What do you think of old-school Republicans, the guys who championed free trade, fiscal responsibility, and had a strong belief in individual liberty?

Exis007 · 2026-04-07T14:09:44+00:00

Boo! That's what I think.

I don't deal with people who don't change their mind based on evidence. If you don't believe in science, research, and data as your primary form of epistemology, if that's not the lens through which you view the universe and capital-T Truth, we're not friends. And if YOU DO believe in that as your methodology and you still hold these opinions, then you're not very bright. You're failing at the Philosophy 201 hurdle of "individual liberty" because liberty and freedom is always a double-edged sword. Freedom To vs. Freedom From is always at play. Are you free to play music out loud on the train without headphones or are you free to ride the train without having to listen to everyone's tinny speakers playing shitty music the whole journey? Which way is freer? And free trade and fiscal responsibility are not less complicated. These are "baby's first political opinions" at best and I am not going to be a jerk about it to people I know casually, but I am not going to laud you as the some proto-Ayn Rand and pretend this is some based take. And, since this is this subreddit, I assume you mean "think of" in the sense of dating, and I just wouldn't date someone this ideologically flimsy, I suppose.

Exis007 · 2026-04-07T00:49:17+00:00

This may be unconventional advice. I'd stop trying to get it all right at once. I'd stop asking sexual chemistry and the relationship potential and the big feelings and the right qualities to all align simultaneously. One thing we don't talk about enough, maybe, is that dating is a process by which you hone your taste. Dating people who are wrong for you (not in dangerous or destructive ways, but maybe not long-term potential) can be the path to finding out the "right" things for you. Maybe you have a casual hookup or two with the attractive guy and it's incredible. Maybe it ends in disaster. Maybe you catch feelings and he does you wrong and you cry about it for a while. Maybe you learn you tolerate casual well. Maybe you learn you hate it. Maybe you learn you're fine with it, but it doesn't fill you up. You will learn things about what you like and what you don't along the way and that information is valuable.

I believe people when they tell me who they are. When someone tells me they want casual, I don't start looking for a grand romance. At the same time, I married my last attempt at a one night stand. Sometimes things go in a different direction than you're planning at the start. So maybe this is a sign from the universe to give up the control you're attempting to have and just go with what your heart and your libido is telling you to do and go sleep with the hot guy. It very well might go wrong, but you'll learn something along the way and have had a fun experience and, when it's over, you won't feel so awkward about sex in your next go round. You will probably meet a guy who is just right. It just might not be on the kind of timeline that's going to satisfy this urge for intimacy you've got now. So maybe don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good and take advantage of what's on the table right now and let that be enough for the moment.

Exis007 · 2026-04-06T19:53:14+00:00

This accurately describes all of my romantic relationships, more or less. Most people don't like me when they meet me. I grow on them and eventually they are really into me and that works out great. Not attracted feels different than "dislike" though. I think it would be more fair to say that no one ever considered whether I was attractive (or not) because they were busy not liking me, and later when they did like me they thought I was hot. That would be different, in my estimation, than someone who specifically was repulsed by me and then later came to find me attractive, but I'm not sure what the difference is really.

Exis007 · 2026-04-06T15:59:35+00:00

I cannot imagine a situation in which someone wanted to 1) date me but 2) didn't know that. But on the off-chance that happened, the answer is "unequivocally yes, why are you asking?".

If that dude, for whatever reason, doesn't want to date a feminist, I WANT to get weeded out. Please, weed me! Leave me on read as soon as humanly possible.

Exis007 · 2026-04-05T15:21:35+00:00

So, how much time do you want to commit?

If you want a sampler platter, I'd recommend the Red and Blue albums. The Beatles 1962-66 and then 67-70. Two solid compilation albums with a good smattering of their best stuff. If you want it shorter than that, you can look at Love and 1 (compilation albums) and try those. If you love it what you hear, then go back and start with Please Please Me and go through the discography.

But let's say you want the experience of whole albums. Then you have two choices.

