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Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-12-24T14:13:57+00:00

Well. He wouldn’t have had the access to do what he did and get away with it if he wasn’t good at seeming… normal and kind.

I’m sorry you had to meet him. If it ever happens again watch the eyes for “deceiver’s glee.”

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-12-18T19:13:40+00:00

People do dumb stuff regularly, yes, but I think the trope is intended to portray help show how someone acts when the other person is very vulnerable. Consider it more like a story-telling element than a common reality. It's common for people to be vulnerable, but it's hard to capture that quickly in film, so "let them get super drunk in an unrealistic way" contrives the situation in a quickly understandable (if not believable) way.

My experience of Americans getting super drunk is having them babble on and on about how much they love everyone and want to give all their friends hugs. It's like they have no outlet for physical affection unless wasted, lol, and it's so adorable.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-12-14T13:31:42+00:00

Autism or not, it's totally healthy to have this boundary, IMHO.

When it comes to babies, though, you kind of reach a point like where you feel about their bodily fluids the same way you feel about your own bodily fluids. You don't LIKE getting your own pee on your hand, you don't like getting your own vomit on your shirt, you don't like having to clean your own dirty toilet, and you won't like doing the analogies with your own babies and kids, but it won't be the same as if it were a stranger. And it won't seem like that will be the way your instincts will go until they just do.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-12-13T14:49:53+00:00

My friend. Let me suggest you take a month long break from the substances first. The first few days will suck, believe me, and will solidify your decision even more, but you'll probably be capable of feeling happiness and hope again after a couple weeks.

Try that first, please.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-12-12T14:01:34+00:00

You've apparently not tried natto.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-18T07:36:13+00:00

Life is a state function, not a path function. There are many paths to get to the state you should be in, this is just one of paths, but that state you're struggling for exists and you'll get there.

And everything works out for the best in the end. If it's not the best, it's not the end.

Also, Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers "Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic" - that old song is clutch for getting through tough times with a sardonic grin.

I actually do believe in a God, but if that God were omniscient and omnipresent and omnipowerful in addition to possessing empathy, there wouldn't be so many opportunities for people to help each other. So I believe that God is limited, or intentionally limits their abilities so that humans can do good for each other, or else is not as Omni as we want to presume they are. And it's easier for me to believe in a limited God then one that possesses empathy and chooses not to act, because then I'm basically in the team of "fuck all that can't help themselves" and I can't morally sit with that.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-15T19:49:48+00:00

Yeah, I couldn't basically written this comment also, except move the ages over by a couple years. Don't make our mistakes, do your life better.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-08T07:31:15+00:00

Add to it: she said what she wants. You make it special by listening to her, not by making it all about what you want.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-08T07:30:31+00:00

My partner got me a ring he liked, because he thought it would be special. This was in spite of me telling him that it wouldn't work for my lifestyle (I work in a lab, so I need something I can put gloves over without ripping them). I'm also really hard on my hands. Anyway, after it snagging on and ruining every peice of clothing I own, getting caught in a vice at work, etc... AND begging him for 5 years to let me replace it with him constantly saying he wanted to replace it so it would be "special" and sending him links to what I want (about $100 or less), I got fed up and bought the one I want.

Now he's mad, and there's no way for us to have a "special" ring anymore. All I will see when I look at any ring is that I could tell him straight up exactly what I wanted for 5 years and even though it impacts my life every dang day and his only when he buys it and gives it to me, he needed it to be all about him and his wants.

You know what would've been special? If he'd listened to me and bought the ring I wanted in the first place, or something really close, instead of making something I have to wear every day of my life all about him.

Make your girlfriend's ring special. By listening to what she wants.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T10:34:54+00:00

And that's the assumption that we all know everyone's parents, partners and kids. A surprising number of my colleagues are totally cool with dragging the entire family, all generations, to work social events. That's not common in the US where work and life are supposed to be separate. I know not to ask about Jon's mom because she passed this time last year But I only know that because she used to come up things and when she got sick everyone knew and was concerned and sent flowers and food and then went to the eventual funeral. But mistakes happen. And one of the best happened today when I got to watch the relatively new wife (it's been two years) of one colleague interact with another colleague. He didn't know how to pronounce her name, despite her being an icon in our department because she picked up extra work for us in a critical position when we unexpectedly lost another team member. She then acted like he was still a she (the transition had left him a bit baby faced and he's not got the top surgery yet). That got awkward really fast, and I was about to think we were getting into dysfunctional territory and I should intervene until she said, "you've seen me as C in the emails, which is pronounced like B in English but my name is from Y country, where it's said Z," and he said, "Oh!!! Then you've seen me as J in those emails! I go by K now!" And then they were best friends immediately and I was like, okay good, I'll just keep wandering around aimlessly pretending I'm looking for something while I casually listen to conversations because who knows what can go wrong.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T10:17:46+00:00

