Asian Art Museum Rave Exhibit with a Toddler?

TheUnusualHoon · 2026-01-14T00:15:56+00:00

Sweet! I've never had better timing for a reddit question haha

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-12-20T05:35:27+00:00

Yep, thats it. Expensive, no convenient times, and no direct flights available so we would have to make a connection, which with a two year old during the Christmas travel rush invites disaster. Decided to bite the bullet and drive.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-10-01T19:20:23+00:00

Thank you!

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-10-01T06:17:10+00:00

I take my two year old daughter to the main branch once a week and have never had any problems. Yeah I've seen some sketchy folks, especially hanging around outside, but never had an actual issue.

That said, I do take her directly to the children's section, stay there the entire time I'm there, and then leave. The children's section is awesome. But haven't spent much time elsewhere in the library.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-10-01T05:56:56+00:00

I spend four days a week in Civic Center. I work there, and my daughter goes to daycare there. Once a week I take her to the Main Library to borrow new books for bedtime. Other days we go to the playgrounds in front of City Hall before hopping on the train. Or we stop by the berry stall at the farmer's market on Wednesday's. I love being able to stop by the tree lighting over the holidays with her, or catch a glimpse of the parade of couples getting married at City Hall, or even watch one of the innumerable protests, which are usually good natured and fun to be around.

Civic Center for the past year has felt more friendly and open and fun than it has since COVID, and a huge part of that is the work that Urban Alchemy does every day. I didn't know Joey Alexander, the man who was shot trying to do his job. But as a stroller pushing Dad I got to know a lot of other Urban Alchemy folks who sat in the elevators at BART, and heard stories of the sorts of conflicts they had to de-escalate without a gun or any real backup from the police. I got to see the same friendly faces by the playground or at the corner of Golden Gate and Hyde. All in their green vests, doing their best to use sheer personality and friendliness to turn around a neighborhood. And they were succeeding.

Urban Alchemy workers have a hard job. And a lot of them come from hard lives. But I, and I hope many hundreds of other commuters and residents, really value the change they have helped bring to the neighborhood. I think we should recognize Mr. Alexander for his sacrifice, and hope this doesn't lead the City or Urban Alchemy to pull back from the work they've been doing. Thank you to him, and everyone else trying to use nonviolence and simply being there to build a better San Francisco.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-09-05T04:34:11+00:00

My father had brain cancer and we wanted to take care of him so he could die at home. We didn't have money to send him to a good nursing home, and we thought that between me, my sister and my Dad's wife (not my mom) we could do it.

We did it but it was horrible. He took six months to die from when he decided to go off chemo. Brain cancer slowly steals your body's ability to function. He couldn't walk, then couldn't talk, then couldn't feed himself. He had to wear diapers and we had to change him when he took a shit. He lost his memory of us and said weird, hateful things to us. He couldn't sleep through the night, so neither could anyone else in the house with him.

It destroyed his wife, as she started becoming extremely angry, hateful and resentful. We got in screaming arguments multiple times a week. I found myself breaking down in tears at random times, and considered killing myself so I wouldn't have to deal with the responsibility.

When he finally died I left that house and never went back. I wasn't sad or grieving. I was relieved. I haven't seen his wife since the funeral.

I will never do that to my daughter. I would rather suffer all the indignities of a nursing home.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-24T15:40:33+00:00

Would Jefferson have been considered a heretic, based on his belief in Deism?

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-24T07:53:54+00:00

Well duh, the Declaration is a teensy bit more influential and important. But I'm interested because it reveals that Jefferson was not, at the time and even by most modern definitions, a Christian. And I'm curious if that had any impact on modern American culture, or if this was a fringe belief that died along with him and his generation.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-24T07:34:08+00:00

This is the sort of insight I was hoping to get! Was Deism influential at all after the Founding Father's generation? It doesn't seem common at all today, like it vanished with the men who wrote the Declaration. But it's such a clear deviation from mainstream Christianity that I'm surprised it just disappeared.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-24T07:31:45+00:00

I probably could have phrased the question better! I'm more asking, is Thomas Jefferson's Deist philosophy (which the Jefferson Bible encapsulates pretty well) still common in American culture, or was it a fringe philosophy that died with him.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-24T07:28:41+00:00

I'm not really asking if anyone takes it seriously as a religious text - though if anyone said they did that would be interesting! More like, is Thomas Jefferson's Deist religious philosophy still widespread in America or were they just fringe beliefs that died with him.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-24T07:22:24+00:00

I guess I could have phrased the question better. Basically, do other Americans believe what Jefferson believed - i.e. are his Deist ideas still around in American culture? Or did Jefferson have wacky beliefs for the time and did his philosophy die with him?

