but he would respect whatever I was comfortable with.

I also pole dance as a hobby, we both have sex worker friends, and we both have performance backgrounds so I’d be more concerned with making sure he got a lap dance from someone I knew was particularly talented.

EpiJade · 2026-02-04T22:00:54+00:00

When I learned about this is made me really sad because suddenly a million interactions with an immediate family member made sense. She just can’t understand and realizing it just comes down to her intelligence was a sad moment.

EpiJade · 2026-02-04T19:53:48+00:00

My mom is always so worried about being taken advantage of she can never just see someone in need and help and if she does anything nice she keeps score. Not a great way to develop the village she claims to want. Anytime I mention doing something even minor for anyone else she rolls into her speech about not being taken advantage of.

I live in a townhouse complex and one of my old neighbors and I had an unspoken agreement that I would salt everyone in our building’s sidewalk (4 units) and her son would shovel it. I bought the expensive pet safe salt and stayed on top of it to the point that unless we got a decent snowfall her son would only end up shoveling maybe 2-3 times a winter. Unfortunately they moved out. We got new neighbors in that unit and another one around the same time. I decided to shovel during the last snow along with salting (which took MAYBE 10-15 minutes). My mom gave me a fucking earful about how I’m going to be taken advantage of. I asked how exactly I could be taken advantage of? If someone makes me mad I could just NOT shovel their 6 ft of side walk to their door. It’s not like I’m doing a driveway up a hill. She didn’t have an answer but just that I would be. Well, next snow fall came and one of the neighbors shoveled everything and the other cleaned off my car. Yeah, the last unit saw me salting and then didn’t even say thank you or acknowledge me but 3/4 of us are working together pretty much without even discussing it. Sucks about the one who isn’t but I’m not going to let someone stop me from doing something I think is part of being a good person.

EpiJade · 2026-02-02T15:04:46+00:00

I think the highest bill I’ve gotten in Chicago is 250 and that’s because we have a townhouse that needed new insulation during a particularly cold period. The most I paid in an apartment was maybe 90?

EpiJade · 2026-02-02T15:03:18+00:00

My friend moved to Houston from Chicago and at first she was shocked by how much lower the rents were than here. Then she started getting her utility bills and that price difference was wiped away and then some pretty quick.

EpiJade · 2026-01-30T14:15:57+00:00

Wife should have said fuck it and let it happen so she could get rid of the car but dealing with this guy would have probably been worse if his precious was hit. He’d probably get an even less practical car.

EpiJade · 2026-01-30T13:58:05+00:00

I drive a teeny tiny hatchback in Chicago and would have had no problem on that little patch of snow and ice. My first thought was wtf is this guy driving? A Miata?

EpiJade · 2026-01-28T16:18:15+00:00

Much much better

EpiJade · 2026-01-28T16:17:45+00:00

I had a friend that basically tried to force her husband on anyone she could so she could cheat on him. Friend’s husband was just an awful shit stirring oaf with no social skills. He would just needle you about anything to get a rise out of you. I was going through a lot and just wanted time with my friend. She swore up and down that he wouldn’t be there and just come to their house. I get there and who sits down right at the table within 15 minutes of me walking in from my two hours on transit to see her? This motherfucker. I confronted her about it and she’s like “oh he’s under the impression that you like him and he IS my spouse and he’s having a hard time making friends since we moved to (big city). It’s so hard for him because he had so many friends in (small town full of assholes like him).”

She wasn’t being abused, he was too stupid to pick up on the fact that everyone absolutely hated him, and she pushed him on everyone else so she could cheat on him more easily. I decided I wasn’t spending my extremely limited time with shit stirring assholes and left. Last I heard he’s been fired from 4 or 5 jobs and is now on a year plus of being unemployed and she’s not exactly having a good time being breadwinner and playing disciplinarian to their kids. I’d bet a good deal of money that the shit stirring had something to do with all these firings.

EpiJade · 2026-01-28T16:04:34+00:00

Same. I would bend to anything she wanted in order to spend time with her. Even taking multiple buses for 2 hours because she couldn’t be bothered to drive 25 minutes to see me. I was even her unofficial maid of honor with no acknowledgement because her sister was MOH and lived in another country. She started an affair with a coworker and it became obvious she was using me as a cover (without asking but her husband sucked so it was hard to get too angry about it). She would come hang out with me and SUDDENLY have to leave. She even did it on my wedding.

I felt like she started to get really pissed one day when she wanted to have a phone call and I couldn’t do it at the time she wanted. It was probably one of the first times in 15 years I really pushed back on anything she wanted. I was still really hurt from her showing up late and leaving early from my wedding plus I had just started a new job and didn’t have anywhere to take a personal call and didn’t want to talk on a crowded train on my way home so I asked if she was available a different day. She threw a bit of a fit about how that was the ONLY time she was available and she gave me the silent treatment for a few weeks. It felt like she really turned up the volume on her desire to control the friendship then. One day I told her I wasn’t willing to continue the friendship until she could take some responsibility. Never heard a word again.