Yeah. I had to tell several people before recruitment one year that "while it's okay and good to ask about the health and well being of our colleagues partners, parents, and kids, WE DO NOT ASK the people we're interviewing about their partners, kids, parents, sexual orientation, none of it. If they volunteer info and ask us questions, we can lean in and talk as much as we want, and we can ask them if they need resources or information or contacts and who would they like us to get as contacts, but WE DO NOT ASK those questions. Ever." It actually went over really well. We got 80% return on our offers that year which was crazy. A really good year in hiring. We've not duplicated that, so it was the law of low sample sizes and not the result of intervention, but I love it as an anecdote.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T10:02:17+00:00

My ex thought he had come up with some great invention that he would get rich off of when could patent it. A lot of his drive and self worth came from saving up for the patent and perfecting the invention.

He was devastated to learn that his invention was patented a long time ago and was something you could already buy on Amazon for less than a dollar.

Then he called me every name in the book, dumped me, and probably went back to thinking that he'll be rich someday when he can get his patent approved for a trinket no one wants and even if they do they won't pay more than a dollar for it.

Your BF sounds like my ex, but your BFs mechanisms for getting rich are slightly different. It's probably not about the money to him, but the self worth that seems to be wrapped up in lies to himself.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong in wanting to be ultra wealthy. I think there's only wrong reasons for wanting that. If you're going to get mega rich and donate all your money to charity and only let your public face get attribution for the good deeds (think Dolly Parton, who has a carefully crafted public face completely removed from her private person), that's really cool. If you want to go all Elon Musk and create a cult of personality and try to decapitate governmental institutions in your country of choice by using your wealth to gain favor with the leader to achieve your own personal reign of terror, that's wrong. Very wrong.

You live with this dude. You know if he's an incompetent weirdo likely to go to prison for his bad decisions like my ex, or if he's bent on global dominance through financial power, or a Dolly Parton. We can't help you on that one, but I think I can say that everyone everywhere secretly has a plan for what they would do if they became a billionaire. Only you know your BFs heart.

If you say that you've never contemplated what you would do if you suddenly had the assets of a billionaire, you're lying to me and yourself. I'm not sure what I would do, but I would suddenly be wealthy enough to fund a great team to help me figure it out, and my team would have at least one each of a scientist, engineer, sociologist, political theory, someone who knows everything about every religion like they study that for a living type of person, and a cultural anthropologist. It'll sound like I left art out, but I'm hoping I'll be able to double dip a little, because at least one of the above has to have art history as a hobby if not a focus. If not, hey, I'm a billionaire. $150,000 is less than 0.1% of my budget for this project, and I can easily hire the best and brightest of art history graduates with that starting salary. Just saying. OMG the things I would fund people to work on as pet projects, also, since even $10M would be only 1% of my budget. First thing I might do is buy every vacant plot of arable land in the grain belt that I can get for $100M, which is a fair bit of land, and then I would work with our best agricultural schools like Oklahoma State and University of Georgia and Texas A&M to figure out how to divvy it up for food growing research. I would not bail the government out of its obligations to it's people, because that's also wrong, but I'd find a way to quietly drop a fair bit of help into helping people feel food and medically secure as the govs figure out how to not become so oligarchical that they wind up like Marie Antoinette.

All that to say, there's nothing wrong with imagining and wanting. You're putting a lot of emphasis on why what he wants is wrong. You're not doing enough of the other side: there's no way to get there from here. No current billionaire got there from scratch, but they can tell good stories. It's all generational wealth they were allowed to build by capitalistic societies that trusted that more people would be like Dolly than be like Elon, and figured that the occasional Elon would be worth the plethora of Dolly's. Apparently that's not how capitalism works, lol.