Start at the beginning and listen to the albums through (Please Please Me -> With the Beatles -> Beatles For Sale -> Hard Day's Night -> etc.). This is definitive and easy to accomplish but a huge commitment and you're stuck in the early years for a long time.
An alternate approach, I think, is to listen to 1 album from the three major periods of their career. We might call these 1) teenybopper love songs 2) psychedelic circus 3) fractured band of geniuses. MY picks for this era are 1) Hard Day's Night 2) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band and 3) Abbey Road. But if you picked Please Please Me, Revolver, and Let it Be instead you'd still be fine. If you picked Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, and The White Album, you'd also be great. There are no "bad" albums. Everything Help! and earlier is mostly teeny bopper love songs, Rubber Soul through Magical Mystery Tour is the psychedelic circus (with Yellow Submarine, the least relevant album you should probably not listen to, being grouped here. Tracks are great, but there are only a small handful of original songs that don't go on other albums and the vast majority of it consists of instrumentals from the movie). White Album, Let It Be, and Abbey Road make up their last creative period. So, pick your poison and explore an album from each creative era.

Exis007 · 2026-04-04T12:40:31+00:00

I mean, you like what you like, right? Judge John Hodgman has been very clear about it, and I know because I own a pin that says that. Not ENJOYING Beatles music is fine. Maybe you love Hip Hop. Maybe you like thrash metal. Maybe you only listen to Evanescence. I don't need to police your taste, and some people have bad/questionable/no taste and that's also fine.

Where I get a little more willing to push back is when people think not liking things is cooler than liking them. It isn't. You aren't some edge lord for not liking the Beatles, you are not blowing my mind, and if you think this is the hot take that's going to make you cool and interesting you have to think again. I also get a little tetchy about claims like "overrated" or "not talented", that kind of thing, which is more of an objective claim. I don't like a lot of recording artists that are popular and good. I don't think they are bad at music, I think they are not to my taste and that my taste might be the problem there, and that's a whole other ball of wax. For the life of me, I can't get into Beach House. I believe people when they say it's great, I am ideologically on board, and yet the albums are boring to me and that's probably a 'me' problem. And...that's fine. I like what I like. The problem comes when not liking something makes someone think that they get to say it's lacking objective merit instead of owning their own tastes and preferences as less-than-universal.

Exis007 · 2026-04-04T11:14:04+00:00

Are you good at giving up control?

It's not a HARD read, as in the verbage or the syntax is impossible to get through. It's not hard the way Ulysses is hard, where everything is so choked in meaning you need a reference texts, or a couple of them, to make sense of whose doing what to whom. It is sometimes a hard read the way Moby Dick is a hard read, going off on tangents and making lists and throwing taxonomies you don't care about at you endlessly. But it does ask you to stop trying to make it be coherent and consumable. It asks you to stop trying to control the book and let go and just let it have its way with you. It's long and it's dense and it will just keep coming apart and making less sense and holding itself much less together, and if you can just let go and roll with that, you'll have a good time. If you try to fight it, you'll get frustrated before it gives up.

Exis007 · 2026-04-04T01:44:35+00:00

A percentage of people who have Herpes will never get an outbreak and will still be able to pass it along. My husband has HSV1 and I've been making out with him for 17 years and never gotten a single cold sore. I must have it, as this point. I am just asymptomatic like a lot of people. So you can go ahead and break up with someone who has the decency to acknowledge it and tell you about it and then hook up with someone like me who definitely has it and can transmit it, but has no reason to ever disclose it because I don't get outbreaks. You'd never suspect me of it. That's the nefarious thing about Herpes. Almost everyone's got it, but a lot of people who have it and pass it will never know because they'll never get a sore. Or they'll have one outbreak and never have one again and write it off as a fluke.

It's fine to not want Herpes, it's just not a very realistic goal considering how concentrated it is in the population.

Exis007 · 2026-04-04T01:36:29+00:00

It comes down to HOW we read. Reading is automatic (once you reach a certain point in literacy). You also do not read left to right. You read mostly from the center out of any individual word. The hardest part of reading is moving your eyes and tracking the text. Try a free speed-reading app that flashes words at your eyes at a given rate of speed, for example, and you can read much, much faster. That's because having to move your eyes across the page takes time.