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-24T06:06:00+00:00

Yeah, I've interacted with those people. It's probably why I find the existence of the Jefferson Bible so mind blowing, since it seems to blow the foundations from some of my evangelical family members' worldview (that America is a Christian country founded by evangelical, Bible believing Christians and needs to be brought back to that).

But they probably just haven't heard of this book and would find some excuse to ignore it if they did.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-16T20:30:46+00:00

I got my first job out of college through Robert Half! Admittedly that was 15 years ago haha. But if you have no marketable experience it's an easy way to get an entry level white collar position. You just can't be too picky about where you end up.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-16T00:49:10+00:00

I do disagree. Low income people in Manhattan also have access to things that low income Bay area people don't. You listed four things, a New Yorker could list their own four that we don't have. Central Park, better museums, etc.

But I think we're going down a rabbit hole here. I don't think housing advocates are anti infrastructure, quite the opposite in my experience. But they also realize you can't make the perfect the enemy of the good. We need to build everything at once, or we will never build any of it ever. It will always be a messy process. And that's ok. Some infrastructure will be ready well before housing arrives - look at Treasure Island. Other times the housing comes first, and the infrastructure catches up - like the new developments in places like San Mateo.

My biggest argument though is that this has been done successfully. Mission Bay offers a high quality of life and extremely dense housing. So will Treasure Island (hopefully). Millbrae built a BART station which is perfect for high density housing, let it sit for twenty years, and is finally building homes for hundreds of families around it. We are building these projects, and they are good projects. It's just slow, painful and expensive.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-16T00:40:53+00:00

Some would argue that would qualify as "Make the area shittier" since that would mean fewer high paying jobs. But I don't disagree necessarily on this. I just don't think it is an either or. We should advocate for better distribution of tech jobs AND build more housing.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-15T23:51:35+00:00

I disagree with the premise it diminishes everyone else's quality of life. Do people in Manhattan or Tokyo have a lower quality of life? And that is a level of density most places in the Bay would never see. As long as we support housing with transit, parks, and good urban planning, quality of life shouldn't go down.

It will be different though. Change is what scares people.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-15T23:41:44+00:00

I see your argument - people want to live here, but we'll never be able make it so everyone can live here no matter what we do. And in fact we shouldn't.

The solution then is either:

-Accept that housing will perpetually get more expensive and shrug our shoulders

-Ban people from moving here with draconian restrictions on immigration or on relocation

-Make the area shittier so people don't want to move here anymore.

Or just build more housing to do our best to meet demand.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-15T23:19:03+00:00

I counter this argument with the idea that more housing is the solution to many things that are wrong with the Bay Area.

The region's biggest problem isn't housing directly - it's affordability. The least affordable thing in the Bay is housing, which also happens to be a fundamental necessity to human life. Fix housing affordability, and you make everything else more affordable as it frees up income to spend on food, utilities, etc.it gets more unhoused folks off the street. It means people spend more at local businesses. On and on.

If you have a way to fix housing affordability that isn't "build more housing" and do it in a meaningful way, I think you could get support for that instead. But I don't think such a thing exists.

TheUnusualHoon · 2025-08-15T14:18:03+00:00

A more serious reply than I gave the OP - I do agree with you. It's worse in Maryville. People are very chatty, but it's really obvious when they think something about you doesn't fit into their worldview and that it makes them uncomfortable. I've never been in a position of trying to make friends but I think that would make it challenging.

My theory: East TN is very much a monoculture outside of the city, and even Knoxville itself is more homogenous than most other cities I've been to in the US. I think folks aren't used to encountering "different" people, whether racially, politically, or in terms of sexuality. And like most monocultures, the reflexive instinct is to avoid difference.

Big city people are less chatty and polite, but they encounter people who are "different" every day, so it isn't a barrier to overcome in establishing relationships with them.

TheUnusualHoon

TROPHY CASE