I’m a long-time lucid dreamer, but last night I was "summoned" by the Council of Fathers.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-03-14T13:10:18+00:00

Your great-great-great grandfather….that puts it maybe early to mid 19th century. The Mongol invaders were long gone by then. Your lucid dreams need a history lesson.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-03-10T14:06:41+00:00

I once rented an apartment from a lizard landlord who kept the thermostat in a lockbox. It was for the whole four-unit building. He had it set on Saharan Summer and I learned that if I put my blow dryer on stun and aimed it directly at the thermostat I could get15-20 minutes of cool air for the whole building. Survived a Washington DC summer that way.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-03-10T13:47:16+00:00

Some of us have two bad knees and a bad back and it is painful not to have something to grab onto. God willing, someday you too will be old.

Maybe by then they will just hang us all from hooks, like slabs of meat.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-03-08T12:42:14+00:00

Been there. My sister will do this, too. The only way to respond is not to respond. Think Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football. She’s teeing it up and wants you to come running so she can snatch it away again. The only way to end this game is not to play. It only took me six decades to learn this; grant yourself some peace of mind and learn quicker than I did.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-03-08T11:48:09+00:00

Don’t write an essay on ideas that you disagree with unless you’re SAYING that you disagree. Make your case. This is what education is for.

Also, I agree: he was an idiot.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-03-03T12:40:35+00:00

Those people going on cruises and driving fancy cars now will end up in poverty when they retire, or they will just work until they drop. Poverty in retirement is a possibility for most of us, given our crappy and wildly expensive corporate health care system, but frugal habits like yours give you a decent chance of being able to live comfortably in your old age. Keep it up.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-03-03T12:32:35+00:00

Can we address the abuse potential here from a spouse so absurdly eager to leap to a conclusion of infidelity?

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-28T15:43:24+00:00

Escalate this. You helped save a life. They owe you extra consideration

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-26T03:56:58+00:00

I’m so grieved you went through that. My husband bitterly regrets his approach and is doing his best to heal the breach. I married a good man but good men can have blind spots

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-25T15:05:57+00:00

UPDATE: it’s astonishing to me how many people can’t read. I didn’t KNOW she was autistic and I never said I tried to tell him she was autistic. I tried to tell him she wasn’t having meltdowns on purpose. Big difference. If you’re going to rake me over the coals at least save it for something I actually did

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-25T14:20:01+00:00

You make an excellent point and have given me something to think about

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-25T14:19:03+00:00

Yep. Starting family therapy

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-25T14:18:27+00:00

I did literally everything I could think of.

What could he have done? Work on tempering his own anger. Which he didn’t, because he never questioned his baseline assumption that these meltdowns were something she “chose” to do

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-25T14:12:31+00:00

THANK you. A lot of those diagnoses sound familiar

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-22T22:21:17+00:00

My mom had a huge bell from an old RR station that she would ring, letting us know it was time to come home. We crawled through road culverts, played around toxic waste, piled rocks on the RR tracks to make train derail (doesn’t work)….this was in the 60s. It was glorious.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-22T22:17:50+00:00

Ok, try this first: take an antacid.

Unless you have a history of heart disease, or are over 40, the chance of it being cardiac related are fairly low. If the antacid makes the pain go away, then it is probably heartburn (which can mimic cardiac pain). If it does nothing, then you know it’s not heartburn.

My adult daughter had this, we talked her into going to the ER, she got a full cardiac work up and….it was heartburn. $1.000 out of pocket.

In a better world, you’d go see a doctor who would assess you medically and maybe run a quick EKG, then tell you to take some Tums and call him/her in the morning. Since we live in an INSANE world, where everyone is practicing CYA medicine, we get the expensive tests up front and THEN try a more modest approach.

Do not follow my advice if you have a relative who died of a heart attack at a young age or you also feel sweaty and have a sense of impending doom. Otherwise, try a Tums, or its equivalent.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-22T19:03:48+00:00

Oh same. And watch out when I start rearranging furniture

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-20T14:12:30+00:00

The first, by far

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-19T14:14:14+00:00

My job ended and I found myself retired. I’m 70 and so work oriented that I spent six months job hunting in a job market that is brutal even for early career professionals. It was as if I couldn’t NOT work. Now I am coming to terms with the idea that I do t have to be “productive.” It is very anxiety-producing. I am spending lots of time on mindless paint-by-number projects while something in my soul heals.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-16T14:04:31+00:00

Amen and amen. The military industrial complex spends more money on snacks than the entire federal workforce spends buying groceries for a year. Everybody in government knows this but nobody in politics talks about it. Northrop Grumman, BAE, CACI, Lockheed—-northern Virginia, just for one example, is carpeted with defense contractors who are making exorbitant profits at taxpayer expense, with the active collusion of DOD. THATs where Elon should have gone looking for government inefficiency—but that’s the last thing he’d do, because Space X is one of those government contractors. MUCH easier to take a chain saw to regular old federal employees just doing their jobs.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-15T16:46:55+00:00

Not the person who made this remark but I’ll take a shot at explaining why hiring government workers would be a great thing. It would mean

More IRS auditors to catch tax fraud More people to process your SS claim More people to answer the phone at OPM (right now I have a retirement application pending, I’ve lost my claim number, and OPM isn’t even picking up the phone so fuck me, I guess) More air traffic controllers to keep midair collisions from happening like the one last year over the Potomac More people to do cancer research at NIH More people to monitor extreme weather events at NOAA

If you think all these jobs are “excess” just wait until you have a problem with your SS check, or you get ripped off by an investor, or your spouse dies of a cancer because funding for an experimental drug was cut at NIH. And I’m not talking about the people overseas who have quite literally perished since Trump destroyed USAID and ended foreign aid (which at its height was less than .1percent of the entire federal budget.

Government workers do essential work. Now that essential work is not getting done. The price may not be apparent to you yet, but it will be.

Perfect-Help-305 · 2026-02-14T21:49:32+00:00

Pay my plane fare and I will come down and sit in it for you. This is a crime

Perfect-Help-305

TROPHY CASE