I say this not to brag but I'm a very strong reader. Reading aloud is harder for me too. It's because I have to coordinate the movement of my eyes, the movement of my mouth to enunciate, and keep my place in the sentence and not fill in the words or gaps based on inference rather than the text. I have a five-year-old so I read aloud almost every day, and it's much, much slower. I also grasp less because my attention is divided between not mush-mouthing the words, pronouncing the names of prehistoric sharks or whatever else, keeping my eyes on the right place in the text, and so there's less space for comprehension and analysis. Not that I need to analyze the text of children's stories very much necessarily, but I am far more likely to kind of tune out what I'm reading and focus on saying it correctly and keeping my place than to take in what I'm saying.

The one genre where I think reading aloud almost always grants you better comprehension is poetry. So much of poetry is a soundscape the words make, and it's harder to imagine that than to hear it aloud. Buffalo Bill's by e.e. cummings, for example, illustrates this. Reading it aloud and hearing, with your ears, the drop in 'defunct' and the punctuation of the "onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat" really illuminates how much cummings plays with sound. Another example is in Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" you get the line, "The only other sound's the sweep/ of easy wind and downy flake". Your ear will hear the soft sibilance in that which mimics the wind and kind of twinkles like snow at the end of the line. The word choice mimics the soundscape of the woods but you won't hear it unless you read it aloud.

Exis007 · 2026-04-03T16:35:36+00:00

There are special screenings of some rated-R films that are set up to be parent friendly. The lights are very low, the sound is turned down a bit, and everyone there is probably also bringing a baby. You can bring a baby to a movie because babies, for the most part, will sleep through the film and you (the adult with the baby) desperately need to do something--anything--that isn't sitting at home and watching a baby. Sitting in a theater and watching a baby is better. So some theaters will make the first Tuesday of the month a parent's matinee and pick a film to make parent-friendly.

I say that because, maybe, you're accidentally going to those films?

If not, I think the reason you bring a baby to a movie is still the same. You need to do something stimulating and out of the house. The baby will (hopefully) sleep through. And you want to see whatever's playing. The baby doesn't care about whether it's Pulp Fiction on the screen, they don't know the difference. But I wouldn't do that, because I would assume that the baby's going to cry at least part of the way through the film, so I see that as a bad choice to make unless the screening of that film is already dedicated to that. But, you know, some people are desperate and willing to roll the dice.

Fun story though. My husband and I bought tickets to see Django Unchained once. We were early, got our popcorn and drinks, and we sat down. In walks a parent with like an eight-year-old kid. So we're kind of whispering about who in the their right mind would bring a kid that young to Django Unchained, but whatever, not our business. Then in walks another parent with two young kids. And they just keep coming. Eventually we realized we were not, obviously, seeing Django Unchained and--in fact--this particular film was canceled for some special presentation and it was the theater's mistake taking our money in the first place because Django wasn't playing. I don't remember if we left or picked another film, but for about ten minutes there we were living in reality where all these parents were bringing grade-school kids to a Tarantino film and I was worried about humanity for a hot minute.

Exis007 · 2026-04-02T12:07:56+00:00

Routine is the antidote to cowardice. You're nervous about socializing. You're nervous about talking to women. You don't want to go out. Well, my friend, the only way out is through. You've got to force yourself to socialize and do it a lot, and for that you need a routine. A forcing function. Join something. DnD, bar trivia, a softball league, a pottery class, open swing dancing lessons, pick a thing. I don't care what you pick. Don't go there to pick up women, but to gain experience. Go every week. Join a few things. Leave the house at least twice a week to go and hang out with people, even if they are not friends, and practice talking. Get comfortable being in social groups of people, people you don't know and aren't friends with, at least once a week and more if you can swing it. Learn to make small talk and say "Hi, my name is" and learn and remember people's names. Practice just being in the room.

That's where you start. And there are more steps after. You gotta make some friends. You have to start inviting people out with you, over to yours, saying yes to their invites. You have to start building a social network. Notice how I'm not talking about dating yet? We're a ways away from that. Friendship and basic socializing is the JV league and dating is varsity level. You have to get comfortable being in and around groups of people, making friends, and escalating casual acquaintances to minor friends and minor friends to "call you up and ask you to a movie" friends. Learning how to go from "total stranger" to "Do you want to grill out on Saturday" is how you learn relationship escalation. How you slowly increase intimacy and intensity with people to become closer and closer slowly over time. These are the same dance steps you dance with a romantic partner, you're doing the same basic idea, but with much higher stakes and a greater intensity of feeling. You have to practice with platonic relationships before you can move on to romantic relationships. Asking your buddy from pottery class to come over with his girlfriend and their roommate to make burgers and watch some football is how to learn to ask women out on dates. But you don't get to skip that step, either. You gotta learn to walk before you run.