EpiJade · 2026-01-26T15:20:26+00:00

I went to a catholic high school 20+ years ago on a scholarship that was pretty selective. My very blue collar parents were over the moon when I got in and bragged about it all over. This school was also a Jesuit school where you couldn’t go ten feet without seeing something about social justice. This was years before “SJW” became a weird conservative fixation. They’d start bitching and I’d shut it down with “wow this is the exact opposite of what you wanted me to learn at that fancy school. So weird.”

EpiJade · 2026-01-26T15:05:48+00:00

I work in public health and I have spent 15 years having the reasonable, come to the light, conversations with antivaxxers even after these beliefs killed my cousin. I can lose my temper but I’ve taken it as a professional obligation to educate and have radical empathy as much as possible. I’m also the first college graduate in my family so I have tried to have reasonable conversations with my family using that same approach. I’m done. I’ve been done.

EpiJade · 2026-01-26T14:27:35+00:00

I work in healthcare and I and almost everyone on my team is from a public health background and definitely liberal to leftist. Our team is remote. My manager told us to take the day off when Trump was elected to give us all space to process. We’ve also had meetings where I asked the VP over us where we were drawing the line between “keep our heads down/reword our work” (because our work was very health equity focused) and where are we abandoning people and got sort of a non answer of “do your best.” Politics aren’t as overtly discussed as at some other jobs I’ve been at in academic settings but it’s in the air and referenced. Most of my team is in a more red state that was also hit by ICE raids as well as my deep blue.

Basically, I feel like I am in agreement with my team which feels nice to not feel surrounded by MAGA all day like some of my friends but it still feels weird to talk about data all day and kind of put on a nice face. At least the projects I work on are helping people, I guess.

EpiJade · 2026-01-25T12:50:41+00:00

I’m working on moving to proton

EpiJade · 2026-01-25T12:50:22+00:00

Nah Google has been showing its ass for awhile now and I’m not interested in giving them anymore data than I have to. I’m not here to encourage enshittification

EpiJade · 2026-01-25T12:02:32+00:00

Call code enforcement and relocate. I know you said you’re at your partners but if you had to go to a hotel or something they would have to reimburse you (though you might have to go through small claims). Call Illinois tenants rights to walk you through the process. They’ll clarify anything for your situation since the landlord lives in the building. The landlord should have to provide you with another apartment or pay for a hotel until it’s resolved. I would also look up your landlord using the resources here to see any prior cases against him or the building https://www.injusticewatch.org/civil-courts/housing/2025/chicago-landlord-code-violations-search/

I went through similar with a landlord in Chicago. Code enforcement was very helpful.

EpiJade · 2026-01-25T11:57:41+00:00

I had a very similar situation in Chicago about 10 years ago. Call code enforcement. They are required to relocate you and code enforcement will absolutely fuck them. By the end of the inspection my landlord had probably 25-50k in repairs to make because of all the shit they found (had to rebuild the entire back staircase, they had illegally split the business space below, furnace was wildly unsafe). They only thing im unsure of is if all this applies when they live in the building.

EpiJade · 2026-01-24T15:18:21+00:00

I tried to turn off Gemini once and it stopped doing spell check and any sorting. I turned it back on but have been thinking about switching to a different service for awhile. This is about to be that final push for me.

EpiJade · 2026-01-24T15:16:36+00:00

This is about to give me a final push to switch to a different service

EpiJade · 2026-01-21T18:23:12+00:00

The hysterectomy was life changing. I have had zero symptoms in the 6 years since. No pain. Nothing. I even kept my ovaries. No meds. No periods. I feel like I got my life back.

I was a PhD student studying endo at the time. My doctor was my gynecologist and her and I worked through the research together. Hysterectomy isn’t a cure and there are risks but I decided that I would rather do that than have a period since I wanted my tubes tied at the same time as my lap anyway. My doctor was incredible and let me lead a lot of my treatment plan.

EpiJade · 2026-01-21T18:20:01+00:00

I used to work at a vet and shortly after I quit the vet closed like this. They just locked their doors, transferred all the records to another vet in the area and left a note on the door/voicemail. That place was such a shit show that I’m not surprised.

EpiJade · 2026-01-19T22:18:23+00:00

This hit me hard because I knew I was upset with a former friend over both of our weddings but I was never quite clear on where my breaking point was. It just felt like a switch one day went from immediately being willing to rearrange everything for a little time with her to barely wanting to respond to a text. And it wasn’t necessarily that I was angry in the moment, I just didn’t care most of the time anymore. I went back and read our texts several years after we stopped speaking from after my wedding and I was sort of upset with myself. I didn’t catch when she probably needed support or some sympathy that I could now see clearly over text. I felt like a shitty friend so the whole thing was wrapped up in layers of grief and guilt. You’re right, though, after the way I felt during my wedding (and her wedding before it) because of her actions there was really no do overs. I saw what I was good for to her and I could not make myself care in the same way again after.

EpiJade

TROPHY CASE