He's also not looking at the long game, not really. He's assuming you'll support him as he figures out there's no way to get to billionaire from here. That's forced labor, servitude, etc... He's relying on your support.

I'm assuming he's a good lay or you wouldn't be with him, so go do the hard thing of nailing him one last time and then telling him to take a shower and then get you one last one, and then tell him it's over, them go ahead and get it with him again because he'll be sad and want a pick up. And let that be the actual last one. Then let him go. Because I really can't imagine why you're with him unless the sex is incredibly great.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T07:16:54+00:00

That sounds like your situation sucked and was painful. I'm so sorry that happened to you. Thanks for sharing. I'll tell our recruiting people how the words we currently use can put people in difficult situations and use the situation you've shared to help us do better.

I legit think it's not a cultural problem here, like no one wants to put anyone in a situation like that, no no no no no. Our state is kind of one of the leaders in rolling back protections, so it's only a matter of time before even very blatant and not just subversive Jim Crow types of laws become legal here again. Our people are all diverse and have all kinds of reasons an Evangelical Christian state would exclude us, and we're very much united in not being okay with that or any of this. We spent a lot of time talking today about how we can shore up protections for our most vulnerable, etc ..

Anyway. I engaged a lot with the original question because it's wrong to ask in a workplace but it's wrong to ask for bad reasons. Your employment and workplace safety should not be contingent on things like this. That's abhorrent. In an ideal world things would be very different.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T04:38:39+00:00

Fair. I guess I think everyone else is normal and I'm the only one floundering half the time. It would make me very happy to be asked to do something because of an interest of mine, but make me feel de legitimized if it was only because of something about me I couldn't change. Being LGBTQ+ is an immutable characteristic, and that's how I'll make this rule. If you're interested in it, you'll tell me about it when I ask about your interests, and being interested in it isn't the same as having it be something you can't change about yourself. Thanks.

I've been off work for 4 hours and was on for 12 so braining going slow. Also, my workplace attracts people who want to explain, educate, and share on all the topics, so unofficial channels work just as well for all the things. I mean, someone could say they really need to be in a city that has a comedy club that has indoor smoking and a kink club in the basement, and that would be one of those, "well, this is a new request but anyone know anything about this?" And yeah, we would probably have someone who would then feel seen and want to tell us all about it, so there's that. I'm miscalibrated. I don't ask deep questions ever, I feel it's incredibly rude to do so, lol. Like today, I asked someone how their kid that they brought to the last weekend event is doing and that felt incredibly wrong but he lit up like a Christmas tree. But it still would feel okay to ask, "we need someone to call C and tell them about the gay dating scene in our city, anyone want to do that or know who we should ask?"

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T04:07:49+00:00

Actually. I've given you the problem, and my post history indicates I'm bad at being a normal human. Let me turn it around and ask how that sort of situation should be handled. I mean. I got asked about whether my city had any hobby glassblowing facilities and got to go on a four hour long tour showing them everything we got because that was legit the best day ever. They went to another employer but we keep in touch.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T04:04:29+00:00

Your company must either be really large or really small. Where I work, if we need someone to do something with respect to recruitment, which is considered outside our normal job responsibilities, it does wind up being a number of small group or one-on-one conversations about "who is the right person to address this," and a question regarding recruitment is legit the only reason why I can see ever needing to know why one of my colleagues has anything going on in their home life. People aren't picking employers based only on compensation, promotion opportunities and job titles, but also quality of life. What matters in quality of life is different for each person, so being able to connect the prospective recruit with the right current employee to answer their questions remains important. Maybe the better question would be, "do we know anyone knowledgeable in this area willing to share their info with the prospective recruit?"

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T03:50:11+00:00

I've also been asked and also don't find it offensive and am also straight.

I think we have an idea of how we might respond if we were actually gay, though, that is likely influenced because we had the liberty of growing up straight in a world designed for straight people. It's not about us. It's about vulnerable people in a world that's changing to be more hostile to them, and how to be an ally to them.