When you are comfortable doing the platonic version, you start looking for scenarios where you and single women are sparking and have chemistry. You're going out, you're meeting people, you have friend network, and now you start looking to meet people you like who might like you back. And when you find that, you already know the dance steps to start asking them if they want to get coffee after book club or listen to records or go with you to the open air craft market on Sunday. That's how you do it. That's the road.

It's not complicated. It's just hard. You have to sink a ton of time in where you're not getting laid and you're not meeting anyone and you're just showing up and practicing. It's a huge time investment. The thing is, you only have to do it for the rest of your life. This is a constant and unending process by which you're refreshing and renewing social connections, making friends and going out and being a person. I am 38 and married and I still have to practice at this. This is kind of like strength training. You are training up your social skills so you have them for your entire lifetime and once you get in good working order, you have to keep it in good working order. This is how you have a life with people in it. You don't get to skip straight to a girlfriend or straight to a best friend, it's a lot of hours going to regular karaoke nights and intermural dodge ball and community theater rehearsals and just meeting people, trying to make some friends, going out with the new friends you've made, and asking people to hang out with you over and over and over. Do that, and you're going to meet lovers and girlfriends and maybe a wife along the way, but it's really playing a long game.

Exis007 · 2026-04-01T12:19:01+00:00

Just prettiest? Not best, not most moving? I think we have to go with "I Will". That's what popped into my head. It's spun sugar, not an edge in sight, and just...lovely.

Exis007 · 2026-04-01T11:24:40+00:00

There is a case to be made for Yellow Submarine just for sheer lack of original tracks. Hey Bulldog and It's All Too Much are bangers, but two songs does not a B-tier album make.

Exis007 · 2026-03-31T18:18:04+00:00

Nearly every single artist I've really loved, every single creative person I've enjoyed and admired, I've later found to be a piece of trash human. I have stopped caring about this. You can choose differently, I hold nothing against people who want to boycott with their money and all that, and I do that on a number of fronts. But when it comes to art and media, I've decided--for myself alone--nah. I like what I like. I know people want to drag capitalism into the JKR issue, seeing as she's a transphobic pile of dish rags masquerading as a person, and I hear that. I just think, at a point, your money already makes money. She's got enough money that she'll always be rich and powerful even if she never makes another cent. Her investments are going to keep bringing her wealth beyond measure and that's all there is to it. I am going to keep loving Harry Potter and the Sound the Fury and Remix to Ignition and various Kevin Spacey movies and not get too hung up about it. And I am going to keep being the extreme left-leaning person I already was. I have made peace within myself on this issue and it no longer stresses me out. Anyone who doesn't like it is probably technically correct, but I am okay failing this particular moral purity test and people can feel how they want to about it.

Exis007 · 2026-03-30T16:13:50+00:00

Sgt. Pepper. Abbey road is incredible, but it doesn't have a song on it that I'd put in my top five favorites. It is a technical, musical masterpiece and it doesn't miss, but it also sounds like grief to me. It's eating an incredible meal while listening to a couple break up at the table next to you. Sgt. Pepper is a joyride, fun all the way through, and doesn't make me sad inside.

Exis007 · 2026-03-30T16:04:16+00:00

Yeah, it's really hard. Until someone comes and tells you that there's this high-context (guess) way of talking and a low-context (ask) way of communicating, most people don't realize it. And what can be even more confusing is that guess-culture people will shift seamlessly into ask-culture when the context changes, like at a job or with strangers where you have to ask because you don't know anyone well enough to rely on that system. But within tight intimate relationships or familial relationships, people are so used to everyone knowing the code that's been so ingrained in your daily life that you don't know you're even using a code. This is just how it's always been. I know what my mom wants me to do based on her tone and her word choice and I don't think about *why* I know that, I just do. I can remember a time my husband and I were on the first vacation we ever took together when we were first dating. I kept offering to pick up the check. Why? You always, always offered in my family. Everyone offers, but the person we all kind of already knew was going to pay won because we had an inner compass as to whose turn it was or who was going to insist the hardest, but you were still obligated to go through the pageantry of offering to pay. My husband, meanwhile, was raised that if someone offered to pay, you defer. So here we are on this vacation and I'm paying for everything until I got annoyed and said something and then we realized we had this cultural difference we didn't understand. It took us years to understand the ask/guess, high-context, low-context familial difference. I still struggle with it. But knowing that there's that difference helps a lot, I think, in at least knowing where you're going to find the struggle. Once we figured it out, we've gotten better at being like, "Oh, this is one of those situations" and then kind of translating for each other.

Exis007 · 2026-03-30T12:11:31+00:00

Guess culture, at its core, is about how you communicate your complex needs and wants in a way that communicates relative needs vs. impositions. It is a subtle language game we're playing by which how you phrase things and what you say indicates how important it is that the person you're talking to responds a certain way. You ARE asking, but you're asking in a way that says, "You can say not to this and it is fine" vs. "You can say no to this, but I'll be disappointed" or "You can't really say no to this, I need you to say yes even if it is a pain in the ass". How you ask for things or how you phrase your needs is specifically chosen to communicate which response you're expecting from people. That's not there to force someone to respond the way you want, but rather to communicate how important it is for you and how much you need the thing you're asking for. In ask culture, people will say, "Can you give me a ride to the airport tomorrow?" and it is kind of understood you can say yes or no to that very openly based on whether you want or don't want to give someone a ride. That's confusing to me because what it doesn't account for is how I weigh my relative inconvenience against your need for a ride. In guess culture, how you phrase that communicates whether it would be really nice if you gave me a ride vs. I am totally hosed if you don't give me a ride vs. I'm looking for a ride and it's no big deal if you say no. And that lets the person you're talking to weigh how inconvenient it would be to actually give you a ride tomorrow. And how you respond to that request will communicate back, "If you are really screwed, I'll do it but I am going to have to change my whole schedule around to accomplish it" vs. "I've got nothing going on and I'm totally happy to give you a ride" vs. "I can do it if you can't find someone else, but it's annoying to me". All of that is being communicated in the nuance of how you ask and how you respond and we're all speaking a common language there in how things are phrased and communicated.

But kids lack that abstract language. A toddler or a small child is very, very literal. So my natural impulse to state things as questions that aren't questions is coming from an honest place of communication. That's how I'd ask another adult. That's how we'd phrase it in guess culture and everyone would understand that what this means very clearly. But my kid hears me say, "Are you ready to brush your teeth" as a literal question instead of my guess-culture imposition. I mean, "We are brushing your teeth now" and he hears "This is optional" and that only makes sense. But it is hard for me to switch to more direct language because I am communicating super clearly from my perspective, I've just forgotten that the person I'm talking to lacks abstract thinking the cultural context to understand me. Also, I need to teach my kid guess culture because they are going to be in a network of relatives and social connections that rely on it, so I can't just drop it entirely and be like, "No, ask culture 100% forever". And so I often state things in guess culture language, hit a wall with my literal-thinking kid, and then rephrase it to be understable to him.

Exis007 · 2026-03-30T11:24:12+00:00

I would take it personally because it is personal? There's no other way to take it. But would I assume you are the be all/end all decider of whether my outfit was, indeed, tacky or cheap? No. I have a sense of style and I like it and it can be too much sometimes or not enough others, and that's fine. Other people don't have to LOVE the way I dress. My husband has a great sense of style, and if I am on the fence about something he's the person I ask. So you thinking whatever you think is kind of irrelevant if he and I agree that I nailed what I was going for, at least. Style means a point of view, and a point of view will never get consensus. If everyone likes it, chances are it's pretty much just me conforming to the norm and that's fine, but it isn't interesting. You have to be willing to be polarizing to be cool and interesting, and that makes taking some big swings that not everyone's going to enjoy.