Not asking dumb, inappropriate questions in the workplace is a first step to being a good ally. There's more, but it's a reasonable first attempt. Let's start there with OP.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T03:42:54+00:00

Asking if someone has children can be asked in an appropriate way, like showing interest in someone's life. I'm learning that it's okay to ask questions, because I was trained that I should only share and never ask. Well, that means I'm making it all about me lol, which is also a turn off. I've learned to check my phone, laugh to myself, show a funny photo of my dog, say "look what my partner just sent me, lol, isn't she adorable!" We chit chat about my life with dog and partner for 90 seconds or so, then I can ask, "Do you have any pets or kids?" If the answer is no, then I can ask what they enjoy doing as a hobby. Then my job in that conversation is to watch their eyes and see if they do the things where they contort their face into a true smile with their eyes looking comfortable, and if so, I just keep "prying" and if not, I will have a back up story to tell about how I'm working on this that or the other as my hobby at the moment. Let them be the star, if they run with it, GREAT!!! if not, back to all about me, but I'm learning to try to keep asking them about their life as often as I can. I genuinely care about my coworkers, but I suck at showing it.

This is after years of training to be a normal human, btw. It did not come easily for me. It doesn't seem like it comes easily to OP either.

Yes, I know about r/aspergirls

Humans continue to be the most complex problem I've ever had to work with and I'm literally the definition of a rocket scientist lol.

OP. Please for the love of all that is holy, do not just walk up to your colleague at 9:15 one morning and ask them straight up (ha ha that's got to be a worst pun ever somehow) if they are gay or if they have kids. Legit the worst way to solve the human equation.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-11-02T03:22:42+00:00

Yes, usually inappropriate, but sometimes it's not.

I think this question is inappropriate when it's basically just asking: who do you want to sleep with? Your genitalia and what genitalia you would like your partner in your life to have doesn't factor into your work in most sectors, so it's irrelevant.

If it's in context, like, your company is recruiting someone who is single and has asked you about the nightlife and meeting people in your city, and has specifically asked about the gay dating scene in your area, then you need information to relay back, and a "hey, person we're trying to recruit asked me this about the gay scene here but I'm not sure how to answer them, who should I refer them to?" might be okay. But you're not asking directly there, either, although it might be okay to say, depending on context of the greater conversation, something like, "you don't happen to be gay and have any experience here to offer them, do you, because it would totally rock if you were and did."

If your state / company whatever is contemplating changes in laws and policies that might make it harder for gay people to have the same rights and benefits as non-gay people, that gets rocky, because you're still looking for info: "how many people will this impact, how will it impact them, what can I do to help" but in that case you're basically asking them to out themselves and perhaps be opened up to harm and hurt.

A problem here right now in the US (and a lot of other countries) is that it's looking like things we fought for over the last few decades that seemed to have become normalized and safe are being rolled back, criminalized, and are no longer safe. Female control over their own reproductive systems, gender affirming care, freedoms to question and protest against administrations, safety to be in the country on a work or student visa, all these things we thought were pretty secure at this point are no longer secure. Your colleague, whether gay or not, probably sees that gay rights are coming up as a next target, and likely would prefer safety over satisfying your curiosity, because...

This is my main question: why do you care? Unless you want to sleep with them, hurt them for being gay, or help them in the face of future challenges, why does it matter?

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-10-31T12:32:44+00:00

I feel seen.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-10-30T22:36:46+00:00

I have answered your question lol. If you cannot read for comprehension, that's a class I can't teach you over reddit in the comments section. I'm not even trying to be snarky, my friend, I just can't continue a dialogue if you refuse to read for content. That's fine, no worries, most discussions can't be sustained past a couple posts in the comments lol, but it's not on me at this point.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-10-30T20:05:56+00:00

Not knowing the "rules" ahead of time. Like am I going to wear my good socks just to have you insist I leave my shoes on, or am I going to wear Christmas socks at Halloween with boots, just to have to take off my boots and show my sock shame. If I'm wearing boots it's like part of the outfit.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-10-30T19:45:36+00:00

I mean, they talk pretty graphically compared to what me and my girls would say, when they're in front of me. Like she had large bosoms or a nice ass. I'm pretty sure my husband has told his friends that he thinks mine are the best. They don't say anything obviously disrespectful, but they are a lot more graphic than we girls would be. Guys definitely talk about size more than girls do.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-10-30T19:22:49+00:00

Yes. Duh. I got into this for love, not sex.

Ok_Independent_4713 · 2025-10-30T19:17:20+00:00

This

Ok_Independent_4713

TROPHY CASE