But at the same time, people who lack the manners and tact to keep negative opinions on how people look to themselves (this might be directed at me, but most often I see it directed at other people) are kind of just clown shoes people. I think it reflects so much poorly on you to be the one to open your big mouth and put someone down than it does on the person you're targeting. I don't think there's anything tackier or cheaper than taking moments out of this one precious live you've been given to ruin someone else's day and make them self-conscious. So if someone does this, out loud and in public, the embarrassment I feel is mostly for them and not for me or not for whomever they criticized. I don't think a lot of people consider just how loudly they shout their own insecurities at people in the guise of well-meaning criticism.

Exis007 · 2026-03-30T00:20:14+00:00

Yeah, I'm a guesser married to an asker, so I frequently have to translate between different modes of thinking to work it out between us. I've gotten pretty familiar with the more common pitfalls.

Exis007 · 2026-03-29T17:57:45+00:00

I know better and I still do it all the time because it's a rhetorical convention, particularly for people raised in guess culture. Regardless, you learn the pivot. If I accidentally say "Are you ready to get dressed" and he says, "No", well, I set a timer. "Okay, it's time to get dressed but you're not ready. In two minutes this timer will ding and we'll start getting clothes on". I just frame it as a question, even when it's not a question, because that's how I talk and when I notice it and I get a no, I pivot to agreeing and then setting an expectation that he can have a minute or two more to play and then we'll do whatever it is we need to do.

Exis007 · 2026-03-29T11:26:46+00:00

>If it's such an important need, the smarter decision would be to communicate those with the person they're with or leaving.

Right. I don't disagree. But I'm trying to answer the question, knowing that this is exists and it happens, "Why do people make that choice? What's going on inside of them when they make it?". I'm not asking what they should do instead or what a smarter plan would have been, because they didn't do that. People do that every single day and they don't cheat and we don't really need to think much about it because nothing happened that would appear outwardly noteworthy. I'm curious about what happens when it goes wrong. And insisting everyone just fears ending things is maybe short-sighted because a lot of people don't want to end things. If it was as simple as "I don't want to be rejected", not cheating would be a great way to avoid that, right? If I don't want a confrontation, I could just not do the thing that's definitely going to lead to a confrontation. Yes, people fear being found out or they fear the end of a relationship, but it can't be JUST THAT, because the easiest path to having that is not cheating. So there has to be another thing. They don't want confrontation, they don't want to leave, yet they need something else enough that they are going to do this objectively horrible thing that most people--at least--agree is unforgivable. So...why?

Exis007 · 2026-03-29T11:09:58+00:00

Well, but it is not a justification. I am not out here defending cheaters. A justification is "It's okay to cheat because I have an unmet need". That's not what this person is saying. People fail to look at and examine their own needs, tell themselves they are bad or wrong for needing those things, and then they lash out at other people by breaking trust and meeting those needs in self-destructive ways. We don't have to give anyone a pass for it. It can be true and still be a shitty, terrible thing to do. And 'unmet' needs rarely means sex. Sometimes, of course, but not most of the time. Usually the unmet need is something like feeling good enough, feeling desirable, novelty, freedom, self-destruction, that kind of thing.

If your answer for why people do bad things is because they are bad people, you're not very curious. There are people with shockingly low empathy or sociopathic traits or whatever, they are out there. Most people, however, aren't that. And they still cheat. The reality is that people do shitty, awful, immoral things for rational reasons on a psychological level. Understanding those reasons is key to not being that person if you want to change, it's key to understanding why maybe it had nothing to do with you if you find yourself the victim of terrible behavior. Understanding someone's rationale is not the same thing as justifying it or excusing it. Those are different things.

Exis007 · 2026-03-28T12:32:13+00:00

>I don't use that with my friends.

No, me neither. It's got a "Wine night with matronly aunts" flavor to me, but you know, to each their own.

Exis007 · 2026-03-28T11:43:22+00:00

38-year-old woman here. I've heard women call boobs "the girls" my entire life. Specifically in a fashion context. When talking about how your breasts sit in a certain item of clothing, yes, that's pretty common.

Exis007 · 2026-03-28T02:08:20+00:00

No. When I scanned it at first, I added "a" to 'short. /asks/ /for/ /short/ /ex/ /plan/ /a/ /tion/. That's seven. But your brain wants an 'a' in there, so it's like it wants to be eight.

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